03 University Years

I have been fortunate to have had some very happy times in my life but not the least of these were my 8 years at the University of Adelaide studying first for an honours science degree specialising in mathematics and then to proceed to a PhD in a fantastic environment.

1964: First Year

Arrival at University in 1964 was a really exciting time, being able to choose the subjects I studied, assembling my timetable, etc.

On arrival I always thought I was going to study mathematics, as this seemed to be my strength, and having discovered at school via two great mathematics teachers (now both deceased) that mathematics was a far bigger subject than just the more computationally oriented topics taught in the syllabus.

However I had one last time to question this when I got a higher result for chemistry than mathematics in first year, in fact in the top 5 or so out of a class of 700.

During the year I had found geology very difficult to pass, even though I felt I understood the lectures well, as I did not seem to be good at saying in the exams what the lecturers were looking for. However I worked very hard on this and probably ended up passing well enough.

Physics and chemistry were more familiar though but I had roller coaster rides with both of them. Again I felt I understood the subjects well, but in those days examinations were very difficult, both at university and in the public exams towards the end of school. For example in a physics exam, there might be 6 questions, all very difficult, maybe a small number of free marks at the start, and I would be lucky to find one or two questions for which I had trained very well and could nail. This was normally enough to pass.

But with both subjects I had good luck and bad luck during the year with various questions asked in exams and at various times I would have very good results in one and not the other.

With chemistry I liked organic chemistry very much, and I had a very good lecturer in physical and inorganic chemistry, who made everyone think, but most of the students had deserted this lecture for one where the professor was and where they got better notes.

In the end I decided that chemistry might be a passing phase, so I stuck with the mathematics, and was able to choose all mathematics for second year, Pure Mathematics II, Applied Mathematics II and Mathematical Statistics I.

1965: Second Year

Second year was the best I had in terms of results, with very high distinctions in all three subjects, particularly Applied Mathematics II which I enjoyed very much. An interesting thing was that two other students, John Noble (who had been a student with me throughout my Edwardstown Primary School days) and Bevan Hill all worked closely together, reviewing the lectures at the end of each day and working through assignments together (they did not contribute to final marks - in those days the exams were 100% of assessment). It was a very good example of collaborative learning. The lecturer we had for Pure Mathematics 2 was Maurice Gray, who had also lectured in Mathematics 1. He had a teaching background and no PhD, but he was well in charge of the material and was an excellent lecturer. The lecturer in Mathematical Statistics 1 was Kerwin Morris, who was very experienced as a Lecturer and very thorough and organised.

1966: Third Year

I wanted to proceed to Honours and so enrolled in Honours Mathematics 3, which provided extra lectures than needed for passing the ordinary degree, which John and Bevan wanted to do. So I was more by myself, with other students I did not know so well, and I found this year and Honours itself more difficult. I had to drop Applied or Stats and whereas I had hoped to continue with Stats I chose to focus on the applied with which I had done so well in second year. This was the Golden Period of Eric Barnes and Ren Potts, the two great Professors, but unfortunately I never had lectures by Ren, whose seminars I attended when possible and he was clearly a great lecturer. Ren was a great motivator though and had come into our last class of second year to exhort us to continue to improve our careers by studying more mathematics.

Probably the highlight for me was the Numerical Analysis course, in which we were taught to program in FORTRAN. Adelaide had been progressive in acquiring mainframe computers, originally small IBMs, then a CDC 3200 and then became the first place outside the US to have a CDC 6400. Programming was a highly satisfying experience. Of course in those days punch cards were used and we had to create our own cards. Towards the end of the year though I had decided my future lay in Numerical Analysis or maybe Number Theory (having been inspired by lectures on the topic by Eric Barnes). My exam results were lowered from Distinctions to Credits, but this was enough to qualify for the Honours year.

1967: Honours

After discussing the matter with Eric Barnes, I decided to focus on Numerical Analysis for my thesis and was allocated Jerry Kautsky as supervisor. Jerry was the only Numerical Analyst in the department, and a Czech who was very oriented towards Functional Analysis, sometimes much more so than I would have preferred, but it did lead me to a stronger base in Pure Mathematics than I expected. I had been inspired by work of the Swedish mathematician Dahlquist on the stability of finite difference methods for solving Ordinary Differential Equations and Jerry was happy to supervise my work on this in which I wanted to write an overview of the topic.

