Oliphant

Shot	Vision	Audio	In Point
1	Animated Film Australia Logo fade to black		10:01:30
2	Australian Biography GFX sequence fade to black		10:01:38
3	Archival Rocket launch		10:01:46
4	Archival Rocket launch		10:01:50
5	Archival fighter planes taking off		10:01:51
6	Archival Rocket launch		10:01:52
7	Archival explosion		10:01:52
8	Archival Mushroom cloud		10:01:54
9	Archival Mushroom cloud		10:01:55
10	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: Life is such a wonderful phenomenon that I'd like to be thought of as somebody who cared.	10:01:56
11	Archival rocket launching		10:02:03
12	Archival rocket launching		10:02:05
13	Archival rocket launching underwater		10:02:05
14	Archival rocket launching		10:02:06
15	Oliphant dissolve to	Oliphant sync: I wouldn't like somebody to dig up some dirt -- and there might be some dirt in my past -- that I'm unconscious of. Such as being concerned with the development of the nuclear weapon and I might be cursed for it. I, hate that idea, I don't want to be cursed by anybody.	10:02:08
16	Photo a young Oliphant Tilt fades up Sir Marcus Oliphant Born 1901 Nuclear Physicist		10:02:30
17	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: When I was young, I was always fooling about in the shed at the back of the garden with bits of wire and bits of wood and one thing or another, making what my brothers called his raggedy baggedy engines. [laugh] And I always pottering about, with my hands. I loved doing things with my hands and one of my greatest memories is of my -- at my suggestion for a Christmas present -- I was given by my father a plane for planing wood, for smoothing wood, and it was the wrong sort of plane and I was so disappointed and I just had to pretend that it was, it was alright.	10:02:37
18	Photo Oliphant parents	Oliphant v/o: My father was a civil servant, a very dignified almost Victorian person, very cultured man, very well read man, so was my mother,	10:03:32
19		Oliphant sync: but he was never -- except that he was very fond of walking and we went for very long walks, hundreds of miles, and carrying our swags and sleeping on the, in the open and -- he was very fond of that and that taught me a very great deal about nature which I've been aware of ever since. For instance, I remember once, we were walking along and it was a windy day and the trees were waving very much in the breeze, and I said isn't there a danger that they'll break in the wind and he said to me oh no son, no son, that's the way they take their exercise. [laugh]	10:03:48
20	Photo Oliphant farther	Oliphant v/o: My father was a very religious man,	10:04:36
21	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: and I grew up to be an, oh, a choir boy at the church and then an altar boy, altar server, and that continued until I went to university.	10:04:41
22	Photo Rutherford	Oliphant v/o: Now in 1925, Rutherford, who was the head of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge,	10:04:56
23	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: he visited his old mother. He was a New Zealander you see and he went to New Zealand to visit his old mother and of course in those days one travelled by ship and when the ship called in at Adelaide, Rutherford came up to the University and gave a lecture, and he talked about what was going on in the Cavendish Laboratory, and the sort of things that were happening and the people who were working there and he was so generous in his giving his praise to the people who were his students who worked with him and doing the jobs, that I thought to myself then, that's the man I want to work with. So from then on my efforts were directed towards trying to get a scholarship to go to Cambridge, which I managed in 1927.	10:05:05
24	Archival people on side of port	Oliphant v/o: It took seven	10:06:00
25	Archival Ship	weeks from Adelaide to Liverpool	10:06:02
26	Archival Wheels of steam engine	and then took the boat train to London, and in London	10:06:06
27	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: Rose, my wife, had relatives with whom we, stayed for a day or two while I got, while we got our bearings and I went down to Cambridge and explored the situation a bit. Got myself enrolled in Trinity College, and went and saw Rutherford, who was very kind to me. And he -- it was rather amusing -- he said to me, now he said, go round, after he had a talk to me as to what I wanted to do and so on, go round and talk to some of the boys, and I said the boys? Who do you mean? He said, all, go down the basement, talk to J. J. Thompson, J. J. Thompson was the man who discovered the electron and was Rutherford's teacher, he was still working down the basement. And you'll find Astn the mass spectrograph man next door and then he gave one to two other names that to me were just sort of text book names and I went, made this round with great trepidation, but found everybody very kind and helpful	10:06:12
