Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 403
Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 403]
198
later to become Professor at the Veterinary School and finally Director of the C.I.S.R.O. as Sir Clunies Ross. He was busy learning something of the Japanese language, to be well fitted to go to the Imperial University of Tokyo and learn all he could about the host of the liver fluke from the Professor of Zoology there, who had recently published the results of some very valuable research work on the life-cycle of this sheep parasite. Clunies Ross finally discovered the exact identity of this host, much to the benefit of the sheep-breeding industry.
In Fourth Year there was a complete subdivision of the forty undergraduates who started as one class in First Year. Half of the original number had fallen by the wayside, "plucked" in the examinations, mostly at the end of First Year, though a few had dropped out for other reasons., Only seven of us were left in Civil, about a dozen in Mechanical and Electrical and a mere three in Mining.
Now, as successful final-year students, we were treated almost as equals by the professors and lecturers who, because we were such a small class, were able to take a very close personal interest in each of us. I was appointed a Junior Demonstrator in Surveying, for a term, with a welcome honorarium of 15, to teach the senior architectural students how to use theodolite and precision-level in the field.
We now listened to specialist lecturers; men who held senior positions in governmental construction departments, or were consulting engineers. The principal subjects were Docks and Harbours, Economics of Railway Transport, Irrigation, Road and Bridge Construction, Railway Engineering, Water Supply and one very mathematical but interesting study, Geodesy of the shape and dimensions of the Earth's surface. The lecturer was the State Statist and a Cambridge post-graduate scholar. He was a brilliant mathematician and an excellent teacher; he knew his subject well, having been engaged on the trigonometrical survey of New South Wales as a younger man.
As the rather gay "goings-on" at the "Astoria were not