Honorary Appointment

I am very happy to be able to advise that offer and acceptance formalities have now been completed for me to take up an honorary appointment as an Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of New England.

I am pleased to be strengthening in this way a family connection with this fine institution which goes way back beyond my doing a Science degree here in the early 1960s, to a day in early 1938 when my father became the first student to enrol at the fledgling New England University College (of the University of Sydney). With the exception of the war years and sabbaticals, he spent his entire working life here, retiring as the third Professor of Psychology in 1978, forty years after his first undergraduate year here.

New England Ensemble 40th Anniversary

This afternoon I had the pleasure of attending, in the Madgwick Hall at the University of New England, a concert given by the members of the former New England Ensemble to mark the fortieth anniversary of the first concert they gave on campus in 1975.

The Ensemble (Andrew Lorenz, violin; Robert Harris, viola; Janis Laurs, cello; and Wendy Lorenz, piano) was ensemble-in-residence in the University's Music Department from 1975-82 and by all accounts made a lasting contribution to the musical life of the city and the region. In returning from studies abroad to take up their appointments they became the first full time professional ensemble based outside a capital city. They achieved national and international recognition.

At this afternoon's concert they played three works that had particular significance for them:

• Beethoven's Piano Quartet in E-flat Major Opus 16 was their first commercial recording, with the Cherry Pie label in Sydney. It went to three pressings in the first twelve months of its release.
• Peter Sculthorpe's Landscape II was commissioned by Musica Viva for the New England Ensemble.
• Dvorak's Piano Quartet in E-flat Major Opus 87 was the first work they performed, in the same hall, almost forty years ago to the day.

It was a great occasion, well attended by an enthusiastic audience, and it is a great pity that it had to be a one-off.

Treasures of modern physics

Last Saturday morning I dropped into Boobooks, Armidale's wonderful second-hand bookshop, and came away with two classics of modern physics: Louis de Broglie's Wave Mechanics (1930 - translated from the French original) and Paul Dirac's The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (3rd edition 1947, first published 1930). These two authors made fundamental contributions to their respective branches of physics, de Broglie winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1929, and Dirac sharing the prize with Erwin Schrödinger in 1933.

The flyleaf of de Broglie’s Wave Mechanics showed it to have been the property of “R.H. Healey B.Sc., Physics IV 1932”.

Imagine my delight on subsequently discovering on another flyleaf that it once belonged to my physics professor, J.M. (Jack) Somerville, who was also my first year tutor (those were the days!). Jack Somerville was one of the four original staff members of the New England University College, teaching the full University of Sydney Physics and Mathematics curriculum, and became the first Professor of Physics at UNE. Sadly, he died suddenly in 1964, while I was working as a research assistant in the Department, a great shock to the University community as a whole.

I already have a copy of a more modern text on quantum mechanics (David Beard’s Quantum Mechanics), sent to him by a publisher, which he gave to me in 1963, inviting me as he did so me to give him my opinion of it (which was highly favourable). I am very happy to have fortuitously acquired this additional link with such an admirable man.

On looking to see who R.H. Healey might be, I find that he was a student at Sydney University who shared with physicist, radio astronomer and school teacher Ruby Payne-Scott (1912-1981) the Deas Thomson and Walter Burfitt scholarships for physics.

As for Dirac’s Quantum Mechanics, that belonged to one N.W. Taylor. That will be Nathaniel Wesley Taylor, an outstanding mathematician who was one of the first two recipients of a University of New England Ph.D., at the Graduation Ceremony in 1958, and who was in the Mathematics Department when I was a student.

I think I will go back to Boobooks and see what other treasures I can find amongst the mathematics and physics texts.

A day trip to Dangar Falls

I guess January is a time when most of us remember summers past and what we did in the holidays of our youth.

The first few days of January always remind me of a particular day in very early January of one particular year, 1962, the start of my second year at the University of New England.

One fine morning in the first few days of January 1962 the late Helen Beh (1), Susan Somerville (2) and I packed a picnic and headed off in Helen’s Volkswagen in the direction of Dangars Falls, a spectacular 120m waterfall about 25km southeast of Armidale, at the head of Dangar Gorge in Oxley Wild Rivers National Park.  It was Armidale’s quietest time – the boarding schools were closed and the university and teachers college students had all gone home, so there were relatively few people about except people like Sue and me, both children of academics, or Helen, preparing herself for her honours year.

Both Sue and Helen were taking up appointments that year as Demonstrators in Psychology.  Sue, who was a year ahead of Helen, had just completed her honours year, becoming the first female student to be awarded a University Medal in Psychology.

The sole purpose of the last stretch of the road is to convey people to the gorge; after the last farm gate was left behind it goes nowhere else.  That last stretch of a kilometre or so was in dreadful condition, with ruts so deep that Helen’s VW began bottoming out, and although it was protected by the metal shield underneath there was some danger of running aground in such a way that the driving wheels were no longer in contact with Mother Earth.

