Newsletter#2

Otago School of Mines & Metallurgy 1950s Graduates Newsletter- November

2001

Introduction Hello fellow Old Boys of the Otago School of Mines! As well a few other well-meaning characters on the mailing list. This is the second edition of this astounding magazine . . . OK amazing. And that because [a] I can still write it and [b] you can still read it. So we must be alive still, even if only just. The contents consists mainly of the results of ongoing email correspondence between the members of a core group of about a dozen graduates from the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The main items relate to the demise of the O.S.M., the suggested resurrection of same and the Normandy-2002 Reunion. If you know of anyone who might be interested but who is not on the mailing list attached, please forward them a copy, either by email, fax or snail-mail. If they have an email address, please ‘copy” me when you send to it so that I can build up my addressbook of readers. I will cover Kininmonth, Pierson, Hart, Doig & (Doreen) Floyd, who are not on the net.

Anecdotes From Rex Guinivere Steve Low , Dave Newick & I were colleagues at Bukit Besi, about 24 miles in from the NE coast of Malaysia in the 1960s. Until 1962 the only access was by a 24 inch railroad that the Japanese had built in the 1930's and we had an airstrip that a couple of Cessnas used to take people and stuff to Kuala Lumpur and back. Offshore at Dungun/Sura was an island called Pulau Tinggal (resting island). It was quite beautiful, with white beaches and coconut palms etc; but it was infested with rats ! On the shore side there was this lagoon with crystal clear water. You could watch everything going on at the bottom which must have been about 40ft down. With a snorkel and the warm water you could lie suspended on the surface and just watch in awe at the beauty of it all. There were schools of angel fish that were vertical lines with bulging eyes when they were looking directly at you. Then the school would turn to look at something else and you'd find yourself surrounded by these wonderfully coloured fish about twice the size of your hand. Down below there were the lovely parrot fish like dark green cockatoos flashing through the coralsometimes chased by small shark. We used to go out there in these one-lung diesel-engined piraus -local fishing boats-put-put-put with a load of food and fruit and Anchor beer and some of the lovely young women of Bukit Besi for a fishing and picnic day on Fridays (the Muslim “Sunday”). Well, one time we are out there having an idyllic time of it with Steve Low and his wife Pearl and he said to us -" Why don't we chuck this mining stuff and buy ourselves a sailing ship and live in the south seas?" Well, we all thought that was a great idea and had all sorts of wild suggestions and ideas about making a great easy life of it on the South Seas trading pearls and copra and bananas etc. Then someone said something about-yeah that would be great until some hurricane came along out of nowhere and marooned us all-well those who survived, anyway-on some lousy island like Pulau Tinggal, infested with rats but not just 15 miles from the coast at Sura! So we all muttered and eventually put in back at Sura and went on with our lives in the mines! It would have been great while it lasted though! That's 38 years ago now and Steve is gone. I wonder where Pearl is? The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on. Nor all thy piety nor wit can bring it back to cancel half a line. Nor all thy tears wash out one word of it. Ah my beloved fill the cup that clears Today of past regrets and future fears. Tomorrow? Why, tomorrow I may be myself With yesterday's seven thousand years.

Vale

Doug Alexander Bruce Coleman Jim (J.F.A.) Taylor

Abdullah bin Mohammed Yusof Doug Ainge, (1987) Doug Alexander James Edgar Berry (early 70's) Doug Buchanan Cyril Graham Alec Cunningham Peter Hutton

Sid Jarvis Alan McIntosh Hugh Muir Olly Paterson Jack Roberts (60s?) John Rogers Jim (J.F A)Taylor

Bill Watson (1985?) Gordon John Williams, (1984.) Antoni (Jontek) Wodzick, (1999.)

