MEMOIRES

The Road from Circular Head

Circular Head, in the far North West of Tasmania, was a pretty isolated place when I was growing up, there was the road and the railway but the coastal trader still docked regularly at the Smithton wharf, a reminder of the little boats that used to ply a dangerous trade in Bass Straight.

It was a long way out of the district with the gravel road winding through the hills on the way to Wynyard and Burnie. You can probably still find parts of the old road like the terrible bend called the “Devil’s Elbow” if you poke about a bit off the new road.

That was the road from the farm near Irishtown that led to the Grammar School in Launceston, then to the University of Tasmania in Hobart, then to Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney.

Actually the farm was a mile off the Lower Scotchtown Road, running out of Smithton towards Edith Creek. Irishtown was the nearest place with a shop, a post office and a football team.  I grew up expecting to be a farmer and there was talk of agricultural college, then I went to boarding school (Launceston Grammar)  and the science master probably had a word to Dad and the talk shifted to Ag Science at the university.

One day while I said grace after lunch there was a great crash at the end of the dining room as one of the big photos of past headmasters fell off the wall. There was a roar of laugher from the children near the accident, because they could see that the picture was the Reverend R A Champion, my granduncle. He moved on from Grammar to the Kings School in Sydney and then to a parish at Bungendore, near Canberra. Two of his sons died in World War I. One of them was missing in action and a couple of years ago his remains turned up in a French paddock so he had a proper burial at last.

Round about the time I started thinking about doing Agricultural Science a speaker visited the school to talk about World Hunger. The school was big on community service and there was a good example at home as well, without a lot being said. Dad could always be relied on to help with any community collection that was happening, as well as fundraising for the football club. One time he put a shovel in the car and drove down to the main road to fill in a big pothole near the corner with loose gravel from the side of the road. I was about six at the time and I told him the council workers were supposed to do that. He replied that any number of cars could break their springs in the hole before the council workers got to it.

The speaker must have said something about the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation and I had the idea of getting some qualifications and working with FAO in distant lands. I must have mentioned this to Dad and he expressed disbelief that the people in Africa needed someone from Tasmania to tell them how to grow things. He had a good point because by the time I had the qualifications I discovered that the problem of hunger was nothing to do with the capacity of the people to grow food. It was all about the social and political conditions, so I shifted from Agriculture to Sociology to get at the problem from that direction.

Getting back to the university in Hobart, I lived in Hytten Hall, a men’s college a stone’s throw from the heart of the campus on the slopes of Mount Nelson.

The Hall had a very bad reputation and relatives in Launceston who heard the rumours of riotous behaviour were alarmed to hear that I missed out on a place in Christ College where Grammar boys usually went. I thought that I did a really good interview as well. When they asked how I would feel about rooming with a coloured man I replied it would be fine as long as he was a good Christian. I still think that was an inspired answer but there were too many of us and some of the others must have been equally inspired. John Gee got in, he rowed in the Tasmanian eight, became a Rhodes Scholar, went to Oxford  and became a diplomat and an arms inspector in Iraq. Last year he was awarded with a Commonwealth gong and died a few weeks later.

Jon Hawkes got in as well because his father was a man of the cloth, however Jon was cut to a different pattern from his father, he joined the drama society, went to a lot of parties and failed every subject. He also lined up the biggest collection of empty spirits bottles on his window sill that the college had ever seen. He moved to Monash University where his father was the chaplain, worked in the book room and started his degree again, one subject per year. He became the editor of Rolling Stone (Australia), a prime mover in the innovative drama group based at the Pram Factory in Melbourne (David Williamson’s first base) and then he was the business manager and strongman with Circus Oz. I kept in touch with him and he said I was the only person from the school that he ever talked to later on.

The tone of the Hall was set to some extent by the leadership from George Wilson the Warden. George was a big man in a small body. A New Zealander with the silver-haired appearance of Einstein and Albert Schwietzer he coached the Uni rugby team.  When he first arrived in Tasmania at the age of 37 he made the state ruby union team at half back. In Christchurch during the war when George was a lecturer in History he was trying to organise militia groups to hide food and weapons in the hills to fight on if the Japanese invaded.

Some years later when I met Colin Simkin I discovered that George was on a committee with Karl Popper, agitating for representation of the academic staff on the University council. “You will want the college porter on the council next” grumbled the old Registrar. Prescient words!

George wanted his young men to work hard and play hard which we generally did, and in the third term most of us went into examination mode. Not that George or anyone else was in a position to force people to do much, apart from abiding by the reasonably relaxed rules of the house. Once evening we raided the women’s college, Jane Franklin Hall, it would have been called a ‘panty raid’ in US parlance. When we got upstairs and found ourselves surrounded by screaming girls running in all directions we didn’t know what to do.  So we threw a lot of bedding down the stairs and carried some back to the Hall. The warden of Jane Franklin did not enter into the spirit of the occasion and told George that she had notified the police, so he had to read the riot act and tell us not to do it again.

