Pr-OPENING OF NEWq SCIENCE LABORATORIES AT 4ESLEY
COLLEGE, MELBOURNE
ON 7TH JULY, 1962.
Speech by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. R. G. Menzies
Mr. President, Headnaastex Mr. Robson and ladies and Gentlemen:
I always like to begin even the feeblest of speeches
with a couple of preliminary observations, and the first one
that I want to make to you is that the President of the Council
is a man possessed of low cunning. ( Laughter) I have found,
after many years in office, that if people write and say to
me, "' vie would like you to do so and so on 15th of August, or
whatever it may be and I am engaged on the 1 5th of August, I
can honestly say how deeply sorry I am that I can't be there.
( Laughter) But with great, low cunning, as he has practically
admitted to you he said to me, in effect, " Now, do come and
do this job Iand name your own date." ( Laughter) Well, you
know, I don t want anybody to be encouraged by this example,
but there's nothing more difficult than that. The only
possible hope you have is to get out of the country. ( Laughter)
And, believe it or not, I can't be out of the country all the
time. ( Laughter) He also made a glancing reference to my
majority. Well, as I said to an audience last night, I'm " 1it" i.
( Laughter) ( Applause)
But, Sir, one develops a certain amount of philosophy
about these things. I've had the most remarkable experience;
no doubt bred into me by this school. I've run a minority
Government. I had a majority Government once which was sustained
in office by one and a half Independents, ( Laughter) and each
time I went back to the Lodge at the end of the week for dinner,
I would say to my wife, " M1y dear, nothing but death can put me
out of office before Tuesday." ( Laughter).
Which reminds me Sir, that my wife is tremendously
sorry not to be here. She? s not only been under doctor's orders,
but doing frightfully well under them, I am happy to say. She
is also becoming impatient of them, and therefore I have to say
every now and then, " No. You shall not go." I don't think she
can be all that well, because it is the first time she has ever
taken my advice, ( Laughter)
Now, Sir, I'm the least scientific of mortals. All
I know about science is that a few misguided fellows in my time
did chemistry, and they had a distinguished teacher who was
known irreverently as " Bunse" l and some of them studied physics
and some of them branched off into a mysterious thing called
mechanics. All I know is that the only record you will find
of me in the scholastic history of the school is in things like
History, English, French and Latin. As for the mathematical
and scientific subjects, having an indecently good memory, I
was a master of the bookwork and didn't know what it was all
about. ( Laughter) So I could get 50, and that, after all,
oddly enough, was more than some people got. ( Laughter)
Yes, Sir, I associate myself a great deal with the
humanities, with those studies of humane letters which the
world needs so much and which, perhaps, it tends to neglect
not a little. But more and more in recent times, I've had
borne in on me tha this world is changing almost at an
explosive rate. The population of the world we used to
think we knew about it will probably more or less double
between now and the turn of the century. This presents the
most colossal problem. More thousands of millions of people, ** e/ 2
and in a world in which the pressure of population on the
resources of the world comes greater and greater; where
the mirrored problem of sustenance becomes more and more
acute as years go on. And if all these problems are to be
solved if they are to be solved on the principle of justice
which cloesn't breed hatred between those who have not and
those who have, then we, ourselves, must make a contribution
in the field of science which will harness the resources of
the world to produce more to feed more people, to give more
hope, more skill, more productivity to other nations in the
world. This business of scientific training it is not
just a matter for ourselves, though we need it. It is something
which will represent some measure of what we are contributing
to the world. That is not to say that everybody is to
become a scientist. I had a faint and friendly quarrel with
a very distinguished scientist one of the most distinguished
in our history, when he suggested one day that every Cabinet
Minister ought to be required to have a scientific degree.
And I thought, " Oh dear." ( Laughter) It would afford me a
much-needed relief from office. I had no complaint about
that but the idea of twenty experts sitting in a Cabinet
really frightened me, rather ( Laughter) I wondered what
would become of the real experts when they were being overruled
by the political exports.
But, Sir, it is true, profoundly true that this
world, not only as we see it now, but as we look at it over
the next twenty, thirty, forty years, with the eye of imagination
in my case, this world is going to ru quire such added
stores of pure science, such added stores of applied science,
of technology, if it is going to sustain itself and raise the
average level of wellbeing and of happiness. In other words,
Sir, to come back to the point about the humanities, I think
it is tremendously important that people should pursue humane
studies, but they won't be able to in the future unless the
scientists and the technologists have done their part to raise
the standards of the world and to give us the means of justifying
our own independent existence in Australia. Science, I
see as the developer and the protector.
