[T]he landscape of colonial science reveals the strong leadership of a few men, frequently dependent on the goodwill and patronage of government; a commitment to empirical utility, as against abstract science; and a close relationship between academic and government science. Then and since, science served Australia as a guide to “moral improvement” and social organisation; as a social elevator for ambitious young men and women; and as a social adhesive for artisans and managers. MacLeod (1988).

In March 1926, Pawsey entered the University of Melbourne, enrolled in a Bachelor of Science.

If we pause to think about it, it seems appropriate for a Young Australian League alumnus to embark on a life of science. To write about the history of science from Australia brings us to a consideration of what Joe had just been treated to: the relations of Empire. In Australia, science was produced by, and in turn produced, the British Empire—one need only consider the rapid developments in navigation (such as longitude), in medicine (understanding of and treatment of that scourge of the British Navy, scurvy), in botany and zoology (developing systems of classifications that made sense of the plants and animals of the New World), and of course in astronomy (for one navigated by the stars, and observing the Transit of Venus was the excuse that took Captain James Cook to the almost unknown southern land) to grasp this fundamental relationship. The problems addressed were the needs of Empire; the resources of Empire funded the curiosity and questions of the savants in Britain and the continent. In this way the social structure of British and European science was built around asymmetries, in which there was a flow of primary data—specimens, calculations—from the colonies back to London, Oxbridge, Edinburgh and Paris, where the scientific aristocrats formed their theories about the processes of geological change, or the origin of species, or the nature of gases, or the structures of matter. This relationship between the “periphery” and the “metropolis” was material, ideological, theoretical and social (Hodge, 2011; Bennett & Hodge, 2011, and MacLeod, 2000).

In Australia, where the first English invaders arrived in 1788, the first century of colonial life was mostly a struggle to survive, and such science as was pursued was a scramble to understand the very different natural world—flora, fauna, weather, geology—the colonists faced. Books and journals were expensive and precious resources, and it took months for new scientific publications to arrive from Britain (Moyal, 1976 and MacLeod, 1988) . Scientific interest in Australia, however, was lively, and many leading European scientists (Charles Darwin among them) made the long voyage to visit, explore and encourage local scientific activity. Of course one of the leading colonial sciences was astronomy. The southern skies were a necessary and important component of growing understanding of position calculation and meteorology, as well as being of absorbing interest to the new settler, and each Australian colony quickly established an Observatory and government astronomer to go with it; in addition, a number of private observatories were expensively shipped out and built.

But astronomy was not quite the same as physics, and physics itself was a very new field that emerged slowly from studies of electricity and magnetism over the course of the nineteenth century. The first two Universities, in Sydney and Melbourne, were founded in the late 1850s but taught only tiny numbers of students, with science subjects being taught as part of Arts degrees. The first science faculties were established in the late 1880s; the 23-year-old William Bragg came from Cambridge (where experimental physics was not then taught) to be Professor of Mathematics and Experimental Physics at the University of Adelaide in 1886 (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1915/wh-bragg/biographical/); 24-year-old Richard Threlfall came from Cambridge to be Professor of Physics at the University of Sydney in 1888 (Home , 1990); Thomas Rankin Lyle, mature at 29, followed from Dublin, to take the Chair in Natural Philosophy at the University of Melbourne in 1889.

The Professoriate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were defined by their energy, their singular achievements, and by the intellectual isolation and “tyranny of distance” (Blainey, 1982) that marked so much of life for white Australians, whether immigrants or “Currency” (locally born) lads and lasses. Isolation and the tyranny of distance was particularly acute in physics, and their impacts were keenly felt. William Bragg’s experience was a case in point. To teach himself experimental physics, Bragg read a handbook on the ship he sailed on to Adelaide, and then apprenticed himself to a local firm of instrument makers in order to build a laboratory useful to students (or to himself). The formation of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science in 1888, which allowed Bragg to meet with his counterparts from Sydney and Melbourne, was decisive for those “such as myself,” as he told his fiancée Gwendoline, “who are willing to work but who don’t know quite where to begin.” In particular, exposure to new ideas and direct mentoring from experienced experimentalist Richard Threlfall proved to be the critical stimulus that encouraged Bragg to explore published literature on radioactivity and hesitantly to begin to undertake experiments that might contribute to it. This also was not easy in the Australian colonies. In order to pursue an interest in the exciting new discovery of X-rays, he needed to collaborate with a local chemist, Samuel Barbour, who could supply a glass discharge tube obtained during a visit to England, and his father-in-law, Charles Todd, the Government Astronomer, who could lend an induction coil and a battery sufficient to produce the required Roentgen rays.

