Saving our Skins: Chapter 6. Lauder Stargazers
Saving our Skins: Chapter 6. Lauder Stargazers
Atmospheric Reflections from a Lauder Stargazer
The continuing story of “Saving our Skins”. Here I focus on life and work at Lauder in the early 1980s. Things were different then.
Updated September 5, 2021.
Our friends in the local community outside the research station were mainly sheep farmers. We were in our early 30s, so like our friends, were still young and fit. But the grizzled faces and extending bellies of the older generation attested to their harsh outdoor lifestyles with too much beer. The rural community was in a downward spiral, with job losses as farms mechanised and amalgamated. It was a microcosm of a global trend that continues to this day for unskilled workers. A trend that has led to sharp social division, political unrest, and the emergence of populist governments that have little regard for environmental issues.
The nearby village of Lauder still had a shop, run by Ruth McNamara. Her husband, Brian, was one of our staff. The only other establishments were the pub, the garage, the school, a derelict village hall and about 6 houses. The garage and school were to soon close. The town had sprung up in the first decade of the century to support construction of the railway line from Dunedin to Central Otago. But that was now in its death throes. The daily railcars disappeared soon after our arrival. Then, after the completion of the Clyde Dam in 1990 even the last goods trains disappeared, and the line was uplifted. The only remaining relics were the names on the Lauder Railway School and the Lauder Railway Hotel. The decline continued for about 20 years, until somebody had the bright idea of converting the disused railway line into a cycle path. The Otago Central Rail Trail, as it was named, was born. It provided new life to the rural communities, with boutique cafes and accommodation springing up along its 150 km path between Middlemarch and Clyde.
Lauder’s nearest neighbour, about 10 km down the valley, is Omakau. Correctly pronounced in Māori as “aww-ma-koh”, it’s invariably mispronounced with wilful ignorance by the locals as “oh-mah-cow” (at least they get one syllable right). I learnt the correct pronunciation by osmosis, as Louise is a teacher of Te Reo Māori. Omakau (now, how did you pronounce that?) was then a town of a couple of hundred people or so. It served a wide area and when we arrived in 1979 it boasted two pubs, two grocery shops, two garages, an engineering firm, several stock and station agents, a couple of banks and a post office. But the number of businesses dwindled to about 4 before the rail trail revival started to reverse the trend.
About 5km past Omakau, the road climbs through a cutting near the top of Tiger Hill. At each end of the cutting you can still see remnants of an old gravel road below, that looped around the north side of the peak in the 1960s when the Auroral Station was first established. A painting on the dining room wall of friends Peter and Francie Diver arouses a vivid image of the place and times. It shows a musterer on horseback driving a mob of sheep past a dilapidated shack alongside the old road. There are a few tussocks and craggy outcrops in the foreground. The background view carries on towards the Dunstan Range and Mt St Bathans at the north end of the valley. The Hawkdun Range can be seen in the distance (about 70 km away) at the back right. Lauder is just out of sight, about 15 km behind the crag on the right. The north edge of Thomsons Gorge is just visible on the left, partly obscured by a bank of low cloud or fog. A few scudding clouds higher in the sky complete the picture.
As you might have guessed, it’s one of my favourites. It was painted by a local artist, Jan Rasmussen, about 5 years before we arrived, but to me it encapsulates what was so good about Central Otago at the time. The shack has now gone, but the site still appeals as an idyllic building spot. Except for the wind. There’d be no escape from the nor’ westers funnelling through the gorge.
The way Peter and Francie acquired the painting also encapsulates what’s good about life in rural New Zealand. Peter was running a few cattle on their ten-acre block at the time, and he purchased the painting (as a Christmas present for Francie) in exchange for a “side of beef” – half the meat from a full cattle beast. In those days, that was about $150, but now it would be about $1000. But they got the better side of the trade. The painting would fetch at least ten times that now. Not that Jan would care. She passed away earlier this year (2019).
Lauder’s nearest shopping centre of any size is Alexandra, then a town of about 4,000 people another 20 km down the valley past Tiger Hill. Science staff at Lauder rarely ventured that far afield. Sometimes weeks could be spent within the confines of the compound without crossing the cattle-stops that separated us from the outside world. But Alexandra was the commercial centre for the wider Central Otago area that in those days included Queenstown and Wanaka. Louise would venture there for shopping about once a week – often accompanied by other “station wives” as they were called. The Alexandra-Clyde area continued to grow even as smaller communities retrenched, but it’s no longer the commercial hub it was, having been surpassed by the much faster growth in new tourist hubs of the Lakes District, including Queenstown, Wanaka, and now even Cromwell.
