Andrew Sayers is the Director
of the National Portrait Gallery and Professor John Richards
is Dean and Director of the ANU College of Engineering and Computer
Science. Over a cup of coffee at an on-campus café, they
discussed which Australian engineers warranted a portrait in
the Gallery and the eternal difficulty of remembering those
of generations past who have contributed to the building of
our nation.
John Richards: It’s a bit of a hard
question in general because there are so many engineers, so
in a sense where do you start and where do you stop? I think
the problem I have is that we tend to think about the engineers
we know in the modern era – and people like John Bradfield
[the engineer largely responsible for bringing the Sydney Harbour
Bridge to fruition] are interesting because they were very formative,
especially in the development of a place like Sydney. But I
want to talk about Alfred Traeger – inventor of the pedal
radio – because that’s such a long time ago. If
we are trying to think about who the engineers are that made
a big impact we tend to get caught up in the current era, but
we need to go back to the past too.
Andrew Sayers: Well, that’s interesting,
because whenever we engage our public in any conversation about
who should be in the National Portrait Gallery, inevitably people
suggest names from the modern era. And it’s amazing how
short the span of public awareness is. When it comes to the
19th century, these names – apart from some like Ned Kelly
and Burke and Wills – all tend to be wrapped in kind of
mist of historical distance.
JR: Yes. The Institution of Engineers puts
out a list of the 100 most influential engineers every so often
and they, of course, focus on the modern era, looking at who
the current most influential engineers are. People in the past
have done things that might not look nearly so important as
engineering inventions as some of the modern ones, but the impact
they have had on society has been enormous. That’s why
I come back to Traeger because he worked with John Flynn [founder
of the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia] when Flynn
was setting up the inland medical mission and trying to get
people connected. I’m not quite sure how they got together,
but Traeger presumably said something along the lines ‘I
can build a radio that we can use for people to communicate
that won’t need any power because people will pedal a
dynamo to generate the power needed to communicate.’ And
that had a huge impact on how Flynn did his work and how people
in the outback could communicate. But I imagine if you were
to ask people now to name the 100 most influential engineers,
Traeger wouldn’t even figure because that was back in
the 1920s. He launched the pedal radio in 1929.
AS: But it’s also interesting because
in a way that’s also a story that is linked to the general
kind of diminution of Flynn as a figure in our public imagination
as well. When I was primary school Flynn was ‘Flynn of
the Inland’, one of the half-dozen or so people you looked
at as Australian heroes, whereas now that’s different.
So you do get generational shifts.
JR: You know when you think of going to broadband
internet across the outback, that’s a big change in the
space of seventy years – from having no communication,
apart from the telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin, to talking
about broadband right across the country from satellite.
AS: Well, we may be coming back to Traeger,
when local power generation becomes an issue in the future!
But it is fascinating. When the National Portrait Gallery in
Britain did their exhibition of British sporting heroes, they
asked the public to nominate the greatest British sporting heroes
of all time. It was fascinating because the three names that
got the greatest number of votes were Daley Thompson, Steve
Redgrave and a cricketer of the modern era. I expected figures
like W.G. Grace or those bare knuckled pugilists to emerge.
But they didn’t, so our perspective on these things is
really very recent.
I guess the other thing about engineering that fascinates me
is that there are so many difference species of engineering.
It has a place in so many different areas. In some ways it’s
literally nation-building, but there is also a whole range of
other engineering.
JR: Do you know how that all happened? It’s
really quite interesting. The word ‘engineer’ comes
from people who built the engines of war – the catapults
and the battering rams and things like that. The original engineers
were those people who helped the medieval knights win battles.
The reason we have the term ‘civil engineering’
is because they were the first engineers who weren’t military
engineers. So engineers had learnt their trade building trebuchets,
battering rams, catapults and things to pour hot oil on people,
and then translated that into building civil structures such
as roads. I think civil engineering as a recognised branch emerged
in the mid 1700s, probably around 1750 and so, you had that
division between military engineering and civil engineering.
Around 1850 or so, mechanical engineering separated out.
Civil engineers are the ones who build bridges and road structures.
Mechanical engineers are the ones who design and build mechanical
devices, such as turbines, and also look at fluid flow –
you know the sorts of things you find on the Snowy Mountains
Scheme for power generation.
Mechanical engineering and electrical engineering were very
strongly linked for a long time, then they split in 1870 or
so. So you then had the three traditional branches of civil,
mechanical and electrical that existed for many years. Now there
must be 20 or 30 branches. I think in the modern era we have
so dissected engineering as a field that the specialisations
are too much in silos, but the modern problems of society need
someone who can bridge across all those silos. So the engineering
program we run here, which we loosely call systems engineering,
combines electrical, mechanical and materials engineering because
since many problems are a combination of those.
AS: From the point of view of the portrait
gallery putting together a group of people who have made a significant
contribution, we are less interested in category definitions
and we start with the individual. But all portrait galleries
do look for these interesting crossovers in groupings, and there
are lots of fields where we are looking for an interesting exemplar.
When there have been discussions at the Board level, I think
Bradfield’s name emerges as an exemplar of engineering,
having built an icon.
JR: One with much controversy too.
AS: That’s right. Then the other, of
course, is C.Y. O’Connor and the Mundaring to Kalgoorlie
pipeline – that’s another great story attached to
an individual. With the Bradfield painting [recently acquired
by the National Portrait Gallery], I hadn’t known this
portrait existed. It’s the best moment when you’re
the director of a portrait gallery and somebody rings you up
and says ‘we have in the family a portrait of our ancestor’.
And it also happened recently with a portrait of [Sir John]
Monash.
JR: Who was also an engineer, wasn’t
he?
AS: That’s right. The Australian War
Memorial has lots of representations of Monash, but this particular
painting was the one that his family always considered to be
the one that ‘got the man’. It’s a marvellous
portrait, painted in 1919, such a fabulous moment – you
could almost see in his face the mixture of war weariness and
determination that were characteristics of the man. We haven’t
put it on display yet, because we are having some conservation
work done on it. But both of those pictures were in the families
and now we are able to share them with the wider public.
^^
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