THE DISH

The radio telescope at Parkes.

July 21st, 1969. Although I sometimes have trouble remembering what I did yesterday July 21st 1969 is one of those days where I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing. How can I be sure? Well it was the day man landed on the moon.

The Apollo 11 spacecraft piloted by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin was launched on July 16th and carried the astronauts to the moon and into the history books. While Collins orbited the moon Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the moon's surface touching down their landing craft, 'The Eagle' on the Sea of Tranquility. They spent 21 hours and 31 minutes on the surface and became the first humans to walk upon the moon.

I was at primary school at the time. I think in year 6. The school stopped and everyone huddled together in rooms to watch this historic event on television. Being seniors, there not being enough TVs, and my grandfather being principal, four or five of us were allowed to go to a student's house near the school and watch it there. The boy whose house we went to was Ian Holt, and I think the other students were Phillip Ewing, Nicky Perriman and Nicholas Baronoff. Like six hundred million people around the globe we did watch the moon walk on TV and we must have been so enthralled that we forgot to return to school after the event and so somehow missed the afternoon lessons.

A poster advertising the movie about the telescope.

Many years later, in 1997 I was appointed to Parkes High School in the middle of the state. Coincidentally, Parkes is the home of the satellite tracking station which relayed the pictures that I, and the rest of the world watched on that day in 1969. The part played by the telescope at Parkes (or at least a version of it) is now well known thanks to a movie made about the event and released on October 19, 2000 called 'The Dish'. I later also watched this movie on a makeshift screen in the paddock beside the historic telescope.

The telescope at Parkes was conceived by E. G. (Taffy) Bowen, then head of the CSIRO's Radiophysics Laboratory. Bowen had been involved with radar during World War II and had made many contacts overseas. He was able to convince both the Carnegie Institute and the California Institute of Technology to fund half the costs for building a telescope in Australia. The then Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, was so impressed with the involvement of these two prestigious bodies that he agreed the government would fund the other half of the project.

An historical photo showing the building of the telescope.

There seemed to be nobody in Australia with the expertise capable of building the telescope and so the CSIRO consulted with Wallis Barnes (of 'dambusters' fame) the chief engineer at Vickers in Great Britain. Wallis came up with some revolutionary ideas for the telescope and the way it was maneuvered. The design for the telescope was completed in 1959 by Freeman Fox (the company that had designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge). A contract for construction of the telescope was then awarded to the Maschinenfabik Augsburg-Nurnberg A.G. Company in Germany and the telescope itself completed in 1961. It has been operating almost continuously since this date.

The telescope as it stands today.

When the moon walk began three stations were receiving the signals back on Earth: NASA's Goldstone station in California, The Honeysuckle Creek station outside of Canberra and the CSIRO's Radio Telescope at Parkes. The signal were being relayed to NASA Mission control in Houston. For the first few minutes NASA switched between Goldstone and Honeysuckle Creek to try obtain the best images. However when they received the images from Parkes they were so superior in quality that they remained with Parkes for the rest of the telecast.

Although the movie does stretch the truth with a few details, one incident is portrayed accurately. In the movie the telescope was plagued by high winds as the walk was due to take place. The winds would be dangerous to the telescope if it was not in the upright position and strapped down. In reality the telescope dish was, at the time of the walk,tipped over on its access waiting for the first signals from the moon as it came above the horizon. Suddenly the structure was hit by 110 kilometre an hour wind gusts which shook the control room and pushed the telescope back on its zenith axis gear. It came very close to Parkes' role in the mission being aborted and the telescope being shutdown until the weather cleared. However the telescope continued to operate outside of its safety parameters but was closely monitored the whole time.

A close-up of the dish showing that it is part covered with metal plates and part mesh.

From Parkes the signal was sent by microwave links to Sydney. In Sydney the signal was split. One signal was sent to the ABC studios to be played on Australian television, the other was sent to Houston where it was distributed to television networks around the world. However the retransmitting from Houston meant there was a delay of 300 milliseconds, thus Australian audiences were the first to see the images of the walk on the moon, albeit by .3 of a second.

