Tag Archives: australia

Fashion, music, politics, sports

[August 28, 1968] The Carnival is Over (The Seekers Break Up)

Leave a comment


by Kaye Dee

Without a doubt, Australia’s most famous musical export would have to be The Seekers, the folk-pop quartet from Melbourne who burst onto the international stage in 1964 and have given The Beatles and The Rolling Stones a run for their money when it comes to Top Ten hits. So, even with persistent rumours for some months that the band might soon break up, it comes as something of a surprise that, at the height of their fame, The Seekers announced in July that they have decided to go their separate ways.

The Seekers at the 1966 Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium

Singing for their Supper
The Seekers – Athol Guy (28), Keith Potger (27), Bruce Woodley (26) and Judith Durham (25) – formed in Melbourne in 1962. But how did a group of clean cut, coffee-house musicians – all of them with middle-class day jobs – become a hot property in the booming British pop scene and a household name on three continents? 

When the group was formed, none of its members were newcomers to the local music scene. The three male members had all attended the same Melbourne school and had their own bands before forming a new “doo wop” band, the Escorts, with singer Ken Ray. This group then transformed into The Seekers in 1962 as the folk music movement grew in Melbourne.

At the same time, Miss Durham, blessed with perfect pitch and originally planning to become an opera singer, was carving out a place in the local jazz scene. As the lead vocalist with a top Melbourne jazz band, “Judy” Durham had already released an EP with a local record label. With her beautiful and versatile voice, she can sing jazz, opera, blues and gospel – and there is no question that Judith Durham’s vocal talents have been a major factor in The Seekers’ success over the past six years.

When Ken Ray married and left the Seekers, Miss Durham was working at the same advertising agency as Athol Guy, and he recruited her as Mr. Ray’s replacement, creating The Seekers as we know them today: Judith Durham, the lead vocalist, also performing piano and tambourine; Athol Guy on double bass and vocals; Keith Potger on twelve-string guitar, banjo and vocals; and Bruce Woodley on guitar, mandolin, banjo and vocals.

On the cover of The Seekers first album, Keith Potger was replaced by former Seeker Ken Ray, because his day job as a radio producer at the Australian Broadcasting Commission barred him from involvement in a commercial enterprise. (L-R: Judith Durham, Ken Ray, Bruce Woodley and Athol Guy).




Breaking Into the Australian Charts
Miss Durham’s golden voice and the group’s folk-influenced sound quickly made them popular in Melbourne, although they were largely unknown outside it. When her previous connection with local record label W&G provided the opportunity for a recording contract, The Seekers released their debut album "Introducing The Seekers" in 1963, opening the way to reach a national audience.

In the liner notes for the album, The Seekers described their approach to their music: “We don't claim to be folk singers in the true sense of the word. Then again, we don't regard ourselves as being ‘commercial’. Why? Because we sing the songs we like, the way we like and the way we think people will like to hear them. No long-haired ethnic purity for us, it's more fun our way.”

Two tracks were released as singles, with their version of Australia’s unofficial national anthem “Waltzing Matilda” charting in the Top 40 in Melbourne, and the Top 100 nationally. Obviously, people did like to hear The Seekers singing what they liked, their way.

Sailing Away to International Fame
Since the 1950s, many Aussie entertainers seeking fame and fortune have headed off to Britain to try their luck in its larger, more vibrant entertainment industry, and in 1964, The Seekers decided that the time had come for them to follow suit. With a year-long contract to work as the house band on a cruise ship, the group departed Australia in March.

The Seekers planned to work in the UK and get some exposure for their music during the ten-week layover there before working the return cruise to Australia. Shrewdly, the group sent copies of their album and promotional photographs ahead of them to London talent agencies, hoping this might help them line up some work once they arrived. The tactic was successful, and once in London in May, the group discovered that a top agency had taken them on and already booked them on national TV shows, and on the UK variety theatre and club circuit.

Their planned “working holiday” almost immediately turned into a full-time career, with important London bookings and television appearances, a UK recording deal and the release of their first UK single, “Myra”. This was quickly followed by two studio albums and, at the end of 1964, their first big hit “I’ll Never Find Another You”.

What made The Seekers (deprecatingly described by some in the British press as “three bank tellers and a secretary” due to their conservative style of dress and a lifestyle that was definitely not “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll”) such a marketable property in a British pop scene fuelled by teen angst and teenage rebellion?

Internationally successful folk acts like Peter, Paul & Mary had paved the way for The Seekers’ sound, the product of Judith Durham’s pure and powerful voice and the “nice harmonies” of the three men. With their clean-cut good looks, equally clean-cut voices and quiet dress, they appealed to English squares because they represented something they could understand and feel comfortable with, while at the same time their catchy tunes and soulful ballads, and their sheer musical talent attracted a wide range of audiences. The conservative BBC loved them, because their music contained no offensive lyrics, and their performances no outlandish behaviour, meaning that they received a large amount of air time on radio and television, which gave them wide exposure. 

A Match Made by a Manager
Many of the catchy tunes that repeatedly propelled Seekers to the top of the charts, commencing with “I’ll Never Find Another You” (apparently recorded at the famous Abbey Road Studios by day while The Beatles were recording there at night), were written expressly for The Seekers by singer-songwriter-producer Tom Springfield, brother of Dusty Springfield. In a clever move, the agent managing The Seekers introduced them to Mr. Springfield shortly after he had split with his sister. Tom Springfield felt that The Seekers’ style of singing and performance would suit the particular kind of music he preferred to write. He became their resident songwriter, signing the group to his production company. 

In November 1964 “I'll Never Find Another You” became a massive worldwide hit, reaching Number 1 in Australia and the UK, and Number 4 in the US. It also rated highly in Europe and eventually sold 1.75 million copies worldwide. This earned The Seekers a place in the record books as the first Australian pop group to have a Top 5 hit simultaneously in the Australian, UK and US markets, as well as the first to sell over a million copies of a single.


A World of Their Own
You could say that 1965 was the year that The Seekers conquered the world, with hit after hit rising up the charts! “A World of Our Own”, “Morningtown Ride”, and my favourite, “The Carnival is Over”, were all Top Ten hits, as was their 1965 album release. With its melody apparently drawn from a Russian folk song, “The Carnival is Over” reached Number 1 in the UK, even overtaking The Rolling Stones' “Get Off My Cloud”! I’ve heard that the single sold over 90,000 copies per day in Britain, which is no mean feat.

The Seekers receiving their gold record in Australia for "The Carnival is Over"








Winning the Top of the Pops Best New Group of 1964, The Seekers starred in the New Musical Express “All-Star Poll Winners Concert” in April 1965, on a bill that included the cream of the British pop scene – The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Cliff Richard, Dusty Springfield, The Who and The Yardbirds: The Seekers would go on to outsell them all in 1966! Then followed a breakthrough performance in June on The Ed Sullivan Show – the first time any Australian musicians had appeared on US television.

The Seekers during their first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1965


The Seekers' amazing success was repeated in 1966, commencing with a sell-out concert tour of Australia, during which they filmed their first Australian TV special, “At Home with the Seekers”. There was also a successful collaboration with Paul Simon (of Simon & Garfunkel fame), which produced “Someday, One Day”, another major hit. Bruce Woodley then co-wrote several songs with Mr. Simon, including “Red Rubber Ball”, released on The Seekers 1966 UK Top 10 album “Come the Day”. 

In November, The Seekers appeared on the bill at the prestigious Royal Command Performance concert at the London Palladium, before H.M. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Finally, in December, the group released what became their biggest hit, and highest charting American release.

“Georgy Girl”, the title song for the film of the same name, reached Number 3 in the UK, Number 1 in Australia, and Number 1 on the US Cashbox Top 100 in February 1967, ultimately selling 3.5 million copies worldwide. Jim Dale and Tom Springfield, the song’s writers, were nominated for the 1967 Academy Award for Best Original Song of 1966, although The Seekers had to pass up the opportunity to perform at the awards ceremony due to a prior booking in the UK. Unfortunately for them, the Oscar was won by the title song of the film Born Free.

The Seekers at the Myer Music Bowl, a publicity shot for "The Seekers Down Under"




While touring Australia in March last year, The Seekers appeared at a concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne, which is claimed to have drawn an audience of 200,000 – the largest concert audience ever in the southern hemisphere according to the Guinness Book of Records. (Though rumour has it that the audience figure is somewhat exaggerated, because visitors to the annual Moomba festival occurring in the vicinity were also counted!). During their 20-minute performance, the group was accompanied by the Australian Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hector Crawford, also a producer of radio, film and television. Film of this performance was included in The Seekers’ second Australian TV special, “The Seekers Down Under,” which drew a record audience of over 6 million!

A scene from "The Seekers Down Under", showing the group in Canberra

By this time Miss Durham apparently felt the need to branch out on a musical career of her own, and recorded a debut solo single, "The Olive Tree", which was released in June last year, while The Seekers were on a North American tour. For The Seekers as a group, the hits just kept on coming, for both their single releases and their most recent album, “The Seekers Seen in Green”. But when Judith Durham’s second solo single, “Again and Again”, appeared at the end of last year, it sparked early rumours that the group might split up.

During their North American tour, The Seekers joined fellow Aussie performers Rolf Harris, Normie Rowe and Bobby Limb in the special “Australia Day at Expo 67” concert in Montreal, that became the first official satellite broadcast into Australia. They also made another appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, singing “Georgy Girl”, which has turned out to be their last US hit.

The Seekers performing at the Australia Day concert broadcast via satellite to Australia from Expo 67

Our Last Goodbye
Though we didn’t know it at the time, when The Seekers returned to Australia last December, it was to be their final Australasian tour. But in a fitting finale to their career, The Seekers’ rapid rise to international fame was crowned with Australia’s highest honour: in January, they were collectively named “Australians of the Year for 1967”. This was the first time that a group, rather than an individual, has received this prestigious national recognition.


The Seekers with Australian Prime Minister John Gorton and his wife after receiving the "Australians of the Year" award.

During this tour, they also filmed their final Australian TV special, “The World of the Seekers”. Filmed in colour for international distribution, the programme was first screened in cinemas (so we could see it in colour, lacking colour television in this country) before being broadcast nationally to outstanding ratings. 

At some point during the tour, Miss Durham informed her band mates that she intended to leave The Seekers in the middle of the year, although the swirling rumours of their impending break-up were consistently denied and laughed off, even a few weeks before the split was announced. 

Despite knowing that their days of performing together were coming to a close, The Seekers recorded a final single, “Days of My Life”, in April, which sadly has proved less than successful. A final UK album, “Live at The Talk of the Town” has also been recorded and will be released later this year. A compilation album, “The Seekers — Greatest Hits” has just been released here in Australia (quick work by the record company, that one!).

When The Seekers publicly announced in the UK on Wednesday 3 July that they were breaking up, they insisted that they had never intended to go on performing indefinitely. “It’s getting far too complicated, and should be run as a cold hard business, which means it has now reached a stage we never wanted it to,” they said in a group statement. “It is time for us to part. We are all at a stage where we should be growing up as individuals, not as a group”. This rather suggests that Miss Durham was not alone in her desire to branch out into a solo career, and her decision to depart simply accelerated something that was already in train.

The Seekers made their last appearance together in a 50 minute television special on 9 July, rapidly arranged by the BBC. “Farewell The Seekers”, which has not yet been screened in Australia, was reportedly an emotional experience on screen and off, attracting an audience of more than 10 million viewers. When the lights went down, the carnival was over, and an amazing chapter in Australia’s musical history had drawn to a close. I wonder what will come next for the former Seekers?