For Honours I was I believe in Adelaide's largest ever class of 27 students, and we were split into more than one room, where for the first time we had permanent working desks for the first time. As far as I recall Honours was assessed as about 9 units, of which the thesis was worth about 2 and so we had to submit ourselves for exams in about 7 courses. We did therefore attend more than 7 courses and chose which ones to be examined in. Unfortunately Ren was away on study leave and there were not many options in Applied Maths. Jerry did give a good Numerical Analysis course and we also were allowed to attend lectures at Flinders University on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons, where there was a good course on asymptotic analysis by Roger Hosking (who became a colleague many years later when I discovered him on the Faculty of University of Brunei Darussalam in the late 1990s). Probably the most memorable lectures though were the Flinders ones by Igor Kluvanek, from Kosice in what is now Slovakia, which were brilliant ones on functional analysis.

I finished with a Division 2A result, which most students got in those days but was enough to be able to proceed. Jerry was to go back to Czechoslovakia to live (unfortunately he was to time this with the Soviet invasion) and I knew I had to find a new supervisor. One likely possibility was to transfer to Flinders and work with former scoutmaster and neighbour Tom Sag, who was a Numerical Analyst.

Summer Employment

For my undergraduate years summer employment was a necessary part of economic life, but also a major character-building and life-learning experience. My first job was at the end of secondary school, where I worked in the Woolworths shop, one of the early supermarkets, at Black Forest at the time, filling shelves. On one occasion, to my father's surprise, I had 3d (three pence or threepence) deducted as tax. This resulted in me filling in my first tax return and getting a refund of 3d.

In my first two years of undergraduate I worked with the South Australian Bulk Handling Company, which needed extra staff to process the farmers' ledgers for the harvest which occurred during the summer. In the afternoon I always went into town to do odd jobs for the company, which taught me a lot about doing business.

For the last two years I got manual work in the Coca-Cola factory, loading trucks and working on the production line. This was quite hard work, involving 14 hours a day for the week days and a further 6 and a half hours on Saturdays to meet the summer demand for soft drinks. I would just go home and sleep during the remainder of each weekend. I made a lot of money at the time, being paid time and a half after 8 hours, double time after 12 hours in one day, and once to meet the demand worked on New Years Day for triple pay.

1968 to 1971: PhD

At the end of 1967 I took a long break. A friend George Lockey, a Physics student, and I went to New Zealand to hitch hike down and up the country over 6 weeks. On returning towards the end of January I found a problem. For the first time, there were not enough Commonwealth Postgraduate Awards available to cater for such a large number of eligible students and I was one of those who had to go elsewhere for a scholarship. I had survived until now living at home and working during holidays at places such as Woolworths, the SA Bulk Handling Company as a clerk and as a labourer at Coca Cola, as described above, but even living at home I was looking for income by now.

Tom Sag could not get me a scholarship so I looked elsewhere. The mathematics department at Adelaide did not have a supervisor suitable for me and I turned my attention to Computer Science. Here at Adelaide Professor John Ovenstone, who had been responsible for acquiring the University's CDC 6400 was prepared to take me on and found me a scholarship funded by CDC.

I had an interesting 8 months in this new building, looking at an idea Ovenstone had, but in particular learning a lot of new things about computing, attending department courses and seminars. But in the end I was getting unhappy as I felt there was not a PhD in the work I was looking at.

In September I received a phone call from a new Reader in the Maths Department, a young guy called Ernie Tuck. He said he heard I might be looking for something better and he had an interesting problem he needed solved to fulfil a contract with the US Navy. He said if I could solve a certain problem by the end of the year it could indicate my ability to continue to the bigger problem which he said would be worth a PhD and in the short term he could fund me from his US Navy contract.

Ernie was only 8 years older than me, had come from Adelaide but had gone to Cambridge to do his PhD with Australian-born Fluid Mechanicist George Batchelor, and then gone on to make his name in Naval Hydrodynamics. He had by-passed the usual academic promotion process to be appointed as a reader directly. He showed me the problem he wanted solved and a preliminary one to prove my ability. I did not feel that strong in hydrodynamics, but this was essentially a numerical analysis problem, solving integral equations with a singularity (which anomalously improved the conditioning of the problem for numerical treatment). I was able to solve the problem, and by December was able to present the solution to Ernie. I was on board with a really exciting project and Chapter 1 of a 7-chapter PhD Thesis already written.