The telescope at Parkes is a radio telescope and listens for signals from space. Its dish is 64 metres and is moveable. It often operates in conjunction with the Australia Telescope Compact Array at Narrabri and a single dish at Mopra, near Coonabarabran. The Parkes, Morpa and Narrabri telescopes by operating together use a technique called "interferometry". This allows them to simulate a dish many hundreds of kilometres wide giving scientists the ability to see very fine detail and to form an accurate picture of an area in space in a 12 hour period.and can map a specific area of space. The telescopes are operated by the Australian Telescope National Facility, a division of CSIRO. They are operated for scientific purposes and not for military or defence purposes.

The Parkes telescope operates all year round. It has been involved in tracking space missions, including the Apollo missions in the 1960s, Mariner 2, Mariner 4, Voyager, Giotto, Galileo and Cassini-Huygens probes. It is a world centre for research into pulsars, discovering over half of those known of today. Listed amongst its other achievements are helping to identify the first quasar and discovering magnetic fields in space.

The main characters in the movie discuss problems at the dish.

The movie "The Dish" was directed by Rob Stitch. It was about three fictional staff at the telescope and their American observer during the moon mission. The characters cope with blackouts, high winds and even a love story. At one stage, in the movie, the telescopes main computer is wiped out and the observers lose track of the Apollo 11 spacecraft which they are supposed to be tracking. Scenes involving the telescope where shot on location, including the 'cricket' and the 'hayride' scenes. Other scenes were shot not in Parkes but at Forbes, a town 33 kilometres away. This was done because of the historical buildings still standing at Forbes which better suited the period being portrayed. The movie was written by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy and Rob Stitch. The main actors were Sam Neill, Billy Mitchell, Tom Long and Patrick Warburton. It was nominated for 11 awards, winning 3. The Dish was the highest grossing film in Australia in 200.

A scene from the movie where actors played cricket in the telescope's dish.

Oh...and I did say I remembered July 21st 1969. If you look up articles on the internet you will sometimes come across the date that man walked on the moon as July 20th 1969. This is American time but by Greenwich Mean Time it was July 21st. To be precise it was at 12.56pm Australian Eastern Standard Time. If it had been the 20th I may have missed it, as it was a Sunday and there was no school.

Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon, followed closely by Buzz Aldrin. How many other men have walked on the moon, and who are they? (Answer at bottom)

An attraction at the telescope and the visitor's centre is the whispering dishes. The shape of the dishes channel voice waves and makes a whisper audible to someone standing at another dish some distance away.

There have been 12 men to walk on the moon. They are:
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11, July 21, 1969),
Pete Conrad and Alan Bean (Apollo 12, November 19-20, 1969),
Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14, February 5-6, 1971),
David Scott and james Irwin (Apollo 15, July 31, 1971),
John W Young and Charles Duke (Apollo 16, April 21-23, 1972)
Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17, December 11-14, 1972)

.............................. of course some people still claim it is all a huge hoax and we have never walked on the moon!

WHERE ARE THE MERMAIDS?

Photo from: http://designdazzle.blogspot.com/2009/06/mermaid-party-ideas.html

After teaching for many years, and teaching in Special Education, I guess it is this story more than any other which sums up my philosophy of teaching. It has, and still is one of my favourite.Whenever I present professional development activities to teachers I read this to them and more often than not I get choked up by the end. It is a simple, yet powerful story from a book by Robert Fulghum, called “Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”. If you haven't read any of his books than I recommend them. The story:

Giants, Wizards, and Dwarfs was the game to play. Being left in charge of about 80 children 7 to 10 years old while their parents were off doing parenty things, I mustered my troops in the parish hall and explained the game. It's a large-scale version of Rock, Paper, and Scissors, and involves some intellectual decision-making. But the real purpose of the game is to make a lot of noise and run around chasing people until nobody know which side your are on or who won.

