Launch of Earth Sciences
at Flinders University

In my eighty second year, I record the events which led to the establishment and the presently pursued successful program of Earth Sciences at Flinders University.

An assessment of my efforts during these years came in 1997 from Professor John Noye's CTAC: "Rainer Radok was something of a singular point in the evolution of Australian Applied Mathematics. He may not have been a comfortable colleague, but his interests and influence have lived on and prospered in the Computational Mathematics Group of ANZIAM and in the very successful series of CTAC Conferences. Important names in the early and pre-history of CTAC include Bob Anderssen, Alan Easton, Rob May, and, in particular, John Noye. All were students directly influenced by Radok at Adelaide or Flinders Universities. In one way or another, they were all active in promoting computational mathematics within the Victorian Branch of ANZIAM - then the Applied Mathematics Division of the Australian Mathematical Society - and in enlisting the contributions of others."

I attach cuttings from newspapers to the end of this document.

I was appointed a senior lecturer in Mathematics at Adelaide University in 1963 and given a personal chair there in 1964. It was the start of an extremely successful and most satisfying period of my life. The head of the Department, Ren Potts, gave me a free hand to select and build up a specialization in research. I understood very well the desirability to engage in a field of research which is somehow related to one's location and, if possible, fills a local need. In Australia, water was the most challenging topic. The Great Artesian Basin, underlying the continent, was awaiting systematic study and conservative exploitation. On the other hand, apart from uninhabited Antarctica, Australia is the only continent which is totally surrounded by the World's Oceans. Oceanography was new to Australian universities and its pursuit would not bring with it the great heat of Australia's deserts. I selected oceanography, a field new to me.

At the mouth of Australia's longest river, the Murray-Murrumbidgee- Darling system, lies an elongated lake, the Coorong. It serves as an escape reservoir when heavy rainfalls over the Murray's 1,000,000 square kilometres drainage area cause rare, but quite huge floods to descend. I had seen this lake on the map and associated it always with my original home and its lagoon in Europe.

As a first step into oceanography or, to be more exact, limnology, Ren Potts and I took a paddle along the more than 100 km long and only 1 or 2 kilometres wide Coorong in a collapsible canoe which I had purchased in Vienna once I knew that I would go to Adelaide. The white dunes of the very narrow Young Husband Peninsula separate the Coorong from the untiring, monumental surf of Earth's only infinite ocean ringing Antarctica. We slept on the beach of an island in the Coorong and listened to the sound of the surf coming across the dunes. In the morning, we were woken up by innumerable pelicans, black swans and other less familiar water birds.

In 1964, I obtained the lease of a block of land on the mainland shore of the Coorong and purchased personally a corrugated iron hut. One early morning, a policeman on a motor cycle led the way for the flat top carrier with the 15 metres long hut out of Adelaide on the 150 km long road to its destination. Two years later, in December 1966, it provided the command post for an experiment, during which 65 senior students from Adelaide's high schools were scattered for three days around the Coorong to make meteorological observations and take water level measurements with elementary gauges, designed specially for this purpose. The objective were the standing waves (seiches) of the Coorong, their generation and frequencies, as well as arousal of interest in such matters among high school students. David Provis, one of my students and later colleagues, was a participant. The leader of this project was B.J.Noye, with experience as a reserve officer, who began his graduate work with me and became a most active member of Adelaide University's Department of Applied Mathematics.

Another project concerned Australia's tidal phenomena. I found out that there neither existed a national tidal data bank nor were tidal predictions done in Australia. One of my successors, Geof Lennon, came from the Liverpool Institute; he continued this work and, I believe, achieved my initial aim to have the predictions done at Flinders University.

During my time, we built up gradually a bank of past and present tidal data which covered the entire Australian coast for many years. This work had the support of the Commonwealth Division of National Mapping, for which we undertook a survey of mean sea levels. A.K.Easton undertook his postgraduate work in this field and went on a more than 20 000 km long trip around the continent by car, ship and aircraft, to visit all tide recording stations. His thesis "The Tides of the Continent of Australia" became the standard work for Australian tides.

