MEMOIRES

Keith Barley

Supervisor and Friend

This is a tribute to the late Keith Barley who supervised my postgraduate work at the Waite Institute in 1967 and 1968.He was a wonderful supervisor who quickly became a friend. His wife Anne got into the picture because often on Fridays after a beer or two at the Arkaba we would go on to dinner at their home. Sometimes we would meet at other times and one weekend they took me on my first visit to an art gallery. Their influence went well beyond soil-plant relations and it was all for the good. It was in Keith’s office that I first saw Quadrant and The Australian Humanist , and of course later on he introduced me to the works of Karl Popper.

John Beattie was the Soil Science lecturer in Hobart. Near the end of 1966 he wrote to Keith and to Jim Quirk in Perth to ask if they were interested in taking on a fresh graduate for postgraduate study. Quirk was not interested but Keith was positive, even enthusiastic.  He advised John that I should apply for a studentship from the Meat Research Council, formulating the project in very broad and general terms, mentioning  soils, plants and animals. The result was a generous living allowance for the  honours year.

It later turned out that the more pragmatic members of the Council were becoming disgruntled with some of the esoteric research they were funding and my thesis on the penetration of clay by root hairs would not have alleviated their concerns. Keith had a view on this, not that he mentioned it in respect to my project but he said it when I raised the issue of some other work that had no apparent application. He said (words to the effect that ) the short period of postgrad study was probably the only time in most people’s lives when they could play seriously and freely in the world of ideas and they should make the most of it without being restricted by concerns about the practical application of the research. One day as we walked away from a talk on soil testing he was almost spitting with irritation at the effort being wasted in that direction but I can’t recall what it was that disturbed him, maybe it was too narrowly practical or maybe it wasn’t really practical at all because it was never going to deliver the benefits that farmers expected. Keith was well aware of the need for practical work but he had a broader view.

With the enrolment in place we arranged to meet in Melbourne early in 1967 at a major conference of Australian and New Zealand scientists (ANZAAS) In the meantime the agitation over the Vietnam War was building up and I had a letter published in The Australian commenting with heavy irony on the banning of a conscientious objector from classroom teaching. It was supposed to be critical of the decision but it could have been read either way. Keith took The Australian but he never mentioned the letter and neither did I.

We met for coffee between sessions at the conference. He was a neat figure with a three-piece suit and well trimmed beard which was unusual in those days. I think we may have been a little awkward and formal, each feeling our way. He probably inquired whether I had any ideas about a research topic and I would have mentioned the recently-discovered “mucigel” or sludge around the root. Another interest was the phenomenon of clay skins “cutans” on the surface of soil aggregates.

He was a Reader (between Senior Lecturer and Professor) in the soil-plant relations group in the Agronomy branch of the Waite Institute which was the postgraduate part of the Faculty of Agriculture. It was said that Keith did not aspire to a Chair because he wanted to focus on teaching and research. The other branches of the Waite were Plant Pathology, Animal Production, Soil Chemistry, Plant Breeding, Entomology and Biochemistry. Agronomy was almost a microcosm of the whole, with groups working on soils, crops, plant breeding, pastures and animal production.

The Waite and especially the people in soils gained immensely from the close proximity of the CSIRO Soils Division. The CSIRO Wine Research Unit was also next door but nobody took much notice in those days when we were still drinking most of our wine out of glass flagons.

Keith wanted me to explore the topic fairly thoroughly before firming up the thesis project. This is the really tricky part of supervising research students, working out how much the student can be left to explore the field and how soon he or she needs to be pushed and shoved and cajoled to get to work on a manageable project that can be turned into a  presentable thesis in the time required.

Some students get too little help so they can thrash around and waste months or even years (in a doctorate). Others function as additional technical assistants for the professor, so they generate papers and a thesis but they don’t usually discover how to work their way into a problem and become independent researchers.

It was necessary to do a lot of reading and also some preliminary work in the field. One sunny morning we drove to Victor Harbour with Bruce Cockroft (an older Ph D student) to look at some exposed soil profiles with strata of clay that cracked into large peds (lumps of soil). The idea was to check the root distribution (if any could be found) and take some samples back to the lab for further investigation. The beach was nearby and we had sandwiches for lunch, so we sat on the otherwise deserted shore and  Keith decided to take a dip, naked, like a good Humanist with no old-fashioned prejudices about the body beautiful. Bruce and I were more conservative on this issue, so we sat still and dry while Keith took the waters until some people loomed up on the horizon and he hastened back to sit beside us, with his hat strategically placed as the interlopers walked past.

