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CHAPTER 1
COLONIAL BOYS
South Australia and New Zealand, 1871 to 1916
Edward Gibbon Wakefield was serving three years in Newgate Prison for the abduction of a fifteen-year-old heiress – whom he had then secretly married in the hope of securing her inheritance – when he devised the radical colonisation model that gave birth to South Australia. This was something of a paradox, given that a central pillar of 'systemised colonisation' was the explicit exclusion of convicts.
What also set the proposed new settlement apart from Australia's existing colonies was the novel idea of preselling parcels of surveyed land, to attract immigrants of financial means. Capital raised from those sales would subsidise the relocation of less wealthy families, thereby providing South Australia with a willing labour force.
While the penal colonies had been devised to ease pressure on Britain's overstocked prison system, the systemised settlements were designed to solve a similar crisis in its choked industrial cities. 'Here we are, three or four in a bed,' Captain William Gowan told the inaugural public meeting of the South Australia Association in late June 1834. 'We cannot walk along the streets, but we are jostled by some person thrusting his elbow into our side.'
That urgency was reflected in the speed at which Wakefield's idea evolved from concept in the late 1820s to colony in 1836. The first shipload of South Australia's free settlers dropped anchor at Holdfast Bay a few days after Christmas of that year – at which time little of the required survey work had begun. This, coupled with a low asking price of £1 per acre (less than AU$200 today), meant the venture risked collapse under a weight of debt before it had even found its feet. It also meant that Wakefield, the scheme's architect, distanced himself from further involvement and shifted his sights to nearby New Zealand.
Not six months after the hopeful South Australian colonists had celebrated their arrival with a drunken ship's party on the mosquito-plagued shores of Holdfast Bay, Wakefield oversaw the establishment of the New Zealand Association. His enthusiasm for the new endeavour led him to proclaim that the volcanic islands on the fringe of the South Pacific Ocean represented 'the fittest country in the world for colonisation'.
Following four years of complex wrangling, a promising location named in honour of Vice-Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson was planned on New Zealand's South Island. Come the dawn of 1842, an advance colonisation party had built more than 100 basic huts at Nelson, and within months the community numbered around 500 immigrants.
As the frontier township grew, there came a need for qualified artisans to provide its basic infrastructure. The New Zealand Association placed advertisements in newspapers throughout Britain, and it was a call for a general-purpose wright – proficient in shaping timber, iron and steel – that caught the attention of George Rutherford in the overcrowded Scottish city of Dundee. With his wife, Barbara, and their four children, he boarded the 470-ton Phoebe, which sailed for Nelson on 16 November 1842. They arrived in port on a warm, clear autumn afternoon in late March of the following year.
No sooner had the family made footfall in Nelson than they began an onward journey of almost fifty kilometres across Tasman Bay to the fertile soils and soaring forests around Motueka. It was there that they settled in a mud and raupo (swamp-reed) hut, and that George went to work on the sawmill he had been hired to help construct.
Despite a decade of gruelling labour that included bouts of desperate poverty, George eventually saved sufficient money to purchase twenty acres of land at Waimea South, near the Wai-iti River, in late 1854. The property faced the main track leading to Nelson, twenty-five kilometres away: a thoroughfare since named Lord Rutherford Road.
South Australia, 1840s to 1850s
Across the Tasman Sea, the fragile colony of South Australia continued to be buffeted by economic and social turbulence. The shortfall in the land sales needed to bolster its barren coffers was soon compounded by a dramatic population exodus to the lucrative goldfields of Victoria and New South Wales.
The resultant need to replenish a rapidly diminishing workforce saw assisted immigration grow from around 4600 in 1853 to almost double the following year. Among that 1854 intake was James Smith Olifent, a grocer by trade from the Dover region of county Kent, who, accompanied by his wife, Eliza, and their children travelled aboard the three-masted barque Ruby and disembarked at Adelaide's port in late March.
James Olifent abandoned the grocery business and found work at Adelaide's destitute asylum, newly established to tackle the colony's escalating social dysfunction. James would eventually become superintendent of the grim institution, housed in a complex of austere, double-storey buildings across the road from the governor's grandiose quarters, where his great-grandson would be installed as vice-regal resident more than a century later.
Within two years of the Olifents' arrival, a government-funded library opened next door to the asylum, in the South Australian Institute. Soon afterwards, as pledged by the colony's founders, a circulating library was also established. Collections of books, magazines and newspapers were conveyed to country towns and outlying settlements in an innovative scheme believed to be a global first. By 1866, there were twenty book boxes circulating throughout South Australia; seven years later, that number had increased fourfold.
Also among South Australia's first statutory authorities was the Central Board of Education. Annual enrolments at accredited schools stood around 3300 shortly before the Olifent family's arrival, but had almost tripled within a decade.