Careers Hitchon’s Brilliant Career (Additional to his potted history in NL#1) The history of CAFL (Cie des Ateliers et Forges de la Loire) is interesting. The Company was founded in 1958 by the merger of a number of steel plants in the St Etienne area, notably 4 plants, each of about 3000 people, Jacob Holtzer at Unieux, Verdier at Firminy, Le Marais at St Etienne and La Marine at St Chamond. There was also a plate plant at Rive de Gier and a crucible steel plant at St Etienne. There were also a large number of subsidiary companies in other parts of France. The total number of personell was about 18.000.I was attached to the Jacob Holtzer plant in the technical service department. My job was to follow the products from the steel shops as they were processed down stream at Jacob Holtzer and at the other plants, so I got to know the Company very well. If the products had metallurgical defects, I had to solve the problem at the steelmaking shops. Jacob Holtzer was founded in 1825, initially it was a wrought iron and a crucible steel shop. The wrought iron was made by the puddling process and the steel from cast iron. The puddling installation still existed when I was there. The crucible process was the only way of making steel until the Bessemer process was developed in the 1860’s – 1870’s. In those days it was used for making tool steels and other small volume productions. The Company had the reputation of making the best tool steel in the world and I tried to understand what were the reasons. I came to the conclusion that it was because of the iron ore and the refractories. Holtzer had its own iron ore mine in the centre of France and it was an ore with low residuals and impurities. The Company also had its own refractory plant. The bricks and ramming mixes were made from a high quality chrome-magnesite deposit. The steel shops in my time were an induction furnace shop, with furnaces up to 10 Tons, and an electric arc furnace shop, with furnaces up to 50 Tons. All the CAFL steel shops were EAF plants, there was no integrated steel production via the blast furnace process. Even the thick plate plant at Rive de Gier used large EAF furnaces. The production was for army and navy armament plates. When the first continuous casting plant in France was built by CAFL at Unieux, one of the billet productions was Holtzer iron which was used as a raw material by the melting shops for making high quality steel grades. I used this Holtzer iron for my steel productions when I went to Laval and this was the reason for the good quality. Holtzer Iron, DRI (Directly Reduced Iron) and HBI (Hot Bricketted Iron) are equivalent products. Many Companies have adopted this product for making long and flat products via the EAF – Ladle Furnace – continuous casting processes. In 1967 there was the merger of CAFL and the Scheider plants at Le Creusot to form Creusot Loire which had personell of about 36.000. The Schneider plants were making the same productions as CAFL. The aim of the merger was to concentrate certain productions at CAFL and the others at Le Creusot. Since my production responsibilities were transferred to Le Creusot, I was nominated Technical Director at Fonderies de Laval in March 1967.

Potted Histories Price (Eddy) After leaving Dunedin in 1956, I spent 6 months in the steel works at Port Kembla/Woolongong, working in a new open hearth plant where the new design of furnaces were turning out record tonnages of steel each week, (each open hearth employee got a box of chewing gum when a record was broken). Deciding that steel making was not my forte, I went to the University of New South Wales in Sydney working on a process for melting reactive metals suspended in an electromagnetic field. The intent was to scale up the process to make casting of a useful size. Learnt a little electrical theory to complement the night school classes at Dunedin Tech, and a little more metallurgy, but scaling up was an elusive goal. I then took a ship to the UK in late 1960 and landed a job doing research on platinum metals at the International Nickel Company in London, at their Acton plant. Mostly, it was on processes for fabricating metals such as iridium and ruthenium into useful conditions such as wire and developing alloys that would have potential use, for example as electrodes in heavy duty piston engines used in helicopters. Quite an experience to have to lock up one’s working materials in a safe at the end of the day and at the end of the year produce an accounting of where each gram went. After having a large deficit at the end of the first year I quickly learned the procedure of ensuring the

