Trevor Alfred Housley (31 October 191010 October 1968) was a senior Australian public servant. He was

Director-General A director general or director-general (plural: ''directors general'', ''directors-general'', ''director generals'' or ''director-generals'' ) or general director is a senior executive officer, often the chief executive officer, within a government ...

of the

Postmaster-General's Department The Postmaster-General's Department (PMG) was a department of the Australian federal government, established at Federation in 1901, whose responsibilities included the provision of postal and telegraphic services throughout Australia. It was ...

from 1965 until his death in October 1968.

Life and career

Trevor Housley was born on 31 October 1910 in

Gympie Gympie ( ) is a city and a Suburbs and localities (Australia), locality in the Gympie Region, Queensland, Australia. In the Wide Bay-Burnett District, Gympie is about north of the state capital, Brisbane. The city lies on the Mary River (Queen ...

, Queensland. Housley served for four years as chief airways engineer in the

Department of Civil Aviation A civil aviation authority (CAA) is a national or supranational statutory authority that oversees the regulation of civil aviation, including the maintenance of an aircraft register. Role Due to the inherent dangers in the use of flight vehicles, ...

, until 1951 when he joined the Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) as assistant general manager. In 1956, he was appointed to OTC general manager. In the general manager role, Housley led a delegation to the Commonwealth Telecommunications Conference in 1958 which recommended a worldwide telephone cable system be developed. He returned to London in 1960 to convene a management committee responsible for plans to lay the British Commonwealth trans-Pacific cable between Australia and New Zealand. Housley was appointed Director-General of Posts and Telegraphs, heading the Postmaster-General's Department, in 1965. In 1967, he penned ''Communications in Modern Society'', in which he argued that if public administrators could shift from paper communication to phone-calls, it would streamline the service and enable "quickly responsive sensitivity to public need". At Kew, Melbourne on 10 October 1968, while still in office as Director-General of the Postmaster-General's Department, Housley died of an intracranial haemorrhage.

Awards and honours

1961, Housley was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2012, a street in the

Canberra Canberra ( ) is the capital city of Australia. Founded following the federation of the colonies of Australia as the seat of government for the new nation, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The ci ...

suburb of Casey was named Housley Street in Trevor Housley's honour.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Housley, Trevor 1910 births 1968 deaths Australian public servants Australian Commanders of the Order of the British Empire People from Gympie