The Professor of Geophysics of the National University in Canberra, J.C.Jaeger, took a keen interest in my endeavours and lent me his chief technician Gus Angus and a tide gauge. With the aid of my brother Uwe, who during his twenty years in the Meteorology Department of Melbourne University had established close contact with the Australian Antarctic Division, I obtained 2 berths on the boat serving Australia's research station at Macquarie Island. In January 1964, we set out for the island in the Danish, ice-going ship "Nella Dan" which, due to a lack of a keel, behaved in the long waves of the Antarctic Ocean like a hazelnut shell until the lonely island, half way between New Zealand's southern tip and Antarctica, appeared on the horizon. Sea going army trucks carried us ashore through the heavy surf.

A tide gauge had been operated for a few months on the island in 1914 at the time of the First Australian Antarctic Expedition under Sir Douglas Mawson, Professor of Geology at Adelaide University. The task of establishing a tide gauge under the tumultuous conditions of the ever present high waves was solved with great difficulty; a few weeks later, the gauge was washed away. However, the effort was not in vain, since on the way back to Hobart we heard over the ship’s radio that a large earthquake in Alaska was likely to generate a tsunami - a solitary wave; it reached the Australian East Coast as well as Macquarie Island, where it was recorded by our gauge. In addition, the records from our gauge carried the imprint of an interesting wave phenomenon - wave trapping. The tsunami and optimal ship routing became the research topic of Roger Braddock, today a senior academic at Brisbane's new university. The trapping of waves around islands was first studied by Professor Longuet-Higgins from England who, at my invitation, lectured for a few months in our Department at Adelaide University. Bill Summerfield produced a nice thesis on wave trapping around islands of elliptic shape, a good approximation to Macquarie Island. He is today teaching mathematics at the University of Newcastle.

Our first seaborne expedition almost ended in disaster. We chartered a local research vessel with sails and engine, the "SAORI" - the initials of Reg Spriggs' South Australian Research Institute. With full sails, we crossed half of the Great Australian Bight to Thevenard and collected underway water samples, measured currents and took other observations, using borrowed equipment.

I looked around for an ocean shore research station to record tides, waves, winds, etc., because students must take observations and be able to distinguish between good and bad data. At the suggestion of Ivor Thomas at Adelaide University, I visited Kangaroo Island, straddlinq the mouths of the two South Australian Gulfs. At Cape de Couëdic, I found a disused, dilapidated lighthouse keeper's residence; the light house had been automatized some years earlier. Later on, this station was manned by a pensioner who looked after the instrumentation and soon was on familiar terms with kangaroos, opossums and goanas. I took there frequently visitors like Professor M.A.Lavrentjev, President of the Siberian Academy of Sciences, and Professor Walter Munk, Head of the Institute of Geophysical and Planetary Physics at La Jolla, California.

In the following years, this station provided facilities for the testing of instrumentation as well as most welcome, working holidays. It was at this station that the first Australian Applied Mathematics Conference was held with less than 20 participants, including an American working at that time with Ren Potts. We sat in the nearby sand hills and drew diagrams in the sand. This event established the tradition for these continuing conferences.

In 1965, the Shell Company invited me to study the entry of large ships into Port Phillip Bay and Melbourne. Ships must pass over a shallow ledge (the "Rip") which had been blasted repeatedly in the past. I travelled to Warnambool in Victoria, where the pilot boat took me to the tanker "Philine", which was on its way from the Middle East to Sydney; it was to be instrumented for the experiments. Afterwards, arrangements are made for the tests at the "Rip". John Noye was the obvious choice for manager of the exercise. At my suggestion, Shell made available funds so that we could invite as consultant Ernest Tuck, whom I had met in the USA at the Taylor Model Basin of the Office of Naval Research, where he had made his name as a specialist in ship movements. He later rejoined his Alma Mater, where he is to-day Chairman of the Department of Applied Mathematics.

Prior to Shell's request, I had made arrangements for a six months sabbatical leave in the USSR, following invitations of the Academy of Sciences, and in the USA as a Fulbright scholar. Without hesitation, I left John Noye in charge and flew with my wife to Europe. We entered the USSR by train through Prague, Warsaw and Minsk. Most of our time was spent in and near Moscow, where I gave seminars and visited institutes.