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technicians collected all dust and scrap from laboratory working operations to which I gave an estimated composition and which produced a surplus the following year. In 1963 after a tour of Europe, I moved to Canada where I started a job as a metallurgist in the aircraft engine industry at Orenda Engines, in Malton, just north of Toronto. At about that time I married Barbara whom I had met in London and who had originally come from Melbourne. The aircraft industry in Canada at that time was starting to recover from the cancellation of the Avro Arrow fighter plane project which the Canadian Government had cancelled a couple of years earlier. The morale in the plant was low, as for most of the employees the experience of working on a project to produce a fighter plane ahead of anything in the world at the time, was the most exciting thing that they had ever been involved in and infuriatingly the project was cancelled just as it was coming to fruition. However the project was poorly controlled financially and it was not clear who would buy the fighters. So the firm was split up and the engine plant settled in to make industrial gas turbines and supply engines and components for GE and Pratt and Whitney. I spent a number of years doing failure investigations on engines from Canadian fighter aircraft that had been dug up from the muskeg after the pilot bailed out. At the same time I started development and test programs on nuclear reactor materials for the CANDU reactor under contract to the Chalk River Laboratories of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL). Eventually I saw the light and in early 1971 joined the design and engineering side of AECL in their facility in Mississauga, just outside Toronto. It was a joy to work in an encouraging environment after the ups and downs of the aircraft industry and the first series of large scale CANDU reactors were to come on line soon after. I specialized in the design and production of reactor core components, in particular the zirconium alloy components, as well as those of the main heat transport circuit. The work involved a fair amount of travel to domestic and offshore sites and manufacturing plants to resolve product, installation and performance problems. Some of the most difficult and technically demanding work came as a mem ber of multi-discipline task forces set up between AECL and utilities to solve technical problems that occurred in operating reactors. The duration of such task forces could be as long as 2 years reflecting the difficulty in coming to grips with the causes and developing solutions. At AECL, I moved from metallurgical engineer to a position supervising a group of metallurgists, welding engineers and chemists. Eventually it included sitting on committees determining funding priorities for proposed R & D programs. I finally became Director of Metallurgical Engineering in the Office of the Chief Engineer providing technical oversight to the design development. In the last few years I became the company’s liaison officer to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Since the work required a number of visits to Vienna each year, it was no great hardship, and I continued to work on an IAEA committee for a short time after retirement. Over the years I spent a lot of time helping to organize conferences for the Canadian Nuclear Society, including the Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference in Bannf in 1998, for the Pacific Nuclear Council. I served on the council of the Society for about 16 years and was president of the Society in 1994-95. I was made a Fellow of the Society in 1997. I am now retired and Barbara and I continue to live in Oakville, Ontario, our home for the last 35 years. We have 4 children; 3 boys and a girl. The two oldest boys live in Toronto and have 5 children between them. Our daughter is a high school teacher in NZ, north of Wellington and our youngest boy is in Melbourne and hopefully moving to Sydney to a new job in the investment industry. I try to avoid anything that looks like work but I give the occasional lecture at workshops organized by the nuclear society and to secondary school students at the Science Centre in Toronto. Mostly I concentrate my activities on the golf course in futile pursuit of a low score with as much travel to interesting locations as is reasonable. Harraway (Denys) Graduated 1956 and employed at Mt Isa as a Shift Metallurgist until September when I took up a Research Assistant Scholarship at the University of Minnesota under Strathmore R.B. Cooke, a 1930's graduate of the OSM. In 1958 graduated MS major Met. Eng. minor Economic Geology and felt that was enough of academia and poverty. Returned to Mt. Isa. In 1961 met the wonderful Susan North, a teacher, and we were married in Cairns in 1962. Son David was born in 1963. We enjoyed the Isa Learnt a lot from various positions, Mill Metallurgist and in the Research Dept. Was President of Apex and involved with AusIMM Susan was active in amateur theatre. In 1964 left Mt Isa for BHP Newcastle where until 1969 I worked on several Pilbara iron ores, on Groote Eylandt manganese and on nickel laterites. In 1969 we were moved to BHP Melbourne as Mineral Sales Development Manager and then spent several years touring the Globe visiting mines and metallurgical companies. !n 1975 I was posted to New York as BHP American Representative and subsequently ,President of BHP(USA) Inc., a company, inter alia, exploring for oil and selling manganese products. We lived in the village of Scarsdale,17 miles up the Hudson Line from New York city David and Jane attended schools there . Returned to Melbourne in 1980 to a position of Manager Resources Planning and Development in the then Minerals Division working on a number of projects and then in 1984 we went to San Francisco for four years following BHP's acquisition of Utah International from General Electric. (Ever felt like a pork chop in Jerusalem ?)By the end of 1987 things were smoother, so back to Melbourne and the children and other projects inspired by earlier threats by Robert Holmes a Court that BHP was too stuffy, viz. Very Fast Trains, Cape York Space Port, BHP Aerospace and Electronics and finally a serious look at buying into Telecom Australia. Retired, somewhat unwillingly from BHP in 1991and after a year working for a Not-For-Profit charity raising money from corporations I became involved with Boyden International, a major Executive Search firm. I am now largely retired. Son David is an Occupational Therapist with two daughters and daughter Jane with a Business Degree is proficient with computers and is completing a Diploma in Horticulture. She has one daughter, born last year. Susan and I do volunteer work for the National Trust, Play a lot of Duplicate Bridge, subscribe to local theatre, music and opera companies and travel often around Australia and abroad. I am active in Probus, one of the City clubs formed by Melbourne Rotary. We have a weekender (crib, bach ?) at Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula where I play Golf badly.

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News of Graduates Sam Martin (1958) Former head of BHP Steel who is now about 82,living in Toorak with Ruth, and now busy writing his biography and his World War 2 experiences. He was with Freyberg in Italy. (Must have been a late starter – Ed.) Murdoch Mackenzie (1959) Still working at last report . . . for Cognis Australia , in Melbourne. Ivan Jackson (1959) Retired from teaching at Victoria University to go surfing & skiing, and 12 months ago rode his bike around the old gold mining areas of the West Coast and Otago. Now he’s writing a history of the Surf Lifesaving in New Zealand. (I guess he’s not married ;-)) – Ed.) Lloyd Jones (1940) See the mention of 1372 days in the notes below ? Well they made Lloyd the longest serving Japanese prisoner attending the recent inauguration of the Changi Chapel in Singapore. He and Tommy Thompson were the oldest members of the 2000 Birthday Bash. John Hitchon (1956) John has been doing some consulting work in China over the last few months, and has some fascinating stories to tell. If you are interested please contact him Harry McQuillan (??) Harry conducts (literally) tours to Iran every year when there are enough takers. He worked with Dr Williams in the establishment of the geological survey there many years ago. If you are interested contact him