The term 'book colonies', sometimes sneeringly applied to South Australia and the New Zealand communities settled under the systemised scheme, stemmed from their contrived genesis by ink on paper rather than boot leather across unexplored ground. However, it could also be taken as reference to the ready availability of schooling and reading material in those ambitious settlements, which sought to change the manner in which Britain expanded its empire.
Certainly, books and learning were integral to shaping the brilliant minds of Ernest Rutherford and Mark Oliphant. While both young men were encouraged by supportive parents and driven by innate curiosity, the opportunities afforded them by public schooling – and in Oliphant's case, the crucial influence of a public library – suggested the name 'book colonies' might also reflect these settlements' nobler aspirations.
New Zealand, 1865 to 1882
The school that served the farming community of Waimea South, where George Rutherford had built a timber home for Barbara and their brood, which had increased to five boys and three girls, was sited in the neighbouring hamlet of Spring Grove. Among those who taught the school's 100 or so students were a widow, Caroline Thompson, and her twenty-year-old daughter Martha. When Spring Grove's headmaster died suddenly in 1865, Martha Thompson was briefly appointed as sole senior teacher. However, she resigned after two months in the prestigious role due to her forthcoming marriage to George and Barbara Rutherford's third son, James.
The home that James and Martha then built on a portion of George Rutherford's twenty-acre allotment provided sleeping space for the first eight of the couple's eventual twelve children. The fourth of those, registered through clerical oversight as 'Earnest', was born at the house on 30 August 1871.
South Australia, late 1860s to 1901
By the late 1860s, Adelaide's General Post Office had become the hub of telecommunications between Australia and the wider world. Before the spread of wires and poles and the roll-out of under-sea cables, messages from the mother country were carried by mail steamers and offloaded at King George Sound (now Albany). From there, they would be couriered to Adelaide for faster dissemination to the eastern seaboard.
This costly and time-consuming system required one of South Australian Postmaster-General Charles Todd's employees to regularly make the 5000-kilometre round trip to and from the mail steamer's terminus. One of those clerks was Harry Smith Olifent, son of James and Eliza, who took the job immediately after leaving school. Rapid advances in ocean transport and telecommunications rendered the role redundant by the 1870s, and Harry Olifent was reassigned to a desk job at Todd's GPO.
In addition to serving as an office bearer for the Freemasons' mother lodge, Harry Olifent was an avid member of a literary society that met at a Congregational church in central Adelaide. It was through this social circle, one of many that drew together 'book colony' folks with likeminded values, that Harry met his future wife, Alice Robinson. Reading and learning became highly prized in the couple's single-storey cottage in the inner eastern suburb of Dulwich, where they raised seven children.
Despite his modest GPO earnings, Harry was somehow able to enrol their second son, Harold George Olifent, at Prince Alfred College, one of Adelaide's most prestigious private schools. Young Harold, who later became known to all as 'Baron' in recognition of his tall stature and dignified demeanour, clearly showed sufficient academic potential for his parents to make major financial sacrifices in order to nurture it.
Yet, to his enduring frustration, Baron would find himself a lifelong civil servant. His only dalliance with manual work was a fleeting, impulsive dash to Coolgardie in the West Australian goldfields during the rush of the 1890s. He returned not with a fortune, but with a small, solitary nugget, which he later bequeathed to his first-born son.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, when Baron is believed to have adopted the alternative spelling 'Oliphant', such an administrative matter did not require formal lodgment with authorities. The name 'Olifent' was recorded on the marriage certificate for Harold George (Baron) and Beatrice Tucker when they were wed on 27 December 1900, just days before Australia celebrated Federation.
The couple had met when Baron, like his father, joined a literary society, operated by St Paul's Church in central Adelaide. The church adhered to the Anglo-Catholicism into which the Olifent children had been raised, and of which Baron had become a devout follower. Beatrice was the daughter of a headmaster at a government-run school and she, not unlike Ernest Rutherford's mother, Martha, began her working life as sole teacher in an isolated community – at Hawker, a staging post almost 400 kilometres north of Adelaide. Her commitment to the church did not run as deep as Baron's, but they shared similar reading tastes, as well as views on politics and social issues very much in step with their respective educated, working-class upbringings.
'Oliphant' is the surname registered for the couple's first child, born on 8 October 1901. The boy was named Marcus Lawrence Elwin Oliphant, in honour of author Marcus Clarke, whose sprawling novel For the Term of His Natural Life was the era's definitive account of the brutal penal system founded through British imperialism on the far side of the globe. The couple's academic ambitions for their son were apparent from his birth.