No comments Leave A Comment
Fashion, music, politics, sports

[December 26, 1967] The Prime Minister is Missing! (Disappearance of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt)

3 Comments



by Kaye Dee

Christmas is supposed to be a time of family celebration, but this year in Australia it has instead become a time of national mourning following the tragic disappearance of our Prime Minister, Mr. Harold Holt. The country is in shock as we come to terms with the loss of a relatively new national leader in an apparent drowning accident.

A Fateful Swim
The full circumstances surrounding the Prime Minister’s disappearance have yet to be established. What we do know is that on Sunday 17 December Mr. Holt was swimming off Cheviot Beach, south of the Victorian state capital of Melbourne, when he was lost to the view of friends onshore after swimming out into deep water and apparently being swamped by a large wave.

The Prime Minister’s love of the ocean is well known: he and his wife have beachside holiday homes in Queensland and at Portsea, not far from Cheviot Beach.  A strong swimmer, fond of skindiving and spearfishing, Mr. Holt apparently claimed to “know Cheviot beach like the back of my hand”, and to be familiar with its sometimes treacherous offshore currents. While skindiving on an earlier visit, Mr. Holt had once recovered a porthole from the wreck of the SS Cheviot, the ship which broke up and sank near the beach, due to its dangerous currents, with the loss of 35 lives on 20 October 1887.

On 17 December, while spending the weekend at Portsea, Mr. Holt and four companions decided to stop at remote Cheviot Beach for a swim before lunch when returning from a drive. The water conditions were rough and only one of Holt’s companions ultimately went into the water with him.  Mr. Holt swam out into deep water and may have been caught in a rip current when he disappeared. Mrs. Gillespie, one of the group who remained on the shore, saw Mr. Holt disappear, describing it as “like a leaf being taken out […] so quick and final”.

A Desperate Search
The Prime Minister’s disappearance sparked “one of the largest search operations in Australian history”. Three amateur divers initially tried to brave the heavy seas but found them too turbulent. They were soon joined by the Victoria Police, deploying helicopters, watercraft, police divers, and two Navy diving teams. By the end of the day, more than 190 personnel were involved. However, the leader of one of the Navy teams apparently believed that “any chance of finding the Prime Minister was lost by the Sunday night”.

Despite this gloomy assessment, the number of searchers eventually increased to more than 340, including 50 divers, working in extremely difficult weather and sea conditions. The intense search continued until December 21, but was then scaled back, although the quest to find Mr. Holt’s body still continues.

Readers outside Australia may be wondering how the leader of the country could go swimming without being accompanied by a security detail. Australian leaders have traditionally not employed bodyguards or other protective measures and Mr. Holt similarly refused a security detail when he first assumed the Prime Ministership: he considered it was unnecessary and might distance him from the public. Although a couple of incidents in mid-1966 resulted in Holt grudgingly accepting a single bodyguard for his official duties, he continued to refuse any protection while on holiday, considering it a violation of his privacy. (Nasty rumour has it that he also wanted to conceal the extramarital affairs he has been suspected of indulging in). Thus, he was unaccompanied by any official security during his weekend break.
The first searchers combing Cheviot Beach, looking for any clue to the Prime Minister's disappearance

A Man of the Twentieth Century
The third Australian Prime Minister to die in office, Mr. Holt was a relatively young man, only 59. The first of our national leaders to be born in the Twentieth Century, Holt believed it was his responsibility as Prime Minister “to reflect the modern Australia to my fellow countrymen, to our allies and the outside world at large”. Mr. Holt became Prime Minister when he assumed the leadership of the incumbent Liberal Party in January 1966.

A lawyer and political lobbyist before being elected to the Federal Parliament, Mr. Holt was an enthusiastic sportsman and swimmer, as well as an effective orator, making him a sharp contrast with his Prime Ministerial predecessors and most of his parliamentary colleagues. His popularity with the public was reflected in his crushing victory in the elections of late 1966.  Mr. Holt (right), at Parliament House, during his period as Treasurer to his predecessor, Sir Robert Menzies (left)

With extensive political and governmental experience, serving as a Minister in several critical portfolios, Mr. Holt helped to transform post-War Australia into a modern democracy that now sees itself as more than just an outpost of the British Empire.

His important economic reforms have included the creation of the Reserve Bank of Australia and the introduction of decimal currency. As Prime Minister he also promoted significant political reforms, including the nation-building post-war immigration scheme; dismantling the shameful White Australia policy (which largely precluded non-white people from immigrating to Australia); and amending the Constitution to give the Federal Government responsibility for Aboriginal affairs. This latter change means that Australia’s first inhabitants can now be counted in the national census for the first time. (Yes, I’m embarrassed to say that until this year, our Constitution did not recognise Aboriginal Australians as citizens or count them in the population of the country!)

Mr. Holt supported Australia’s membership of INTELSAT and the expansion of the NASA tracking station networks in Australia. In June this year, he became the first Australian Prime Minister to make a satellite broadcast, appearing in the special “Australia Day” programme from Expo 67 in Montreal. In March, he officially opened the Manned Space Flight Network station at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canberra, which will play a major role in the Apollo Moon programme. While there, he received as a special gift from the staff, a portrait generated by one of the station computers! Mr. Holt's computer-generated portrait. It took the staff at the NASA Honeysuckle Creek tracking station about 20 hours to programme the computer to produce this image.

Turning Our Eyes to Asia
Mr. Holt also had the foresight to recognise that, in a region of politically unstable nations, Australia needs to be better engaged with Asia and the Pacific. Earlier this year, he said in Parliament that “geographically we are part of Asia, and increasingly we have become aware of our involvement in the affairs of Asia – our greatest dangers and our highest hopes are centred in Asia's tomorrows”.

Prime Minister Holt at the South East Asian Treaty Organisation's meeting in Manila in October 1966

As Prime Minister, Mr. Holt's first overseas trip was to South-East Asia in April 1966, visiting Malaysia, Singapore, South Vietnam, and Thailand. This year, he toured Cambodia, Laos, South Korea, and Taiwan, and had planned future visits to other Asian nations.

Of course, in considering Australian involvement in Asia, we cannot ignore the ongoing conflict in Vietnam. Fervently opposed to Communism, Mr. Holt’s approach to national security emphasised countering Communist expansion. This lay behind his interest in encouraging greater engagement with Asia and his government’s expansion of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War. In March 1966, Prime Minister Holt tripled the number of Australian troops in Vietnam to around 4,500, which included 1,500 conscript national servicemen: since October this year, with the most recent announcement of a troop increase, there are now over 8,000 Australian military personnel stationed in South Vietnam.
Although Mr. Holt’s expansion of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam conflict was initially popular – and has been considered a key factor in his landslide election victory last year – the tide of public opinion has been turning against the war in recent months, especially as greater numbers of young men, conscripted into national service through a “birthday lottery” system that many people consider unfair, are being sent overseas to fight.

“All the Way with LBJ!”
The Vietnam War has dominated Australian foreign policy since Mr. Holt became Prime Minister, as he believed that “unless there is security for all small nations, there cannot be security for any small nation”. Believing that the United States provides a critical “shield” for Asian and South Pacific nations against Communist aggression, Mr. Holt cultivated a close relationship between Australia and America and formed a strong personal friendship with President Johnson, whom he had first met in 1942, when Mr. Johnson visited Melbourne as a naval officer.

In 1966, Mr. Holt visited the U.S. twice. On his first visit, he made a comment at a White House address that has become somewhat controversial here in Australia. While apparently intending the remark to be taken as a “light-hearted gesture of goodwill”, Mr. Holt’s comment that “you have an admiring friend, a staunch friend that will be all the way with LBJ” (a reference, I’m told, to the slogan used in Mr. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign), was seen by many in Australia as sycophantic and embarrassingly servile.

Despite the controversy, I suspect that this jingle-like phrase will become one of Mr. Holt’s best-known utterances. It certainly appeared again when President Johnson made the first ever visit to Australia by a serving US President in October 1966. The President toured five cities, being greeted by both large crowds of the curious and anti-war demonstrators. I accompanied my sister and her family to join the crowds lining the motorcade route in Sydney, as I was certainly interested to get a glimpse of a US President!

Changing of the Guard
No trace of Mr. Holt was found by the evening of 18 December. At 10 p.m. that day the Governor-General announced that the Prime Minister was presumed dead. Since the country cannot be left without a leader, Mr. John McEwen, the leader of the junior government coalition party, the Country Party – and therefore the Deputy Prime Minister – has been sworn in as the interim Prime Minister, and the Liberal party will elect a new leader, and thus a new Prime Minister, early in the new year. Although Mr. Holt’s body still has not been found, a memorial service was held on 22 December, at St Paul's Anglican Cathedral, Melbourne. There were 2,000 people within the cathedral, while thousands more lined the nearby streets and listened through a public-address system. The funeral was broadcast on radio and television and, also via satellite to the United States, the UK and Europe. This was the first major satellite broadcast from Australia of a significant local news event. Interim Prime Minister McEwen with international dignitaries at Harold Holt's memorial

International dignitaries and heads of state attended the memorial service, including Charles, Prince of Wales (representing Her Majesty the Queen), the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader of the UK, the UN Secretary General and President Johnson. Seven Prime Ministers and Presidents from Asian and Pacific Countries also attended, in addition to foreign ministers and ambassadors from many countries in the region and the Commonwealth.

A Tragic Accident, Suicide or Something More Sinister?
Without a body, no definitive conclusions can be reached as to what happened to the Prime Minister. The official view, and it seems that of his family, close friends and colleagues, is that Mr. Holt overestimated his swimming ability and went literally out of his depth in dangerous conditions, resulting in a tragic accidental drowning. Other possibilities include that he may have suffered a heart-attack or other sudden medical issue in the water (although his health was generally good), been stung by a deadly jellyfish (yes, we do have them in Australia), or attacked by a shark.

Some allegations have been raised that Mr. Holt committed suicide due to a number of political difficulties and controversies that have arisen in recent months. However, his wife and friends have rejected this as uncharacteristic of his personality. Already, outlandish theories have also been advanced for the Prime Minister’s disappearance, including suggestions that he has faked his own death in order to run off with a mistress, or that he has been assassinated by the CIA (but one would have to ask why, since he was so pro-American). As long as no body is found, I suspect that the mystery of Prime Minister Holt’s disappearance will continue to haunt, and fascinate, Australia – and that the bizarre theories will continue.

In the meantime, Australia mourns the loss of a forward-looking leader and the promise he might have represented.










3 Comments Leave A Comment
Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[August 22, 1967] Boldly Going Down Under (Star Trek, Spies and space in Australia)

Leave a comment



by Kaye Dee

Since Star Trek debuted in the US last year, I’ve been eagerly awaiting its appearance Down Under after reading all the fascinating episode reviews that my fellow writers have produced for the Journey.

As I’ve mentioned before , the arrival of overseas television programmes onto Australian screens can vary wildly, from a few months to several years after premiering in their home country, so I had no idea how long I might have to wait. Thankfully, this time it’s only taken about ten months for the adventures of the crew of the USS Enterprise to reach our shores, with the series premiering in Sydney on TCN-9, the flagship station of the Nine Network, on Thursday 6 July.

Who’s Watching Out for the Watchers?
Like the introduction of Doctor Who in Australia, Star Trek’s presence on our screens has had to pass the scrutiny of the Australian Film Censorship Board (AFCB), which reviews all foreign content for television broadcast in Australia – and like Doctor Who, it has not escaped unscathed. The good Doctor’s Australian premiere was delayed by the AFCB considering its early episodes not suitable for broadcast in a “children’s” timeslot. Other episodes have experienced censorship cuts of scenes considered scary for children, and the entire Dalek Masterplan story was even banned for being too terrifying! (I really must write a future article on the curious censorship of Doctor Who in Australia).

