Testimony to the Grace of God in the Life of David Alfred Pryce Vaux
David Vaux was born 4 August 1947 in in Bergkirchen in the British Zone of Allied-occupied Germany, the first son of Peter and Jean (nee Carleton-Stiff) Vaux. His father was a decorated, senior British military officer and the family moved to Libya, Germany and Malaysia where he was stationed. David's mother served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in wartime London working with Holerith tabulators, high-volume data-processors that were precursors to the first computers. While his family hoped David would also become a military man, that was far from his mind and nature, for he could not embrace the expected patriotic, military, class and church traditions.
He had his own adventures and misadventures at London University, the Players’ Theatre, the antique trade, the King’s Road hippie scene and the anti-war movement. After a year at London University, David turned to office work and volunteering to support US draft resisters seeking shelter in the UK, his first encounter with Americans and an experience that went deep, solidifying his lifelong pacifism.
In 1969, David married Priscilla Bebbington, a teacher, and together they emigrated to Australia, where David took up a scholarship at Newcastle Teacher’s College. He was introduced to stage direction in a night course of the Newcastle Workers Club. Along the way, he found gratification in the disciplines of Political Science, English literature, Meditation and Theatre. David and Priscilla were accepted as volunteers with Volunteer Service Abroad, to teach wherever they were needed, spending a year at St. Andrew’s Anglican school in Tonga, returning to Australia in 1975. Their daughter Frances Elena Vaux was born in 1978, their son Carleton Anand Vaux in 1981, and in 1990, David and Priscilla adopted Deepahk Kumar Vaux, from St. Christopher’s Home, an orphanage near Suva, Fiji, who came to live in Tumoulin at the age of four.
David showed deep devotion to all his children, faithfully supporting their endeavors. He traveled alone to Brazil in 2013, with no local language skills, to wait with a phone for a boat Carleton and his team had designed, built and journeyed from Peru to the mouth of the Amazon in NE Brazil, at times a treacherous and arduous passage. He waited two weeks in a foreign city, where people spoke little English, to ensure the safe arrival of his son.
During the decade that he and Priscilla combined teaching in Tonga, New Zealand, and Australia, they also traveled in India, where for a time David also studied Transcendental Meditation. All these experiences fed David's deeply inquisitive nature and his drive to engage with other cultures and diverse spiritual paths, as well as the lives of the many people he encountered. During this time he became a vegetarian, a commitment from which he never wavered.
Back in Australia, David taught at St Teresa’s College, Abergowrie, a Catholic boys’ boarding school in Far North Queensland, from 1975-78. In 1978 David and Priscilla moved to an old potato farm with a small wooden house at Tumoulin, near Ravenshoe on the Atherton Tablelands. Over the next few decades David built many additions to the house, turning it into a sprawling family home. Trees and shrubs were planted, transforming the bare farmland into a beautiful garden. They named the property Midpath, after the Middle Way of Buddhism.
David taught at St. Barnabas’ Anglican School in Ravenshoe from 1979-83, and after short stints teaching at Ravenshoe and Innisfail High Schools, he taught English, Drama, Economics and History at Mount Saint Bernard College in Herberton, during 1988-2001. David was English department head and a much beloved English and drama teacher for 13 years. He had a gift of working with adolescent students who did not always fit the expected mold.
He loved literature, and although he didn’t know it well enough when he left school to insist on studying Arts, he developed his literary gifts through most of his life, as both a writer and editor, founding his own literary business, EL Kumanand Press. He self-published two books of poetry as well as collections of short stories and novellas, collaborating with local artists: Coffee Cellar Chants (1973), Calling Through Fog: Poems and Paragraphs (1992), Spinning the Sun (1995) a collection of short stories, including his own, Elvira, and Scorpion Tales (1996), a collection of novellas, including his own, The Crocodile’s Anklet. His first novel Cassowary Hill set in tropical north Queensland was published in 2015. Inevitably itinerant, David worked in five countries - teaching, publishing, editing, arts funding, house building, nonviolent activism, theater and writing.
He was a teacher of deep gift. He was an amiable and compassionate man, a capable builder, a very creative person with an adventurous spirit. He made conversation into an unhurried, all-consuming art. With friends in Australia when he was younger, and even later in life, he was known to talk well into the night. David was finally a Quaker after long spiritual searching. He had worshipped as a Baha’i for three years whilst living on the Atherton Tablelands. David Vaux then attended the Ravenshoe Worshipping Group in North Queensland and was welcomed into Quaker membership in Queensland Regional Meeting, Australia Yearly Meeting on 1st February 1998.
In 2004 David returned to England where he lived for two years with his second wife Molly Vaux in the small Derbyshire village of Church Broughton. David taught English and drama again, and it was a time for re-connection with his family. Quaker membership was transferred to Witham Monthly Meeting Britain Yearly meeting on 12th May 2004. Moving to the U.S in 2006, they established a rural home in a high valley of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico, and his membership was transferred to Santa Fe Meeting, New Mexico, USA in 2007. In 2014, they settled in Portland, Oregon, and in 2020 moved to Philadelphia, by which time a second round of lymphoma had taken over his body. With characteristic stout-heartedness and cheerfulness, he embraced the medical staff as an integral part of his social network.
That he has been an almost lifelong expatriate and inveterate traveler may in part be attributed to his birth after World War II in a non-existent country described on his birth certificate as the British Army on the Rhine. In need of a passport so that he could travel to England to attend a boarding school, he was discovered to be a bureaucratic anomaly, and a citizen of nowhere. He was issued with a retrospective birth certificate. This quaint occurrence befits a man who had the wanderer’s nature, a universal spirit, had lived in five countries, and felt at home with many peoples.
David had edited the biography of Donald Groom, the first Secretary of Australia Yearly Meeting, Peace Comes Walking (2002) by Tasmanian friend Victoria Rigney. Groom was an English Friend who had done service carrying food and medical supplies across the lines to both sides in the Spanish Civil War and then spent time in India with Mahatma Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave. David's spirit fitted closely with Groom's contemplative nature and active nonviolence, and with Donald's translation of the first verse of the Isawaya Upanishad, included at the front of the biography:
The Eternal is complete in itself The Finite is complete in itself
Our completeness comes out of another completeness
When one completeness is taken from another completeness
Completeness of itself remains
He passed from this life on 30th April 2023 in his 75th year. A small family observance was held beside a Friends burial ground in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, on June 17, 2023, and a memorial gathering with his Australian family and old friends was held in Atherton at Halloran’s Hill, North Queensland on July 1st, 2023.
We give thanks for the Grace of God in the Life of David Vaux.