p NUCLEAR RE7SEARCH FOUNDATION DINNER
Seech b the Prime nister, the Rt. Hon. R. G. Menzies
Mr. Chairman, Chancellor, Mr, Renshaw and gentlemen:
This is really an anti-climax. Here am I a simple soul,
dealing with the better part of œ 2,000m. a year and every time the
expenditure of the Government goes up our Lordships of the Press
say how disgraceful it is; and every time the Revenue goes up
they say how wicked this is; and I've been listening now to
Professor Messel who positively secures merit, not only in your
mind, but in the mind of one of the masters of the Press, by
being able to say that he has increased the expenditure 20 times.
( Laughter) Parkinson's Law becomes respectable tonight!
( Laughter) Even the Vice-Chancellor, my old friend, Stephen
Roberts, I thought played his cards very badly: he explained
that he was going to blackmail somebody, but he at once disclosed
the means by which ha was going to blackmail him which, if I may
say so to him, was a mistake. A competent blackmailer never puts
all the cards on the table. ( Laughter)
And here is Messel being positively applauded by you for
spending more money than he has. ( Laughter) And when he wants
you to make up the deficiency, does he do what poor wretched
creatures like Governments have to do, anrid say, " Well we must
raise your taxes a little"? Not at all. He just says to you,
" Now, make it a pleasure, make it a privilege, give mo another
œ 150,000 and I'll settle for it". All I can say is that when I
go back to Canberra on Monday I'm not only going to send for the
Treasurer, but I'm going to send for the Commissioner of
Taxation. ( Laughter) And I'm going to say, " We've missed
something." ( Laughter) " When the assessments go out, add a
little note in red ink, ' If you feel moved to give us another
000 don't hesitate"'. ( Laughter) And, of course, I don't
want to be too cynical but I don't think the re. sponse would be
all that magnificent. Still this is a very interesting experience for me,
because I have a simple job a sort of anti-climactic job. I
just propose the health of he University of Sydney. I think it
is a remarkable University because although I have a Degree from
my own University which I won't mention down there somewhere
for which I had to work and sweat, I have been given a Degree in
the University of Sydney unearned, and, so far as I remember,
unpaid for. ( Laughter) Therefore, as a graduate of the Sydney
University, causa honoris, it is my task to propose the toast of
the University which has attracted to its numnbers the greatest
collector of revenue, voluntary revenue, in the history of
Australia. ( Applause)
This, of course, all puzzles me very much, very much
indeed. I wouldn't wrant to talk about politics because a! you
know I'm now in a state of almost ineffable bliss at Canberra,
( Laughter) but this throws a new light on Sydney where up to now
I have always been in the habit of being told by my " friends"
that there is much to be said for me but the taxes ought to be
lower. And hero you are, you come along at vast expense to
yourselves and you listen to a man putting the hard word on you;
and all the evidence is that he has put the hard word not only on
you but on people all round the world and that you pay and like
it. Now I'm going back to Canberra to say to my Victorian
colleagues " Don't be faint-hearted. Make it a pleasure, and
they'll pay". Do you understand that? I think that's something.
2.
However, my job tonight is not to marvel at what has
been done, but to say something about the University of Sydney,
the oldest University in Australia. This University, the first
in Australia, has seen its children, its nephews, its
derivatives in one wy or another, this or that side of the
blanket, spreading all round Australia. And I happen to be here
not simply because I an Prime Minister because that, as you
have reminded me of late, is a somewhat precarious post.
( Laughter) I am here as one who, if he's given time to look back
on his life whether that's a good thing or a bad thing I
wouldn't quite know they say that when a man is drowning the
whole of his past life comes before him there's no first hand
evidence of this ( Laughter) nor have I ever thought it a very
happy way to die-I don't want the whole of my past life to come
before me ( Laughter) as one who would like to think, when I am
ultimately relieved, with somewhat bogus expressions of
gratitude, of the tasks that I now pursue, that I could look back
and say " What is the thing in your public life that has given
you the most pleasure?" And my ansiwer would be clear and
unambiguous. I would like to remember that it has been my
singular fortune to be somebody who, with the complete backing of
his Government has done something to begin a new era for the
Universities of Australia. ( Applause)
This is one of those things that satisfies the mind and
will, I hope, satisfy the memory. If one speaks in that way, if
one thinks in that way, then it is, of course completely clear
that as one looks over the University field, the whole field, now
so rapidly expanding, now reaching out to cover hundreds of
thousands where it once covered thousands, one must always come
back to the University of Sydney, the first University.