Similarly, The Man Trap , screened as the first episode in the US, has also been banned here, deemed unsuitable for the show’s 8.30pm timeslot due to its themes of vampirism! Apparently, the ACFB thinks Australian adults can’t handle a good, suspenseful horror-themed story at a decent viewing hour, even though it permits B-grade (or should that be Z-grade?) vampire and other horror movies to be screened after 10.30pm, as part of the Awful Movies show hosted by Deadly Earnest (the nom-de-screen of local television personality Ian Bannerman, seen above in character). However, that show plays on another network, so it is unlikely that we’ll see The Man Trap turn up there any time soon.

Meanwhile, the AFCB is still reviewing some of the first series episodes, but hopefully they won’t ban any more from screening in the normal Star Trek timeslot. However, the review process seems to have thrown any adherence to the US screening order out the window and the seven episodes shown so far have appeared in quite a different sequence. Commencing with The Corbomite Manoeuvre as the first episode, we’ve now seen Menagerie (parts 1 and 2), Arena, This Side of Paradise, A Taste of Armageddon and Tomorrow is Yesterday. Galileo Seven is scheduled for this coming Thursday. My favourite so far? Tomorrow is Yesterday : I'm always up for a time travel story.

This order may be at least partly based on what TCN-9 has available while the AFCB completes its reviews. But it could also be that the television station staff have been indulging in the apparently common practice (so I’m told by my friend at the Australian Broadcasting Commission) of picking episodes at random off the shelf, when no specific screening order has been defined. Still, as long as we get to see the rest of the episodes, in whatever order, I’ll be happy, even if we will only be watching them in black and white (as we’re not likely to get colour TV in Australia until the mid-1970s on current government planning).

A Sydney Exclusive For Now
Star Trek is only screening in Sydney at the moment, although it will be shown nationally later in the year on other Nine Network capital city stations. The reason for this broadcast strategy is not clear, but perhaps Nine is waiting to see how popular the series is in Australia’s largest market before scheduling it elsewhere? Even though the various Irwin Allen productions have had reasonable ratings on Australian television, science fiction is still seen as something of a gamble by Australian commercial broadcasters and Nine may not be as confident in its purchase of the series as it seems.

On the other hand, rumour has it that Mr. Kerry Packer, the son of the Nine Network’s chief shareholder, media baron Sir Frank Packer, is something of a science fiction fan – I do have it on good authority that he’s a fan of that wonderfully quirky British series The Avengers. Maybe Mr. Packer wants to enjoy Star Trek in his home market of Sydney first, before sharing it with the rest of the country?


Everyone Loves Mr. Spock
While the arrival of Star Trek hasn’t had a huge promotional campaign attached to it – unlike the debut of Mission:Impossible (see below) – Sir Frank has certainly made use of the resources of his Australian Consolidated Press magazines and newspapers to plug the series. The Australian Women’s Weekly, the country’s most popular women’s magazine, is rather conservative and not exactly known for embracing “out there” interests like science fiction. Yet its television critic, Nan Musgrove, gave Star Trek a very positive review in her column (and it does feel like a genuinely positive review, not just a promotion for a Packer interest).

A full page colour spread about Star Trek (above) has recently appeared in the 2 August issue and a further article about Mr. Nimoy’s Emmy nomination in the 9 August issue. Articles about Star Trek have also appeared in the Packer-owned TV Week magazine and Daily Telegraph newspaper.

The television critics of other newspapers and television guides have also generally reviewed the series favourably, although one did dismiss it rather scathingly (but then, I think he dislikes science fiction as a matter of principle!) Mr. Spock certainly stands out as the most intriguing and popular character to the reviewers, and to letter writers to the newspapers and magazines. Several have also commented very favourably on the multi-national nature of the Enterprise crew and the lack of racial prejudice in the series – these latter comments undoubtedly influenced by the racial unrest we’ve seen in the US in recent times.

Who's Watching?
I’ve not been able to obtain any ratings figures yet for these early Star Trek episodes, so it’s hard to really judge the show’s popularity with the viewing audience. But if what I’m hearing at the university is anything to go by, and what my sister and her husband tell me they are hearing at the hairdresser and at work, people who would not consider themselves science fiction fans (or even interested in science fiction) are watching Star Trek and enjoying it.

And it’s not just the adults that are watching Star Trek, either. My niece Vickie, who recently turned 10, asked to be allowed to stay up and watch Star Trek for her birthday (as her normal bedtime is 8.30pm). Her first episode was Arena – and she was so taken by it that she refused to go to bed at the usual time the following week, insisting that now she is a "big girl", she's old enough to stay up an extra hour one night a week! Well, how could we refuse a budding fan? So now she joins her parents and I in our new Thursday night routine of watching Hunter at 7.30, followed by Star Trek at 8.30pm.


Spies are All the Rage
Hunter, which precedes Star Trek (and commenced on the same evening that Star Trek premiered), is a new Australian-made spy drama from the Crawford Productions stable. Better known for its radio dramas and police show Homicide, Crawfords has decided to cash in on the current popularity of the espionage genre by producing a very slick, American-style spy drama based around the exploits of John Hunter, a Bond-like intelligence agent for an Australian security organisation, COSMIC (Commonwealth Office of Security & Military Intelligence Co-ordination).

Being on the Nine Network, Hunter has also been heavily promoted in the Packer-owned press, but nothing like the way in which the 0-10 Network has promoted the debut of its prize overseas spy-drama purchase, Mission: Impossible. Ahead of that show’s first screening at the end of June, TEN-10 in Sydney flew 50 journalists and celebrities down to Canberra on a specially chartered flight. The station’s guests were treated to an in-flight meal of champagne, fillet mignon and “super spy cocktails” (served by silver-mini-skirted hostesses), before enjoying an exclusive preview of the first episode, screened at the museum within the Royal Australian Mint! The 0-10 network must be expecting great things from Mission: Impossible, to spend so lavishly on its promotion. 

Crawfords has preferred to spend its Hunter budget, not on promotion, but on extensive location filming. This has included segments of its first six-part story, The Tolhurst File, being shot on location at the Woomera Rocket Range. Hunter is the first commercial television programme to receive permission to film at Woomera, and it’s rumoured that Hector Crawford himself made use of his high-level political connections to obtain the clearances – because right now Woomera is a very busy place indeed!

ELDO Launches at Woomera
Of course, I wouldn't let a piece on science fiction go by without a bit on actual science as well–and there is plenty to report.

It’s been over twelve months since I wrote an update on the activities of the ELDO programme. After the Europa F-4 launch was un-necessarily terminated by the Range Safety Officer in May last year, a replacement flight to test the all-up configuration of the three-stage vehicle had to be arranged. This took place on 15 November 1966, with an active Blue Streak first stage and inert dummies of the French second stage and West German third stage. The rocket’s dummy test satellite also carried instrumentation to measure the conditions that a real satellite would experience during launch.

Fortunately, this test flight was a complete success, reaching a height of over 60 miles. The dummy upper stages separated successfully from the active first stage, with all the vehicle’s components falling, as planned, into the upper region of the Simpson Desert, south-east of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

Not so successful, however, was the flight of Europa F-6, launched just a couple of weeks ago on 4 August. This mission was intended to be the first trial flight with active first and second stages (the third stage and satellite still being dummies). Initially planned for 11 July, the flight experienced 10 aborts and launch delays over more than two weeks due to systems problems and weather.

When the mission finally launched, while the first stage once again performed as planned, the French second stage failed to ignite. The cause of this failure is not yet known, but as many components of the French Coralie stage were reaching the end of their operational life due to the launch delays, investigations of the failure are focussed on this aspect. A reflight, already dubbed F6/2 is being scheduled for later this year, possibly November.

An "Australian" Astronaut
And Australia now has its "own" astronaut, in the person of Dr Phillip K Chapman, just this month selected as part of NASA's second group of 11 scientist-astronauts. Although Chapman, who is now an American citizen (as he had to be, in order to be eligible for the astronaut programme), will not fly as an astronaut wearing an Australian flag on his shoulder, we are all excited that he will probably participate in the Apollo Applications Program, which is planned to follow-on from the initial Apollo lunar landing program: maybe he will even get to walk on the Moon as the Apollo programme expands?

Originally from Melbourne, Chapman (seen here in the back row, extreme right) is one of the first two naturalised US citizens to be selected as an astronaut. A physicist and engineer, specialising in instrumentation, Chapman studied at the University of Sydney and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from which he obtained a degree in aeronautics and astronautics.

Prior to his astronaut selection, Chapman's career has included studying aurorae in Antarctica, as part of the Australian expedition there during the International Geophysical Year. He also worked on aviation electronics in Canada before joining MIT as a staff physicist in 1961. Prior to his selection as an astronaut, Chapman has most recently been employed in MIT’s Experimental Astronomy Laboratory, where he worked on several satellites. I hope I'll have the opportuntiy to meet Dr Chapman some time soon, and I look forward to reporting on his future astronaut career. 

And while I wait for a real life Australian astronaut to make his first flight, I can at last enjoy the adventures of the crew of the USS Enterprise for myself – and hope that one day they'll add an Australian to its crew as well!



No comments Leave A Comment
Science / Space Race

[July 22, 1967] Getting the mail through (Australia introduces Postcodes)

1 Comment



by Kaye Dee

In my first article for the Journey, just over three years ago, I talked about rocket mail and flying postmen. Well, we haven’t seen either of them yet – despite continual promises that they are “only a few years away”. This month, though, Australia has taken a step into the future of postal technology with the introduction of Postcode, the new national mail sorting system.

Zipping the Mail Along
Postal codes are not exactly new. They were first developed in large cities like London (where they were introduced in 1857) to help improve the speed of mail sorting and delivery as populations and the size and complexity of cities grew.

Modern postal codes were first introduced in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1932, followed by Germany (1941), Singapore (1950) and Argentina in 1958. Britain began introducing its current postal code system in 1959, while the US Postal Service introduced the five-digit ZIP code in 1963. I was interested to learn as I prepared to write this article that the ZIP part of ZIP code is actually an acronym standing for Zone Improvement Plan. I always thought that it was just a play on the idea of zipping, or speeding, the mail along to its destination. Switzerland was the most recent country to introduce postal codes before Australia, in 1964.

Mechanising Mail Sorting
What made the Postmaster General’s Department (PMG), which manages all Australia’s postal, telephone and telegraph services, decide that we needed to follow suit and speed up our mail by using a postal code system? After all, Australia’s current population is only 11.87 million – less than the population of New York City, which I understand is about 15.6 million.

Until now, mail sorting in this country has primarily been done by skilled human sorters, who have a detailed knowledge of geographical localities, reading the address on each letter. However, there are about 8,000 delivery offices around the country, so getting the mail to its final destnations has required at least two or three stages of sorting.


Mail sorting at the Sydney General Post Office in 1964

Australia has long been a world leader in in postal service mechanisation, and as early as 1958, the PMG decided to introduce large-scale mechanical mail sorting systems across Australia. As the first stage of this plan, the Sydney Mail Exchange opened in the suburb of Redfern in 1965, to automate and centralise the mail sorting facilities for New South Wales. It’s the largest and most advanced mechanised mail centre in the Southern Hemisphere, and the new electronic equipment and technology is attracting Worldwide interest. I’ve even heard that the Mail Exchange’s design concept is being considered as a possible future system by the US Postal Service.


