Cockeyed Optimist

In 1959, the Mechanical Engineering Department of the University of Queensland, with another couple of departments, was still located in the city, while the main campus was at St. Lucia, a leafy suburb about 5 km away; a beautiful campus in a bend of the river.

The city site was in George St., and was also in a bend of the river, next to the Botanical Gardens; when the University of Queensland moved out, in the mid-sixties, it was taken over by QIT, the Queensland Institute of Technology; later this became the Queensland University of Technology, or QUT, which is the present occupant (it has other campuses around Brisbane).

(The Brisbane river meanders a lot; it was said that one could lay a ruler on a map of Greater Brisbane, and it would intersect the river 17 times; some of the bends were referred to as ‘pockets’. On this map, the George St. site is in the pocket just below and to the right of the main ‘BRISBANE’ label.)

It would be seven years before I moved to St. Lucia, but meanwhile it was convenient to be located within walking distance of the CBD. You could go shopping easily, and buy your lunch from one of the many sandwich shops. I was caught out, not for the last time, by the different usage of language I encountered in Brisbane; the first time I asked for sandwiches, I said I wanted two; this caused the person making them some confusion — I found out that two slices of bread, cut into four triangles, counted as four sandwiches.

A couple of days later, as I went to the departmental office after a lecture, Vera, the Professor’s secretary said “You’ve got chalk on your strides!”, which I couldn’t understand either, until I found that ’strides’ meant ‘trousers’.

The language was not the only source of confusion for a wet-behind-the-ears ‘new chum’ from ‘the old country’ (these terms are no longer widely used). I didn’t know what to wear to classes, for a start; at Cambridge the lecturers wore suits or sports coats — since their subject was Engineering they did not, like other dons, wear their academic gowns, since they might have got caught in machinery. I soon abandoned my suit, in any case the climate was against it.

And I didn’t know I was supposed to take a class roll (in some faculties the students even had to sit in their allocated numbered seats); and so I didn’t take one. The students didn’t object, of course, and when I finally found out, after about three years, there wasn’t much point in starting, so I didn’t.

I was allocated some thermodynamics subjects to teach, but fortunately my predecessor, who had moved on to a job in South Africa, had left a set of very comprehensive notes for one of these, so that gave me an excellent start. And the senior lecturer in this area was also very helpful to me in the early stages. I also helped out in the drawing offices, which I was able to do quite easily, since it mainly amounted to pointing out errors the students had made in their drawings, and answering their questions.

There were also labs to supervise; the thermo lab was in some ways like a museum of technology, with a steam engine that would have been suitable for a paddle steamer, a gas (coal gas) engine, like the illustration below, that hadn’t been in service in the real world for sixty years but had an impressive wheel, about 2 metres in diameter, to which was attached a rope brake for measuring torque, and more modern automotive engines. There was also a set of small petrol engines that the students were supposed to strip down and reassemble; they didn’t get credit until they could demonstrate their engine running.

There was also, in an adjoining shed, a huge ice-making plant that had to be tested, called the Linde plant, it ran on ammonia and smelt that way. After I’d been there a couple of years, this was replaced by a more modern refrigeration plant. Strangely, though, in the reports that students had to write up about their lab experiments, reports on the Linde plant kept on being handed in for at least two years. I think the colleges (the Australian equivalent of fraternities in the US, near enough) maintained banks of reports for their students to draw on.

When I first arrived, the departments of Electrical, Civil and Mining and Metallurgical Engineering all had some parts of their organizations at the George St, site, but they progressively moved to St. Lucia. I think we were the last to leave; this happened in 1966, while I was in England for a year’s sabbatical, so when I got back I went straight to St. Lucia.

I will describe my sabbaticals later; for now I will keep to the main account.

Since I joined the department, I had been aware of some pressure to do research; the department had produced one PhD at that stage, based on an active program of research into sugar milling technology — cane sugar production being an important aspect of primary production in Queensland and northern New South Wales. I was eventually persuaded to pick up a topic that another staff member had started to look into — coal-burning gas turbines.

This was, as it turned out, a big mistake, because to do it properly would have involved expensive equipment, and, besides, there was nobody around who could supervise such a project satisfactorily. After flirting a little with ways of visualising the aerodynamics of pulverized coal in air-streams, I abandoned the idea (and, incidentally, any chance of promotion — I stayed at my initial lecturer level until I left the University in 1995. In 2001 I started a PhD again — in IT — and was awarded it in 2006, a little late for advancement).

So I carried on lecturing in thermodynamics and some related areas and supervising undergraduate theses, which all final-year (fourth year) students were expected to write. Brisbane in the 1960s had very little engineering industry, so we used to run an excursion to Sydney for the fourth years so they could visit a few factories and see engineering production in action. I was induced to get a truck/bus licence, and a colleague and I drove a bus full of students the several hundred miles to Sydney and back. We stayed at one of the Sydney University colleges, and it was quite an interesting trip; I learnt as much as the students did, I think.

One factory we visited made tv sets, and it was a revelation to me to see at least five different brands all coming off the same production line. That was the same factory, I think, that made gramophone (phonograph) records (some of my older readers might remember these). We watched some women whose job it was to check the masters for defects before they were used to make the stampers for pressing the records. They sat all day listening for pops and clicks; when they heard one they marked it with coloured pencil for someone to smooth them out by hand. I asked one of the women what sort of music she liked and was told “I can’t afford to listen to the music, mate, I’m too busy listening for clicks” — poor thing.

There was a somewhat similar inspection job at a factory making ball bearings. An inspector would take a tray of ball bearings, sometimes only about two millimetres in diameter, give them a swirl, and unerringly pick out any with surface defects. We were allowed to try this, and within a few minutes we could start seeing them, too.

Eventually, my interests starting turning to the educational aspects of my job, and for my second sabbatical, in 1973, I went to the University Teaching Methods Unit, at the University of London, to learn more about it. While I was there I applied for, and got, a job at the newly-established Tertiary Education Institute at Queensland University, where I was to work from 1974 until I retired in 1995.

I will talk about that in the next chapter.

If you liked this, why not treat me to a coffee (or a bone for Kafka)? Thanks, mate!

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