This is a tremendous privilege for people to belong to
the first University, well over 100 years old. You look back on
the people who started it; you look back on the state of
Australia when they started it; you look back on the way in
which their friends no doubt said to them, " But how crazy can you
be? You want to start a University? le're a more colony. ; Je're
a handful of people". But they started it. They laid its
foundations. And if they could now come up from the tomb and
look at what has happened in the field of Universities in
Australia they would know that they built better than they knew;
they would feel a great pride in what has happened in their
country, then a new country, in some . ays a crude country, but a
country in which they were determined to sow seeds that would
grow and flourish and ultimately do something for a vast section
of the people of a future great nation. This I think, is a
tremendous privilege for the University of Sydney.
Of course there are other Universities. I have made a
modest and glancing reference to the University of Melbourne.
There are, I'm credibly informed by the Chairman of the
Universities Co:-ission, Universities in other places which have
their demands, which have their ambitions, which have their
function to perform. are now living in a period of time in
which we not only talk about what we can do for the old
Universities, but about what we can do to create new ones, about
what we can do to establish a varied, and perhaps complex system
of tertiary education in Australia which will all serve to make
this country the great country that we know, in our hearts, it
is and is bound to be.
But tonight rI' going back to the origin. There is an
old Latin r:. axim which, for the bonefit of those educated at the
Sydney Grammar School I will translate into English ( Laughter):
" It is bettor to seek the fountainhoads than to divide up the
little streams". It is a good thing that we should go back to
the fountainheads.
.6 14.
But it was merely a graphic way of putting this: that
that was a tine, oven in my y-' ung manhood when the University was
something apart, a hone of privilege, dealing with matters not to
be understood by ordinary people; and that the rest of the world
might go on ignoring it with groat satisfaction, and, indeed, with
some advantage. Today, thanks to the fact that the Universities
have injected themselves into the public life of the country, into
the social life of the country, and thanks to the fact that scores
and hundreds, and perhaps for all I know, thousands of practical
men of affairs have made it their business to see what goes on in
a University, to help it, and to influence it, that old, false
dichotomy has disappeared. We no longer say, " Ah, yes,
University men and ordinary decent blokes different compartments.'
No. All that has gone, and it is a good thing that it has gone.
The fact that it has gone is not, if you will allow me to
say so, due to the unassisted genius of the business man; it is,
to a very formidable extent due to the new and practical and
enthusiastic approach of the people who are in, and of, the
Universities themselves.
This, I think, is a great period to live in. I would
like to live, and I won't for enough years to see some of the
fruits of this. But I believe that if one could, by a mere wave
of the hand, or ovei by an Order in Council, arrange that one
should live for another 40 years not in office, don't you worry
( Laughter) and just retain enough wit and enough memory and
enough historic imagination to appreciate the picture, one would
find in tnis wonderful country of ours by the turn of the century
a community which, because the Univursities and the public had
been married and had had issue, was making a contribution to life
and to living, a splendid example in the world, rivalling, in the
eyes of the classicist, tae contribution that was made by ancient
Greece. All this takes r. e back to . rhere I began because there is
a sort of " folie circulaire" about politicians for you nay not
have noticed we end where we began. If I may and where I began
I would like to say that this brings me back to the University of
Sydney, the father University of Australia, to use the modern
jargon, " the father imagoe" of the Universities of Australia. And
it is one of my pleasant satisfactions that when I have sat down,
as I'm about to in a minute and a half, you will hear in reply
to this toast a man who is the Chancellor, this great man,
Charles Bickerton Blackburn,( Applause) a man who, if I may say so,
is the greatest of Chancellors, the Chancellor of the oldest
University in Australia, and himself, technically, but only
technically, the oldest Chancellor in Australia. So when you
drink the health of the University have in mind this venerable
person who is at the s: ime time the youngest Chancellor in
Australia and, I sometimes think, the youngest man here.
( Applause)