“Changi” Those members who reside in Australia will be aware of the TV Series of this title which ran during October and November. It was written by John Doyle of “Roy & HG” fame, and has created quite a lot of controversy about it’s historical accuracy or lack of it. The old lags of Changi fall of their chairs laughing at the depiction of prisoners and conditions. But Doyle says he wasn’t writing history, but trying to show how mateship and humour enabled Australian servicemen to survive the conditions in disproportionately high numbers. If you would like to find out more about the series, visit the ABC website: http://abc.net.au/changi/ This extract from the Otago Daily Times, presum ably late in 1945, tells something of the ordeals of the POWs in Malaysia during WWII. It came in a bunch of stuff sent by Gill Parata, Head of the Alumni & Development Office of the OU.

Back from Singapore – Young Dunedin Engineer FOUR YEARS A PRISONER: After having been a prisoner of the Japanese for nearly four years, a young New Zealand mining engineer, Mr. L. S. Jones, of Dunedin, arrived in Auckland from Sydney by flying-boat yesterday afternoon. Mr. Jones was educated at the Otago Boys’ High School and Otago University. He left New Zealand in 1939 for Singapore where he was employed by the General Mining Agency Company. In December, 1941, when working in a tin mine in Siam. Mr. Jones was captured. and taken by easy stages to Singapore. where he arrived in August.1942. He said the journey was made at a series of intervals, stops being made at various prison camps. On his arrival at Singapore Mr. Jones was interned in Changi Gaol, where he remained until May, 1944, when he was transferred to the Syme Road internment camp. The speaker described conditions in both camps as terrible, saying that he had beriberi and suffered from a shortage of food bordering on starvation. Mr. Jones is returning to his home in Dunedin for a holiday and intends to remain in New Zealand indefinitely.

Also included was a certificate of membership of the QANTAS “Elevated Order of the Long Hop” . . . 19 hours flying the Indian Ocean (3,825 miles) in November 1945 ! Quite a dashing young fellow, wasn’t he, despite his then recent experiences ? Included in the package from OU was an extract from Lloyd’s memoirs about his 1372 days as a POW, and a note from Jack Mackie about O.S.M. graduates in Malaysia before and during the war. If you are interested to know more, I suggest you contact these gentlemen direct. You’ll find their email addresses in the attached list (page 9).

Resurrection of the O.S.M. ? For those readers who did not receive this information earlier, Ahmad Azizuddin has been corresponding with the Professor of Surveying at OU, John Hannah, about the possibility of reviving the Otago School of Mines at Otago University. He has also very generously donated a large sum of money towards this objective. Because there no longer is a School of Mines at OU, it was redirected to the “J. B. Mackie Trust” which was established in the School of Surveying, to assist in teaching and research within the school. The Institute of Surveyors added about $50,000 and individuals smaller amounts, including Capt’n Jack himself! There was some email discussion about the “resurrection” a few months ago. The people in the best position to know about the possibilities don’t hold out much hope of it happening. But according to the Vice-Chancellor, there does seem to be a possibility of involving the name and history of the Otago School of Mines in some way in their Applied Science courses in Geology.