So formally I transferred across to the Mathematics Department at the beginning of 1969 on a US Navy Scholarship as Ernie's first PhD student. Others came on stream in the form of David Guiney and Max Haselgrove, while John Blake did some work with a view to transferring to Cambridge, also under Batchelor, later in the year. I also found myself sharing a room with Chris (CJ) Harman (who was working with Dr Abdi, and who was to become a life-long friend). The department was vibrant, with many students doing post-graduate work with Ren Potts. One of these, two rooms away was Tony Tan, with whom I often had interesting discussions in the corridor and he was later to become President of Singapore.

As I say the department under Ren's leadership was vibrant. It was compulsory to be a member of the tea club. For half an hour each morning (1030 to 1100) and afternoon (1530 to 1600) one had to sit at a long table where we only discussed mathematics. Many good research ideas would arise from the cross-fertilisation of ideas.

My particular project was very interesting. The US Navy wanted to know what the forces were on ships berthed in open water. I am sure that there were wartime advantages in wanting to know how strong one needed to construct a moorage, but there were civilian needs to know these forces. For example the big copper mine at Bougainville was not near a harbour, and giant ore carriers would have to berth in exposed moorages to take on their loads.

My knowledge of asymptotic analysis was also to be useful. As Ernie put it, the naval problem had an outer problem, which was effectively a ribbon diffraction problem, and an inner problem, looking at the ship's cross-section. These would take 6 chapters, as it turned out with a seventh needed to match asymptotic expansions from the two results and get the overall picture. Not only did it offer interesting mathematics, but it was one with direct industrial application as well.

Chapter 1, which I had written at the end of 1968, was simpler than the real problem as it had a Dirichlet boundary condition. In fluid problems these conditions tend to be of the Neumann type, which were more difficult to treat. The Neumann one and a "mixed" one (because even in shallow water we wanted to allow for some energy to pass under the ship) took up most of my time in 1969 so I had Chapters 2 and 3 done by the beginning of 1970. But then I began to stagnate thinking about the inner problem and Ernie distracted me. He knew I had learned German and he asked me to translate a chapter from Handbuch der Physik which he desperately wanted to read in English. I got distracted by this also as it turned out to be quite long and a lot of work.

Ren Potts did not muck around and he did not want to have his department's reputation by having a PhD failed. As a result he kept tabs on every student in the department. Once he decided there was a student at risk he would weed him out, but he would always line up a good job first. At about this period I was getting pessimistic about things and I got a call to Ren's office. Nervously I arrived. Ren introduced himself to me and then told me he heard I was a good squash player, and with one good player having just left he needed a replacement opponent. I will tell this story in more detail later in this chapter, below, but I was relieved. However it shook me up and I had a discussion with Ernie. Fortunately the translation was finished anyway and I re-engaged with zeal and got into the inner problem. The period of about September through to about April 1971 was really exciting as I cracked the solution. Not only did I crack it but the method generalised somewhat and what was able to be checked in the earlier terms of the solution matched known results. So the PhD was done and just needed writing up which I had until the end of 1971 to complete and did comfortably.

So I started looking for jobs, mainly academic or research jobs. There was a commercial hydrodynamicist in Adelaide who was interested also. I applied for about 6 jobs and it was just the time when there was an over-supply of PhD graduates, and the outlook was bleak. Ren was fantastic though at helping me write applications and soon I got a positive response. In fact the first job I had applied for, at the Canberra College of Advanced Education, yielded an interview, and I was to be flown First Class to Canberra for the interview with a Commonwealth car to take me from the airport to the College, just starting in Belconnen.

There was an early hitch though. When I got to Adelaide airport at dawn, there was Steve McKee, a former Honours colleague at Adelaide who was finishing a PhD at Flinders. It turned out he was being flown to be interviewed for the same job. We wondered how many more there would be.

As it turned out there was only a third candidate interviewed. The interview was one of the classic ones at the CCAE. Interviewing me were the College Principal (Sam Richardson, English former Royal Marine Commando and Islamic Law scholar) in person, Head of the School of Liberal Studies (another Englishman Peter Mosedale, still alive in 2013) and the Head of Mathematics Ivor Vivian, who was proud of Welsh heritage. I faced a barrage of questions alternating between Ivor and Sam. Ivors' were straight down the line, checking what Maths I knew, which units I could teach. But Sam's were about my private life. I was single and he was trying to determine whether I had a girlfriend or went out with girls. I later learned that this was a normal tactic. He preferred to employ WASPS who were not gay. Sam from his military background was an interrogation expert. There are many legendary stories about lines of questioning he would take on, many of which would not be acceptable in later years.