Well, now Sir, you may be a classical scholar or a
student of history or of literature and want nothing more than
a library. I don't mean one of those great things, containing
all those well-bound books that every gentlemen's library ought
to include, I mean a library the books that you know, that
you read, that you look at, that you turn to. This is all the
reflective scholar in those fields will need an adequate
library and there you are. But in science I was so
interested today to hear Mr. Robson talking about the difference
between his time and today. Of course there is a difference.
When I look back, even looking through the door at
these mysteries, at the rather sketchy equipment, the rather
sketchy apparatus, I just marvel when I go into a well-furnished
lab, today and see what is needed for these purposes; how far
the boundaries of scicantific knowledge have been pushed. So
far indeed that what was advanced in my time is elementary
today. And this is as it should be. The more advanced the
study, the more complex will become the apparatus needed, the
mathods to be employed.
E~ very time I speak with the Universities Commission,
which is something that gives me satisfaction as I look back
on it, I am reminded that in a new university, in the development
of a university, the cost on the scientific side far
3.
excels anything on the other side of university life. If a
university is going to be a great university in the scientific
field, then it must expect to spend hundreds of thousands or
millions more on scientific equipment than it would on the
side of humane letters in the old-fashioned nineteenth century
way. Well, I acknowledge this.
It has been my great honour and Mr. Robson has
referred to it, to have been the promoter of a lot of new
things in the university field and of vast expenditures in
the university field in Australia. So vast that I don't even
talk about them now until the last moment in case the Treasury
overhears me. ( Laughter) But on the scientific side, no
longer can things be done on the cheap. This is why this
industrial fund seems to me to be such an imaginative affair,
Quite frankly, Mr. Robson, Mr. Booth and Mr. Trigg, I had no
idea that big businessmen were so imaginative. ( Laughter)
But those limitations on their imagination which makes them
fail to understand my Budget ( Laughter) have not prevented
them from this tremendous conception.
Think of it. School after school helped in a massive
wdy to produce first-class scientific training& And don't
let us think of any training at school as ending when the boys
leave school because thatis not true. The best of those who
use these facilities will be in the universities6 The best
of those who go to the universities will find themselves
irresistibly drawn into post-graduate work, into research work
and will provide the scientific leaders of the future. Right
down through the line, we must aim at the very best that we
can get and we can't get the best in the field of science,
whatever the genius of the teacher, whatever the incipient
genius of the student, unless you have the scientific apparatus
that can be used. People like myself can achi. e: ve a certain
amount of half-merited success scholastically by having good
memories, by being able to read and learning how to read and
learning how to remember and learning, I hope, how to think.
But you can't teach science in the modern world unless you can
also put into the hands of the student the things that are
needed to illustrate to him, to give him the feel of the
developments that have occurred in physics and chemistry and
in a score of other subsequent and perhaps mere refined studies.
So it is for those reasons that I am delighted to be
here and I am particularly delighted to be here in my old
school. I notice a few changes well hI don't mean individually,
I noticed today with some astonishmcnt hat my contemporaries
who are here today seem to me to look rather elderly. I don't
understand it. lU putting that on one side, the one thing
that I notice with regret is that in my day there were forms
with backs and if somebody of a wicked disposition got in
early at assembly and pushed the first one back, the whole
of them went right back to the back wall of the hall ( Laughter)
and this was received with magnificent applause. ( Laughter)
It was regarded as the most instructive physics lesson for the
day. ( Laughter) But now, I'm afraid Sir, with prosperity you've
become respectable. You have chairs, but you can't prevent
me from turning my
m1 ' ind back to the fact that when I used to
sit down in that corner, it was my pride and joy to look at
L. A. Adamson and be frightened of him. ( Laughter) To look at
Harold Stewart and be more frightened of him, with his gimlet eye
and a most unfailing perception of the gaps in my knowledge of
Latin. ( Laughter) But all came well on a Friday morning when he
would stand up and sing, in a fine true voice much to our enjoyment,
" W'hen I was a now boy, and an addle-hea ed cub".( Laughter)
So my mind goes back to that, Sir new boy no longer, addleheaded
cub only in the views of my more biased adversaries.,
Sir, I have the very greatest pleasure in declaring the
new rL 1ro