28	Photo Cambridge building	Oliphant v/o: and that was my introduction to Cavendish Laboratory and Cambridge.	10:07:29
29	Oliphant	Interviewer o/s: And what work were you doing? Oliphant sync: I was doing some work on the facts produced when positive ions hit a metallic surface of various kinds, and this is a process that's important in the discharge of electricity through gases which J. J. Thompson's great specialty. So I was in good company, in those early days. But then very soon after that,	10:07:34
30	Photo Rutherford and Oliphant	Oliphant v/o: Rutherford asked me whether I'd like to work with him and of course this was a great honour and he	10:08:08
31	Oliphnat	Oliphant sync: felt that he wanted to do some experiments which were like those that were being done by Cockcroft and Walton in the laboratory. Cockcroft and Walton together had, for the first time, produced the disintegration of an atom by artificially accelerated particles. And this was the first time that the atom had been split artificially, and this of course excited Rutherford and he wanted to do some experiments which he thought of in that field and he wanted some technical, somebody technically good to help him. And he thought that I was the right person. So he asked me to work with him and that was absolutely heaven working with him, actually with him, it was, cause he was full of ideas all the time, most of which of course were nonsense, but every now and again there was gold amongst all that dirt and we got on famously together. And I had one or two research students working with me also. We set up equipment in a cellar in the old Cavendish, a room which we had to use because it could be blacked out, completely blacked out. And one detected the products of the, such formations of the atoms that were fired out like little bullets.	10:08:16
32	Photo Oliphnat and other Scientist Zoom out Lecture Theatre	Oliphant v/o: And, finding new things and one had the feeling that one was understanding, one was coming to	10:10:16
33	Oliphant	Straight away a new world was opened to us. There were a new set of explosions, atomic explosions which were terrific in their intensity and in their, the number that took place, it was like entering a new realm of of star watching as it were, were looking at these scintillations.	10:09:52
34	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: have knowledge of how matter was built up of how the, and then beginning to have ideas of how it all began, how creation took place.	10:10:27
35	Archival Plane flying		10:10:41
36	Archival Plane flying on fire		10:10:41
37	Archival Hitler	Hitler sync: [German]	10:10:44
38	Archival Smoking factory		10:10:48
39	Archival Saluting Army		10:10:48
40	Archival smoking building	Oliphant v/o: When the war broke out,	10:10:50
41	Archival Planes flying over sea	a lot of us	10:10:53
42	Archival Pilot in plane	were taken and	10:10:54
43	Archival man looking through Telescope	initiated	10:10:56
44	Archival Ship exploding	in to the very deadly secrets of radar.	10:10:56
45	Archival Fighter planes flying		10:11:00
46	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: I was given the job of trying to produce electromagnetic way for very much shorter wavelength than were available at that time. That time, the shortest wavelength available was about a metre and a half and that a was produced with a tiny little valve called a micro pup, which didn't give much energy.	10:11:01
47	Photo three men around a table	Oliphant v/o: So we set to work. I got together a, carefully got together a small team of people and two of the boys	10:11:26
48	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: discovered that they could make resonators which were like a revolver, with	10:11:35
49	Photo resonators	Oliphant v/o: holes in a ring and slots that pointed towards a cathode inside. The whole thing made out of metal with just a blast to bring the power out	10:11:42
50	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: and this worked like magic. This was the magnetron,	10:11:54
51	Archival Blitz	Oliphant v/o: and within 18 months or so,	10:11:59
52	Archival Pilot	we'd shot our bomb,	10:12:01
53	Archival Blitz	we'd got these things flying.	10:12:02