After the interview Steve and I went down to the Refectory for lunch, where we were surprised to see alcoholic drinks available in a student refectory for the first time, and we each bought a beer to recover from our experiences. We were expecting to then trek back to the airport. Before we left though, Ivor came down looking for us, and told me, in front of Steve, that I was successful in getting the job. So a future career in Canberra was starting to take shape. Steve did get a job in Ballarat shortly after.

It now needed the PhD examiner results to come through. We were not supposed to know who our examiners were, but one was normally interstate and the other usually overseas. Ernie found one of the examiner comments so good he showed me just one complimentary paragraph. I was OK.

About 4 years later an American wrote to me pointing out some experimental work had conflicted with my result for the next term in the series which had been not possible for me to compare. I looked at it and found an arithmetic error. The method was correct, but when I fixed the error my result did then match experimental observations. As I understand it though my results were used to calculate forces. An engineer (Bob Beck, who had been to Adelaide before) from the University of Michigan came over to work with Ernie after I left and was apparently able to translate my mathematical results into engineering terms.

In South Australia I had been able to get a driving licence at the age of 16. I had been to a special course on defensive driving with the SA Police at the barracks at Thebarton and I have found this of great value. One got a learner's licence on 16 on passing a written test and then went straight to a full licence once passing a practical test, which could be attempted after 3 months. I went back to Thebarton for this test and passed on a first attempt, being nervous only about the parallel parking.

First I bought from my parents their Ford Consul, which they had bought, imported from England, new in 1954. When my Grandfather Taylor died in 1968 I changed the Consul over for his Vauxhall Viva. I had driven it to Bendigo for a wedding though and had engine problems for the return trip. I decided I needed a 6 cylinder car and with the promise of my new job, traded the Viva in on one of the brand new light blue Holden HQs, with a 202 engine, which cost $3003 at the time at Smiths of Port Adelaide. This car was going to become legendary as I ended up owning it for over 20 years.

My Mathematical Genealogy

Mathematical genealogy is an important thing for many and is at least interesting if not completely meaningful. In many cases people can trace their PhD supervisors back to famous mathematicians such as Gauss. I cannot do this. My PhD supervisor Ernie Tuck was a very famous applied mathematician and I was his first PhD student. But his PhD supervisor Fritz Ursell did not actually have a doctorate, with good explanation, so my ancestry line is not much longer than that of Cain or Abel. However anyone who follows the link to Ursell in the previous sentence will understand that he was a very significant mathematician. I never met him but I was well aware of him through Ernie, who he outlived by 3 years, and he only passed away in 2012 at the age of 89.

A seminar was held in January 2003 to mark Ernie's retirement. Before the lectures the group of former students present was photographed on the lawns. The person sitting in front is Max Haselgrove. Some other former students I can identify are Larry Forbes, fifth from left, Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck, left of Ernie and Charles Macaskill to the rear right of Ernie as we face him.

Here we are in the lecture theatre, one of Adelaide's famous two ground floor mathematics lecture theatres. The building has since been demolished. Larry Forbes, who became Head of Maths at the University of Tasmania, is at the left of the front row. As you face Ernie, Nick Newman (MIT) is behind and to the left. Nick and Ernie were both students of Ursell and were both reputed to be among the world's three leading naval hydrodynamicists. Graeme Hocking is in the next row back at the right. He became an academic at Murdoch. And Ren Potts is at the left in the third row.

Here I am with Ernie and Arieh Helfgott at the function afterwards. Arieh was an Israeli citizen who had fought in the 1967 Yom Kippur War and had played for Israel in the World Chess Olympiad. He had once challenged us to a blindfold chess game (with us not blindfold) which he duly won. And then he reconstructed the game and showed us where our losing move was, somewhere about move 55. His father had died of a heart condition and his work with Ernie was trying to develop a model of the heart. He was working with the University's Institute for Medical and Veterinary Science.

My Honours Year colleagues

I was I believe in the largest honours year of Adelaide University's mathematics department. I recall there may have been up to 27 of us. Some of the class later became very successful. I can find the following names from the graduation list, although not all might have passed. I am fairly sure there were more, but maybe not up to the full 27 of my recollection.

