SPEECH BY THE RIGHT HON R. G. MENZIES AT THE OPENING
OF THE PHYTOTRON AT C. oS. IR0o CANBERRA, A. C. T.
ON 229H AU 2T
Sir, Your Excellencies, and Ladies and Gentlemen
I have been very much struck today by the profound
difference there is between politics and agricultural biology0
You have just had it explained to you, those who are not
already expert, that what is to be done in this place is to
control the environment. In politics, it's the other way
round, Thus today I've been down freezing at the airport
saying goodbye to the King and Queen of Thailand, and acting,
as nature has equipped me to do, us a windbreak for the Queen,
with the wind blowing piactically at freezing point. And
here I am this afternoon being gently cooked, feeling all the
germs that I acquired in the wind this morning getting on
nicely, being encouraged, being cultivated inside me.
Now there is one other thing that I would like to
tell you about the phytotron and I hope this won't go any
further I beg of you to keep this dark. When C. S. I. R. O.
first of all decided that a request ought to be made to the
Government to find the money for a phytotron, the proposal
fell into the hands of a relatively junior officer in my
department who read it, and in all good faith, scribbled out
a note saying, " This isronsense0 Oliphant already has a
cyclotron, why do we have this overlapping and duplication?"
Now that's not a it's a true story, but it. s a good story
because it exhibits something that people don't always understand
the astuteness of the civil service to avoid overlapping and
waste. Thus " cocking a snoot" at Parkinson's Law with a
vengeance. Well, Sir, you came along or somebody came along
and explained to me what a phytotron was and I must confess
that from that moment I found myself vastly interested in J. t.
The idea of taking what has been in the past field work in
remote places conducted under great difficulty and concentrating
it in point of time. and space -that seemed to me, even to my
ignorant lay mind, a dramatic thing, the value of which I
thought quite obvious,
It isn't always easy to resist the C, SI. R. O. though
it thinks we resist it too much, Sir Frederick White referred
to his great predecessor, lan Clunies Ross. I always thought
of him not purely just as a scientist in himself, though he
was, but as the greatest public relations man for science that
this country has ever had.-a phenomenal genius for not sparing
himself, for going out day after day, week after week, making
other people understand the importance of the work that's being
done in scientific research and, of course, in particular by
C. S. I. ROo I suppose that if we were to ask ourselves what in
the last twenty yearsup to fifty years, had been the great
distinguishing feature of this century, apart from wars and
political confusions, the answer would be the flowering of
science and the growing application of science to technology,
to the problems, the practical word-a-day problems, of the
worldo And I7m perfectly certain that this is, in particular,
true of agricultural scientific worko Each time we open a
report by a statistician or by a demographer and we are told
how rapidly the population of the world will double and how
rapidly it will treble, we would need to be very insensitive
to the problems of life if we weren't almost appalled by the
idea that the same earth will have to sustain so many more
thousands of millions of people, And. it will sustain them
0 0 0 U 0 0/ 2
only if, literally, the earth is encouraged to bring out its
harivosto And in this field of scientific investigation, I
think we see one of the great hopes of the future of mankind
ne of the great hopes of fthture peace, oddly enough, because
in a starving world there will always be war, And the great
hope of peace with a growing population in the world is th't
mon of devotion and women of devotionr. and distinction should
give their talents to the kind of inv-estigation that will be
conducted here. Now it isn't al. ways easy. is it, to make peoyle
understand how important that is, fie're a bit given to taking
things for granted. We ought to be able to bring up, not a
few hundred people but a few scores of thousands of people
to Kave a look at his and see wlhat is in the wind, see what
is going on, see what the great objectives are, because then
I think we would have a more understanding and encoaraging
public. But there's another aspect of that which I want
to mention to you0 We are in Australia I speak only for
Australians here this afternoon we ar: e not a cynical race
because cynicism is " well, whatts the use?", But we are a
sceptical race, We need to have it proved " Show me, show
me about this." I can remember and Ive said this before,
I think in the presence of Dr. Lckson, I can remember a
time when I was a small boy in the country, when the agricultural
scientist put himself to tho trcuble of going up into
the wheat country where I was born to try to explain to a
collection of wheat farmers that a mysterious subjoet called
superphosphate, if applied to that light sandy loam in that
part of the country would bring about an enormous increase
in productivity, ind you know, I could just almost hear
wdoheast wit as cogsoti? n" g onS o ina ndth eso. r m" iOndh s well", O h, I Id odno'tn ' ktn okwno, w, t hew hoatld
man didnyt use " Uh wcll you see, and in the end
about three reasonably enlightened farmers decided that they
would. give it a go,,
I think from the long memory of it that they were
told at that time in this particular soil that they ought
to use a 1hundredweight of super to tbe acre And these three
decided that they would try it out rather tentatively with
half a hundredweight, And when they got ancther three bushels
to the acre as ompared with their neighbours, then a few more
people came to the conclusion th. lat it was prett1y good, You
see, this is not a cynical attitude of mind but it's a
sceptical attitude of mind and if I were asked to say, to
name One defect in our pr'esent technological equipment in
these areas, I would say it is that there i too great a gap
in point of time and in point of space between the work done
in a place like this and the work done on the farm and shoep
station, In other words, we ale, so far in Australia, rather
failing on the extension of the results of research to the
man on the farm,
This requires, of course, a great deal of co-operation
between C! ommonwealth and Statos we hKave divided authorities
on it but it also requires in the farmier himself a realization
that he will not get the benefit of these investigotions until
he is not only interested but enthusiastic and keen and
demanding about getting it brought to him and his farm. And
I know Sir. that you, because you! ve spoken many times to me
about this, that you. woCuld regard it as a state almost of
paradise, if the wol'k done, the magnificent work done by
found its way out qaite quickly, quite effectively,
C 0 0 JO a2/ 3
3
to the people who are engaged in production, because
there is no doubt about it, all the old ideas have gone,
Going back to that remote period wrnen I was a boy myself,
Australia was a desert, it had a few sketchy bits of
cultivable land around the margins, it had some areas
where the rain fell agreeably, But oh, it could never
sustain a population of more than ten millions. And
then some bold fellow said, oh no, twenty, twenty some
day, not this century, of course, but some time in the
future twenty.
Now we are casting loose from all those silly
prejudiced ideaj and if we are now discovering that the
same area of land, and of course it's been enormously
extended, that the same area of land, with the benefits
of scientific research brought to it, can produce twice
as much, three times as much, four times as much as it
did then we're ourselves making a contribution to the
sus enance of an enormous, relatively enormous population
in our own country and also making available for developing
countries, which have much more acute problems of
population and feeding, the results of the work that will
be done here,
So, Sir, I say that I'm grateful to you for
allowing me to come along here and have the pleasure of
saying a few very inadequate words on what I helieve
to be one of the exciting occasions in applied science in
the history of our country. Sir, I declare the phytotron,
the controlled environment the CERES I'll call it I'm
told now for short Vhatevcr you call it, I declare it
open, Y~ Y_