54	Archival GUns on wing of Plane	We'd got	10:12:04
55	Archival	radar working in the air, we'd got working it	10:12:04
56	Archival Radar screen	pointing search lights at aircraft at night,	10:12:07
57	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: we'd got it working on ships,	10:12:11
58	Archival Radar	Oliphant v/o: we'd got it detecting ships	10:12:13
59	Archival People around map on table	at sea and	10:12:14
60	Archival People around map on table	all in 18	10:12:16
61	Archival Map of sky	months or two years.	10:12:18
62	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: And then I thought, oh well, bugger it all, this is not really interesting work. This is work for engineers now. So I went back to the, the work on nuclear physics. Now the interesting thing is that working with me in the laboratory at that time were two German refugees, from Hitler's Germany.	10:12:20
63	Photo Piles and Frish,	Oliphant v/o: One was named Piles the other one's name Frish, these two people together, of course they were enemy aliens,	10:12:48
64	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: they weren't allowed to know anything about this secret weapon or radar you see. So they had to be kept out of that. So not being allowed to do, that they set to work to do some calculations about nuclear energy, about the possibility of getting nuclear energy, and, they -- lo and behold -- they came through with a paper, which they said that if one could separate the uranium	10:12:56
65	Archival Nuclear explosion	Oliphant v/o: then one could make a bomb of enormous power and they calculated the amount of uranium	10:13:27
66	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: 235 that was required and also the explosive force that might be produced. And this was absolutely hair raising. Here were these two chaps not allowed to have anything to do with the secrets of radar, producing this paper on this possibility of making a nuclear weapon. So this paper was sent to the United States to inform them.	10:13:33
67	Archival Plane in sky	Oliphant v/o: So I had to dash across to America in connection with the Magnetron, but while I	10:14:03
68	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: was there, I was asked to see what had happened to our report, the Piles Frish report, so I went to the, to Washington, to the Chairman of the American committee, who was the head of their department that was responsible for standards, their standards laboratory. And he was a real stick in the mud and he'd taken this report, thought it was a bit interesting, but had stuck it in his safe and hadn't circulated it to the other members of the committee. So I went straight away to see Bush and Connant, who were the President's scientific and technical advisers and both of them took the point of view, well this is very interesting but this if for the next war, not for this war. So still dissatisfied, I got on an aeroplane	10:14:09
69	Photo Oliphant and Lawrence	Oliphant v/o: and went to see Lawrence whom I'd worked with you see and knew to be a live wire and a member of the committee.	10:15:17
70	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: So I told him about this, and he was so upset that he got on the plane with me and we went back to Washington. Within a few days	10:15:24
71	Archival Oak Ridge Title fades up 1944 Oak Ridge Tennessee Atomic Energy Installation	Oliphant v/o: the man had the project well on its way. And we moved to America, whole of the British team moved to America. Interviewer v/o: Why were you so anxious	10:15:37
72	Oliphant	Interviewer o/s: that this should get moving? Oliphant sync: Because we had information from the Secret Service that the Germans were trying to produce a nuclear weapon.	10:15:51
73	Archival Men in laboratory	Oliphant v/o: It was quite clear to us	10:16:03
74	Archival Men in laboratory	that the thing was going to be successful.	10:16:05
75	Archival Men in laboratory	When we'd separate the isotopes of uranium and	10:16:07
76	Archival Two men at Machine	stocks of plutonium, the theory there was no	10:16:12
77	Archival man at Machine	doubt about it at all in our minds,	10:16:16
78	Photo Oliphant	and one had no doubts whatever about the horror of the situation.	10:16:18
79	Archival plane flying over fields Titles fade up Hiroshima August 6 1945		10:16:28
80	Archival Opening hatch in plane		10:16:31
81	Archival Hiroshima from the Air		10:16:33
82	Archival Explosion		10:16:34
83	Archival Fallout from bomb fades to black	Newcaster v/o: We are able to note the Atomic bomb was drop on Hiroshima,	10:16:37