• Jeff Baxter. Jeff became a well known identity for many years on the Executive of the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, and was for many years an academic in Adelaide in Mathematics Education.
• Jack Bonnett. I never heard of him later but he had a teaching bond and went into that area. He was very strong and got first class honours.
• Susan Chambers
• Brian Daniels. Brian started a Masters but ended up joining AMP with the intention of becoming an Actuary.
• Roger Duke. I came across Roger in 1978 when I worked in the Open University and found him working there. I found him very helpful and sociable and he had some good tips for me on living in England. It is possible he later returned to Australia.
• John Field. I went to the same school as John, but my recollection is that he was doing statistics so I didn't see so much of him. He worked in Townsville with the CSIRO for many years, but I went to a 40th anniversary school reunion in Adelaide in 2003, and he was back there by then working as a consultant. In fact he was also at the School's 50 year reunion for my year and I sat next to him.
• Chris (CJ) Harman. CJ joined the year having taught for about 3 years or so before returning to study. CJ and I were to share a room and become lifelong close friends. He became first a lecturer at Mitchell CAE in Bathurst and finished his career as an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Queensland at Toowoomba before retiring to live on the Sunshine Coast. For a long time he was also a member of the Australian Mathematics Competition Problems Committee. Chris also represented Australia at baseball, twice, ten years apart, and once introduced me to Glenelg baseball teammate Ian Chappell before he became famous as Australia's cricket captain, while working as a Coke rep at Flinders University when we were there for lectures.
• Ian Knowles
• Paul Linden. I did not know Paul at all well but it can be seen from the link to his home page that he has had a very successful career.
• Janet Macpherson
• Steve McKee. Steve is discussed above. After finishing his PhD at Flinders he got a lectureship at Ballarat.
• Robb Muirhead. Robb also went to the same school as me. As he was a statistician and in a different room I saw little of him at the time. He became one of the most successful students of my year through University, and got his PhD very quickly before moving I believe to Yale and now still in the US as a consultant. He made contact with me a few years ago and I remain in contact as a good friend.
• Pippa Phillips (later Pippa Simpson).
• Doug Ratcliff. Doug also became a statistician and I believe he became a very senior research scientist in the CSIRO. I did come across him recently and we compared some notes.
• Leon Simon. Leon would be the most famous of the class. A great Australian mathematician at Stanford.
• Greg Spencer
• Peter Taylor
• Jim Thompson
• Vern Treilbs. Vern was another bonded teacher, and he became a very proficient mathematics teacher, academic and consultant, sometimes working at an international school in Indonesia and later returning to Adelaide, first working at the new Australian Maths and Science School at Flinders University. For a few years he was also a member of the Australian Mathematics Competition Problems Committee.
• Denis Trenerry. Dennis worked next to me in our Honours room. After finishing a PhD in Pure Mathematics, got an academic position at Broken Hill, but UNSW closed that campus down and he spent most of his professional career at their Kensington campus.
• Keith Watkins
• Tony Whitford. Tony got a position at a Teachers' College in Adelaide, the one near or at Thebarton at the time.

There were only 8 of these who worked in my room and many of those in the other rooms I did not get to know at all. There were no statistics students in our room. So I have no idea what happened to many of them.

Sport: Squash and Australian football

I had played various sports at school, including football (the Australian variety), tennis and cricket, but squash was a sport to which I had been introduced in Year 8 but not able to continue. University sport had a Squash Club and this gave me a chance to resume it. I first naively entered the University Championships and found myself drawn against Ren Potts, the number 3 seed, in the first round. He turned up and demolished me 9-0 9-0 in probably only 5 minutes. I hardly saw the ball. It was to be the only time I was ever zipped and I was never zipped in a best of 5, although I would have been here, for sure.

I found casual opponents in first year and managed to get into a team for the winter pennant of 1965 in E grade, which was not bad as I think the grades went down to about M. I eventually started winning games there and justifying this selection.

In the meantime, the Bevan Hill mentioned above as a second year study partner came from McLaren Vale, the wine growing town south of Adelaide, and got me and John Noble playing in their teams during 1965 also. The team was an easy-beat side, which is probably why Bevan was looking for recruits. However we sometimes won. I actually ended up playing as ruckman and full forward at times for their A team in the southern league, and once had to face recent West Adelaide and state ruckman Trevor Barker in a game. He was shorter than me but he was so good it was intimidating.

The funniest experience was once when I was playing for the B team against Christie's Beach, at Christie's, a team which was in the top four and sure to beat us, as we were used to. The day was as bad a winter's day as I can recall. It was cold and wet with rain throughout and the ground mostly flooded as a result.

In the dressing room before the game one team member, in an attempt to lift our spirits given impending disaster, drew from his bag a bottle of Stone's Green Ginger Wine, and passed it round. We all had a swig as the bottle went round. On the field I felt like Superman, soaring to win every knock, passing the ball to the rover each time, and it soon became apparent the whole team felt the same way. We played above ourselves and in a low-scoring game, about 6 goals to 3 we had beaten this highly ranked team.