Sydey's ultra-modern new mail exchange, in the inner-city suburb of Redfern

Sydney is our largest city, and New South Wales, the most populous state, so it makes sense to introduce a new Postcode system to work in conjunction with the state-of-the-art electronic mail handling equipment at the Sydney Mail Exchange, through which so much mail passes. Postcodes simplify the sorting process, as the mail sorter is now a coding operator, who enters the postcode using their data entry terminal, enabling the letters to be rapidly sorted electronically and speedily despatched to their delivery offices.


The Sydney Mail Exchange's state-of-the-art data entry system for the new sorting computers. Conveyors drop individual letters in front of the operators, who then type the postcode or suburb identifying the letter’s destination

The computers controlling this process occupy a large amount of space in the Mail Exchange building. Similar mechanised sorting systems will be gradually introduced around the country over the coming years: they’ll be immediately able to take advantage of the Postcode system to speed their mail sorting, without many of the teething problems that have bedevilled the Sydney mail Exchange.

The Australian Postcode System
The Postcode system was introduced on Saturday, 1 July. The new four-digit number system replaces some earlier postal sorting systems, such as Melbourne's letter and number codes (e.g., N3, E5) and a similar system that has been in use in rural and regional New South Wales. Nearly 5,000 postcodes have been allocated across the country, to every city, town, suburb and small regional centre.

Postcodes have been allocated following a broad geographical pattern, with Postcode numbers for capital city suburbs beginning in the west and moving to the north, east and south. A similar pattern is followed for regional country areas. The first digit of the Postcodes in each station corresponds to radio station call signs for that state: 2 (New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory – our equivalent of the District of Columbia), 3 (Victoria), 4 (Queensland), 5 (South Australia), 6 (Western Australia), 7 (Tasmania) and 8 (Northern Territory).

I think this is a good idea because everyone knows the radio callsigns, so it will make it easier to remember Postcodes for their friends locally or interstate. Subscriber Trunk Dialing for telephones, which commenced last year, is also using the state radio call sign number as the basis of the dialing codes for each capital city, so I imagine that will help with remembering the direct dial codes too. 

Getting the Word Out

The first edition of the Postcode booklet, listing every national Postcode, is being distributed free by mail this month to every Australian household and business address. A total of 4.5 million booklets are expected to be distributed, along with a postcard identifying the recipient’s own postcode. Of course, with 5,000 postcodes to include in the booklet, and with some geographical oddities to contend with, it’s not surprising that diligent nit-pickers have already found faults in the booklet to complain about and have been writing carping letters to the editors of local and major state newspapers.

There has been extensive advertising about the new Postcode system in the newspapers and on television and radio, but so far, we have not been treated to a catchy jingle like the one that introduced us to decimal currency last year.

The PMG is hoping that if we all start using the Postcodes properly at the end of addresses, not only will it improve the speed of mail delivery, but that next year it will make it easier to introduce “post office preferred-size envelopes” as well, whose standardised sizes will further improve the speed of mechanised mail sorting! 

And then I can finally get my postcards from the Traveler in a timely manner!



1 Comment Leave A Comment
Science / Space Race

[June 28, 1967] Around the World in Two Seconds (Our World Global Satellite Broadcast)

4 Comments


by Kaye Dee

I love how our world is drawing closer every day to some of the amazing futures that science fiction has spread before us. I’ve written before about the importance of satellite communications in connecting this divided planet. Just two days ago, 24 countries around the globe were linked together in the first world-spanning live satellite broadcast, titled – appropriately enough – Our World.

Our World's visual symbol incorporates a modernised version of da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man", with arms encircling the globe, and vertical and horizontal lines representing longitude and latitude

Down Under Comes Up Live – from a town with no television!
For us in Australia, being instantaneously connected to the rest of the world through phone and television is a major step in breaking the “tyranny of distance” that has shaped our national history. Our first Satellite Earth Station was opened just last October in Carnarvon, a remote township in Western Australia, whose only other connection to the rest of the world is a phone line. It’s no wonder NASA wanted to provide a satellite connection back to the United States for its tracking station located there, using the INTELSAT communications network. Just after the station opened, a mishap with the launch of the first INTELSAT II satellite (Blue Bird) on 26 October placed the satellite into the wrong orbit, providing an opportunity for the first satellite broadcast from Down Under.


SES Carnarvon's unusual antenna, one of only four that have been built for the INTELSAT network. Officially described a 42-foot aperture cassegrain-fed folded-horn antenna, you can see why it's nicknamed the “sugar scoop”

According to my friend at the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), some hasty calculations revealed that short segments of television broadcast could be relayed to the United Kingdom via INTELSAT II in its unplanned elliptical orbit. So the ABC and the BBC quickly put together a plan for a live telecast, called Down Under Comes Up Live, from Carnarvon – a town which doesn’t even have a television service!

Connection was the theme, and ordinary people were the stars of the show. The program reunited three families of British immigrants living in Carnarvon, two of whom who happened to be employees of the NASA tracking station, with their relatives in the BBC studios in London. It also included some interviews with local residents talking abut life in their remote community. Introducing new babies to family is a universal ritual, and it's delightful to see that it was one that played out in both Down Under Comes Up Live and Our World.

Down Under Comes Up Live was a direct one-way broadcast (a return signal was not possible for technical reasons) that was a complex undertaking (and a good rehearsal for our involvement in Our World). Without a local television station in Carnarvon, ABC outside broadcast vans and their technical staff made a 560 mile trip from Perth to produce the program. The vision was sent live to London from the satellite station, but the audio to and from London was transmitted separately by cable.

On Friday 25 November 1966, more than twelve minutes of television was broadcast to London. Although the program was seen live in the UK, rather ironically, we couldn’t see it live in Australia because there are no television links between Carnarvon and Perth. We had to wait for a few days to see this history-making program, once a film copy of the UK broadcast was flown back to Australia.

Incoming – Australia Day at Expo 67
Apart from a few test transmissions, it was just three weeks ago that we saw the first satellite broadcast into Australia – a live telecast of Australia’s ‘special day’ at Expo 67 in Montreal. This time the transmission came via NASA’s Applications Technology Satellite (ATS)-1. To support this program, NASA has established a temporary satellite station at Cooby Creek dam, about 14 miles north of Toowoomba in Queensland.

The picturesque setting for NASA's Cooby Creek tracking station that brought both Australia Day at Expo 67 and Our World to Australia via ATS-1

Several hundred thousand people around the country, including my sister’s family and I, watched live through the early hours of 7 June our time, as Australia took centre stage in Canada. The program commenced with Prime Minister Harold Holt officially opening the Australian Pavilion at the Expo. Special events for “Australia Day” included boomerang throwing, sheep-dog trials, wood chopping contests and tennis matches with members of the Australian Davis Cup team. Celebrity was an important theme for the variety concert, "Pop Goes Australia", which showcased Australian talent, including the internationally-known Rolf Harris and The Seekers.

The clarity of the satellite picture from Montreal was surprisingly good: I’ve heard that hundreds of viewers rang the ABC in Sydney wanting to be assured that the vision really was being broadcast live from Canada! I just wish I could find some decent reproductions to show you or had thought to take a picture on the screen of our TV set. 

Our World – joining hands (almost) around the planet
So, with just two satellite broadcasts under its belt, from 4.50am Australian Eastern Time on 26 June, Australia participated in the Our World program, helping to string Puck's "girdle around the world". We joined 13 other nations in providing television content for the first live global television broadcast, which instantaneously linked 24 countries on six continents via four communications satellites, with the signals travelling around the world in just 2 seconds!

The brainchild of the BBC, though produced under the auspices of the European Broadcasting Union, the global telecast was controlled from the BBC in London, with America’s National Educational Television in New York City feeding items from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia and Japan to the British Control Centre. Literally thousands of technicians handled the outside broadcasts and studio operations around the world. Satellite ground stations in Australia (NASA's Cooby Creek facility again), Japan, Canada, the United States, Britain and France transmitted sound and vision to and from the satellites. As each of the contributing countries provided commentary in their own language, there was also the necessity of rapidly translating the various languages, so that everyone in the receiving countries could understand what was being said.

The technical complexity of Our World is evident from this diagram, which shows just part of the world-wide links between television stations and satellites necessary to make the global broadcast a reality

Given the incredible technical complexity of the television transmission, it’s quite amazing that the two-hour program was carried through with very few technical problems – especially when the entire broadcast was televised live, with no filmed insertions or other previously produced material apart from the opening montage. We saw everything as it happened.

Our World was intended as a major achievement for both space technology and international relations, a bridge between East and West in these troubled times of wars cold and hot. Unfortunately, at the last minute, politics reared its ugly head and the USSR and several Eastern European nations that were originally going to participate pulled out of the broadcast just a few days before, as a protest against the recent war in the Middle East. This was disappointing and made for some hurried re-arrangement of parts of the program, but it didn’t dampen the mostly aspirational tone of the broadcast as a celebration of human achievement and hope for a more peaceful future. There was also the irony that a US segment about the Glassboro, New Jersey conference between American president Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin was still included in the broadcast, although – since the Our World producers insisted that no politicians could be shown – only an external view of the house where the conference was being held was televised.

New Babies and their World
The broadcast crossed countries, seas and time zones, and was presented as fusing “yesterday”, “today” and “tomorrow” (by dint of the different time zones around the world) into a globe-encircling “now”. The birth of several babies across the world opened the program, which was presented in a sense as a “survey” of the world into which these newborns are entering.

A baby in Mexico, born live on television for all the world to see!

The babies are introduced to their new world through several themes: This Moment's World (what people were doing are doing at that moment around the world); the Hungry World (what scientists are doing to attempt to solve or alleviate the hunger problem); the Crowded World (looking at proposed solutions to the population explosion); Aspiration to Physical Excellence (the continual attempt to develop physical skill); Aspiration to Artistic Excellence (the drive to excel in the arts); and the World Beyond (focussed on astronomy and space travel. Within these themes, vignettes of life and activity from around the world formed the tapestry of the program. Even if some of the actual presentation was, quite frankly, dull and pedestrian (the excitement was, after all, the fact that we were seeing something live from another part of the globe), I thought the concept was an interesting way to approach telling the story of our planet. If an extra-terrestrial civilisation one day happens to intercept this program as its signals travel through space, they'll learn a lot more about the reality of the Earth and its people from Our World than they will get from episodes of I love Lucy.

Everyday Life

The theme This Moment's World presented a panorama of people and activities in various parts of the globe, moving through evening in Europe to afternoon in New York City, with a visit to Tunis along the way. I loved the views of old and new parts of the city. We saw Marshall McLuhan being interviewed in a Toronto television control room, people swimming at the beach at lunchtime in Vancouver, Canada (making us Aussies all envious on a cold winter's morning) and workmen digging a subway at 4am in Japan. Since the program took place between 5.00 am and 7.00 am Australian Eastern time, our first contribution commenced at 5:22 am local time, with a visit to the Hammer Street Tram Depot in Melbourne, where the first tram of the day was departing to service Monday morning commuters. 

This segment was the first cross to the Southern Hemisphere and came directly after the broadcast from Japan. The switch from Japan to Australia was apparently the most technically complicated of the program, as the Japanese and Australian satellite stations had to switch immediately from transmission to receiving mode and back again. The material coming into Australia also had to be converted from the 525-line system to our 625-line format for local broadcast, while the segment going out of Australia had to be converted from 625 to 525-line in order to be sent back to the US and then on to London!