We took the train to Leningrad for more visits to institutes and intense sight seeing. Afterwards, we were for two weeks guests of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian Republic. I had translated in 1948 a book on integral equations by its President, N.I.Muskhelishvili, which was published by Noordhoff in Holland in 1951. One day we were shown in the Academy's conference hall the Georgian film "Father of a Soldier". In its last scene, I recognized the ruins of the stock exchange of my home town Königsberg, which I was allowed to visit some weeks later, although it had been closed to foreigners since 1945.

I flew East with Professor Gleb Mikhailov for a visit to Lake Baikal outside Irkutsk. We went on a short expedition on the Lake, which gave me a chance to see Russian equipment at work. On my return to Australia, I ordered several shallow water Alekseev Current Recorders and other Russian apparatus. After giving a lecture in Novosibirsk, Professor M.A.Lavrentjev drove me proudly in a random manner through the Taiga's vividly autumn coloured trees in his hobby car, an American Land Rover.

From the USSR, we flew through New York to San Diego, California, for three months work with Professor Walter Munk and Frank Snodgras, his instrument wizard at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at La Jolla. Their automatic, internally recording capsules were placed in great depths on the sea floor and recalled acoustically. We went out to sea for several days to recover equipment deposited some months earlier. A special feature of this investigation of "Deep Sea Tides" was their movable laboratory which was simply flown to wherever shipping might be waiting for it - eventually Adelaide. Everything was prepared in the laboratory at La Jolla and loaded into the mobile laboratory prior to any expedition.

During my stay in La Jolla, Walter and I agreed to cooperate in an expedition between Australia and Antarctica to deploy his capsules. He was to seek support from the US National Science Foundation and the use of its expedition ship "USS Eltanin". While Frank Snodgrass spent several months in Adelaide and on the "Eltanin" cruise, he received a doctorate at Flinders University.

During the Sixties, many new universities were established in Australia. On the basis of his population statistics, Professor P.H.Karmel, Head of the Department of Economics of Adelaide University, proposed in 1960 the establishment of a second university in South Australia. By 1965, all the ground work had been done and the time had come for recruitment. It was obvious to me that such a major undertaking as oceanographical research with a need for laboratories and workshops could not be readily accommodated on the confined premises of Adelaide University, located in the centre of town. Therefore a transfer to the new university would greatly assist my project. Thus, in 1966, I became the Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Adelaide at Bedford Park, later named the Flinders University of South Australia.

During 1966 and 1967, academic positions were advertised for the Applied Mathematics Group. Oceanography was booming elsewhere and Australia was far away from where things were happening. So I was lucky in eventually being able to hire Dr.R.A.D. Byron-Scott, a native of South Australia, who had studied meteorology at Harvard and McGill Universities, Dr.J.A.T.Bye, a graduate from Imperial College, who had worked at the Liverpool Tidal Institute and the Scripps Institution at La Jolla, and Roger Hosking, who after leaving Flinders University held chairs in New Zealand, Queensland, at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand and now at Brunei University. John's wife Jean, who had worked in data analysis at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, took over the running of the tidal data bank. Later on, Dr.C. van der Borch, another Adelaide graduate with a doctorate from Scripps, joined our staff as marine geologist and was later on appointed Professor of Marine Geology.

Recognizing the need for work in hydrology, I contacted John Holmes of the local CSIRO Division who undertook to supervise the work on tritium trace elements in the Southern Ocean by an Indian student A.Tamuly. In 1970, John became Professor of Hydrology in the School of Earth Sciences.

Around this time, I was elected Vice Chairman of the School of Physical Sciences, which also housed the Mathematics Department. With the support of the Chairman, Prof.J.R.Anderson, I proposed a separate School of Earth Sciences with chairs in hydrology, meteorology, marine geology and oceanography. We drew up the plans before John resigned from Flinders University to become Chairman of the Tribo-Physics Division of CSIRO in Melbourne.

During the years 1964 - 1971, I tried to my best ability to fill the spot of inspirer and initiator. In the process, I undoubtedly neglected to look after my own interests in a political sense, as I was to discover during the sad events which led to my resignation.