As is well known, Bragg’s experimental research program grew in success and confidence, and he began to cultivate research students and colleagues in his turn, including the young John Percival Vissing Madsen, who would later direct the wartime radar research program in which Joe Pawsey played so central a role. Madsen represented the first generation of Australian-born scientists; he graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Science and the University Medal in Mathematics in 1900, and Bachelor of Engineering and University Medal in 1901 (Myers, 1986). He then came to the University of Adelaide as Lecturer in Mathematics and Physics where, with and led by Bragg, he conducted experiments in radioactivity and X-rays, leading to a Doctor of Science, the highest degree possible to obtain in Australia until after World War II. Madsen’s collaboration with Bragg was unquestionably fundamental in shaping his vision and understanding of what knowledge-driven science could accomplish.

Eventually isolation became too much for Bragg; he wanted colleagues who could understand his research and to partake in the discussion of new ideas and data. In 1909 Bragg returned to Britain, and as is well known, two Nobel prizes quickly followed. Bragg certainly demonstrated that it was possible to undertake first class research in physics in Australia. But, as historian of Australian physics Rod Home remarked, it took a Bragg to do it. After his departure, his students were not able to sustain a research programme (Home , 1984 and Home 1990). J.P.V. Madsen, who, right from the beginning, had held a strong interest in practical applications for science, returned to Sydney in the same year that Bragg left, to take up a lectureship in Engineering; and there he found a flair, not for research himself, but for the facilitation and support of research by others. It is in these stories that we can see the relation between “metropolis” and “periphery” at its most stark.

Nonetheless, science was growing slowly in Australia. If Madsen’s career was one sign of this, so too was that of Thomas H. Laby, Pawsey’s professor at the University of Melbourne. Laby was born less than a year after Madsen (1880), but his father’s early death in 1888 left him in straitened economic circumstances, and he was limited to a technical college education. A little coaching enabled him to gain a job as assistant in the chemical laboratory of the NSW Agricultural Department, analysing the chemical composition of fertilisers, and then to becoming Demonstrator in Chemistry at the University of Sydney, just as Madsen left for Adelaide. Laby was a gifted experimentalist, and he began to try a little experimentation on topics drawn from what he could get hold of in the limited scientific literature to which he had access (it took months for the latest publications from scientific journals in Europe to reach Australia, and very few people could afford subscriptions to them).

The fundamental mechanism for nurturing a young scientist in the “Dominions” was a trip “Home”, that is, back to England. (Joe’s son Hastings recalled that his father-in-law very typically always referred to England as “Home”, even though he was a second generation Australian and died in 2004!). In this way, such a young man (a few women began to follow this path in the early twentieth century, too) could learn the latest experimental techniques and the latest ideas, and could form the networks needed to sustain continued work in science after returning. The initial resource that supported a trip “Home” was the 1851 Exhibition Scholarships. These were established with excess funds after the Great Exhibition of 1851 (in London) (Auerbach, 1999) and were intended to develop scientific and technical training in sciences (physics, chemistry, mechanics/engineering) important to British national industries, and a small but growing percentage were made available to students from Dominion/Commonwealth Universities. Indeed such was the demand from outside the UK, that an additional scheme of Overseas Research Scholarships was instituted. While the 1851 Exhibition Scholarships and the Overseas Research Scholarships schemes were Imperial in that they harnessed the best Colonial resources for use in metropolitan science, Rod Home notes that in that period, little distinction was made between Imperial and Colonial interests: what was good for Britain was simply considered to be good for her Empire. To receive a Scholarship, a University judged to be a centre for education in Physics (or Chemistry or mechanics) had to put a candidate’s name forward, and the professor in charge often needed to advocate directly to such members of the Scholarship Committee as they had connections with; or else the advocacy needed to come from the Director of the laboratory in the UK, where the candidate hoped to undertake their research.

The impact of the scheme on science might perhaps be judged by the fact that one of the early recipients was Ernest Rutherford, who was awarded an “Ex” in 1895 to study at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, the step that paved the way to his Nobel prize winning research while at McGill, where he worked out the concept of radioactive half-life, discovered the radioactive element radon, and identified alpha and beta radiation. Like his friend William Bragg, whom he met and encouraged while travelling from New Zealand to the Cavendish, Rutherford eventually desired to return from the periphery to the “centre”. In 1919 he became Cambridge Professor and Director of the Cavendish Laboratory himself. In the UK and especially at the Cavendish, he then nurtured the embryonic careers of “Dominion” men.

Rutherford understood that the “centre” was as dependent on the Dominion “periphery” as it was the bestower and owner of scarce intellectual resources. By mentoring Dominion students such as Laby, the Cavendish and other “metropolitan” research centres received a constant influx of extraordinary talent, fresh ideas, different experiences, and in some cases, less constraining education, assumption or experiences than the “Public School” men of the hierarchical UK education system. Rutherford, Bragg and others could thus cultivate a lifelong research network that kept the centre constantly updated about the research springing up in ever widening circles.