Sweden gave us the first – and almost the only – female presenter in the program!

Global Concerns
Australia also featured in the Hungry World theme, which concentrated on food production and the issues of feeding an ever-growing world population. In addition to items from the United States and a shrimp farm in Takamatsu, Japan, we visited the Canberra phytotron, a laboratory run by the national scientific research agency, CSIRO. In the phytotron, plants can be grown under a wide range of closely controlled climatic conditions. It’s claimed to be one of the world's finest and most up-to-date facilities for plant research, and a number of international scientists work there alongside local researchers.

The CSIRO phytotron's Director, Dr. Lloyd Evans, at work in his plant laboratory. Apparently, he often starts his workday at 5am, so he didn't have to get up earlier than usual for the show!

A couple of segments that were of interest to me in The Crowded World theme were a visit to Cumbernauld (near my father’s home town of Glasgow, Scotland), which was the recipient of an international award for best planning in a new town, and a glimpse of Habitat, a new concept of living accommodation, on display at Expo '67.

Human Achievement
In Aspiration to Physical Excellence, there were contributions from Rome, Sweden, France (where a parachutist made a dizzying free fall with a camera strapped to him), and Winnipeg, Canada, where a 16-year-old Butterfly champion attempted to beat her own world indoor swimming record.


We get to watch live as actors rehearse the wedding scenes from Italian director Franco Zefferelli's next film, Romeo and Juliet
Aspiration to Artistic Excellence included a visit to the Maeght Foundation museum of modern art in France, with artists Marc Chagall and Joan Miro, Leonard Bernstein and pianist Van Cliburn rehearsing Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. Opera singer Maria Callas, and painter Pablo Picasso also featured. In the context of this theme, it’s interesting to note that the Our World anthem, which accompanied the opening montage was composed by Frenchman Georges Delerue, whose musical score credits includes the recent Academy Award winning motion picture, A Man for All Seasons. He wrote the melody based on the rhythm established by the words “Our World”, sung in 22 different languages by the Vienna Boys’ Choir.

But the highlight of this theme has to be a ‘fly on the wall’ visit to a recording studio where the fabulous Beatles were recording their latest anthem “All You Need is Love”, which was specially written for the Our World broadcast! You can see them below, surrounded by their many friends in the music world, who came to the recording party and became informal backing singers. The black and white shot shows how we saw the FAB Four in the live broadcast, while the colour photo was taken just before the televised performance. 

 
Reaching for the Stars
The World Beyond theme took us to the heart of the Space Race, with a visit to Cape Kennedy to see a Saturn V Moon rocket on the pad being readied for its first flight. The telecast also came to a close on the theme of outer space, with a visit to Australia’s Parkes radio telescope – at 210 ft. the largest fully-steerable radio telescope in the world. Here we sat in on an observation of the most distant object currently known – a mysterious quasar only discovered last year by the Parkes telescope's director, Dr. John Bolton. It’s so far away that its light and radio signals take 13,000 million years to reach us!

An ABC cameraman, wearing a heavy jacket in the early morning winter cold, prepares for filming the Our World segment at the Parkes Radio Telescope.

So that was Our World. A fascinating mix of banality and creativity, made magical by the technology of the Space Age, and the knowledge that everyone watching was sharing the experience simultaneously with millions of others across our planet in a way that has never before been possible. With a worldwide audience estimated between 350 and 700 million, the broadcast was a potent demonstration of the potential reach of satellite television. I'm sure that before too long, satellite television from around the world will be a regular occurrence, bringing us news, sport, entertainment and major world events – and we here in Australia will have to get used to being up at all hours of the night to watch! But I wonder what will top this broadcast's incredible audience reach? The first manned landing on the Moon, perhaps?



4 Comments Leave A Comment
Fashion, music, politics, sports

[February 14, 1966] "…to Replace the Pounds and the Shillings and the Pence" (Australia Goes Decimal)

7 Comments


by Kaye Dee

Today is C-Day (Conversion Day) – the day Australia switches to decimal currency after 140 years of using the British system of Pounds, Shillings and Pence. (I actually think it should have been called D-Day, for Decimalisation Day, but I guess that might have seemed insensitive to some of our returned servicemen). Schoolkids are now sighing with relief that they will not have to learn to do those complicated “money sums” like all the generations before them!

A Rum Deal

Australia’s monetary history is rather colourful. In the early days of the penal colony in Sydney, there was very little hard currency available, and most transactions were by barter. Rum and other spirits became a form of currency, controlled by corrupt military officers, which earned their regiment the nickname “the Rum Corps”. When Governor Bligh (yes, that Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame!) tried to prohibit spirits from being used as a medium of exchange, it resulted in a mutiny that drove him from the colony in 1808. This event is known, not surprisingly, as the Rum Rebellion.


Governor Macquarie, Bligh’s successor, introduced the first Australian currency. He purchased 40,000 Spanish dollars and had a round piece punched out of the middle of each one, producing two coins – the “holey dollar” (valued at five shillings) and the “dump” (valued at one shilling and three pence). His “minter” was a convicted forger!

Real Money

In the mid-1820s, the British Government finally decided to provide the Australian colonies with a proper currency and introduced the British system of Pounds, Shillings and Pence. If you’re not familiar with it, 12 pence (pennies) made up a shilling and 20 shillings made one pound.

Australia used British coins and banknotes right up into the early 1900s. It wasn’t until 1910, nine years after the colonies federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia, that the Australian Pound was introduced. Even then, it was branches of Britain’s Royal Mint in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth that produced the coins, indicating how closely Australia remained tied to Britain. The first Royal Australian Mint was only opened in early 1965 to produce our new decimal coins. 


Australian Pound notes (with pretty boring designs) and the full range of Australian coins available before the changeover to decimal currency. A "florin" was another name for a two shilling coin

Going Decimal

Several times in the past 50 years, there have been suggestions for Australia to adopt a decimal currency system. Decimal currency puts us in line with all the world’s major currencies, apart from the Pound Sterling, and all our trading partners apart from Great Britain. But Britain did not want Australia to change its monetary system, and successive Australian Governments and the Reserve Bank of Australia ultimately accepted the British view.

However, in the late 1950s, Prime Minister Robert Menzies finally recognised the economic and pragmatic importance of converting to a decimalised currency. With Australia’s export trade increasing, the complexity of the Pounds, Shillings and Pence system made the arithmetic of financial transactions unnecessarily difficult (as I know from personal experience). Research showed that decimalisation would save the Australian economy more than £11 million ($22 million) a year, through the increased convenience of a decimal currency. This would quickly offset the £30 million ($60 million) cost of conversion. So, in 1963 the Currency Act nominated 14 February 1966 as the day Australia would go decimal.

In Come the Dollars…

Our new currency needed a name and new designs that would be uniquely Australian. A public competition was held in 1963 to find a name “with an Australian flavour” for the currency. About 1000 submissions were received. These included suggestions such as Austral, Boomer (a male kangaroo), Kanga, Roo, Emu, Digger (an Australian soldier), Zac (old nickname for a sixpence coin; it’s also slang for something worthless), Kwid (a funny spelling of the old slang “quid” meaning a Pound), and Ming (from Prime Minister Menzies’ nickname, which comes from the Flash Gordon character “Ming the Merciless”!).


1963 prototype designs for the possible new "Royal". As you can see, one design followed the style of the existing Pound note, the other was quite modern and tilts towards the style in the eventual dollar design

Mr. Menzies rejected all the competition’s suggestions. Being a fervent monarchist, he proposed instead calling the currency the Royal. However, the public made it clear that they didn’t like that name (I certainly didn’t!), so in September 1963, the Treasurer announced that our new currency would be the dollar (which would be the equivalent of 10 shillings), divided into 100 cents. Everyone was much happier with that.

Monopoly Money
It was decided that the new coins should depict Australian wildlife while the notes should reflect national history and Australia’s contribution to the wider world. Gordon Andrews, one of Australia’s leading industrial designers, has designed the new notes. His bright colours and modern style have already led to some wits comparing the new notes to “Monopoly money”, but I think they look great and represent a nation which is coming out from under Britain’s shadow and finding its own feet. 

Australia's new decimal coins. The 1 cent piece shows a possum (a completely different animal from the American opossum); the 2 cent, a frill-necked lizard; the 5 cent coin shows an echidna (otherwise known as a spiny ant-eater) and the 10 cent a lyre-bird; the 20 cent depicts a platypus and the 50 cent coin carries the Australian Coat of Arms, which includes a kangaroo and an emu

The $1 note acknowledges Australia’s origins depicting Aboriginal art and Queen Elizabeth II, while the $2 highlights Australian agricultural innovation in the development of the superfine wool Australian Merino sheep and rust-disease resistant Federation wheat. The $10 note recognises the freed convicts who helped to build this country and our home-grown poets and writers, and the $20 celebrates internationally renowned Australian aviation pioneers. I understand that next year, once we have become more used to the new notes, a $5 bill will also be introduced. Hopefully, it will recognise the often-overlooked contribution of women to Australia’s history.

Our new dollar notes, with their fresh modern styling. To make the transition easier for users, the decimal notes have been matched to their counterparts in the “old money” and are similarly, but more brightly, coloured as you can see by comparison with the earlier image of the Australian Pounds

Meet Dollar Bill


Dollar Bill, the decimal changeover mascot, singing his jingle to a classical musician playing an instrument shaped like the Pound symbol

In April last year, a new character appeared on our TV screens and in cinema ads. His name is “Dollar Bill” and he was introduced as part of the government’s campaign to educate everyone about decimal currency before C-Day arrived. Dollar Bill has been on TV every night (sometimes too many times a night!), singing his catchy little jingle to help familiarise people with the new currency values and the date of changeover. The most memorable part of the jingle is: “In come the dollars and in come the cents, to replace the pounds and the shillings and the pence. Be prepared folks when the coins begin to mix, on the fourteenth of February 1966”. I’m not sure why, but the identity of the person who provides the voice for Dollar Bill is being kept a secret.

The jingle’s tune is based on the folk song “Click Go the Shears” (about sheering sheep in outback Australia). Everyone knows that song, so it makes the decimal currency rhyme easy to remember. I think it’s engraved on my brain now: I’ve heard it so many times, I suspect I’ll still be able to sing it when I’m sixty! Those of you in America might be interested to know that the tune was originally an American Civil War song "Ring the Bell, Watchman" by Henry Clay Work, that somehow made its way down under.


The character is very popular with kids and apparently the Decimal Currency Board gets about 500 fan mail letters a week for Dollar Bill from school children. He has appeared on everything from billboards to matchbox covers. 

To appeal to the teenage audience, there’s a hip little rock number called “The Decimal Point Song”, sung by a young man named Ian Turpie. It was never going to rate on the pop charts, but I think young Turpie could have a good career ahead of him in entertainment. For older Australians there’s even a series of television ads called “Get with It, Gran”.


Major retailers are helping customers feel comfortable with the changeover by including decimal prices and their "old money" equivalents in their catalogues

It's not easy for older people, or younger ones either for that matter, to get used to the change, especially if they are not very good at maths. But at least we have two years of changeover, during which both old and new currency can be used. Of course, the kids now in Primary School have it easy, as they'll grow up with the new system. It will be interesting to see on the news tonight how the first day of the changeover goes, but I doubt there will be the chaos that some pessimists are predicting after all the community preparation. And who knows – if things go smoothly, maybe the government will even consider taking Australia metric as well in the future! 