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Michael Buckenham said (17.08.01): Firstly in my opinion there is no merit in thinking in terms of a traditional "mining type' academic programme as much more imagination is required in line with the times and the changing fabric of the University of Otago with which mining courses may be integrated. Secondly money will talk but we cannot anticipate something like the 20 million pounds recently given by an Old Boy to the Royal School of Mines. In spite of this the RSM has closed as a mining school and the money will not be used to upgrade the fine RSM building but dispensed elsewhere. This is exactly the same as at my old school the Krumb School of Mines at Columbia University in New York many years before, Thirdly I should mention Dr Ian Smith currently an assistant (or deputy) Vice Chancellor at Otago. Smith was a long time staff member and one time Head of the University of Queensland "mining" Department - I think it is now the Dept of Mining Minerals and Materials - with diversified mineral and research programmes. From my discussions with him he unfortunately understands only too well what you would be about. I hope you don’t take this too negatively - but no one knows more about the trials and tribulations and the politics of the OSM and of its history than I do. I believe also few have a better understanding of minerals education as it must be in a changing industry world and within a financially constrained tertiary education system not only in NZ but in OZ and other parts of the world. David Tennent said (18.08.01) Ahmad's interest in a OSM revival has stirred me, but let’s keep our local and international political feet on the ground. The great OSM name, as such, will never be revived in NZ University Politics or NZ Politics, and that at the moment is the message conveyed in every NZ paper I read. You have only got to read about the current Green Government decision on closing off of GRD's submission for a substantial mining operation at Globe Hill, West Coast, to get an example of current and possibly political small time NZ thinking. Forget the importance of Square Setting in your misspent youth! Today in NZ we should be talking about a Department of Resource Development within the NZ University, from a constructive Nz’ers point of point of view, should be seriously concerned with the protection and development of NZ's interests in the Antarctic and associated waters. If NZ ever wants to move in this w orld, all they have to declare is that they have sovereignty over a part of the Antarctic. Simple as that. I hope some of you have read articles by USA Prof Michael Klare and world resources and politics and conflicts. Some years ago I had dinner with a Ma jor General Jefferies, Aus Northern Commander, (now Gov of WA) he took note when I said Aus and NZ should not worry about Indonesia, but be concerned about protecting our interests in the Antarctic. Chile and Argentine know what it is all about. NZ still has its head in the global warming clouds. So my message is, that we should be concerned with a Global situation, that requires a Dept of Resource Development within the NZ University to ensure our resource position within the Antarctic.

If you want to know more about the current state of play, you can contact: John Hannah, Professor of Surveying ([email protected] ) If you do this please keep Ahmad informed of any pertinent outcomes.

Books There has been a spate of books lately which make exciting reading out of supposedly mundane academic subjects. Some that may interest readers are: “The Surgeon of Crowthorne” by Simon Winchester, Penguin, 1998 ISBN-0-670-87862-6 This is about a criminally insane American doctor in England who made enormous contributions to the content of the original Oxford English Dictionary. Sounds dry, but it makes enthralling reading. “The Map That Changed The World”, also by Simon Winchester, Penguin,2001 ISBN-0-670-88407-3. This is the story of William Smith and the geological mapping of Great Britain. “The Great Arc” by John Keay, Harper Collins, 2000 ISBN-0-00-257062-9. A fascinating story of the geodetic surveying of the entire length and breadth of India in the first half of the 19 th century. The “Great Theodolite” weighed half a ton, and presented some challenges in mounting it on top of 60 foot high observation towers. Transit observations to determine latitudes for baseline calculations, were made with the “Great Circle” which was two feet in diameter. “Time Lord” by Clark Blaise, Pantheon Books, 2001 ISBN-0-375-40176-8 This is about the trouble Fleming had to get the world to use universal time zones. Before him the locals used whatever the hell time they felt like and you never knew where you were-actually "when"-when you travelled. “Longitude”, by Dava Sobel, Fourth Estate, 1995 ISBN-1-85702-571-7 This is a fascinating story of the invention of the chronometer to enable mariners to determine longitude and thus know where they were. It was also made into a gripping TV series starring Michael Gambon (of “Singing Detective” fame). And what about “De Re Metallica” the original mining engineering handbook? I got a copy when I became a Junior member of the AIME but ended up, regretfully, giving it to my TAFE library. Written in (I think) the 16th century it was an amazingly comprehensive manual. The things those guys could do with cast iron and wood was just astounding. And while not wishing to speak ill of the dead, I must say that the illustrations Dr Williams used to pin up around the walls of the Park Lecture Room (when he was too busy to lecture to us), bore some resemblance to those in this book !