A lesser spirit might have abandoned our quest at this stage, or alternatively locked up the car and made the last leg of the journey on foot, but no, that wasn’t what one did when Helen had set her mind to something.  Sue and I got out of the car and began filling the ruts ahead of the wheels with fallen timber, stones or whatever we could lay our hands to, and metre by metre we made our way to where the road comes to an end above the creek near the top of the falls.

Of course when you on an outing like this with Helen you don’t just admire the breathtaking view down the gorge:

or even just content yourself with walking around the edge of the gorge a bit to where you can get a view of the falls:

Not at all. We have to climb down here:

In order to get to here and see how it all looks from below:

Which of course we did. We spent a wonderful hour or so exploring the bottom of the gorge:

and enjoying the sun, before making our way back up the steep slope (no trivial matter) and manhandling the Volkswagen back over the rough patches until we were on our way and returned to the Somerville’s place for a well-earned cuppa, at the end of a memorable day, one which came back to me vividly when I revisited the Falls a few weeks after Helen’s death in 2012 and took the above photos.

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(1) For more about Helen see the obituary written by her husband Cyril Latimer at Vale Helen Beh, 1941-2012.

(2) Susan Somerville was the daughter of Professor Jack Somerville, the Professor of Physics, who was one of the foundation members of the University staff, having taken up an appointment as Lecturer in Mathematics and Physics in 1938. As far as I know, Sue was the first graduate of the university who was the offspring of a student or member of staff, and I was the first offspring of one of the students at NEUC/UNE. She studied under my father, I studied under hers. It was all very “family” in those days. Sue is now a Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University.

Booloominbah, 1950s

This is the 1880s mansion, Booloominbah, that T.R. Forster donated to the State Government of New South Wales, on behalf of the White family, on condition that it be used for the establishment of a university in Armidale. For the background to this gift and the establishment of what is now the University of New England, see my earlier post Booloominbah.

In its original configuration the northern forecourt of the building was accessible from east or west via a circular access road that ran up the hill past the deer park and a cottage on the east side and past where Mary White College and the Psychology Building now stand on the western side. In the 1950s the bus used to run up past the deer park, stop at the main entrance to the building, and return to Armidale via the western approach.

This photo of Booloominbah from the western side of the ring road, taken by my father in the 1950s, gives a view of the building that is no longer available. The road is blocked off and the view is blocked by an administrative building which (criminally in my view) is interposed between the main building and the old laundry which became my father’s EEG laboratory.

Russell Ward by Adhi Hendranto

Going through some old papers a couple of nights ago I came across the 1967 edition of The Martlet, the magazine produced annually by the students of Wright College, the first men’s college at the University of New England and my happy home (not far) away from home 1961-65.

Inside I found this little gem: a sketch of Australian historian Russell Ward (“The Australian Legend”), by Indonesian student Adhi Hendranto. This brought back a number of memories. Russell was my “moral tutor” throughout my time at UNE; this somewhat quaint term deriving from the Oxbridge tradition meant that he was responsible for my pastoral care, the person I could go to if there was anything I wanted to discuss. Russell used to have his dozen or so charges for biscuits and cheese and a pre-dinner sherry once a term, after which we would go off together to formal dinner in Wright College Dining Hall.

In my last couple of years in Wright College, Russell was also my Resident Fellow in Beta Block, living in quarters just around the corner from my room, Beta 2.

As for the artist, Adhi was my next door neighbour for a year or two, so this sketch of Russell by Adhi was a nice find.

UNE campus, 1950s

The two photos below were taken by my father in the late 1950s – probably about 1957. They are scans of 35 mm Kodachrome transparencies.

It felt very much like a university in those days. Students wore undergraduate gowns to all lectures and tutorials, except for laboratory classes. Classes were small, senior staff took tutorials as well as giving lectures, and staff and students knew each other. The university was fully residential, and in the colleges that were built from 1956 on we dined formally four nights a week, again in academic dress, with the Master and Fellows processing in and taking their places on the high table. The university had become autonomous in 1954 and was making its own independent way. There was a lot of optimism about its future, a feeling that staff and students were building something worthwhile.

The image below was taken in the forecourt on the northern side of Booloominbah. It must be third term, with the annual exams approaching. Of the beautiful grounds around Booloominbah it used to be said in relation to exam time, “When the wisteria starts to bloom it is time to make your run; when the roses bloom it is too late”.

This second image shows students passing through the main gate of Booloominbah in the direction of the Booth Block, the first permanent building to be added to the estate donated by the White family. Named after Edgar Booth, the first Warden of the New England University College, it served initially as the Science Block. In my time there in the early 1960s it was mainly mathematics and, from 1964, the first computer centre, in the days when computers were mainframes and there was one to serve all of the university’s research and administrative needs.