Australia Day Address – Naracoorte and Lucindale – 26 Jan 2020
I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today. I would also like to pay my respects to elders past and present.
Mayor Erika Vickery OAM, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and especially New Australian citizens and their families here and around Australia.
It is great to be here today to take part in this Australia Day ceremony. Congratulations to you all, I am sure you have overcome many challenges on your road to citizenship and that it is a comfort and relief that you can now really call Australia home. It is an important celebratory day.
I thought I would tell you of my experiences of being in an immigrant family that came to Australia many years ago and of the opportunities we have had here.
My father was Austrian and my mother Hungarian, both born around the turn of last century.
I think the way they met was quite romantic. In the late 1920s my mother was on holiday in Austria and taking a walk in the Vienna woods. By chance my father was also walking his two German Shepherd dogs there. One of the dogs came up to my mother to be patted. They started talking and that was the beginning of a lovely relationship that lasted 50 years til my father died in 1980.
After marriage, my mother came to live in Vienna but not for long, as my father’s job as an electrical engineer took him to France, and then, in the mid 1930s, to England.
In 1940 I was born. It was war time and my father was sent as an enemy alien, together with many other foreigners, to an internment camp in the South of the Country. While in hospital awaiting my birth, my mother was told my father had been transferred to a ship en route to Canada that had just been bombed and sank with no survivors. To add to her troubles, when I was born, she was informed I was mongoloid, a common name at that time for Downs Syndrome. She had no real friends, her English was poor and being wartime, people were wary of her and often discriminated against her. Fortunately, neither of those two Items of bad news were correct, but in my case, for years, my mother gave me home Montessori teaching to determine how mentally retarded I was. Probably it benefitted me!
My father got a good job in the electrical engineering company Plessey but after several years decided to join a start-up company with others, which unfortunately failed. This, however, was good news for my mother who now had an excuse to leave England – by then they were British Citizens – and she applied to go to either Canada or Australia planning to go to whichever came up first – and Australia did.
We left on the SS Otranto in June 1949. I was really excited as my teacher had told me I would probably go to school on horse back and see kangaroos hopping down the street.
Our first impression of Adelaide, where my father had his first interview, was the train trip from Outer Harbour to the city, a not very attractive journey, but nicer than where we lived in England. If the train journey to Adelaide was disappointing our impression of Melbourne city where my father’s second interview was, was even worse. It was the end of winter, cold, wet and grey and there was a coal miners’ strike and a lot of the time there was no electricity for heating. The three of us slept in one bed in a hotel but we were still cold.
We were all pleased when my father liked the Adelaide job best and we took the Overland train with all our luggage back to SA.
Our first accommodation in Adelaide was a rental room in a house on Port Rd, Bowden, and I was enrolled in Hindmarsh Primary School – no possibility of riding horses to school or seeing kangaroos hopping down Port Rd.
My father started work at Philips Electrical Industries in Hendon as an Electrical Engineer with a salary of 751 pounds/year with a promised raise to 796 pounds after six months if his work proved satisfactory. My mother, ever enterprising, went to the city to look for work and took a position washing dishes in a restaurant in Hindley St which she stayed in for half a day. Next she applied and got work in a factory sewing buttons on shirts - Don’t know why she went for that job as she hated sewing. She stayed in that for two weeks. Next she tried out for an office position and ended up as a comptometrist – she was always good at numbers. Over the years she worked at Myer, Harris Scarfs, Philips with my father, DHA and various Gov positions. She was an accurate and diligent worker but hated sitting for long periods, so took the occasional break, always getting work when she wanted it. It was a time of almost full employment. Meanwhile my father stayed in the same job till retirement.
After a couple of months in Adelaide, my parents bought a house in a Housing Trust estate in Blair Athol – it had a mix of public and private housing. My parents paid about 1,300 pounds for the house – twice my father’s yearly income. (Compare this with now.) The house had a copper washing trough heated by gas and a hand wringer – one up on the wash board and kitchen sink we had in England. We also initially had an ice box fridge and the ice man delivered ice every few days. There was one power point per room and the milkman delivered milk to a billy can – that I still have – and Golden Crust bakery drove past in a horse drawn cart selling either white bread or brown bread as the only choices. We thought it all wonderful – life was good and later added to, by the purchase of our first car – a Holden sedan.
I walked to school (3km away) to Blair Athol Primary, where I soon met up and walked with another English girl, Joyce, who is still my best friend. We went on later to Enfield High where the Headmaster and Latin teacher was Maurice Pyne – Christopher Pyne’s grandfather. He was a great teacher and I loved Latin, but science was my real interest. I later obtained a scholarship and studied physics at Adelaide University.
As soon as they were able my parents became Australian citizens and I did later also when I was old enough. They never regretted the move to Australia. They, and I, had opportunities that we would never have conceived of had we stayed in Europe.