There are quite a few handy little pocket calculators like these available that make the conversion process relatively easy. I'll bet their inventors are making a small fortune




7 Comments Leave A Comment
Science / Space Race

[August 30, 1965] 8 Days or Bust! (Gemini 5's epic space mission)

3 Comments


by Kaye Dee

Mr. Barry McGuire should have waited another month to record his hit song Eve of Destruction. Why? Because then his telling line “You may leave Earth for four days in space, but when you return it’s the same old place” could have been made an even punchier by updating it with the latest space flight record of eight days, set by the crew of Gemini 5.


The Gemini 5 crew, Charles "Pete" Conrad (left) and mission commander Gordon "Gordo" Cooper (right), ready to set a new space endurance record

One for the Record Books

The safe return of the Gemini 5 crew yesterday, at the end of a mission dogged by technical problems, not only captured the record for the longest spaceflight to date, it has catapulted the United States into the lead ahead of the Soviet Union for the first time in the Space Race! From the outset, NASA planned for this mission to last eight days, to demonstrate that astronauts could live and work in space for the duration of an Apollo mission to the Moon and back. That this flight time beat the Soviet record of just under five days set by cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky in Vostok 5 in 1963, is a welcome added bonus. Other objectives of the mission included: demonstrating the guidance and control systems; evaluating the new fuel cell system and rendezvous radar; and testing the ability of the astronauts to manoeuvre close to another object.

A Mission Patch: the Start of a New Tradition?

For this crucial mission, NASA paired veteran Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, who flew America’s last and longest Mercury mission, with rookie Charles “Pete” Conrad, a member of the second group of astronauts selected in 1962. Because astronauts have been prohibited from naming their spacecraft (following NASA’s displeasure with the name Gus Grissom selected for Gemini 3), Cooper wanted to wear a mission insignia that would symbolise the purpose of their flight. He and Conrad designed a “mission patch”, along the lines of those worn by military units, showing a Conestoga wagon, the type of vehicle used by many of the pioneering families heading into the American West.


The Gemini 5 mission patch as Cooper and Conrad originally designed it, with its pioneer inspired motto (left), alongside the NASA-modified flight version on the right.

On their original design, the wagon carried a motto that was also derived from pioneering times: “8 Days or Bust”. But according to a rumour I’ve heard from my former WRE colleagues, NASA felt that this might leave the agency open to ridicule if the mission didn’t last that long. Because of this, the embroidered patches that Cooper and Conrad wore on their spacesuits during the flight had the ambitious slogan covered by a piece of cloth. But I like the idea of each mission having its own symbolic insignia, so I hope that mission patches become a tradition for future spaceflights.

Launching into History

Gemini 5 was originally supposed to launch on 19 August, but problems with the telemetry programmer and deteriorating weather delayed the lift-off until 21 August. Like previous Gemini missions, Cooper and Conrad lifted off from Launch Complex 39 at the Cape Kennedy Air Force Station. I understand that NASA will continue to use it for the rest of the Gemini programme while its new John F. Kennedy Space Centre is being constructed nearby for the Apollo missions.

During the launch, the astronauts experienced a type of vibration known as “pogo” (as in pogo stick!) which seems to have momentarily impaired their speech and vision. This will need to be further investigated to determine if it poses a threat to crew health and safety on future flights. After the launch, part of the Titan II launch vehicle's first stage was found floating on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and retrieved; I expect it will go on display in a museum after it has been thoroughly studied.


Recovering the upper half of the Titan II launch vehicle first stage from the Atlantic Ocean

Dr. Rendezvous to the Rescue!

Just over 2 hours after launch, the Rendezvous Evaluation Pod (REP, nicknamed Little Rascal, I’m told) was ejected into orbit from Gemini 5. The crew were supposed to practice rendezvous techniques with this mini satellite. However, about 4 hours into the flight, very low oxygen pressure in one of the spacecraft’s fuel cells that provide onboard power led to a decision to shut both fuel cells down. Gemini 5 is the first mission to use this new method of generating onboard power, but without the fuel cells, the spacecraft has only a limited battery power reserve. As a result, Gemini 5 was powered down, drifting along in "chimp mode," without active control by the crew. It looked for a while as if the mission might be “2 days and bust”, but ground tests showed that the faulty fuel cell should work even with low oxygen pressure and both fuel cells were gradually put back into operation, enabling the mission to continue.


An artist's impression of the Gemini 5 Rendezvous Evaluation Pod, as the mission should have unfolded. Unfortunately, the battery on its flashing beacon, which helped the astronauts to see it against the blackness of space, died before the fuel cell issues were resolved.

The fuel cell failure meant that the REP experiment, and others, had to be scrapped. However, astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin devised a rendezvous simulation to test the Gemini 5 crew, which would require them to rendezvous with a specific point in space. The other astronauts don’t call Aldrin “Dr. Rendezvous” for nothing: he has a doctorate in Astronautics, specialising in orbital mechanics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology! The “phantom rendezvous” test took place on the third day of the mission. Cooper and Conrad proved that precision manoeuvres could be successfully accomplished, carrying out four different rendezvous manoeuvres using the Gemini’s Orbit Attitude and Manoeuvring System (OAMS).

On August 24 Cooper reached a cumulative total of 98 hours in space, over his two flights, taking the record for the longest time spent in space by an American astronaut. By the end of the mission he was the world record holder for time spent in space, leaving Bykovsky’s endurance record well behind!

Fuel Cells for Survival


A diagram showing the fuel cells installed on Gemini 5. Despite their problems on this mission, NASA expects to use fuel cells to provide electrical power and water on future space flights.

Another fuel cell problem surfaced on day four of the mission, but this was relatively minor, which was fortunate as the fuel cells not only produce electrical power for the Gemini spacecraft, but also provide the water supply for the crew. Like a battery, a fuel cell uses a chemical reaction to create an electric current. The Gemini fuel cell uses liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen to generate electricity, which creates water as a by-product. Cooper and Conrad reported that the water had a lot of gas bubbles in it (with a predictable intestinal result!) and that it also had a taste they didn’t like. However, it was drinkable when mixed with Tang powdered orange drink, so I think that this will become a staple on future missions (a good advertising opportunity there!).

A plentiful supply of water also means that NASA will be able to provide the astronauts with more rehydratable foods from now on, although the Gemini 5 crew apparently did not have much of an appetite during the mission, only consuming about 1000 calories a day, instead of the planned 2700 calories.


Thanks to fuel cell-produced water, future NASA missions will have more rehydratable foods available. This sample Gemini meal includes a beef sandwich, strawberry cereal cubes, peaches, and beef and gravy. Astronauts use the water gun to reconstitute the food and scissors to open the packages

More Problems to Endure

The fifth day of the mission saw a major problem develop when one set of OAMS thrusters began to malfunction. This meant that all experiments where the thrusters needed to be used were cancelled. One cancellation was a great disappointment for us here in Australia. The Visual Acuity Test was designed to gauge the acuity of an astronaut’s vision from space, by observing patterns laid out on the ground.

Two test sites were prepared for this Gemini 5 experiment: one at Laredo, Texas and the other on Woodleigh sheep station (ranch), located about 90 miles south of Carnarvon, Western Australia. Carnarvon is the site of NASA’s largest tracking station outside the United States, combining both a Manned Space Flight Network facility and a Space Tracking and Data Acquisition Network station. At Woodleigh, piles of white sea-shells were bulldozed into carefully chosen patterns to determine the smallest pattern the astronauts could discern through the window of their spacecraft.


The Visual Acuity Test patterns at Woodleigh station seen from the air. Though they were composed of very white shells from a nearby beach, I think they might have been difficult to spot from space even under ideal conditions.

However, when this experiment should have been performed on 26 August, Gemini 5 was again drifting along powered down, due to the fuel cell and OAMS problems and could not maintain a stable view of the ground. The astronauts could see the smoke markers identifying the Woodleigh site but not the experimental patterns themselves due to the spacecraft's attitude. Attempts to view the site on later orbits were, unfortunately, no more successful, although the crew could see the lights of Carnarvon and Perth on night-time orbits.

During this powered-down period, Cooper and Conrad became quite cold and experienced feelings of disorientation caused by stars drifting past the windows as their capsule slowly rotated. Eventually, Cooper put covers on the windows to shut out the sight. Not only did they have difficulty sleeping, the crew also had to contend with persistent dandruff, apparently due to the low cabin humidity. The dry, flaky skin they shed settled everywhere, making for an unpleasant cabin environment. Even the instrument panels became partially obscured by dandruff!


No wonder the Gemini 5 crew found it difficult to sleep, when they were crowded together in a space about the same size as the front seat of a VW Beetle! Sleeping in alternate shifts was was not successful, but even sleeping at the same time did not make for a restful "night".

Although the mission’s technical problems caused some experiments to be cancelled, many others were still successfully carried out, including medical and photographic experiments. Among the crew's space science pictures were the first photographs of the zodiacal light and the gegenschein taken from orbit. Photographs of the Earth taken from space are also expected to produce detailed images that will have scientific, military and intelligence value once the films taken in flight are processed. I'm really looking forward to seeing them.

100 Orbits

On 28 August, Gemini 5 became the first manned spacecraft to complete 100 orbits of the Earth. In recognition of the achievement, Mission Control in Houston relayed 15 minutes of Dixieland music to the two astronauts, making Capcom Jim McDivitt the first space disc jockey! Because of the cancellation of experiments during the mission, Conrad had previously said he wished he had brought a book to read, or some music to listen to, and both Cooper and Conrad had expressed a preference for Dixieland music. Later that day, the Capcom at Houston also read up to the crew a little poem that Conrad’s wife, Jane, had written.

From Space to Shining Sea

A few hours before Gemini 5 returned to Earth yesterday, Gordon Cooper made a very special long-distance call – to fellow Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, who is living and working aboard the US Navy’s Sealab II facility, 205 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean near La Jolla, California. This radio call was apparently made to test the effectiveness of an undersea electronics lab installed on Sealab II, but it was also a nice piece of publicity for NASA and the Navy.


Mercury astronaut turned aquanaut Scott Carpenter, inside Sealab II, talks to Gordon Cooper aboard Gemini 5. Don't ask me how I got this photo!

Eight Days Without Busting!

Finally, on 29 August, at 190 hours, 27 minutes, and 43 seconds into the mission, retrofire commenced and Gemini 5 was on its way home. To demonstrate the level of control provided by the Gemini spacecraft design, the astronauts controlled their re-entry, rotating the capsule to create drag and lift. Unfortunately, due to an error by a computer programmer, Gemini 5 splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean 80 miles short of its target landing site, but the crew were quickly located and retrieved. Gemini 5 ended just a few hours short of the planned eight days, but the epic mission had come to a successful conclusion and lived up to its motto – it was most definitely not a bust!


Safely home! The crew of Gemini 5 look tired, but elated, after what what Conrad has described as "“eight days in a garbage can”. Notice those "censored" mission patches, whose motto was right after all!




3 Comments Leave A Comment
Science / Space Race

[July 20, 1965] No War of the Worlds After All? (Mariner IV reaches Mars)

5 Comments


by Kaye Dee

Just a few days ago, on July 15, NASA’s Mariner IV space probe made history by being the first spacecraft to successfully reach the planet Mars, capturing images of its surface. These are the first close-up views of another planet in our solar system and the initial pictures suggest that, despite what science fiction would have us believe, Earth won’t have to fear an invasion from Mars any time soon!

The first close-up image ever taken of Mars, showing the limb of the planet and a haze-like feature that might be clouds. The smallest features in this image are roughly 3 miles across, but there's no sign of Martian canals!