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Mining School History I don’t know how much you know about the demise of the Otago School of Mines, but my knowledge was very hazy until I asked Jack Mackie & Michael Buckenham to enlighten me. Here are edited versions of their responses for your edification : From Jack Mackie 3 -10 August,2001 You are right about the bean-counters closing OSM, but the circumstances were not quite as you say. It was when Gordon Williams was completely immersed in writing his "magnum opus", "The Economic Geology of NZ" around 1961/62 that he failed to notice what was going on around him. Because of the large sums asked for by Gordon, mainly to equip the School with a lot of expensive metallurgical gear (at the insistence of the metallurgical staff), the Univ. admin. set up a committee under Prof. Hugh Parton, (Chemistry Dept.) to look into the way the School was operating. They found, of course, that there were only 3 or 4 students taking metallurgy, and that most of the miners were going overseas to get jobs. I think Gordon felt that the Comalco aluminium smelter at Bluff, and the iron-sand industry developing in the North Island, would create a fairly big demand for metallurgists. The committee didn't believe this and they recommended that: 1) the Faculty of Technology (the OSM, really) should be abolished; 2) the metallurgy department of OSM should be closed and the students taking the Otago courses be sent to Australia, expenses paid, to finish their degrees; 3) the mineral-dressing dept. be made a new Dept. of Mineral Technology in the Faculty of Science, but with some courses for those wanting to major in mining; the Surveying Dept. be made another new dept. in the Faculty of Science. All this happened, of course. When he found out about all this, Gordon was hopping mad and tried to put a stop to it, but the bean-counters put up arguments he couldn't knock down economically, and he had to retire defeated. Gordon used to have some powerful allies in the NZ Mines Dept. (mainly led by Benney, the Undersecretary), but they were no longer there. Gordon had done his PhD in London and was in the same digs as Hugh Parton, also doing a PhD, and I gather they did not hit it off very well in those days. Gordon believed Parton was doing his best to undermine him (I don't think he was, actually) and said some pretty unkind things about him and one or two others, and I gather this behaviour put him off-side with the Univ. authorities who regarded Hugh Parton's administrative abilities pretty highly. Gordon was often too outspoken about people he thought were against him. Gordon was shattered at the treatment meted out to him after the tremendous efforts he had made in the immediate post-war years to put OSM on a sound footing, and was bitterly disappointed. I gather he was offered the post of Prof. and head of the new Mineral Technology Dept. but he turned this down in disgust and went off to the job in Iran. The Univ. created a new chair in Economic Geology which they held open for Gordon until he wished to return. It was never filled. Gordon came back to NZ, retired, was given the status of Emeritus Prof and collected his superannuation. The closing of OSM was a 'fait accompli', happened pretty quickly, and few (no?) outside people (e.g. former graduates, important mining people and big mining companies) were consulted. The whole exercise had an odour of underhandedness about it. I think the Vice-Chancellor of the time was Arthur Beacham, a Welsh economist. He had spent a sabbatical leave at Otago a few years beforehand and in that period spent a lot of time in the Mining School getting help for his research into the economics of the coal mining industry in NZ. He and Gordon were pretty good friends at that stage and when Beacham was appointed V -C, Gordon thought OSM would prosper during his term. Far from it! This was another factor which peed him off no end! No wonder he shot through to Iran! John Hannah, by the way, was one of my first post-grad surveying students. He had leave from the NZ Forest Dept. to attend University. He went on to do his PhD at Ohio State Univ., came back to NZ and became a senior member of the old Lands & Survey Dept. From there he became the third Prof. of Surveying. His department was recently elevated to the status of a Special School and he is now also a Dean! He's a bright chap doing a very good job. If anyone can resuscitate mining at Otago he can, but he will need a lot of advice and support from our 'old boys' and other experts to formulate the courses needed to cater for a modern school. Ahmad is very keen, I gather, and is having a session with Otago's V -C early next year.

From Michael Buckenham 8 August,2000 The Mackie version of the 1960s trauma is a reasonably accurate and a good summary of events of that time. As one of the few who rescued the OSM albeit as a Dept of Min Tech I could develop this summary in due course and put the years and events that followed in perspective. I refer you to my OSM Bulletins of 1971,1977,1980 and finally 1986. And of course the publications of Parsonson (1971) and Parry (1979) the two years in which the OSM held centenary functions. The saga leading up to the Otago closure and relocation in Auckland in 1987 is another story full of personal regional and professional intrigue and I am currently researching this and have access to OU and AU papers and those of the University Grants Committee which made the final decision. A fascinating story will emerge in time. I have a lot of inside material of course and will be in Dunedin next week to do some follow up. I find the OSM Old Boys are little interested in the Auckland episode but it is important to remember that the Otago School of Mines existed at least in name up until the final demise in Auckland in 1997/98. Some of the memorabilia of Otago went to Auckland including the dredge spoon and the School's name plate, all the historical photographs and the OSM prizes and awards. I am working on getting the latter back to Otago. While at Otago the building with all its attributes and tradition remained its focus, It is wrong to say mining died with Williams in the 1960s as this discipline just like processing surveying and applied geology continued as one of the course strengths. While Williams tried hard to bring the School down with him the BSc, BSc(Hons) BMinTech degrees in Mining Min Pro and App Geol were all highly regarded by industry and the University and gained professional recognition. Many mineral programmes award Sc degrees worldwide. In some respects we were ahead of the times marketing technology as programmes of this type and name are now prominent in many of our universities. Otago has recently launched five applied science degree programmes along these lines. In view of this your campaign to reinstate the OSM has some relevance but you are unaware of other recent attempts and forces mitigating against this. In Dunedin under Ron King a strong lobby approached OU and I personally and through the AuslMM worked politically and regionally to initiate interest. Quite frankly the re-emergence as the School of Mines teaching as you remember it has no future but of course the tradition and name is something worth marketing. Otago Uni now and it is clear many others respect OSM for its graduates and contributions over time. In fact much more than when we were actually there!!. During my year as President of The AuslMM I focussed on Education and learned a great deal about the minerals industry and particularly about changing education needs both in our fields and in engineering, science and technology. As you will well know I have travelled widely around the world addressing these topics and seeing first hand the demise of traditional mining schools of which the Royal School of Mines is a typical example. Both at Otago and then at Auckland I did my best to direct programmes to better meet current and future industry needs and better fit the emerging University circumstances where financial constraints mean smaller departments are particularly vulnerable. With the