In 1972, when I made a short return home I was invited to fill in for a first grade squash team in a pennant game. My mother had sent me clippings about how Ian Stephenson, younger brother of Australian squash player Doug, was super-fit and winning games at number 1. I was playing that night in his team at number 2 (and won against a former team mate from Semaphore). After the game I told Ian I had read about his fitness and asked him the secret. He said he had decided to play football and was playing for McLaren Vale. He said "You know, they have an interesting tradition. Before every game someone passes a bottle of Stone's Green Ginger Wine around the dressing room. You would not believe what wonders it does for your game". Well, actually I would.

The stint at McLaren Vale, where our captain coach was former West Adelaide player Bob Kemp, did wonders for me. Before I started I was a tall skinny runt weighing barely 10 stone. After 2 years I had muscled right up put on a couple of stone and was much tougher physically. Ruck is a rugged position, covering the whole field and whereas the players in the country were fair and I didn't receive any injuries, it took a long time to recover from all the knocks and bruising each game.

By 1967, my Honours year, Bevan was no longer studying with me, and I was getting sick of the travelling three times a week, so I decided to join the Uni club, where by contrast the Oval was just across the river. Adelaide Uni was the strongest amateur league club in Adelaide and had ten teams at least with two in the top grade. I had increasingly trained with them at times anyway in the previous years because McLaren Vale was a long way to go. The head coach was former Port player Alan Greer, great guy (who I am pleased to say later appeared in old age in the 2017 Brownlow Medal television program). I was given number 177 to fit on the back of my black jumper with white V and my mother managed to stitch all three numbers on. I made the A3 reserves for my first game against PAOC in the east Parklands, in April 1967. City football was nothing like country. As I was to find out teams in the amateur league had "enforcers", usually older and slower players, but could prove useful by wiping out dangerous players. In the first five minutes I had scored a goal from the forward pocket from a boundary throw-in. And I had taken an overhead mark in the square to kick what was going to be an easy second.

But as I had risen to take that mark my defences were left unprotected. The PAOC enforcer, who must have been 45 years if a day, had obviously already identified me for treatment and ran through my knees. I heard a noise and as I tried to rise I realised that my knee was badly injured.

While waiting to be taken to hospital another teammate received the same treatment. I saw the same fellow run through him. My teammate was taken off with a broken collarbone.

Probably I would have decided that this was not for me. But it didn't matter. I was not going to play again. The surgeon operated on my the next night expecting to remove a cartilage and telling me I would wake up with my knee in ice. But I woke up with the left leg in plaster. I had ruptured the posterior cruciate ligament. The surgeon said said it was the size of the little finger, he had had to draw the two severed parts together and stitch them together with a chromate thread which would eventually dissolve in the blood after the healing had taken hold. He said I would be in plaster for three months and should not contemplate active sport for a year. He said if the same injury happened again he could not guarantee being able to do the join so advised against body contact sports anyway. I understand that procedures and prognosis are a lot better these days.

I was told I would be in hospital for a week and a physio would give me training on the use of crutches. The surgeon's assistant was a guy who I knew. We had worked together in the Bulk Handling Company as clerks. He told me in a rather sadistic way that I would not play any sport again. It was an old fashioned ward of 20 beds, ten on each side. The guy next to me was an old guy. He was served a Cooper's Stout with dinner. I asked for one also. They refused saying I was too healthy to qualify. Most of the patients were young guys, some there for a year with legs suspended from the ceiling with a hook and cable. The physio came and I adapted very quickly to the crutches. Even to the point where it was easy to go up and down stairs. On the second afternoon I was surprised to see my mother in the ward office, outside visiting hours. She said that even though I was supposed to be there for a week they had another rule in the hospital. Any patient who could move faster than a nurse had to be discharged. So she had been called in to take me home.

So I went home to contemplate what to do. My squash had improved and I was now in the renamed Division 3, Adelaide's fourth grade, with District being at the top. This was my main sport and I could see I would now focus on this and get fit for squash. I had been in the Adelaide Intervarsity team in Brisbane in 1966 and it was so good I wanted to make it again in August. Despite the dour predictions the plaster had come off after 6 weeks instead of 3 months in early June and I started gingerly to train in the hope I could make it. Gradually during July I was playing and was able to make it into the pennant team and get selected. And I was able to get into the Adelaide Intervarsity team as number 5 for the team to play at Monash in August. I was the last player selected and certainly lucky.