In the 1980s, communications were rudimentary. Even long-distance phone calls were uncommon because of their prohibitive cost. I recall Gordon Keys, saying one day that he’d received a long-distance call from an ex-pat kiwi scientist, Andrew Matthews, who was interested in an advertised position at Lauder. He said he was “calling from Paris”, but Gordon heard it as “Tarras”, a small settlement about 30 km West as the crow flies, the other side of the Dunstan range. Paris was out of the question in our insular world. Most of our lives revolved around the Manuherekia valley, and Tarras was just one valley away, so much more likely.
Tarras also epitomises the country life. Firstly, just getting there from Lauder. Although about 90 km away by road, there was a grass-road shortcut through Thomsons Gorge, which is only half that distance. It was a 4-wheel-drive track really, but in dry summer weather was negotiable with an ordinary car. The only problem was that because the area was stocked, the route involved opening and closing about 15 gates on the way through. Nowadays, the road is properly formed, so not nearly as appealing – and there are still those 15 gates. Tedious, unless you have a co-driver to deal with them.
Secondly, although Tarras isn’t even a village really, like many other settlements in New Zealand, it boasts a nice little 9-hole golf course. It’s a close-run contest between New Zealand and Scotland as to which country can claim the most golf courses per capita. In New Zealand, with a population of 5 million, there are over 400 courses. More than enough for a different course each day of the year, though many are small nine-hole courses. The smallest and one of the most beautiful I’ve played is the Ringa Ringa Golf Club, on Stewart Island. It has only 6 holes, so to save time I hit three balls on each hole to complete my 18 holes of golf in about 2 hours.
There are only a few playing members at the Tarras course, and green fees to play a round there are $15 for visitors. I played it quite recently with my son Hamish. Even then the greens were still surrounded by electric fences to keep the stock off. A local rule decreed that you must take a compulsory replay if your ball hits the fence. The course also still had a cute little long-drop toilet near the second green. Hamish had occasionally written for a golf magazine called “The Cut”. We were amused to find a well-thumbed issue inside. It was printed on thick glossy paper. Not very comfortable I’m sure, and no pages were missing!
Life at work was different then. We designed and built our own equipment from scratch. The mechanical and electronic workshops were hives of industry. But we pretty much kept to ourselves. Our mechanical engineer, Jack Richardson, was the only staff member who didn’t live at Lauder. He had to move away after his wife, Joan, had become wheelchair bound. She’d been paralysed when her car crashed after skidding on ice at Tiger Hill, halfway between Lauder and Alexandra. Since then he’d commuted from Clyde. He listened to the radio on the way out and always seemed to have a joke to share with us at morning teatime. Those jokes were a godsend to break the awkward silences that would sometimes descend on us. One of his favourite sayings was “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. I think he was talking about ourselves. He was a skilled engineer but a chain roll-your-own smoker. There were no OSH concerns then about smoking in the workplace, and it was nerve-wracking to watch the ash build up on his cigarettes as he worked over our spectrometers. The inevitable ash falls didn’t always miss the sensitive optical surfaces beneath.
There was no internet yet. That would take another 10 years to arrive. Specialised email services between universities and research groups like ours would come a little earlier than for the wider public, but still not until the mid-1980s at Lauder. So, we communicated mainly by letter or telex until the marvellous invention of the fax machine. Long-distance telephone calls were possible, but expensive.
When we embarked on the new area of research to measure nitrogen dioxide in the stratosphere, I sought advice from John Noxon, a scientist working for NOAA in Boulder Colorado, who was already active in the field. I penned him a letter full of questions, sealed it in a stamped addressed envelope, and put it into the mailbag to be picked up by the rural delivery contractor. About six weeks later I received a courteous and hugely useful reply. I finally met Noxon in person and got to thank him properly at an Ozone Symposium in 1984. We had a lot to share and we could easily have gone on to collaborate with him. But that was the only time we met. He died just four months later. I wish I’d kept the correspondence as a souvenir. It’s a lost bit of history that epitomised the stark contrast in pace of life then compared with the rapid turnarounds expected in today’s world.
Paul Johnston and I worked hard learning the ropes in our new area of research. The work often involved long hours, because the main measurement periods were at twilight, and through the hours of darkness. It must have been a lonely period for Louise. But she was busy with the kids, and like most of the station wives, she had a few hours of paid work at the station. She had become our part-time typist/secretary.