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BMinTech we were most successful at Otago with big numbers of students but no acknowledgement from the administration but less so at Auckland where there was no tradition and little interest (in fact an anti interest) in mining in the schools and recruiting area confined in the main to the Auckland region. I should not dwell on the last decade!!

Interesting Websites Here are a few of my favourite websites, which I hope you will find to be of interest: Dull Men – www.dullmen.com . Free software - http://www.completelyfreesoftware.com/index_all.htm l Online study - http://www.u3aonline.org.au/ Translations - http://babelfish.ltavista.com/cgi-bin/translate All about Godzone - http://nz.com/NZ/ All about NASA - http://www.nasa.gov/ All about, well, nearly everything - http://www.howstuffworks.com /

And who said the gold rush is over ?

And have a gander at the Dunedin City Council’s website, especially the article on GOLD: http://www.cityofdunedin.com/city/?page=history_golden Maybe you know of some interesting sites ? let me know & I’ll put them in the next newsletter.

Normandy Reunion ~2002 Planning for the 2002 Reunion of Otago School of Mines is well in hand. And a big hand for John Hitchon’s masterful organization of the events. There have been extensive exchanges of emails by the dozen or so blokes who have expressed interest in attending. I won’t go into a lot of detail here. But if you want to find out more, please contact John at: [email protected] The Reunion will be held in conjunction with a series of visits to D-Day Landing Sites and local tourist attractions such as St. Pair, where the Hitchons have a “wee bach”. Here is John’s second document on the proposals for the reunion. Proposed OSM Normandy Reunion 2002 Start: Rouen in upper Normandy. End: Granville in lower Normandy. Trains: Paris-Rouen and Granville-Paris. Must buy open train tickets (valid two months) and book hire car via French Railways (SNCF) before leaving. Hire car from Rouen leaving it in Granville. Hotel room for two costs around 300Frs/night. Rouen is one of the most visited historical towns in France, mainly because of Joan of Arc and the middle age and renaissance buildings. There is a good ceramic museum of 17th-18th century Rouen porcelain. There are also possible visits down the Seine river valley. The principal D-day sites are in lower Normandy. From Rouen going east to west , we start at Pegasus Bridge on the Orne river just north of Caen. This is a good hours drive from Rouen. Here the paratroops landed at 2a.m. on the 6th June 1944. We drive along the Sword, Juno and Gold beaches to Arromanches to see the remains of the Mulberry harbour. We follow the coast to Colleville sur Mer to visit the American cemetary at Omaha beach. Then we go to the Pointe du Hoc, a cliff on the western side of Omaha beach. The landing was at high tide at 4a.m. and the Marines climbed the cliffs to attack a fortified battery. We then go to Utah beach via Carentan. This is the western side of the landing beaches. From Utah beach we visit Ste Mere Eglise where the paratroops landed at 1a.m. There is still one hanging up on the church spire. From here there is a good hours drive to St Pair sur Mer which is 3Km south of Granville. The best time to be at St Pair is at the new moon or the full moon since we can take advantage of the high tides, up to 13meters. The main attractions are: (1) to visit the Mont St Michel Abbey built on a rock in the bay which is 20Km south of St Pair. (2) to walk across the bay at low tide from the Bec d'Andaine to the Abbey via Tombelaine which is another rock in the bay. This is a 6Km to 7Km walk each way with a guide. You walk with shorts and bare feet since there are two small rivers to cross. (3) a visit to the Chausey islands which are 12Km west of Granville or the Channel islands of Jersey or Guernesey. (4) a number of havens north of Granville, the high tides come up the river valleys and flood the flats where the sheep graze. There are two golf links in the area. The tentative program (at 21.11.01) is: June 3rd : Arrive in Rouen. June 4th: Reunion Dinner in Rouen June 4th and 5th : Visit Rouen & the Seine river valley. June 6th and 7th : Visit the D-day landing beaches. June 7th: Mayoral reception in the afternoon June 8th to 11th : St Pair sur Mer.