The Canals of Mars

Mars has been an object of intense scientific and popular fascination since the last century, when telescope observations first suggested that the planet was potentially Earthlike, since it showed polar caps and surface changes that appeared to represent seasonal variations due to the growth and die-back of vegetation. Then, in 1877, the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli observed what he called “canali” on Mars. He apparently meant grooves or channels on the Martian surface, but his work was translated into English as “canals” and some astronomers took this literally to mean that he had observed structures that were the work of intelligent beings.

A section of one of Percival Lowell’s maps of Mars, published in his 1895 book Mars. The complete map depicted 184 named canals marked on it using numbers.

By the end of the 19th Century, the idea that there is intelligent life on Mars had taken hold, thanks particularly to the writings of American astronomer Percival Lowell (the same Percival Lowell who is also associated with the discovery of the Planet Pluto!) He believed in a Martian civilisation that had constructed vast networks of canals to bring water from the planet’s poles and wrote several books and innumerable newspaper articles detailing his observations of canal systems on the Red Planet. Science fiction stories like H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds, first published in 1897, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Barsoom" series further encouraged popular belief that there was intelligent life on Mars and generated something of a ‘Mars mania’ that has grown across the 20th Century.

Cover of the August 1927 issue of Amazing depicting the iconic Martian machines from Wells' War of the Worlds. This powerful story has been re-interpreted on radio and film and has had a tremendous influence in shaping popular perceptions of life on Mars.

The Mars Race

Most scientists have accepted for a decade or more now that modern telescope observations indicate that it is unlikely that higher forms of life will be found on Mars after all. Yet the fascination with Mars has been so strong that it’s not surprising the planet became an early target for space exploration, after the Moon. The Soviet Union started the race to Mars in October 1960, with “Marsnik” 1 and 2. We don’t know much about these probes, but it seems they both failed even to reach orbit. The USSR’s Mars 1 flew past Mars in June 1963, but it had stopped sending back data in March. Sputnik 22 and Sputnik 24, both launched around the same time as Mars 1, are also believed to be elements of a failed Mars mission. Zond 2, launched just 2 days after Mariner IV, is also assumed to be an attempted Mars mission, though it, too, ceased transmitting en route. Clearly, getting to Mars is hard. Mariner IV was meant to be a twin mission with Mariner III, but that mission also failed at launch.

Even though Mars 1 ceased transmitting long before it reached Mars, the USSR still celebrated it as an achievement on its 1964 Cosmonauts Day stamp.

Mariner IV was launched on an Atlas Agena rocket from Cape Canaveral at 12:22 GMT on November 28, last year. It has an octagonal magnesium frame, 50 inches across the diagonal and 18 inches high, which houses the electronic equipment, propulsion system and attitude control gas supplies and regulators. Four solar panels, containing a total of 28,224 solar cells, are attached to the top of the frame. They are able to generate 310 watts of power at the distance of Mars from the Sun. Mariner also has two antennae for transmitting data back to Earth: An elliptical high-gain parabolic antenna and an omnidirectional low-gain antenna, mounted on a seven-foot, four-inch-tall mast next to the high-gain antenna.

Mariner IV is an incredibly sophisticated space probe for its size, packed with scientific instruments, plus its television camera system. Its design is a radical departure from the conical design used for the Ranger Moon probes and NASA's successful Mariner II mission to Venus.

Deep Space Laboratory

For its relatively small size, Mariner IV is a spacegoing scientific laboratory, designed to measure the conditions in deep space between Mars and the Earth and in the vicinity of Mars itself. Its scientific instruments include a helium magnetometer to measure the characteristics of the interplanetary and planetary magnetic fields; an ionization chamber/Geiger counter, to measure the charged-particle intensity and distribution in interplanetary space and in the vicinity of Mars; a cosmic ray telescope, to measure the direction and energy spectrum of protons and alpha particles; a solar plasma probe, to measure the very low energy charged particle flux from the Sun, and a cosmic dust detector, to measure the momentum, distribution, density, and direction of cosmic dust. Although the Geiger counter failed in February and the plasma probe's performance is degraded, the other instruments are all working well.

Mariner IV's 'endless loop' magnetic tape recorder. Its 330ft of tape has a storage capacity of 5.24 million bits – right at the cutting-edge of recording technology!

Probably the most important instrument on Mariner IV, and certainly the one of the most interest to the public, is its television camera, designed to obtain close-up images of the Martian surface. The camera is mounted on a scan platform at the bottom centre of the spacecraft and consists of 4 parts: a Cassegrain telescope with a 1.05° by 1.05° field of view; a shutter and red/green filter assembly with 0.08s and 0.20s exposure times; a slow scan vidicon tube which translates the optical image into an electrical video signal, and the electronic systems required to convert the analogue signal into a digital signal for transmission. During the fly-by of Mars, all the television images and the data gathered by the scientific instruments were stored on an ‘endless loop’ four-track magnetic tape recorder for later transmission back to Earth. 

First Pictures from Another World

On July 15 Mariner 4 passed within 6117 miles of Mars, spending just 25 minutes doing visual observations of the planet’s surface. During that brief time, its television camera captured 21 full pictures and part of a 22nd, the first ever close-up images of the surface of another planet. Each photo covers an area of about 77 square miles. It takes about 10 hours to transmit each image back to Earth and each picture is being transmitted twice to ensure that all the data is correctly received.

The second Mariner IV image released by NASA shows the border of Elysium Planitia and Amazonis Planitia. Taken from around 9,940 miles, the picture is about 310 miles across and 560 miles from top to bottom because the surface is curving away. North is up and the sun is illuminating the area from the southeast.

Only three of the Mariner Mars images have so far been released, but already they have disappointed scientists and the public alike by putting an end to any hope of finding intelligent life on the Red Planet. What they have so far revealed is a world that looks more like the Moon than the Earth, with no signs of water, vegetation or animal life. When this is coupled with the findings of the scientific instruments, which show that Mars has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide with only a very low atmospheric pressure (only a fraction of that found on Earth, which was quite a surprise to scientists), a daytime temperature of -148 degrees F and no magnetic field (meaning that the surface of the planet is bombarded by the solar wind and cosmic radiation), it means that the prospects for any kind of life on Mars are very small indeed. However, Mariner’s images only cover just 1% of the Martian surface, so perhaps we should not entirely give up hope that future missions will find Mars more exciting and scientifically interesting than it seems right now. After all, the pictures have not yet revealed the cause of the apparent seasonal changes observed from Earth….

The third image we have seen so far shows the Orcus Patera region in western Amazonis Planitia. It was taken with the sun only 13 degrees from vertical, so the topography is hard to make out, although some raised areas can be seen at upper left. The image is 202 miles across and 319 miles from top to bottom. The resolution is about 1.9 miles and north is up.

Australia Plays Its Part

Australia has played a crucial role in the Mariner IV mission, with its first images being received at the Tidbinbilla tracking station outside Canberra. NASA’s second Deep Space Network station in Australia, Tidbinbilla became operational in December 1964 so that it could support the Mars mission. As the signal from Mars is very weak, the station asked the civil aviation authorities to divert any aircraft that might interfere with the reception of the signals from Mariner at the time of the fly-by. This resulted in an amusing incident: at the critical time, just when Mariner 4 had gone behind Mars, the direct phone from Canberra Airport rang and the station was asked if it was experiencing interference from a UFO! It now seems that the offending object was a weather balloon and not a Martian saucer come to check on what the Earthmen are up to.


Nestled in a secluded valley, for protection from radio interference from nearby Canberra, NASA's Tidbinbilla Deep Space Network Station received the first images of Mars from Mariner IV. Australia is host to a growing number of NASA tracking stations covering all its space tracking networks.

A Role for a Radio Telescope

Australia’s Parkes radio telescope, the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world, also played a role in receiving Mariner IV’s Mars images. NASA is basing the design of its new 210 ft antennae for the Deep Space Network on that of the Parkes telescope. As a demonstration of its tracking capabilities, Parkes has also tracked Mariner IV and received some of its images from Mars. Its greater antenna size, and therefore better reception capabilities, mean that its images will be more detailed than those received by the 85 ft dishes at Tidnbinbilla and other NASA stations and they will enhance the overall quality of Mariner IV’s Mars pictures when the Parkes and Tidbinbilla images are combined. I hope that NASA will release the rest of the Mariner images soon: even if they have dashed almost a century of Martian fantasies, they are revealing a planet that is very different from what we have expected and I wonder what further surprises might be in store for us as we explore more of Mars and the rest of the Solar System….

The world-leading radio telescope developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia's national civil scientific research body. Located near Parkes, New South Wales, this astronomical instrument is also proving its value as a space tracking facility and I'm sure that NASA will call on it again in the future for further tracking support




5 Comments Leave A Comment
TV

[June 22, 1965] Standby for Action! (Gerry Anderson’s Stingray)

5 Comments


by Kaye Dee

“Standby for Action!” is the dramatic opening line of the opening titles for Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s most recent marionette science fiction series, Stingray, which then go on to promise us “Anything can happen in the next half hour!” And with over 39 episodes of undersea adventure Stingray lives up to that promise.


World Aquanuat Security Patrol Commander Shore warns us that “Anything can happen in the next half hour” in the Stingray opening titles. Note the caption “in Videcolor” in the background, telling even viewers watching in in black and white that the show is made in colour

Stingray completed its first Australian screening run a few weeks ago on June 9, having commenced on the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), on September 16, 1964. As I’ve recently discovered from my friend at the ABC, this was, unusually, three weeks before the show commenced screening in Britain: as you might recall from my article about the long-delayed arrival of Doctor Who in Australia, we are more likely to be months, if not years, behind in screening television series from overseas. In fact, the Andersons’ earlier series, Fireball XL5, still hasn’t arrived on our shores, but I’ve heard that it will be shown on one of the commercial television channels later in the year.


The Stingray, series title. I’ve read that Gerry Anderson said an undersea show was the next logical step after the land and space exploits of his earlier series Supercar and Fireball XL5

Although I haven’t yet seen Fireball XL5, I discovered Stingray alongside the Andersons’ first Supermarionation puppet creation Supercar, which has been repeated this year on the ABC after first screening in 1963. While Supercar is good kiddie fun (thanks to my niece and nephew for introducing me to both these shows), Stingray shows an order of magnitude of improvement, technically and in the imaginativeness of its storyline.


Stingray, the most advanced submarine of 2065 and titular star of the show

Stingray is a science fiction undersea adventure series, set in the twenty first century (in 2065, as one episode informs us), following the exploits of the crew of Stingray, the most advanced submarine in the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (better known as WASP), one of the armed services of the World Government, charged with policing and protecting civil activities on and under the world’s oceans. However, in Stingray’s world, there are many peoples and civilisations under the sea and, although they have been largely unknown to the surface world previously, many of them have become angered by the “terrainean” exploitation of the resources of the oceans.


The Stingray crew, Troy Tempest, Phones and Marina, the mysterious woman from the sea.

In the first episode, the crew of Stingray, Captain Troy Tempest and his navigator/hydrophone operator, nicknamed “Phones” (apparently his full name is given in the promotional material for the series, but it never gets mentioned on screen), are captured by Titan, King of undersea city of Titanica. When his god (represented by a giant fish that looks like a cross between a grouper and a coelacanth!) rejects Troy and Phones, Titan condemns them to death, but they escape, aided by Marina, the mute daughter of the ruler of another undersea kingdom, whom Titan has been keeping as his slave. Marina returns with Troy and Phones to the WASP home-base of Marineville and becomes a member of the Stingray crew, using her knowledge of the undersea world to assist in their missions.