Organizing a roomful of grade-schoolers into two teams, explaining the rudiments of the game, achieving consensus on group identity -- all this was no mean accomplishment, but we did it with a right good will and were ready to go.

The excitement of the chase had reached a critical mass. I yelled out, “You have to decide now which you are: a GIANT, a WIZARD, or a DWARF”.

While the groups huddled in frenzied, whispered consultation, a tug came at my pant leg. A small child stands there, looking up, and asks in a small concerned voice, “Where do the Mermaids stand?”

A long pause. A very long pause. “Where do the Mermaids stand?” I say.

“Yes, you see, I am a Mermaid.”

“There are no such things as Mermaids.”

“Oh yes there is, I am one!”

She did not relate to being a Giant, a Wizard, or a Dwarf. She knew her category – Mermaid – and was not about to leave the game and go over and stand against the wall where the loser would stand. She intended to participate, wherever Mermaids fit into the scheme of things, without giving up dignity or identity. She took it for granted that there was a place for mermaids and that I would know just where.

Well, where DO the Mermaids stand? All the Mermaids – all those who are different, who do not fit the norm, and who do not accept the available boxes and pigeonholes? Answer that question and you can build a school, a nation or a kingdom on it.

What was my answer at the moment? Every once in a while I say the right thing. “The Mermaid stands right here, by the King of the Sea!” So we stood there, hand in hand, while the Wizards and Dwarfs and Giants rolled by in wild disarray. It is not true, by the way, that Mermaids do not exist. I know at least one personally. I have held her hand.

Photo from: www.halloweenpartystore.com/ Lil-Mermaid.php

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

When I first began teaching I would attend professional development activities and inevitably you would be asked to write down why you were a teacher. Or to put it another way, what was your philosophy of teaching. You were usually given half an hour or so to do this at the start of the day..... which was coincidentally, convenient because it gave the presenter half an hour to get organised. You would sit there for half an hour trying to think of some answer so you could appear brilliant if called upon to read it out. I would wonder whether I was game enough to tell them I finished school and didn't know what to do when someone suggested teaching and mentioned you could get a scholarship to go to university. I would look around and see how the serious people were furiously filling their papers with their views on 'truth, justice and the department of education way'. Then I would revert to doodling or drawing cartoons. See I was keen, very keen but I just didn't have a philosophical vision or a star to steer myself by. I expected to develop this as I learnt my trade.

I began as a History and Special Education teacher. 'Special Education'! This was because I didn't want to teach English. My first practical session was at a high school in Sydney. I taught some History and hang around with the Special Education class. The star pupil was Stephen. He was 14 years old and had not spoken until he was about 9. The high school had a program where he would take messages around the school and this would encourage him to interact with staff and students. This program had been running for over a year so when Stephen appeared at the staffroom door with a note I opened it and read:

This note is of no consequence whatsoever. Just sign the bloody thing and send Stephen on his way.

During the two weeks I was there the class were learning how to cook peas and eat them. They had been doing this for nearly a term. They had coloured-in stencils of peas, grown peas, written stories about peas, and even made little felt pencil cases which looked like a pea pod.... complete with smiling little peas inside when you opened the zipper. During one lesson they had discussed how to cook peas and they had written out the method and had a look at the equipment needed. Now was the big day. A double lesson in which they got to cook and eat their peas. I had a history class during the first period and so at the break went down to the kitchen. Most of the kids were sitting eating their peas. But Stephen was in the corner huddled over the sink. I went over to him and found he was stuffing peas down the plug. "No, Stephen" I said "You are allowed to eat them". He paused long enough to turn and tell me in no uncertain terms "I don't even like spinach".