I think there about 20 booked so far, plus a couple of doubtfuls. If you haven’t made your reservations by now, you’ll be in a bit of trouble, as the place gets invaded (if you’ll pardon the expression) by American and German veterans, around June 6 th. If this is the case, and you want to be in it, I suggest you contact John Hitchon A.S.A.P. to see what can be done. And if you want to know everything about Normandy, go to http://www.normandy-tourism.org/gb/index.html

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Engineering in a Nutshell In principle, there’s nothing to it, says Sue Birchmore in New Scientist 31 March 1988 .ENGINEERING is an art, not a science. Certainly, engineers make use of science—most would be familiar with, for example, the second law of thermodynamics—but we are not ourselves scientists and are not in the business of formulating any more laws of thermodynamics (many engineers would say there are quite enough to learn already). Nevertheless, engineering does have laws of its own. These fundamental laws of engineering are not of the same nature as scientific laws; they describe not what is found to happen in the physical world, but what an engineer needs to do in order to prevail against that physical world. Usually, they remain unwritten, unacknowledged, unrecognised even by those. who work by them. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to commit them to paper. The first law of engineering: If it’s working, leave it alone! This law has a sound scientific basis. All actions increase the total entropy in the Universe; a local decrease can be achieved only by the expenditure of energy. In engineering systems this can be seen at work in the well known phenomenon of fault transfer, or, in layman’s terms, when you fix one bit, you louse up another. In general, any attempt to improve on a mechanism results in an increase of entropy in it, which can be cured only by a large expenditure of energy —yours. A colloquial version of the first law: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Following on from the first law The second law of engineering: If it worked last time, copy it! To look at it from a probabilistic viewpoint; any new idea has a finite probability of failure. That probability may be small, but if you incorporate many new features in one design, the probability of at least one of them failing can become high. The third law of engineering: Always assume the worst! The origins of this are expressed in the well known, but scarcely scientific, law variously attributed to Murphy or Sod: If it can go wrong, it will. If you prefer a more respectable scientific basis, we come back to probabilities. A given event may have a very low probability of occurring on any particular day, but if a situation continues for a sufficient number of days, the probability of it occurring at least once can become high. Because any mechanism tends to be used until it fails, and steps will have been taken to prevent the more obvious modes of failure, we should not be surprised to find it failing in bizarre and unexpected ways. Along with these three fundamental laws go three fundamental principles: (1) It isn’t as easy as it looks. (2) It will take longer than you think. (3) It will cost more than you estimated. The engineer who bears these principles in mind, and conscientiously obeys the three fundamental laws—I was about to say, can’t go far wrong. But that would be to transgress the third law. And ultimately, the engineering world just isn’t amenable to natural laws. Kipling knew; as he wrote, there is “Predestination in the stride o’ yon connecting rod”. Sue Birchmore is a design engineer based in Birmingham (Probably retired by now - Ed.) For those interested in these fascinating philosophies, I have another article entitled “The Chemical Basis of Sod’s Laws”, also from the New Scientist. Just ask, and you will receive.

Epilogue Well friends, as the little pig on the screen used to say “Th-th-th-th-at’s all folks!” Please send me contributions for the next edition of this newsletter, which I plan to produce about May 2002, a month before the Reunion. This document is in “rtf” format, which is supposed to be readable on any platform. Let me know if you have trouble reading it, and I’ll send it to you as a plain “text” document, which will exclude formatting and pictures. Or you can have it MSWord_2000 or “pdf” . . . a bit like Alice’s Restaurant eh ? All the best for Christmas/Ramadan/etc and for a great 2002.

John Neilson

: My God Mabel ! What are we going to write about next time ?

J

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Mailing List @ 20 November,2001

Otago School of Mines Newsletter Mailing List Azizuddin Blaikie Braithwaite Brown Buckenham Doig Farhadian Graveson Guinivere Hannah Harraway Hitchon Hogg Hunt Jackson Jones Lee Lindquist Mackie Mackenzie McQuillan Metcalf Parata Price Reid Riley Sparrow Taylor Tennent Thompson Webster

Floyd Hart Kininmonth Peirson

Ahmad Alistair(Joe) Jock Ian Michael(Mick) Kevin (Spot) ?? Frank Rex John Prof Denys John Bill Bill Ivan Lloyd Tuck Chew Bill John (Jack) Murdoch Harry Frank Gill Eddy Ian Peter Bill John David Tommy Robb (Charlie)

Doreen (Bob Deceased) Ted Bob Bob

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

384 Busby Road, Katikati, New Zealand, 64 7 549 2095 17 Winston Crescent, Glengowrie SA 5044, 08 8295 8388 3 McArthur Place, Fairy Meadow,NSW,2519, 02 4228 8261 13 Park Avenue, Chatswood NSW 2067, 9419 6228

Please advise me of any additional addresses which should be included – J N

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