The first author was anxious flying 15 hours west to an unknown land, but the second was better equipped with construct dimensions from Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country.  We were both relieved to discover that coffee was still coffee, even if it tasted better than in West Texas.  The friendly Australians had little difficulty understanding Texan and were patient with our struggles with Australian.  Australians seemed to embrace diversity, whether understanding dialects from the other side of the world or freely mixing cuisines between continents and hemispheres. We found no bad food in Australia, whether in fine restaurants or outback roadhouses.  Perhaps given the wide range of new experiences to construe, we found ourselves focusing on concrete physical dimensions--one of our favorite recurring experiences was chocolate mudcake.

With erotic food, stimulating wines and lagers, breathtaking landscapes, heartrending art, ancient cultures, sacred rock formations, the world’s largest coral reef, unique flora and fauna, death defying adventures to be sought, or avoided, one might expect the congress to be an incidental experience.  But even the nearby Brisbane museums and Glass House Mountains did not pull us from the sessions.  The vistas shared by the presenters were equally captivating.  Their lived experiences were well-expressed, less as pre-packaged answers than as invitations toward future possibilities.  Just as our travel guides gave us only fleeting glimpses of the riches of Australia, these notes provide only crude sketches of a very few of the conference experiences, most notable of which were the informal and more formal conversations with fellow delegates from Australia, China, Germany, Latvia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Jörn Scheer’s keynote address invited us to consider the implications of George Kelly and Don Bannister’s forays into the political sphere.  Jörn’s extensive work establishing internet resources for personal construct psychology provides a possible venue for international political action.  The value base of personal construct psychology approaches the other as a construing person, equal to oneself, providing an invitational posture towards dialogue across disparate worlds. 

A number of presenters elaborated experiences for which western cultures have often offered simplistic, stereotypic constructions.  Robert Neimeyer’s keynote address illustrated how personal construct and narrative psychologies can enrich our understanding of grieving processes and our ability to be helpful to the bereaved.  Other presenters applied personal construct psychology to experiences of bereaved parents; experiences of abuse and other violent victimization; resolving political violence, and creating alternatives to psychiatric diagnosis. 

Another keynote presenter, David Winter, discussed constructions of love from literature, from RepGrid and other studies of students, and from therapy clients’ constructions of their relationships.  Other presenters elaborated other core aspects of relating such as self-other permanence and transpersonal reverence.  Applications to helping relationships also included caregiving of persons with severe mental illness, dealing with betrayal, suicide and anorexia, adoption practices, couple relationships, breaking down cultural barriers with deaf clients, autism and stuttering, work with children and adolescents, professional supervision, forensic assessment, and reeducation of mental health workers.

Trevor Butt’s keynote address anticipated a growing legacy of George Kelly’s emphasis on understanding persons rather than explaining them within a causal nexus.  Outlining a growing emphasis on pragmatism within social psychology and other social sciences, he inspired us to create new possibilities with others, rather than nailing them to a sequence of antecedants and consequences. Other presentations reflecting this science of possibilities, in addition to clinical presentations discussed previously, applied personal construct psychology to recreation of organizational and other social contexts, such as dissolving gendered perceptions of professions, diversity consulting, constructions of ecological processes in farm landscapes, organizational leadership and career planning, understanding use of informational systems, educational advising, academic publishing, and coaching and sports.  Presenters expanded research and assessment methodologies, including the RepGrid and narrative analysis.

Describing nature as “a vast network of interdependent continuous processes,” Spencer McWilliams shared his journey integrating his practice of personal science with his practice of ordinary mind Zen.  During the evening of creative construing, he supplemented this formal workshop with a photographic slide presentation of images of impermanence: textures of rusting metals, patterns in the sand, rocks carved by the wind, fleeting experiences that we might pass unnoticed.  The evening of creative construing organized by Bill Warren and Jörn Scheer (and disorganized by other participants) further elaborated the new CCC cycle (chaos-creativity-chaos) through poetry and story readings, song, dance, magic, and both abstract and concrete nonsense.  Other conference activities providing opportunities to creatively loosen constructions included a presentation on tattoos as nonverbal symbols of core construing, a workshop on writing as construing, and a performance by an aboriginal dance troupe.  Chaos and creativity were also shared during social outings to the Queensland Art Gallery, the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, and the banquet at a restaurant overlooking the Brisbane River. 

After the conference, these authors explored the Northeast coast and the Red Center by car.  Driving through the Northern Territory, we pondered the experience of being upside down.  The first author remarked that perhaps those from Australia think that we are the ones who live upside down.  The second remarked that he has never seen a globe with Australia on top.  The first reminded him that perhaps this represents a nordicentric bias in the manufacture of globes…

Returning home to the Northern hemisphere we felt much more upside down than in Australia.  Is this jet lag—or the vertigo of possibilities sampled at the conference?  We dreamed of remaining in Oz, where infinite possibilities seemed as ubiquitous as chips, but instead we reluctantly returned to wresting new channels from the accretions of our everyday academic lives.  We are grateful anew to the conference delegates who suggested maps toward constructivist practice.  We particularly thank Beverly Walker for our visit to her home on the beach, where she and David Winter wrote the epic Annual Review of Psychology article with their feline assistants Toby and Harriett.  We hope to have chances to apply suggestions from their presentation on the academic publishing process.  Tantalizingly over the horizon, the promise of the Victoria conference next summer keeps us looking ahead to further dialogues of possibility.

Brisbane, Australia