I was lucky to find at an early stage a very good and efficient secretary who soon, with the aid of consulting funds, became the best paid secretary in the university. Mrs.Betty Parker relieved me of many tedious daily chores; she never failed to make the right decisions in my name. Before she could receive additional remuneration, I had to negotiate with the Vice Chancellor P.C. Karmel the setting up of a consulting fund, an innovation which was received with much suspicion; however, I never drew any funds for personal use from this account. At that time, I also wanted to set up an Institute of Oceanography, but failed to obtain approval and founded instead the Horace Lamb Centre of Oceanographical Research.

During these years, I went frequently overseas and attended meetings. Walter Munk invited me to join the International Working Group on Deep Sea Tides of SCOR (Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research), chaired by him; we held a meeting in Venice, Italy, on the floodings of the Adriatic Sea. As Chairman of the Australian National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, I represented Australia at several meetings and succeeded in Moscow in obtaining support for a I.U.T.A.M. Symposium on "Long Waves in Shallow Water", which was held at the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra with many attendants from abroad in 1976. Its proceedings were published in cooperation with David Provis. There were opportunities to visit Europe and initiate appointments of Czech and East German mathematicians at Adelaide and Flinders Universities like Professor Jirina, Dr.J.Kautsky and Professor I.Kluvanek.

In August 1968, the USSR entered Czechoslovakia. At this critical time, my Czech protégé at Flinders University, Professor Igor Kluvanek, became stranded with his large family in Switzerland, while returning to their country. By telephone to the Australian Embassy in Geneva, I organized their return and proposed that Igor should be appointed to my chair while I would just be the Director of the Horace Lamb Centre. Three years later, when the School of Earth Sciences came into existence, I was appointed Foundation Professor of Oceanography, a position which I only held for a few months.

These years brought many new tasks. We studied Australian mean sea levels for the Commonwealth Division of National Mapping, currents in Bass Strait for the Broken Hill Pty. Ltd which had started to exploit oil reserves under the sea floor, predicted hourly tidal heights at several stations in Torres Strait for purposes of navigation, studied surface drift by means of plastic, moulded cards, released from BHP's platform in Bass Strait and collected later on by Robert Brodie during a walk from from Wilson's Promontory to Sydney, etc. David White from the Long Range Weapons Establishment at Salisbury undertook, at first part time, then full time, the construction of a poor man's version of the La Jolla capsules. Eventually, we deployed five of them in the Great Australian Bight, sailing out of Port Lincoln on a fishing trawler, and recovered them after several weeks with useful data. I gave an interesting film, which was made of this expedition, to Professor Chris van der Borch in 1981 before leaving Australia.

Australia had only one ship, operated by the Australian Royal Navy, which was occasionally made available to us for oceanographical work, its principal user being the CSIRO's Division of Fisheries and Oceanography at Cronulla, South of Sydney. Our work found moral support from the Hydrographer of the Australian Royal Navy, later on the British Hydrographer Sir David Haslam. During these years, we were able to conduct 8 cruises into the Southern Ocean. This work was efficiently executed by Dr.J.A.T.Bye. I demanded that during each cruise a number of fixed reference stations were occupied with a view to studying temporal changes.

Our undergraduate program developed well. We taught applied mathematics as well as introductory courses into meteorology and oceanography. My colleagues had a heavy load of teaching and supervision of graduate students. One of my students joined an Eltanin expedition, led by Professor H.Stommel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, across the Pacific Ocean to Chile, another one spent a year at the Arctic Institute in Cambridge, England, a third one joined a French expedition on the Pacific Ocean with one of our technicians. My department teamed with activity. Projects were finished and post graduate degrees bestowed. In preparation of a well deserved half year's sabbatical leave, I looked around locally for a deputy to be hired at the expense of my consultant fund. Dr.Carl S.Nilsson of the Physics Department of the University of Adelaide showed great interest in our work and was qualified to continue the capsule development and become acting head of the Centre. He was appointed just before my departure in 1970.

