Anatomy of an ANU department
Founded with the best of intentions in the immediate post-WWII years, the ANU has subsequently not only fulfilled many of the hopes of its founders but also engendered envy and distrust, particularly from the rest of the tertiary education sector in Australia. However, with the celebration of its 50th birthday, the publication of Foster and Varghese's excellent The Making of The Australian National University 1946­1996, and a widespread political attack on the sector in general, I discern a new level of acceptance and appreciation of the special place of the ANU in our cultural life. An ingredient of this new maturity is a willingness to look back and appraise the record of the last 50 years - as Foster and Varghese did and as the Research School of Physical Sciences & Engineering did with its more modest Fire in the Belly. Professor Trevor Ophel of the ANU's Department of Nuclear Physics was the principal author of the latter work. He worked particularly hard to get the facts right, added his fair if personal interpretations and delightful interpolations concerning particular staff, students and events, and his commitment and affection for the ANU quietly seeped onto the pages. He thought it "a view from the trenches" rather than a history, but it is an interesting and captivating one nevertheless. The present work is more limited in scope, more technical and, I think, less attractive to a wide audience. It is designed, the author says, to "provide a sentimental journey for the old-timers, an instructive background and context for recent and future arrivals, especially graduate students, and an update of subsequent developments for those involved between times". (The present reviewer is one such "old-timer".) There is a heavy emphasis on the technical side of nuclear physics research - on those many sophisticated facilities and techniques that have been the hallmark of such research and that have often found wider applications beyond it. Thus there are chapters entitled: Accelerators, Helium Beams, Vacuum Practice Over the Years, Data Acquisition, Detectors, Infrastructure [technical], and a large chapter on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry. Amongst these technical accounts, however, there are chapters of broader interest: accounts of problems and their solutions (or otherwise), as in The Saga of the Inclined Field Tubes, Ghost Beams and Other Poltergeists, Skeletons in the Closet. And personal touches do appear from time to time to leaven the diet, as with recollections of a number of vacuum "accidents", their repair using "glyptal", disputes over data handling, and the retirement of long-serving machinist Cliff Hill on medical grounds: "Hill was formally told that he had 30 minutes to be clear of the premises, in accord with the rules of workers' compensation coverage. Hill's verbal response was short and to the point. He stayed for an emotional farewell in the Darkroom at 5pm. The chronicler unashamedly wept that night." These lines are contained in a footnote, and it is a general feature of this book that the footnotes are especially interesting. They should not be passed over. In a welcome chapter entitled Research Review, the current Head of the Department, Professor George Dracoulis, notes: "The outstanding achievements of the Department have rested in many ways on its ability to develop state-of-the-art accelerator and detector facilities with modest resources and staff, and to operate them continuously and reliably. This is a tribute to the skill, dedication and foresight of technical staff and academic staff, who have striven to establish and maintain an ethos of excellence to support the research." Trevor Ophel was the leader in this regard over a very long period. Dracoulis' words justify the focus of this history, and Ophel's technical account is indeed authoritative and thorough. It will be particularly valuable for its proposed audiences. However, Dracoulis also draws attention to "a record of competitive research in physics for an unbroken period of over 40 years", and to "the remarkably diverse areas in which 100 or so PhD graduates of the Department are now engaged, both in Australia and elsewhere". Indeed, Ophel himself recalls that "the most satisfying aspect [of writing the history] stemmed from the need to re-visit a large number of the theses produced in the Department over the years". It is, I think, disappointing that this history says so little about the actual nuclear physics research that resulted from the technical effort and excellence so well described. One wonders how many other ANU departments can boast such detailed and meticulous records as those gathered and treasured by Tony Brinkley and Trevor Ophel for Nuclear Physics? Which enables me to mount again my old hobby-horse and say that it seems to me a disgrace that the ANU - the only university created in Australia for a unique and very special purpose - does not have a fully resourced and staffed archive, for the preservation not only of its "official" records but also of all those other records and memorabilia that alone can document adequately the life and achievements of this institution. John Jenkin School of Philosophy, La Trobe University, Melbourne