An Autobiography of Don Herbison-Evans (updated 8 May 2004)

When I was a toddler during World War 2, my father and mother worked by day, so most days I was left with my Grandmother. She was a pianist, and played for a number of afternoon tea dances. Of course I was taken along. With the dearth of male partners, the many solo ladies there eagerly coopted me into dancing. So I learned the Veleta, and the St Bernard's Waltz and the Military Two Step etc., as soon as I could walk!

My parents had met and courted at social dances, and later tried some competition dancing. When they married, they turned professional. So after the war, of an evening, they would teach dance classes at various halls around my home city (Birmingham, U.K.). They were not able to afford a baby sitter, so I would be taken along too. Dancing just seemed a natural part of life.

My father at this time worked as a labourer attached to the analytical laboratories of a large plastics company. His job was to get samples of all materials entering the plant for analysis. Much of the sampled material was unused during the testing, and he obtained permission to bring home any spare materials. And so, at a very early age, I acquired a chemistry set that you would not believe. These chemicals were great toys, and I got to know them all well.

Then I went to school and found it rather dull. I had one report after several terms of Latin and French, that said:

"He can neither read nor write his own nor any other language".

Then at Secondary School, we started Chemistry. I was back among my familiar toys again. Chemistry was a breeze and a joy, and I felt really at home. I did well at Chemistry. I won an Open Scholarship to St. John's College, Oxford. I remember one of the 3 hour entrance exams which required us to analyse and report on an unknown chemical which was supplied to us. I took one look, and saw immediately that it was Lithium Hydride. It only took about a quarter of an hour to riffle through the analytical procedures to prove it, and I spent the rest of the exam dropping small pieces into concentrated nitric acid, in which it made very satisfying little explosions. So I read Chemistry at Oxford, gaining 1st class honours, and later a Doctorate. And so I became a scientist, and my dancing was all left far behind.

After these Chemistry degrees, I took a Fellowship in a Satellite Communications section at a government research establishment, designing microwave antennas, and I later emigrated to Australia to take another Fellowship in the Astronomy Department at Sydney University, studying double stars with an interferometer.

When that Fellowship ran out, after all the computing I had been doing with the Antennas and Astronomy, the Computer Science Department at Sydney University seemed pleased to take me on as a Lecturer in Numerical Analysis.

At that time, the Head of my new Department (Prof. John Bennett) wanted to start a new course on "Computer Graphics". Being the new boy, I was given the task. It went well, and I started trying to draw some graphic art by computer myself, but got bored with the abstract and geometric forms that dominated "Computer Art" at that time, so I started trying to draw people.

In my spare time I became interested in the wide variety of Caterpillars that seemed intent on stopping me make a nice flower garden. Nobody at the University or local museums seemed to know much about them. So I started photographing them, and rearing them, and getting them identified, and with a similarly minded friend in Melbourne (Stella Crossley), we wrote the manuscript for a book: "Common Australian Caterpillars". We toted it around to all the publishers and they all said "Caterpillars: Ugh, who wants to buy a book about them", so we put it on the shelf and there it lay for about 15 years. But now we are retired, we have started putting our caterpillars onto the world wide web, so who needs publishers. It was to be mainly colour pictures, so it would have cost a great deal to print, and we would never have made a fortune out of it anyway.

One day at the University, a Sydney Choreographer, Phillipa Cullen, came to the Computer Science Department and talking to Prof. Bennett asked a question about a dance notation called 'Labanotation': she had a book with lots of interesting dances described in it, but listed in Labanotation which she did not know. So she asked: "Could a computer program be written to take the notation, and produce animated images of a synthetic figure doing the dance, for then she could copy the figures movements and learn the dance?" So Prof. Bennett brought her round to see me, as I was at least trying to draw human figures by computer.

Well, I read some books on the Labanotation and other dance notations and I could barely understand what they were talking about. So the only thing to do seemed to be to go and take some Ballet and Modern Dance classes. So there I was, a 40+ male with no flexibility or coordination in with classes of beautiful teenage young ladies who could do a quadruple pirouette and kick their leg up to their ear. Quite an experience. Anyway, slowly, I started learning the rudiments of Ballet.

After many years of teaching Computer Science, I started getting tenosynovitis in my fingers from all the keyboard work, and had to take 2 years off from the University. What could I do all day? Daytime television has limits to its appeal. Then it dawned on me that I could use this time to extend my dancing skills. So I enrolled in a fulltime dance diploma course. Besides Ballet, Jazz, Tap, and Modern, it also included some Ballroom dancing as part of the curriculum, and that was finally like coming home.

I advertised for a partner in the Australian Dance Review magazine, and soon found an elegant, patient and talented lady (Anna Piper) willing to dance seriously with me. That was several years ago now. Since then, I have taken early retirement from fulltime teaching, but still do a bit, thanks to my University colleagues, and have time also to engage in Dancesport (competitive ballroom dancing) with Anna, as you see on my various other webpages.

And that's how I got into dancing on computers.

I am still writing and working on the computer program that Phillipa asked about, and I am still trying improve my dancing.