I only played three games and won two against easy opponents and got picked for the team for the semi-final as the number 4 player, despite being ranked 5 in the squad but lost to my Melbourne University opponent. But I was back on track, a little earlier than predicted. Squash was definitely now my game and Intervarsities were a main focus.

My remaining years at University were great for my squash. I gradually rose through the ranks and actually played at number one for the next four Intervarsities, at Armidale 1968, Adelaide 1969, Hobart 1970 and Canberra 1971, except the Adelaide one, where there was a local player Malcolm Gray, a district player, who was happy to play in the team if at home.

In 1969 I also had the Ren Potts incident described above and for my remaining two and a half years played him regularly on Fridays at Aquinas College. He arranged that I always met him at his car outside the building, we'd go to Aquinas and play for an hour and we'd be back at the Maths building at 1315. His secretary blocked his diary out a year in advance to ensure there were no interruptions.

Ren did not play competition and maybe never did. But he was a remarkable athlete, having won the University mile as an undergraduate and having played various sports at a top level since. His main strength was retrieval. He was fast all over the court. The rally was never over until you had seen the ball bounce the second time and he found the back wall useful. Over the two and a half years I had many epic games with him. It was excellent for my development as I must have had similar determination to win. Originally he may have won more often than me but I felt I got on top and won most of our games by 1971. I remained good friends with Ren and often saw him in later life.

Competitively I was also rising through the ranks. By 1968 I had got to the bottom of Division 1 (second grade) and I had become a number 1 player from 1969. In the beginning of 1971 Adelaide University had its own courts as part of the gym on McKinnon Parade. I discovered the circuits in the gym, with the help of gym trainer Pat, a great badminton player. We challenged each other to a squash and badminton game. I got no points in the badminton and he got no points in the squash. I got very fit on the circuits in the first half of 1971 and had mastered the highest level. I was beating everyone in Division 1 also.

I was approached by three District clubs to play in that top grade, Mitcham (my local club) Ken McGregors and Semaphore. I chose Semaphore because there was a chance of more serious practice and coaching and did as a result get to be coached by players like Hunt and Hiscoe. But the Mitcham people and Ken McGregor, who all thought I should play with them, for various reasons, would barely speak with me after this. Ken also associated me with the University, where squash was cheap and after his Davis Club exploits for Australia he had gone professional and wanted squash players to pay at the professional rates, so he didn't like that we could pay at cheaper than his rates. He was though a brilliant squash player ranked about 6 in South Australia and physically very impressive on the court, great volleyer. Another South Australian tennis player Barry Phillips Moore had also been good at squash and Don Bradman had apparently won the 1939 SA Squash Championship.

Adelaide's squash scene was very competitive in those days, as elsewhere in Australia. The matches were on Friday nights and many club members would come for the night out. Typically, and certainly by finals time, there were hundreds of people in the crowds, and the matches got major newspaper coverage. I went through unbeaten except for one match in my season in spring 1971 playing at number 5, including the three finals games including the grand final, but the team lost the grand final. I got to know Port Adelaide people very well and enjoyed their company.

I was also active in that last Adelaide year with the Squash Association, was a Vice President and was mainly responsible for running the main tournaments such as State Championships.

In my last two years (1970 and 1971) I also won the Adelaide University Championship, with Ren Potts being runner up in the 1970 final. I was also awarded a Half Blue for squash and was active with the University Club Committee, serving as Secretary and President, and also being organiser of the 1969 Intervarsity which we hosted. To get a Full Blue at Adelaide Uni you basically either had to get into the state side or all Australian universities. I was not near the state side but may have scrambled into a second Australian Unis side so may have been closer on that basis. I also represented the squash club on the committee of the Adelaide University Sports Association.

Beer with a Brownlow Medallist

I used to sometimes travel to Melbourne on the Overland, where I learnt to sleep sitting up in Economy. In those days the Overland traversed the route very night. I would have a beer in the bar before settling down to sleep. On one trip around 1970 I was with a very modest guy having a beer. Eventually he told me he was Bernie Smith, who had played for West Adelaide, but was in the 1951 Geelong premiership team and had won the Brownlow Medal that year also.

Sport: Water sports

I was also involved in various water sports about this time, but mainly due to interests of friends rather than my own initiative. I had some brief experiences sailing, which was a very pleasant sport except for the maintenance work, preparation and cleaning down after. At school a student Richard Guenther had taken me out as crew on his Rainbow in St Vincents Gulf on at least one occasion. But getting into about third year University a student friend Christopher Rehn had a Heron which we sailed competitively for a season at Grange Sailing Club. The boat was heavy and so were we, so we were not competitive in the most common light conditions, but once in heavy conditions we prevailed and won and I think the conditions were so bad only we and the club champions finished the race. We also went to Port Vincent, where there is very pleasant Easter racing, and where you can see Adelaide from the other side of the Gulf. We were too heavy to win, but there was a good social time, as the South Australian Cruising Yacht Club, with its Sydney to Hobart racers (of which there were only one or two) also took part.