I enjoyed my studies at Adelaide University and graduated with an Honours Degree in Physics – the only girl in my year. Earlier I met and later married, aged 21, my physics demonstrator, Michael Oliphant, who was five years older than me. I remember clearly one day walking across the Adelaide University campus with him when he suddenly said – I’ll probably be dead by 30. He died aged 35. However, before that we had nine happy years together.
I tried out work experience in astronomy at Mt Stromlo Observatory in Canberra and realised it was not for me - I always recommend people try and do work experience in their chosen field to see if it is really for them. My first full time job was at WRE now DST and built either the first or second laser in Australia. Then we had a whole room of equipment to get a ruby laser to work, now lasers are easy to make and have hundreds of applications.
After a year we went to England where we both worked and did in the evenings a M.Sc at London University. Our first daughter Katherine was born in 1965 and shortly after we returned to Australia. Michael got work in Melbourne, but it was not long before it was obvious he was not well. Colon cancer was diagnosed at an advanced stage and not long after he died in January 1971, 10 weeks before our second daughter Michele was born. We had recently built a new house and had a large mortgage and no superannuation. I managed to get some part-time work marking maths papers for RAAF Point Cook students.
But then something happened that changed the direction of my life. I was washing the dishes and listening to the radio – the two girls were playing nearby. Sir MacFarlane Burnett, a Nobel Prize winner, came on – it was the time of the Arab oil crisis – and said, “if we had solar energy then we would not have to fight over oil.” Immediately I thought – that is what I want to do – work in solar energy and for the next 40+ years I have never wavered. I also decided it was time to return to SA where both my parents and in-laws lived. My father-in-law, Sir Mark Oliphant, was then Governor of SA and was also encouraging me to return. It was 1973.
Housing was cheaper in SA than Victoria and I got a home near Flinders Uni with a lower mortgage. I managed to get part time work there and by luck the Professor was interested in solar and I had about seven years of solar research til funding ran out. I then applied for jobs at the Gas Company and ETSA and was accepted by ETSA as a Research Scientist – only one of three in the whole organisation and the only female. I was offered a secretary’s uniform when I joined which I refused! I had my ups and downs at ETSA and my first boss did not like women and refused to promote me or read my reports on work he did not initiate. I eventually had to be moved to another Department involved in marketing and energy efficiency – which turned out to be very useful.
While in that area I got to know my son-in-law Tony Wright who was then Education Officer, much sought after to work with, as he was very bright. My daughter Katherine was a Maths/Science teacher in Whyalla and came to visit me at ETSA to ask for some educational material on electricity. I introduced her to Tony and after she left he came to me and asked whether I minded if he took her out. Of course not I said, if she wants to. They have been together now for about 26 years and are here today with my two lovely granddaughters as well. I am very proud of them all and also my other daughter Michele in Darwin and her three children.
ETSA was actually very good to me as I think I was the employee from hell! I knew what I wanted to do and was pretty singled-minded, so they let me go ahead though they did not always believe in what I was doing and I occasionally had to find my own sources of funding and partnerships. Some projects I worked on included a State Gov initiated large wind survey of the State together with ETSA in the late 1980s. Later when developers were interested in wind, round 2003, they knew exactly where the best places to go were - including Lake Bonney. It set SA up for a good start in wind energy.
A monitoring study together with the SAHT came later, looking at ways to save energy in low income homes and included the impact of SWHs and PV on running costs. Then shortly before I left I was part of a team that installed a solar/diesel power station in Wilpena. I left ETSA at privatisation in 2000, then did some consulting, worked on many Gov and non gov committees – was an adjunct a/prof at Uni SA from whom I got an honorary doctorate last year. I have been a long-time member of the Australian Solar Energy Society and the International Solar Energy Society (ISES), And became President of ises enabling me to travel all over the world from Iceland to South Africa, Germany and China to Chile. I have had a great time. (Had to be careful going through passport control that I did not inadvertently say I was going to an ISIS Meeting !)
In 2015 I was lucky enough to be awarded an AO and the next year I became Senior South Australian of the Year. I have just come back from Abu Dhabi where I attended, as observer, the General Assembly of the International renewable energy Agency (IRENA) where I am on their Coalition for Action Steering Committee and Community Power and Towards 100% RE committees. So I have been able to stay on target working towards a goal set over 40 years ago.
I encourage you, if you have a passion or something you strongly believe in, aim towards it, the effort is worth it. Life is so much more rewarding if you are able to work in an area you feel you can make a positive difference in – no matter what. Though times can be tough there is no doubt that Australia is a place of opportunity and we must work hard to ensure it stays that way for all.
Congratulations to those here and around Australia on becoming Australian Citizens and i hope it bring you great happiness.
Monica Oliphant AO