84	fade up from black Archival Injured person being treated	a military base.	10:16:43
85	Archival Injured person being treated	We won the race of discovery	10:16:44
86	Archival Bomb damage	against the Germans.	10:16:46
87	Archival Bomb damage	We shall continue to use it until we completely	10:16:48
88	Archival burnt out building	destroy Japan's	10:16:51
89	Archival bomb scared Hiroshima	power to make war.	10:16:52
90	Oliphnat	Interviewer o/s: How did you feel at that time, what was your initial reaction? Oliphant sync: Ah, well there was a feeling of utter frustration in that the message hadn't got across that it had been used and used against civilian cities and that all the moral scruples had been thrown side by a so called Christian nation. Not by the Japanese or by infidels of any kind, but by Christian nation, or nations because England was behind America in all this. And a feeling at the same time that, well, perhaps we were wrong, perhaps this ends the war,	10:16:56
91	Archival strips of paper falling	Oliphant v/o: and saves lives.	10:17:48
92	Archival Mass crowds of people in streets	So at the moment, there was that sort of	10:17:50
93	Archival people on streets	mixture of feelings that one had.	10:17:53
94	Oliphant	Interviewer o/s: So you had to try and reconcile two things that you needed to do during the war. One was to defeat the Nazi regime and the other was the great repugnance you had for anything that involved... Oliphant sync: That's right. Interviewer o/s: ...the death of other people. Oliphant sync: Yes. Interviewer o/s: How successful were you in reconciling the two? How did you manage during that time, inside yourself? Oliphant sync: Well I don't know, you've got to develop a double personality, you know, and think one way one moment and then another way the next. You never do reconcile it.	10:17:56
95	Archival Explosion at sea Title fades up 1962 Bikini Atoll - Pacific Ocean	Oliphant v/o: When the Americans let off their first hydrogen weapon,	10:18:36
96	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: it so horrified Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, that he, together with Einstein, wrote a, a manifesto. It was known as the Russell Einstein Manifesto, which they both signed and it was an appeal to the scientists of the world to get together and eliminate from the world this terrible menace of nuclear weapons. And Russell, whom I knew personally, whom I'd done broadcasts with, I naturally fell in with this proposal.	10:18:46
97	Oliphnat	Now I was involved with the first meetings of the Security Council and the Atomic Energy Commission that was established by the United Nations as one of its first activities. Now you remember, that because of the alphabetical order of chairmen of these bodies, Australia provided the first chairman for the first meetings,	10:19:32
98	Photo Doctor Evatt	Oliphant v/o: it was Doctor Evatt, and, the first speech was given by	10:20:01
99	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: the American head of the American delegation	10:20:07
100	Photo Oliphant and others at a UN meeting	Oliphant v/o: and then the next one would come on and then the next to	10:20:09
101	Photo Gromyko	speaker was Mr. Gromyko from Russia, and Mr. Gromyko	10:20:14
102	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: put the proposal -- his proposals were	10:20:19
103	Archival UN Security Council Assembly Tilt fades up 1948 UN Security Council Assembly	Oliphant v/o: very simple --	10:20:23
104	Archival Cameras at meeting	he said Russia demands as number one priority	10:20:24
105	Archival Man signing book Cross Fade	that all existing	10:20:28
106	Archival Men lining up behind man at table signing book	nuclear weapons should be dismantled,	10:20:29
107	Archival Man signing book	and that no nuclear	10:20:32
108	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: weapons in future should be allowed to be made. That there should be a universal inspection of every country and its industries, under the United Nations to verify that no nuclear weapons were being produced. And that was really the essence of what his proposals were. It produced an immediate reaction in Robert Oppenhiemer,	10:20:35
109	Photo Robert Oppenhiemer	Oliphant v/o: who was the adviser to the American delegation on nuclear matters. Of course, having been the father of the nuclear weapon.	10:21:07