Surfing, skin diving and scuba diving with my friend George Lockey were to take up more of my time. He was a member of the University scuba club. I remember diving one day off Edinburgh jetty, thinking I was only down for 5 minutes. But time is obviously difficult in that environment. When I surfaced I had apparently been down 25 minutes and they were getting worried. In that club we also went snorkelling where it was much easier to catch fish than by using a line and there were nice places such as south of Normanville.

However body surfing was the big one and we would spend many weekends either at Chiton Rocks near Victor Harbour, or Southport at the mouth of the Onkaparinga, where surf could come in between Kangaroo Island and Yorke Peninsula, or even further afield such as Stenhouse Bay at the bottom of Yorke peninsula. We would spend whole weekends at Chiton, going sown on the Friday night to catch the 6am morning waves, and then eventually retiring to a pub later in the day when the surf had gone down.

Southport though was a common venue. I had fins and would venture "out the back" waiting for a big one and then getting an exhilarating ride in. But some things which happened scare the wits out of me in later life. I remember one day seeing a shark swim past me, about 20 meters away. We were blase about this as there had only ever been one attack, and that had been back in the 30s.

One day though I was by myself out there and realised I was caught in a terrible rip. I had not experienced this before but had been told if it happened to go sideways with it rather than battle it to shore. I allowed myself to head north some distance, then realised I was inside the man-made reef at the end of the Port Noarlunga jetty. I beached myself out there, and walked the three kilometers or so down the jetty and south to Southport. There seemed to be some activity but I integrated myself with my friends and went home as if nothing had happened. The next morning, a Monday, the front page of the Australian, in its right hand column, had a story about 83 people having been rescued from a rip the day before at Southport beach. I was too far out to be aware at the time.

Later, when I moved to Canberra, one of the first things I did was travel to the coast to check the surf. There was surf there, and the New South Wales beaches were obviously good. The best prospect seemed to be a beach called Congo. Somehow though it wasn't the same, and I did not continue body surfing.

Student life

Student life through my 8 years at University was always very social. And in fact I often was involved in organising it. In years 3 and 4 I was on the committee of the Adelaide University Science Association, which organised social events for Science students, and as noted above on the Squash Club Committee. In those days there were no bars on campuses, but Adelaide University was surrounded by a number of popular hotels where students met. These included the Richmond, the Hackney, the Botanic, and in North Adelaide the Queen's Head and Australia. After I became a research student our group always walked across the Botanic Park on a Friday for a counter lunch at the Hackney. These were important therapeutic times for research students.

But these were what students did in normal times. I was also at University in quite abnormal times in that the Vietnam War was under way and Australian soldiers were being killed in the war. Furthermore 20-year-old males were being conscripted to fight in it. This was being done by ballot. The Tattersalls barrel in Melbourne was being used to withdraw balls with birthdays on them, in bad taste to many, especially those who were to lose sons. I was in the third ballot and I received a notice to say my birthday was not called. But there were enough killed that most people knew someone who had been killed. In fact I knew one from my former scout group and there was another one from the year ahead of me at my school.

As a result emotions were high in Australia as also they were in the US. A huge protest movement developed, there was civil disobedience, and lunch times at the Universities, including mine, were dominated by large protests, with organisations with names such as "Students for a Democratic Society" regularly active. There would also be regular marches in the streets, with students and unionists normally having heavy representation.

It was also a time when popular music was just that. We were in the time of the Beatles and many other British rock bands, and of course we developed our own. The protest movement also spawned a strong development of folk and protest music, under the influence of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary to name a few.

Preparation for Canberra

In January 1972 my time in Adelaide was drawing to a close, and it was time to prepare for my new career in Canberra to begin, a new chapter in my life. By 27 January I had loaded up my HQ with my personal effects. These effects included a wine cellar I already had, with maybe half a dozen cases.

My family gathered in the back yard.

And we then had a farewell dinner in which all my favourite foods were produced. Oysters can be seen on the table here. Here are my mother Betty, sister Susan, young brother John, brother-in-law Tony and my father Jim.

At 0515 on the following morning I was on my way.