Honeysuckle Creek

AS POLITICIAN-turned-writer Andrew Tink viewed the opening scenes of the 2000 film The Dish, he thought “wrong person, wrong place” as he watched actor Sam Neill playing fictional character Cliff Buxton walk towards the Parkes radio telescope. The film portrays Australia’s role in relaying live television footage of the first man on the Moon during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission. But it omits the pivotal role of NASA’s Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, about 300km south of the Parkes Observatory, near Canberra.

Honeysuckle provided the historic live footage of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon that was seen by more than 600 million people worldwide at 12.56pm (AEST) on Monday 21 July 1969.

Andrew has made it his mission to right the record and recognise the crucial role of the Honeysuckle team, particularly station director at the time Tom Reid, in bringing those images – some of the most watched footage in human history – to the world.

AFTER 19 YEARS as a member of the NSW Legislative Assembly, I stepped down in 2007 and took up writing, mostly biographies. I knew Tom Reid, who’d been the station director of NASA’s Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station during the Apollo 11 mission, through his daughter Marg – we’d dated during the early 1970s.

Although I didn’t understand exactly what role Tom and his team at Honeysuckle had played in televising the live broadcast of Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon, I knew it had been important and I wanted to tell Tom’s story. I knew him well enough to understand that he would never have agreed to me writing about his NASA career. Not one to blow his own trumpet, Tom would have done his best to dissuade me.

It wasn’t until after Tom Reid’s death in 2010 that I began to scope out the possibility of a book about Honeysuckle Creek. A number of Tom’s implies that Parkes was the communication facility in Australia for Apollo 11. The truth is that Honeysuckle Creek was. Parkes was and is a radio telescope – not a tracking station. Parkes had no transmitter and so could not send commands or voice to the spacecraft. So ‘Parkes go for command’ as used in the movie is completely wrong and misleading. And the movie studiously avoids stating that the first TV transmission to Australia and the world came from Honeysuckle Creek.”