110	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: And he rushed around to me as the adviser to the chairman of the meeting, said for heaven's sake, get your boss to say something in favour of the Russian proposals because that is wonderful he said, I think that we should consider them very seriously and I will tell my boss that that is what I feel. But I said you get your boss to, to do that he said so, matter of, interest, he said, I'll give you a bit of classified information. He said, the present time there are only three nuclear weapons in existence, and he said it would be take half an hour's work to take them apart, dismantle them. And he said, if the whole proposal failed, it would take us another half hour to put them together again. So he said, we've got nothing to lose by considering very seriously the Russian proposal. Well as soon as I got a moment, I went down to the Chairman who was sitting in the middle of the circular audience of representatives of nations. And said to Doc Evatt, I've been talking to Robert Oppenhiemer, and he and I both believe that the Russian proposal should be considered very seriously. Will you please make a statement to that effect, that we should discuss them in detail and Evatt turned round to me and irritably said, no, no, no, nothing of the sort, we might want to use them against them.	10:21:18
111	Archival Machines		10:23:07
112	Archival Man controls station zoom in CU Man		10:23:11
113	Archival Machinery		10:23:13
114	Archival Dial		10:23:14
115	Archival machinery	Interviewer v/o: What do you see as the alternative	10:23:15
116	Oliphant	Interviewer o/s: form of energy for the future? Oliphant sync: Well I feel that nuclear power is the final answer, but nuclear power not on earth,	10:23:18
117	Archival surface of the sun	Oliphant v/o: but in the sun's interior, and where it	10:23:28
118	Oliphant	Oliphnat sync: hits the earth it contributes about one kilowatt of power per square metre.	10:23:31
119	Photo Sun Raising	Oliphant v/o: If one collected	10:23:38
120	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: the solar power with reasonable efficiency from the desert areas of South Australia alone, let alone the rest of Australia, like Western Australia and Queensland, New South Wales and so on, that from South Australia alone, one could provide all the energy for the whole of the world and one doesn't realise this, that the sun is such a magnificent nuclear reactor. There it is far enough away	10:23:42
121	Archival Sun setting over land	Oliphant v/o: to do us no harm.	10:24:13
122	Photo Oliphant with a others at Research School Title fade up 1950 Oliphant appointed Head of Research School of Physical Sciences, Australian National University	I set out to try and bring Australia into the age of modern physics,	10:24:16
123	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: and that meant of course trying to do experiments that were of the kind that were going on in Europe and America.	10:24:28
124	Archival Man at Metal object	Oliphant v/o: But it turned out to be too difficult a task.	10:24:36
125	Archival Laboratory	We didn't have in Australia the engineering companies to make the sort of equipment that was really	10:24:39
126	Archival Large disc being moved	required. I had to abandon that.	10:24:46
127	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: I think I was a fool to come back, from the intellectual and professional point of view. I was told that I would ruin my research career and I certainly did, because there was so much administration, so many problems of finding members of staff and so on	10:24:50
128	Photo Oliphant in sitting in his Robes	Oliphant v/o: for an outback place like Canberra, that it absorbed the whole of my time, for 20 years.	10:25:11
129	Oliphant	Interviewer o/s: But you created an environment in which others were able to flourish,	10:25:20
130	Photo Sign 'Research School of Physical sciences' tilt down Oliphant under sign	Interviewer v/o: you must have taken some satisfaction from that? Oliphant v/o: Oh this is true, this is true. There's	10:25:24
131	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: some satisfaction in that.	10:25:30
132	Photo Medal tilt up Oliphant		10:25:33
133	Photo Oliphant at Mic giving speech Title fades up 1971, Oliphant becomes Governor of South Australia		10:25:38
134	Photo Army officers standing to attention pan left Oliphant	Oliphant v/o: For the first two or three years	10:25:42
135	Photo Oliphant shaking hands with man wearing Service Medals	it was fun --meeting all sorts of people, and one had	10:25:48
136	Photo Oliphant greeting Prince Philip	of course to put up the royal family. One got to know them very well and other famous people who came along.	10:25:53