New Zealand, 1876 to 1882
The rapid spread of railways into New Zealand's countryside in the decades after Nelson's settlement meant lucrative bridge construction work for James Rutherford. Therefore, as his family moved deeper into the South Island's heart, Ernest Rutherford began school, aged five, at Foxhill, fifteen kilometres from Spring Grove.
The forty or fewer students who knew Ernest Rutherford at the single-room Foxhill Primary School later recalled a most unexceptional boy. Quiet and self-contained, young Ernest rarely engaged in sports or schoolyard games, and preferred to immerse himself in a book while sitting beneath a tree.
Among his treasured primary school possessions was a well-thumbed primer simply entitled Physics, written by Scottish scientist and educator Balfour Stewart. As her son's eminence grew through adulthood, Martha Rutherford would cherish the boyhood keepsake, which bore the simple inscription 'Ernest Rutherford, July 1882' inside its leather cover.
As a boy, Ernest Rutherford's propensity to dribble when lost in distant thoughts, coupled with his solitary nature, saw him nicknamed 'Dopey'. He did, however, boast an advantage over many of his student peers, in that his mother had taught her children reading, writing and basic arithmetic before any of them first walked through a school gate.
Come evening at the family home, Martha Rutherford would gather her progeny around the household hearth, and challenge them with knowledge quizzes and spelling bees. As they progressively reached school age, she would invigilate as they completed their homework and ensure the afternoon and weekend farm chores did not take precedence. On Sundays, when the strictly observed Sabbath meant no frivolity in the Anglican household, Martha would lead the family singalong around her prized Broadwood piano, imported from England and bought with money she had saved during her teaching tenure at Spring Grove.
James Rutherford actively encouraged his wife's impromptu tutorials, conspicuously aware that his own family's semi-nomadic lifestyle had denied him a formal education. As a consequence, by the school leaving age of eleven, he had been competent at reading but unable to write. The reality that he was therefore destined to remain a tradesman meant that James Rutherford's family also had to accept his restless quest for reliable income.
In 1881, James took a ten-year lease on flax-growing land near Havelock, 100 kilometres away via a treacherous dirt track. He left Martha and their eleven children at Foxhill while his new enterprise took shape, and was only able to visit them every three months or so. The Rutherford children were thus almost exclusively in their mother's care.
After two years of separation, James arranged for his wife and children to sail from Nelson to Havelock aboard a small coastal steamer. Ernest was nearing his twelfth birthday in mid-1882 when he began at Havelock's school, which was almost twice the size of Foxhill's. As he once more settled into new surrounds, his detached manner and quiet nature landed him the nickname 'Windy'.
South Australia, 1912 to 1916
Mark Oliphant was also on the brink of adolescence when he entered a single-teacher rural school in 1912. His family had relocated from Adelaide's inner suburbs to Mylor, an experimental hills community twenty-five kilometres from the city centre. The succession of modest rental homes that Baron and Beatrice Oliphant had occupied in Adelaide's inner southern suburbs could no longer accommodate their five sons in any pretence of comfort.
Baron's job as a ledger clerk with the city's water department meant he was unable to make the hours-long commute from the hills each day, so while Beatrice and the boys spent their weekdays in bucolic isolation, he resided with his parents at Dulwich. During those years, the family would only be united during weekends and annual holidays.
Before moving to the hills, Mark had learned he was congenitally and completely deaf in his left ear. Compounding his challenges was the astigmatism diagnosed at Mylor, a condition that blurred his vision. His short-sightedness also prevented him from reading the blackboard from the classroom's back rows, to which taller pupils were assigned. Oliphant's need for wire-rimmed glasses meant he was dubbed 'Four Eyes' in the schoolyard and that, like Rutherford at the same age, he was little interested in sports. It was the adulteration of his surname, rather than any slight on his unathletic disposition, that led to his other nickname of 'Roly Poly'.
While Rutherford would develop a fondness for rugby when he reached senior school, Oliphant's flirtation with Australia's native football code was brief, and almost painfully comical. In one of his few Australian Rules football matches, his poor eyesight led him to kick the ball to the advantage of the opposing side, which prompted one of his aggrieved teammates to threaten to punch him.
With Baron an absentee father for much of the family's four years at Mylor, Beatrice Oliphant took on the role of single parent, just as Martha Rutherford had done in similar circumstances. Beatrice's schoolteacher training meant that the Oliphant boys, like the Rutherford children decades earlier, developed an appreciation for learning and literature.
Where Martha Rutherford had delighted in reminding her offspring that 'All knowledge is power', Beatrice Oliphant's refrain when her sons posed a question was 'Well, let's look it up'. The imperative to source credible, factual detail in order to solve any problem became a cornerstone of all Mark's future endeavours.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Basis of Everything"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Andrew Ramsey.
Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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