Laby’s is a beautiful case in point that, as we shall see, had lengthy consequences for the young Joe Pawsey and, in the end, for the shape of radio astronomy. Laby had made a small study of radium occurring in mineral samples at the Department of Mines in Sydney, and he used this as his—successful—claim to be awarded an Ex to study radioactivity at the Cavendish. But at the Cavendish he was shifted to undertaking research with no application or benefit in mind, exploring the total ionisation of various gases by the alpha rays of uranium. When he left Cambridge, first for Wellington, then for Melbourne, he took with him multiple resources that would be crucial for Joe Pawsey and for the development of physics in Australia. One was his networks, in particular, his growing close friendship with Ernest Rutherford, which became so close that both men and their families stayed with the other when visiting the other’s country. Another was a view of what an ideal professor in the ideal “Commonwealth” of science, would be: one actively engaged in research, one who advocated, not for an external examination system where students were coached to be good exam-passers, but for the endowment of research to which students could be apprenticed. Laby argued: by having the attractions of a “secure though relatively modest livelihood” and “ample leisure for study”, “the nation will contribute its share to the general progress of civilisation … and rising generations will be brought into direct contact with men who are best able to instil into their minds a true conception of the nature and value of knowledge”.

Those words—from 1911—might have been written with Joe Pawsey in mind, so perfectly do they describe what he too would value and his way of thinking. We might presume that having Thomas Laby as his professor was inspirational for Joe, who was one of the students to benefit from Laby’s perspective and energy.

Joe was having fun, too, in his undergraduate years at the University of Melbourne. Since he became a man whose quiet gravitas was one of his professional qualities, it is pleasurable to see at nearly a century’s distance, how much he enjoyed those student years. In 1931, The Wyvern, a Queen’s College (part of the University of Melbourne) publication, reported:

In college life, Mr. Pawsey, better known as Joe, was universally admired and respected. From the first he became a prominent figure and identified himself wholeheartedly with the College activities. His enthusiasm in connection with some of the lighter of these has often proved infectious, as those who shared his undergraduate days will remember. Recently he has created a stir and gained a certain amount of notoriety by the introduction of an alleged automobile into College life.

Joe was in a small pool of students. In 1920 there were 13 BSc graduates at Melbourne and about 50 at Sydney. In 1925, reflecting the bump provided by returned servicemen, there were 44 at Melbourne and still about 50 at Sydney. In 1930, under the influence of the Depression, there were but 29 at Melbourne and 48 at Sydney. Thus Joe Pawsey was already in a small, very elite world—one that was often cosy in that period—where having tea with the professor was natural and expected. The number of students who graduated with honours in Physics was extremely tiny (Branagan & Holland, 1985).

Joe’s academic abilities shone. In the first year he took four subjects, with First Class Honours in three (mixed maths, natural philosophy [physics], and chemistry) and Second Class in pure maths. He also followed lectures in French and German. He was the Exhibitioner (that is, the student achieving the highest mark in a given subject among all matriculating students) in Mixed Mathematics and won a £60 Queen’s College scholarship. The next year (1927), he followed with two First Class Honours (pure maths and physics) and one Second Class Honour (chemistry). He was the Exhibitioner in Pure Mathematics. Again he was awarded a £60 Queen’s College scholarship. In the third year (1928), he again achieved First Class Honours in physics and Second Class Honours in chemistry. He was awarded a First Class Honours BSc in Physics on 13 April 1929.

But what now? The job prospects for graduates who had completed a science degree in 1928, and in particular those who had majored in Physics, were uncertain at best. Graduates in engineering or geology might find work with mining companies or the small but growing number of building, engineering or manufacturing firms operating in Australia. Chemists could find work, as Laby did, in State Agricultural departments or in the nascent pharmaceutical industry or at the Commonwealth Sugar Refineries. But for a physicist, school teaching was the only obvious use for such a degree. The two women who graduated in this field in Sydney—Phyllis Nicol and Ruby Payne-Scott—could not avoid this fate, despite Ruby’s obtaining a one-off research role in cancer research for a few years. Laby’s daughter Jean—not entirely supported by her father, who held reasonably conservative views on women’s roles and abilities—fared only a little better (Goss & McGee, 2009, and Hooker, 2015).

However, while the majority of young men faced the bleak prospects of the Depression, Joe Pawsey discovered that qualifications did open the doors to employment. For a brief period, he held a job in Tasmania working for the Geophysical survey. But swiftly he ventured on a bolder step: into the small, expansive, totally absorbing world of research.