Titan, the evil King of Titanica, the arch-enemy of the Stingray crew, and his minions, the Aquaphibians.

This sets the stage for the series, with Titan and his creepy henchmen X-20 and the Aquaphibians, becoming the WASPs’ main undersea adversaries. While many stories involve battles with, or thwarting plots against, the WASP, or the surface world in general, by Titan and his allies, there is plenty of other action for the Stingray crew as well: we see them involved in exploration, participating in marine archaeology, undertaking rescue missions, investigating piracy and terrorism, assisting undersea peoples, becoming embroiled in international diplomacy and even discovering the truth about the Loch Ness Monster! Of course, being a children’s show, some of the stories are silly, and there are too many ‘dream episodes’, where strange things happen, for my taste – but many have a tongue-in-cheek humour that can be appealing to adults, and others touch on grown-up ideas such as whether or not we should exploit the mineral resources of the ocean floor.


Stingray in its pen under Marineville, awaiting the call to “Action Stations”

Unlike many kids’ adventure shows, the storyline is not completely static but has some developments over time, with Marina being initially somewhat under suspicion as a possible agent of Titan, but gradually becoming accepted, especially by Atlanta Shore, who was romantically involved with Tempest before Marina arrived on the scene. Troy finds himself enthralled by Marina but seems unable to make up his mind between the two women. It must be a first for a children’s television show that it not only portrays a ‘love triangle’ but also makes it the focus of its closing credits, which incorporate the love song “Aqua Marina”.


Atlanta Shore, Troy’s original love interest and her father WASP Commander Sam Shore in Marineville Control. A person with paraplegia in a hovering ‘wheelchair’ as a military commander has to be a role model for disabled children: in the future you can do anything!

I also find it interesting that Stingray includes two handicapped characters among its main cast, both of whom are shown to be vital members of the WASP. Marina may be mute – and episodes deal with her crewmates wanting to help her learn to speak, and the problem of Marineville Control communicating with Marina by radio – but she is intelligent and more than capable of rescuing Troy and Phones on more than one occasion. The Commander of the WASP, Sam Shore, is a paraplegic, who gets around using a hover chair – and an entire episode is devoted to the story of how he was crippled on active duty — but he is in overall charge of the organization. These have to be heartening role models for children afflicted by polio and other disabilities. 


Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and some of the Stingray production team with one of the models of Stingray

Stingray is impressive technically. Those dramatic opening statements at the beginning of the title sequence introduce a series of action shots of Stingray, a lot of explosions, Stingray’s home base Marineville going to red alert (which means the entire base sinking underground and ICBM’s being deployed into launch positions), and an amazing scene of Stingray leaping out of the water, chased by one of Titan’s submarines in the shape of a gigantic mechanical fish. And it’s all accompanied by a staccato, jazzy theme that really works with the visuals.


I’d love to know how they created this dramatic scene of Stingray leaping out of the water, chased by one of Titan’s submarines

The models of futuristic submarines, aircraft and other technology of the twenty first century are beautifully detailed, and the finely crafted miniature sets perfectly match the size of the marionettes, which I understand are about 20 inches tall. I’ve read that the AP Films production team moved into a completely new studio to produce Stingray, which included two sound stages, so that they could shoot two episodes at a time, plus a special stage for filming special effects and huge indoor tanks for filming ocean surface scenes. The ‘underwater’ scenes are apparently shot on a dry set, but filmed through a special fish-filled aquarium in front of the camera, to create a forced perspective of an undersea environment: the kids certainly think it has actually been filmed underwater.


The beautifully detailed model of WASP Headquarters Marineville. The sequences of parts of the base sinking underground during an alert are really impressive

I like the Stingray marionettes, too: they are less caricatured than in Supercar, in fact some of them look like they’ve been modelled on real people. The Troy Tempest puppet reminds me of James Garner, and badguy X-20 looks – and sounds – a lot like Peter Lorre! The puppet faces are also given added realism by having glass eyes, unlike the painted eyes of the earlier puppets. Something I find really interesting is that the marionettes can apparently be fitted with different heads, sculpted so that the face is smiling or frowning, which allows them to express emotion in a way that wasn’t possible in the earlier puppets.


Tell me Troy Tempest isn’t modelled on James Garner!

Stingray also has another claim to fame, it seems, as the first television series in the UK to be filmed completely in colour, even though it will be some years yet before Britain gets colour television (and probably a decade yet before we see it in Australia). I understand has been done in order to improve the possibility of sales into the American market, so I hope it works, and the Andersons make enough profit from Stingray to embark upon a new series in the not-too-distant future.

In the meantime, I look forward to belatedly seeing Fireball XL5 and enjoy it as an interim step between Supercar and Stingray!

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




5 Comments Leave A Comment
Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[January 20, 1965] The T.A.R.D.I.S. Lands Down Under and Japan Invades Australia (Doctor Who and The Samurai)

1 Comment


by Kaye Dee

I’ve been reading Jessica Holmes’ insightful articles about the British science fiction television series Doctor Who since she first started commenting on this show (see December 1963 entry) and I’ve been looking forward for some time to actually seeing it air in Australia. At last my wish has been granted! The T.A.R.D.I.S. has finally landed here, with Doctor Who commencing on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (the ABC is the Australian equivalent of the BBC) just in the past week, mesmerising me with those incredible opening credits.


Doctor Who's ethereal and abstract opening credits perfectly suggest travelling along the corridors of time

Not Just Kid Stuff

I heard from a friend who works at the ABC that Australia has been one of the first countries to buy Doctor Who from the BBC. In fact, I was really excited when he told me in March last year that the ABC had purchased the show and intended to debut it last May, but then delays arose due to censorship issues. Yes, although Doctor Who is classed as a family show in Britain, the Australian censors (who view and classify every overseas television show that comes into the country) have deemed the first thirteen episodes to be not suitable for children and classified them as “Adult”! This means that the ABC must schedule these episodes for screening after 7pm and couldn’t show Doctor Who in the Sunday night 6.30pm timeslot it originally planned. But at last Doctor Who has found a home on Friday night at 7.30pm (at least in Sydney). I just hope the censors aren’t going to decide one day that some stories are too scary to be screened at all!

Doing the Rounds

A funny thing about the ABC is that sometimes when it buys a show from overseas it only purchases one film copy of each episode. This film reel then has to be sent around from state to state so that it can be screened by the ABC broadcaster in each capital city. So, the first Australian screening of Doctor Who was actually in Perth on Tuesday, 12 January. Sydney and Canberra (linked by cable) were next on 15 January. Brisbane will get to see Doctor Who next Friday 22 January, but Melbourne will have to wait until Saturday 20 February and Adelaide won’t see the first episode until Monday 15 March! I’m glad I live in Sydney now.


Anthony Coburn (left) and Ron Grainer (right) may be virtually unknown in Australia, but they've had successful careers in Britain and have made important contributions to the creation of Doctor Who

The Australian Connection

It’s great to see that some Australians are involved with the production of Doctor Who. The premiere story, “An Unearthly Child” has been written by Anthony Coburn. I’d never really heard of him before, but according to a few newspaper articles reviewing the first episode he was born in Melbourne and has been working in England for many years as a staff writer for the BBC. Ron Grainer, who composed the wonderfully eerie and evocative theme music, has also spent most of his professional career composing music in Britain, although he grew up in a small mining town in far north Queensland. Vicki Lucas’ fascinating article on the music of Doctor Who (see December 1963 entry) tells me that an obviously talented lady named Delia Derbyshire at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop created the amazing sound of Grainer’s composition: all I can say is that I’m in awe of her skill at creating electronic music, now that I have actually heard the theme tune for myself.


The mysterious Doctor Who and his granddaughter Susan. I wonder when we'll find out where they really come from and why they are exiles from their home world

A Family Viewing Experience

And that’s what I’ve discovered with the first episode of Doctor Who: it’s one thing to read about the show and look forward to seeing it, but it’s a whole new experience to actually watch it on television. My sister Faye and her kids watched “Unearthly Child” with me and we were all caught up in the mystery of Susan and her grandfather and what's going to happen to the two school teachers now that they've been whisked away somewhere in time and space in the Doctor’s T.A.R.D.I.S. Vickie and David certainly didn’t think that Doctor Who was just for adults, no matter what the censors said! We’re all looking forward to the next episode and enjoying the adventures that those of you in Britain have been watching for over a year.


Promotional image for The Samurai, showing Shintaro wielding a longsword that is the traditional weapon of a samurai warrior. The title character is played by actor Koichi Ose

Japanese Television Arrives in Australia

Doctor Who isn’t the only new television import to catch my attention lately. Despite the animosity that many Australians have felt towards Japan since the War, last year’s Tokyo Olympic Games, where our young swimmer Dawn Fraser did so well, sparked a lot of interest and curiosity about Japan and its culture. So much so, in fact, that TCN-9 in Sydney started showing the first ever Japanese television series on Australian screens at the end of December. It’s an action adventure series called The Samurai, set in feudal Japan three centuries ago. Channel 9 is taking a gamble with this show, which I guess is why they’ve put it on in the doldrums period of the Summer holidays.


Shintaro narrowly avoids a brace of 'star knives' (a weapon used by the ninjas). I've heard that Dads are now making home-made ones for their kids, snipped from used tin lids. It'll be fun to play samurai and ninjas until someone gets hurt with one of these!

A "Western", Japanese Style

The Samurai tells the story of a master swordsman named Shintaro (the “samurai” of the title), a half-brother of Japan’s young ruler, the Shogun, who travels around Japan putting down plots against his brother’s government, usually by the villainous gangs of a semi-magical secret society known as ninjas: you could say that Shintaro is a medieval Japanese cross between James Bond, a Western gunslinger and Robin Hood! Channel 9 has been showing The Samurai five days a week at 3.30pm and with its exotic setting, supernatural action and endearingly bad dubbing with broad American accents, it’s fast becoming very popular – and not just with the kids. Faye’s husband, Bruce, has been absorbed in the show while he’s on holidays and I’ve taken to this fascinating curiosity of a show as well. Mind you, so many ninjas get killed in each episode, I’m surprised the censors haven’t labelled The Samurai as “Adult”, alongside Doctor Who!

Japan Invades the Top 40, Too

Another bit of Japanese culture has also been making its presence felt in the Top 40 charts. In August last year, the lovely Noeleen Batley, Australia’s first female pop singer to have a national hit song, released an English version of a song that was a huge hit in Japan in 1963. “Little Treasure from Japan” charted in Sydney and Brisbane and even made it all the way to #16 in Melbourne last October. It really is a sweet little song, with one of those tunes you can’t get out of your head. My niece Vickie’s dance teacher is already creating a dance routine for her class to perform to the song for their mid-year concert. Now we just have to figure out where we can find a kimono for her costume.


Australia's "Little Miss Sweetheart" Noeleen Batley has had a hit with "Little Treasure from Japan". You can see by the wear on the cover that Faye's copy of the record has already been played quite a bit

Australia International

The fact that Channel 9 took a risk on screening The Samurai is an indication of how much Australians have broadened their worldview since the end of the War. The large influx of European migrants has introduced us to delicious new foods, good coffee (thank you!) and a more cosmopolitan outlook. Our TV might be dominated by British, American and (a long way third) Australian shows now, but hopefully we'll soon see more international programmes. Perhaps someday we'll even see a television channel offering programmes from around the world: I can't wait to see what fun and entertainment we've been missing out on!

[If you have a membership to this year's Worldcon (in New Zealand) or did last year (Dublin), we would very much appreciate your nomination for Best Fanzine! We work for egoboo…]




1 Comment Leave A Comment