137	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: I warned Mr. Dunstan when he asked me whether I would, he could put my name to the, forward to the Queen, as Governor that I wasn't prepared to be a, a military type Governor, that I was, would only go there if I was as free to speak on public questions and so on, as I'd had been in Canberra. Interviewer o/s: And he accepted you on those terms? Oliphant sync: Yes, yeah, indeed seemed to want me to do that. Interviewer o/s: Do you think he lived to regret it? Oliphant sync: Yes, I'm afraid he did. [Laugh]	10:26:03
138	Archival Mr. Johnson and man in uniform pan right to Oliphant shaking hands	Aide o/s: Mr. Johnson... Mrs Johnson... Mrs. Adrian Johnson.	10:26:39
139	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: I was a puppet, after a time and I was, that's all I was. In the morning, at breakfast time,	10:26:50
140	Archival Oliphant at Breakfast table	Oliphant v/o: there was a foolscap piece of paper headed Orders of the Day,	10:27:01
141	Archival man washing car	which told me exactly what I was doing and there was 10:10	10:27:08
142	Archival Oliphant leaving the house and getting into Rolls	you see the Rolls would be at the front door and I would be going to such and such a place	10:27:12
143	Archival Front of Rolls	to do this, give a speech or to open a building or something of that sort. And	10:27:20
144	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: it, that sort of formality got me down a bit. Interviewer o/s: You're not, you weren't used to following orders? Oliphant sync: No, and nor was I used to being on time. [laugh]	10:27:26
145	Photo of wedding cake	Interviewer v/o: You're an individual who stood out from the crowd. You've succeeded beyond the level that most people succeed.	10:27:40
146	Oliphant	Interviewer o/s: How do you explain that? What do you think it is about you as an individual that's enabled you to do these things? Oliphant sync: Cussedness. Determination I think is the only thing. The only -- I think is, that's -- I feel about old age, I often wonder about old age, in my 90's but I realise that the only way to live is just to keep on keeping on. There's no -- once you give in you're lost.	10:27:47
147	Oliphant	interviewer o/s: Do you think there's an afterlife? Oliphant sync: No. Interviewer o/s: You feel quite sure about that? Oliphant sync: I feel quite certain about it. I'm prepared to believe that there is, there are things that we don't understand about nature, and there is some sort of, the beliefs for instance of Buddhism that rather attract me. The idea there's a reservoir of life, for instance, and that when you die, that is, Fitzgerald said in his poem about the Budda, the last line reads 'and then the dew drop fell into the silent sea.' And I rather like the idea of the dew drop of life joining all the rest of	10:28:17
148	Archival Space	Oliphant v/o: life in the universe. You see, this is one of the things that still worries me, we have not the faintest	10:29:06
149	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: idea of the difference between living and dead matter. And what life is, is something that's still completely unknown. And why it should be on this one planet earth in the solar system and not on any of the other planets that circulate around the sun, is, as we now know from our space exploration, is something that's strange. It does make this earth	10:29:13
150	Archival Earth from space zoom in CU Earth	Oliphant v/o: something unique. So that we are living in a world that's moving so rapidly towards understanding that I feel that	10:29:42
151	Oliphant	Oliphant sync: some day perhaps we might understand the difference between living and dead matter, but at the present moment, it is the big puzzle. Interviewer o/s: So after a lifetime of scientific inquiry, you're left with the big mystery, still unsolved? Oliphant sync: That's right, that's right. The big mystery is this phenomenon of life.	10:29:52
152	Credits Interviewer ROBIN HUGHES Research GRAHAM SHIRLEY FRANK HEIMANS Camera PAUL ERE Sound Recording TIM PARROT Sound Mixing ROBERT SULLIVAN Production Manager KIM ANNING Production Accountant MEGAN GILMOUR Production Co-ordinator JOANNE HOLLIMAN Post Production Supervisor BRIAN HICKS Film Australia would like to acknowledge the assistance of: SIR MARCUS OLIPHANT AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY FILMWORLD RESEARCH ABC TV ARCHIVES NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA MIKE SPENCER F.A. LIBRARY J Producer/Director Writer/Editor FRANK HEIMANS Executive Producer RON SAUNDERS Film Australia [Logo]		10:30:16