Important contributions to our rapidly expanding academic program were made by visitors who came for shorter or longer periods to give seminars or courses of lectures. Among them was Professor Gleb Mikhailov from Moscow, who spent a term at Flinders University teaching underground flow of water, Professors John Wehausen of the University of California at Berkeley and Professor Michael Longuet- Higgins, who lectured on water waves.

In August 1970, I took half a years’s sabbatical leave, an unfortunate decision as the future was to show. I visited the Limnological Institute of the Polish Academy of Science at the Masurian Lakes in former East Prussia and spent weeks in Paris, studying in the archives of the French Navy the material of Baudin's expedition in 1802.

On my return to Adelaide in 1971, I was faced with disaster that had struck the Horace Lamb Centre. During the months of my absence, the Anti-Vietnam War psychosis had also reached Australia with protests in all major cities. Carl Nilsson had taken a leading role in Adelaide and failed to deploy our capsules during the summer season, the only time when we could really safely venture into the open sea with rented craft. Neither the Vice Chancellor Peter Carmel nor my colleagues had informed me of these events; I was all the time in close contact with Peter in connection with the appointment of the Professor of Meteorology in the new School of Earth Sciences - Peter Schwerdtfeger! If I had known of these developments, I would have returned immediately and taken charge. Carl Nilsson was paid out of my research funds, but my peers, including Peter Schwerdtfeger, did not let me dismiss him after long drawn out meetings by my colleagues, which I did not attend. It was not an argument with the administration, but interference by this committee in the affairs of the Horace Lamb Centre! I resigned at the end of 1971.

My resignation was accepted by the acting Vice Chancellor Professor Hancock, while the University awaited the newly appointed Vice Chancellor, American Professor Roger Russell. Soon after his arrival, the students revolted, occupied the University's registry and disabled operations for weeks. He became another victim of a turbulent time.

Thus ended a period of my life which proved to me that one can do almost anything, provided one's mind is set and one does not admit diversion. However, in the long run, a major undertaking demands delegation of responsibilities, reliable delegation of power and responsible and loyal colleagues.

I continued similar work during the next 8 years: Measuring currents and winds at Weipa and Groote Eylandt, recording the circulation in Moreton Bay for Brisbane's airport development, studying for the planning of Dow Chemical's installation the circulation in Upper Spencer Gulf, releasing balloons monthly during one year, in order to study with Roland Byron-Scott's assistance the air circulation above the Upper Spencer Gulf on behalf of the South Australian Electricity Trust. I led an expedition an expedition to French Caledonia, which involved my former technician, Alan Suskin, and my sucessor at Flinders University, Professor Guenther Krause, to record currents in the local lagoon, and spent months at the Australian Institute of Marine Science at Townsville recording currents between the mainland and the Great barrier Reef. When I could not find work, I deployed my instruments in the channels leading to the Coorong and presented a paper on this work at a meeting in Japan, etc. I also wrote two books "Australia's Coast", published by Rigby in 1976, and "Capes and Captains", an anthology of Australia's coastal discovery, published by Surrey-Beattie in 1990. I attended conferences in Japan and Russia and relished an economically hazardous, but free existence. In 1981, I accepted a chair at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok as successor to Roger Hosking and since 1985 I have taught mathematics as Visiting Professor in the Physics Department of Thailand's Mahidol University.

My highly valued secretary Mrs. Betty Parker collected during the years 1965 - 1969 newspaper cuttings, scannings of which I add to this Page:

AA Adelaide Advertiser CT Canberra Times SM Sunday Mail WS SA Water Sport
FU Flinders University N News PLT Port Lincoln Times

Details of these events and the many reports, papers and theses during my years at Flinders University are listed in the Reports of the Horace Lamb Centre and Horace Lamb Institute in the Flinders Library. My biographies "Survival" (Bangkok 1992) and "Königsberg - Melbourne/ Vertreibung aus Ostpreußen im Dritten Reich" (Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, Lüneburg, 1998) give further personal details, so do WWW pages at the address shown below.

Prof. Dr. R. Radok

radok81@bkk2.loxinfo.co.th
www:@mpec.sc.mahidol.ac.th

28/3 Mu 13 NongNae 24120 Thailand

Tel.: (66)(38)(523492)

18.3.2001