Computing capabilities at Lauder were laughably limited as seen from today’s perspective. Slide rules – mostly manufactured by Faber-Castell - were the norm for quick calculations. If more accuracy was needed, we sometimes fell back on the old Eton log tables we’d used in our schooldays. An old mechanical desktop calculator in the office had just been superseded by electronic hand-held calculators. The best of these were made by Hewlett-Packard and used “reverse Polish notation” which is much more intuitive for mathematics nerds like us. Computers were virtually non-existent, or at best scarce and ponderously slow by modern standards.
There was just one computer at Lauder, an old hand-me-down Varian 620F from our head office in Wellington. It was Paul Johnston’s “baby” and he spent hours making it sing and dance to his tune after first learning how to program it in machine code. It was about the size of a small filing cabinet, taking up a couple of bays in a 19-inch equipment rack. The front panel was festooned with toggle switches and flashing lights. Paul programmed the computer to make it do useful things like control data logging from our spectrometer. By day it was used for development work and data analysis. By night it was used to control our spectrometers and log data from them. Before sunset each day we had to switch tasks by changing disks and re-booting it with his machine-coded instructions to log data. The data analysis programs were written in the BASIC programming language (BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, designed in 1964 by John Kemeny & Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College, NH.).
Paul taught me the rudiments of programming and together we programmed the Varian to run the data analysis. That included writing routines to calculate the Sun elevation angle and use statistical methods like “least squares” analysis to
extract the signals.
The Varian had only 32 kilobytes of memory. Efficient programming was needed. Only 260 variable names were available, named A1, A2, …A9, B1, B2, …B9, etc up to Z9. No memory prompts there. There was no space for luxuries like comment lines either, so we found that programs we ourselves had written years or months before were sometimes hard to comprehend when we revisited them.
It was booted up by reading a paper tape that had punched start-up instructions. For data storage, it had a single disc drive, and for different tasks we loaded different disks. Each disk was the size of a large serving-platter and could hold about 1 Mbyte of data, less than 1 millionth of that in a modern disk the size of a smartphone. The computing power of a modern smartphone is millions of times greater too.
That lack of computer capability would lead to the so-called “Y2K” crisis at the turn of the century about 20 years later. With the premium on storage, space was saved by representing years with only two digits instead of four, so 1980 was truncated to 80. The Y2K problem would be when the year rolled over from 1999 to 2000. Instead of the year increasing by 1, it would flip from 99 back to 00. Like armies of scientists around the world, we spent many hours in the latter part of the 20th century re-writing our computer code to avoid problems arising from that.
In the early 1980s we published several papers about nitrogen dioxide and ozone in the atmosphere. The drafts of these first papers were hand-written on paper, then cut and pasted into order before being typed up by Louise. Any errors meant a re-type of the whole page, equations and all. We couldn’t have survived without graph-paper to view the data. Graphs were plotted by hand. Final versions of figures were drawn with Städler pens and stencils in black Indian ink on to special semi-transparent tracing paper. Other drawing tools like compasses and set squares were also needed. For more complicated drawings, we asked our colleague Des Rowles to help, as he had some formal training in technical drawing. His main job was looking after the equipment we used to measure variations in the Earth’s magnetic field. The sensitive equipment to do those measurements was set up across the valley in an underground building constructed with no ferrous materials like screws, or nails (that would have upset the readings). References for our papers were formatted by hand. It was a labour of love to write the papers and have them published.
Ozone research was still an emerging issue, and all of our papers broke new ground. It’s much easier to do that when you’re in a developing subject area than in a more mature area of study. Our work attracted the attention of atmospheric researchers from around the world. It also came to the attention of Mike Collins, our Laboratory Director, who was based at the Head Office in Wellington. We were in a new area of research for the whole organisation, and there was little in-house knowledge of it. He encouraged me to apply to the National Research Advisory Council (NRAC) for a fellowship for post-graduate study in the area. When he saw that I didn’t have much idea where to go, he suggested the University of Oxford to study towards a PhD (or DPhil as it’s called there). He knew John Houghton there, who was head of the Department of Atmospheric Physics at the Clarendon Laboratory. They were actively involved in all aspects of the subject, including the development of satellite sensors to probe the atmosphere. It was a huge opportunity, and one we couldn’t ignore. Louise was keen. She is gregarious by nature, and life in the close-knit community at Lauder was starting to get her down.
I was one of the last to receive an NRAC study award. They were discontinued soon afterwards, when changing political whims meant that money to fund this sort of thing was devolved down to the employing agency, rather than from a separate pot of government money. If Mike Collins had known how much my award was to cost DSIR, he may have been less enthusiastic.
[1] BASIC is an acronym Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was designed in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA.
The next chapter “The Dreaming Spires” is about our move to Oxford ….