But Stephen was an expert in other things. He probably knew more about dinosaurs then all the teachers there put together. He could pronounce the names of dinosaurs that we had never heard of. He could tell you when they lived, what they ate, what size they were and how much they weighed. He was so good that the teachers would get him to give a talk to the year 7 classes when they were studying dinosaurs. This also built up Stephen's confidence.

Teaching Special Education taught me a lot. A lot which shaped the way I taught and also transferred over into mainstream classes. It also shaped my 'philosophy' of why I teach. It can best be summed up by a story I once heard:

A famous American writer/philosopher was walking along a huge beach and there were millions of star fish washed up on the beach by a storm. As he walked along he saw a young man pick up a star fish and throw it back into the ocean. He watched for a while as the man picked up another and threw it into the ocean also. He walked up to the man and said "there are millions of them you can't make a difference". The young man paused, but then bent down, pick up another and walked to the water's edge and threw it into the ocean. He came back to the writer and said "it made a difference to that one".

I have already mentioned the Everest Children's Home in Nepal where my daughter, Amanda and I were doing volunteer work. When I returned home she stayed and did an extra month with the kids. In Nepal she spent all the money she possessed on the kids, including hiring them a tutor to try bring their grades up at school. She has also been trying to raise the money to send all of the children to private school as this will help them get a better start in life (there is a big difference in a government and a private school in Nepal). It cost so little to send these kids to school, around $400 a year per child. Amanda has done a fantastic job and there are only 6 kids left to find money for. Of course this won't solve the orphan problem in Nepal....but like the starfish.....it will make a difference to them. The pictures on this post are the children from the Everest Children's Home.

MARIMBA

What is a marimba? Well, I'll get to that.

Recently I visited the small village of Greenethorpe in central NSW, about 30 kilometres from Cowra. The town itself has a population of about 100 people, with another 100 living on farms in the surrounding area. The town was originally built in 1908 to accommodate workers on the nearby Iandra Station, then owned by George Henry Greene.

The town boasts a General store/Post Office, a petrol station, a primary school, an Irish pub (built from mud bricks) and an art gallery. The gallery features the work of talented artist, John Hill, a painter and sculptor. John is also well known for the transformations he does on caravans, turning aluminium boxes into functional, works of art, or 'gypsy' homes. The one he is working on now is fantastic. It is a timber cottage built on the back of a truck and has storage places for his boat and tools underneath the bedroom.

Nearby is also Iandra castle, a 53 room 'English' castle. This was built by Mr G. H. Greene from 1899 to 1903. It is now a private residence, though there are tours of the castle every month.

The village is beautiful, peaceful and friendly, and at present very green and lush. It has recently participated in a 'farm to rent for a dollar a week' promotion to try to attract residents to the town. Though having seen the place I am surprised this is necessary..... it was idyllic.

I was there to help install a children's playground at the school. The school had just over 20 students at present. The students were happy and keen, and it appeared a lot of learning was taking place. However what caught our attention were the marimbas. These were stored in an open weather-shed, so the students had access to them all the time and were encouraged to make use of them frequently.

So what is a marimba. Well it is a musical lnstrument, I imagine from the same family as the xylophone or the glockenspiel. It is made on a timber frame and has pipes made from PVC pipe. On top are wooden slats which are struck using sticks or mallets with a rubber end on them. They produce a rich, percussion sound. Three students can play on the instrument at once.

The marimba originated in Africa and was taken to the Americas with the slave trade where it adopted its modern form, though there are many variations on what they are made from, what they look like and their form and shape. Professional, orchestral quality instruments can cost thousands of dollars, but there are also books (and I imagine internet articles) which explain and give measurements for building one at home.

The students at Greenethorpe all know how to play the instrument and have recently won prizes at the local eisteddfod competition. Because they have access to the instrument all the time they can practice anytime they are in the play ground. The marimbas the school have have all been painted and decorated by a local artist and make for an impressive display. The students were only too happy to entertain us with two tunes which they have been learning, and we were only to happy to be distracted from our work and listen.