Keith’s office was adjacent to the laboratory where I dissected lumps of soil, fixed them in cement, cut sections of the aggregates and became increasingly frustrated in the search for point of entry to work on soil structure and root distribution. The office was the place where I first encountered Quadrant magazine and also The Australian Humanist, just lying around presumably for Keith to read at lunchtime. He never actually put them forward or suggested reading them but as a compulsive reader of course I dipped in, to be mystified by an article of literary criticism in Quadrant and possibly intrigued by the contents of the Humanist. I don’t know what I thought about the humanists, I must gave picked up some strange ideas from glancing at the magazine and at the time (until about a year later) I was a “non-joiner”. Anyway, one day as I was sitting with a lump of soil in my hand and my back to Keith, some mention of the Humanists came up and I remarked that they would probably be a lot of bearded cranks!

Sometimes Keith was prepared to suggest things to read, in addition to papers on soils. One weekend I read Teilhard de Chardin’s book The Phenomenon of Man and mentioned in the lab that I found it interesting. Next  day Keith brought in The Art of the Soluble, a collection of essays by Peter Medawar including a devastating criticism of de Chardin’s book.

Keith shared some of his research interests with Charles Darwin, notably earthworms and the mechanical aspects of plant growth. I don’t know if he was aware of the parallel, he never mentioned it and I only found out about Darwin’s interests decades later.

His work on earthworms was mostly done in NSW where it earned him the nickname “the muck and mystery man”. It may have been done for the doctorate that he did not complete. There is a story that the thesis was accepted and he just had to pay a small fee to complete the process but someone else was awarded a doctorate for work that Keith considered to be substandard so his form of protest was to refuse to take his own degree. Do you happen to know the full story? Maybe I will have to ask Anne.

On the role of mechanical factors in plant growth, he was collaborating with Farrell and Greacen in the CSIRO next door. E L “Bill” Greacen was one of the drinkers at the Arkaba. 

Getting back to the art and science of supervising students, some students probably don’t see enough of their supervisor and the ones who work as lab assistants probably see them too much. I think Keith got the balance right, so we established a kind of master and apprentice relationship without any hint of master and servant. It helped that we worked in close proximity so it was possible to pick up a lot of little things in casual conversation in the lab or on the way to morning tea or to seminars. 

Things like the protocol for lending items of portable equipment (like the vacuum pump for embalming soil samples prior to cutting and polishing sections). If people did not return it as promised, it was not available next time they called. On reading instead of thinking, it is too easy when confronted with a problem to head off to the library instead of putting in some hard thought about it. Value the technical support staff; Keith was always in touch with the concerns of the ancillary staff – their shop steward was the Senior Technician in the adjacent laboratory.

Writing up the thesis and then converting the thesis into a small paper turned out to be a significant education in writing. I thought I wrote well enough before I arrived in Adelaide but when I started on the thesis, with some pressure of time due to the delay in getting the project organised, it turned out that I was a rank beginner. When we got to the paper the condensation and clarity that are required for a refereed journal imposed strict disciplines and sometimes our progress was slow. After one session that yielded about two paragraphs we broke for lunch and Keith remarked “we were really in first gear this morning!”.

Keith turned 40 in 1967 and that seemed to be almost unbelievably ancient from the perspective of 21. Soon we would be told not to trust anyone over 30. I didn’t see much of Keith in his social rounds, apart from the pub and one or two formal Waite functions. People said that Keith and Anne used to be involved in amateur theatricals, in addition to Humanist activities. Anne also played bridge in a group that included our CSIRO colleague ‘Bill” Greacen. Bill kept a collection of native finches in a big cage, also he had an attractive daughter (with a Rhodesian ridgeback dog) and a very talented son who later turned up in Sociology in Sydney until he went off to pursue his big interest (singing) to Paris.

Keith in my memory was always good humoured and very controlled at the same time so I never saw anything like the story that Bill told of a dinner party with a lot of people at a long table, where Keith disappeared from sight and it was possible to follow his progress along the length of the table by the looks on the faces of the ladies.

Keith got into trouble in a small way when I gave a seminar paper on my work and adopted the theme that Agronomists should take more notice of the plant roots, even thought they were out of sight. As an aside I noted that the people studying roots were out of sight in the basement of the building. This was a reference to Bruce Cockroft and myself who did not fit into the room upstairs where most of the other research students had their desks. It was only a joke but some people suspected that Keith had put me up to it for some devious purpose.

Something similar happened when I went to Perth at the end of the year and visited Professor Jim Quirk’s department. Keith and Jim had been at the Waite together for a while and there was some professional rivalry between them (which I knew nothing about). He showed me around and pointed out all the equipment (like a brand new Gee Whizz electron microscope) that he had obtained from different kinds of industry sponsorship. Then I talked to some other staff and all the postgrad students who were around at the time. That seemed like a sensible thing to do, after spending several days and nights on the train to get there, but later the word came back from Perth that Jim thought Keith had sent me over as a spy!