The Hall had a great little library, presumably consisting of George’s books. It was hardly used, except by students on desperate deadlines who could not afford to be distracted by noisy room-mates. All the rooms apart from half a dozen were double rooms. In addition to a well thumbed copy of Balzac’s “Droll Stories” I found “The House of Intellect” by Barzun (a formative experience) also the novels of  Graham Green, some Arthur Koestler “The Lotus and the Robot” and “The Act of Creation”), Bertrand Russell and many others who were not on any of my reading lists.  Due to the dismissal of the professor of philosophy nobody could major in philosophy (the union of philosophers put a black ban on the chair until some time after Professor Orr died).  At that stage my philosophy was coming from the essays of Julian and Aldous Huxley and the Vedas as expounded by the likes of Isherwood. Fortunately I read Popper (courtesy of my supervisor in Adelaide) before I read any mainstream philosophy and when that happened I was stunned to find so much written about perception without reference to the scientific literature.

Ag Science at Hobart was a brand new course, in previous years students had to go to the mainland after first year. Five or six of us went through in the first batch, a couple of others dropped subjects on the way and finished later. The final year was important because I was the only student who wanted to do a second year of Soil Science. The teacher, Dr John Beattie, sent me off to the library at the Commonwealth Soils Laboratory, a branch of which was located nearby (a massive piece of good luck). In the library, surrounded by shelves of bound soil science journals, I formulated the idea of objective knowledge that is located in the bound journals and our subjective knowledge grows as we take on board stuff from that store and from the new research in progress. So much had been done that I began to wonder if there would be anything left to do when I started my own research. Then he turned me over to Kevin Marshall for a term, he was a microbiologist with a world reputation and working with him was like moving up from the seconds into the A team.

The term that I spent with Kevin Marshall (the Oxbridge tutorial system) worked out so well that the faculty encouraged me to move on to a bigger pond for post graduate work. That was Adelaide, at the Waite Research Institute (the postgraduate part of Ag Science) where my supervisor was Keith Barley, very much a member of the A team. He had a reputation around the world for the work he did on the mechanics of plant growth with two colleagues in the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. The Waite Institute, the  CSIRO Soils Laboratory and also the CSIRO Wine Research Institute were all side by side, so there were dozens of research staff and scores of postgraduate students from around the world.

In his laboratory I worked alongside Bruce Cockroft who was managing a Victorian State research farm at Tatura near Shepparton until the Department of Agriculture sent him off with his family to do some research at the Waite. Waterlogging was causing serious problems in the irrigation area and he did a higher degree to work on root growth in saturated clay. I became a friend of the family and later on I always stopped overnight at Tatura on trips between Melbourne and Sydney, sleeping in a caravan out the back with the music of the water running through an irrigation ditch a few metres away.

Interesting people passed through the Waite. Peter Nye from England came for a few months after a spell in Africa. He said the biggest problem with his field work was the baboons that came out of the hills at night and ate the seed in his experimental plots. In the laboratory he did a lot of work with onions and when he gave a talk he was introduced as “a man who really knows his onions”. I called on him at Oxford in 1972 and he took me for a drive to show off the spires of the old university.

A young black man called Danny came from Antigua (home of some famous cricketers). He didn’t complete his degree because his brother came to power with a bloodless coup so Danny went back to be the Minister for Agriculture.

A bright and enthusiastic young fellow came from England with his fiancee and when they married quite soon after they arrived I was the best man. We wore tails for the occasion and I had to give a speech and then read out all the dreadful risque telegrams that people used to send to the newlyweds for the amusement of the old folk. 

A big student from Canada became a real Aussie football nut. We went to the 1967 grand final to see Sturt beat Port Adelaide and the next Friday when we were having our end of the week drink at the Arkaba Hotel we found ourselves surrounded by the Carlton team, over from Melbourne to play Sturt for the battle of the premiers.

A young man gave me and a student friend a brief introduction to the philosopher Hospers when he knocked on the door and we let him in for morning tea. The next morning he returned and we invited him in again, our appetites aroused. He said all the same things from the day before so when he came back the third time we hid in the kitchen. Our place was over the road from the Parkside Mental Hospital and some years later (being slow on the uptake) I realised why I was stopped two or three times on my late evening walks and friendly policemen asked me who I was, and where I lived.

At the end of the year in Adelaide I took a trip to Perth to see the Nullabor Plain, and the Swan River and some soil science laboratories. One of them was in an outer suburb and when I came out to catch a bus in the middle of Friday afternoon an old Holden stopped at the bus stop and the driver said "You'll wait a long time for a bus at this time of day, mate". He was heading back to town, which was ok because he gave me a lift. He was a great one for asking questions and he soon found out who I was and where I came from and what I was doing in Perth. He asked if I knew about the football star who was recruited from Perth to play in Melbourne with the Geelong team. Of course I knew his name was Roy West. He said he used to work with Roy, and then it was "Fancy a drink" and that was ok as well because we went to three pubs and I didn’t need to pay for a drink in any of them.

In each place he was instantly in a circle of friends and he enjoyed introducing me as his new young friend from Tasmania. For some reason they all seemed to think that this was rather amusing and I didn’t get the joke at the time. Maybe it was because I was carrying in my hand a copy of Evelyn Underhill’s classic book on mysticism to read on the bus.  I thought it was a bit strange moving from one pub to the next, with just a beer or two in each and a couple of the pubs were pretty strange as well. One had very rough clientelle and another had a very strangely dressed and theatrical crowd of people. Later I realised it was an early Western Australian version of the gay scene that became a highly visible spectacle in parts of Sydney.

The next day I remembered that Roy West was called “The Policeman” because in Perth he worked in the Special Branch of the Police Force. Special Branches have been disbanded in some states because some of the officers used to get too friendly with criminals and my man in Perth was probably doing a circuit of some watering holes frequented by his contacts on the fringe of the underworld.