The Basis of Everything: Before Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project there was the Cavendish Laboratory - the remarkable story of the scientific friendships that changed the world forever

By Andrew Ramsey

Before the Manhattan Project, before nuclear warfare and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was the twentieth century's great scientific quest to fathom the secrets of the atom.

The unlikely story of an Antipodean friendship that changed the world forever.

Centered on the inter-war years - within the ivy clad walls of Cambridge University's famed Cavendish Laboratory, amid the windswept valleys of north Wales, and in the industrial heartland of Birmingham - The Basis of Everything is the story of the coming of the atomic bomb, and how the unlikely union of two scientists - Ernest Rutherford, the son of a New Zealand farmer, and Mark Oliphant, a peace-loving vegetarian from a tiny Australian hills village - would change the world.

The story that bonds Ernest Rutherford and Mark Oliphant is as extraordinary as it is unlikely. They were kindred souls, schooled and steeped in the furthest frontiers of Britain's empire, whose restless intellect and tireless conviction fused in the crucible of discovery at Cambridge University's celebrated Cavendish Laboratory, at a time when nature's deepest secrets were being revealed. Their brilliance illuminated the sub-atomic recesses of the natural world and, as a direct result, set loose the power of nuclear fusion.

It was a heartfelt, enduring partnership, born at the University of Adelaide's modest physics department and then flourishing further in the confines of the Cavendish before ultimately driving the famed Manhattan Project, which produced the world's first nuclear weapons, unleashed to such devastating effect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Rutherford and Oliphant were men with a shared devotion to pure science, who, through circumstance and necessity, found themselves betrayed as instruments of wars they detested but were duty-bound to prosecute. Consequently, their influence was pivotal in the last great global conflict the world witnessed and in engendering the thermonuclear threat that has held the planet hostage ever since. Yet their pioneering work also lives on in a vast array of innovations seeded by nuclear physics, from radiocarbon dating and TV screens to life-saving diagnostic-imaging devices.

PRAISE FOR THE BASIS OF EVERYTHING

"In The Basis of Everything, journalist Andrew Ramsey has succeeded in telling a story so detailed and compelling that even knowing where it leads does not distract from the journey." The Sydney Morning Herald

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Aug 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781460709559

Andrew Ramsey

Andrew Ramsey is a journalist and author who has written about cricket for more than 20 years. In addition to having his work published in numerous newspapers around the world including The Australian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Hindustan Times and The Hindu, he has been a contributor to Wisden Cricketers' Almanack. He has covered around 100 Test matches including a number of Ashes series in Australia and England, among them the 2005 campaign in the United Kingdom regarded as the 'greatest Ashes battle of the modern era' and Australia's dual 5-0 whitewash summers on home soil in 2006-07 and 2013-14. His book The Wrong Line, which chronicles the travails of the travelling cricket writer, was published in 2012. He is currently Senior Writer with cricket.com.au and, when not ensconced in a press box or an airport, lives in Adelaide, South Australia.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

South Australia, 1925

For the third time in as many decades, Ernest Rutherford sailed into the port of Adelaide while being buffeted by the gathering headwinds of imminent change. He was certainly grateful to meet land after a torrid Indian Ocean crossing. So tempestuous was the voyage from Cape Town aboard the SS Ascanius that a section of the ship’s teak railing was ripped from the deck during a south-westerly gale. It meant the physicist and his wife, Mary, had spent much of the Australia-bound leg bunkered down in their first-class cabin.

Rutherford therefore inhaled deeply on the brackish breeze that fluttered almost apologetically across Port Adelaide’s Outer Harbor as he unsteadily descended the gangplank slung from the steamer. It had not long gone nine o’clock on the morning of 3 September 1925, and he paused momentarily to ponder the changes – to the crowded passenger wharf directly in front of him; to that portion of an extraordinary life story behind him; to the mind-bending details he had unearthed about the very world around him – wrought during the thirty years since his initial visit.

Adelaide had been his first port of call after leaving New Zealand in 1895 as an unknown and uncertain science student bound for a brash adventure at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, where he had earned instant notoriety as the first scholar from such distant dominions to be admitted to the exclusive institution’s hallowed cloisters. When Rutherford had returned to Adelaide in 1914, he had come cloaked in the acclaim rightly afforded the first human to prove that an atom of matter could be divided. That accomplishment had earned the son of a peripatetic flax farmer a knighthood in his adopted English homeland, and a Nobel Prize for his pioneering exploration of the sub-atomic world. But on that occasion, when he had arrived as figurehead of a British scientific delegation, he had carried foreboding as well as fame. The political unrest boiling in Europe upon his departure that northern summer had exploded into conflict while he was at sea. It was a conflagration that would rapidly escalate into the war supposed to end all wars.

So Rutherford, who had turned fifty-four just days earlier, might have justifiably wondered what consequences would flow from his third sojourn in Adelaide in 1925, the launching point for his series of lectures to be given across Australia and in his homeland, New Zealand. Those addresses would shed light on the astounding experimental work he was overseeing in his now-fabled Cavendish Laboratory. And it was those findings that had already fundamentally changed the world’s understanding of, and relationship to, the universe’s building blocks. Rutherford’s genius had revealed to science, to everyone, the mysteries of atoms and their constituent parts. It was information that had hitherto remained unseen and unknown by humankind, and with it had come whispered warnings about the huge power these minuscule particles held and the danger that might be awoken if it were let loose.

Yet for all his insights, Ernest Rutherford did not foresee the chain reaction that would be set in motion by his Adelaide stopover. Indeed, the footfall from that early spring morning that would ultimately echo through history was muffled amid the back-slapping reverence of the local dignitaries who comprised his quayside welcoming party. Barely had Rutherford alighted upon dry land when he was ushered to a car and driven to a formal civic reception at Adelaide’s grand Town Hall.

While his wife made a head start on the couple’s planned reunion with their respective families in New Zealand that would follow the lecture tour, Rutherford was chaperoned to the mayoral gathering. Adelaide was in a celebratory mood – though not altogether in expectation of the two lectures the famous visitor was scheduled to deliver. Rather, spirits were lifted by the bud-burst of pure white almond blossoms across the suburbs and throughout their hills backdrop, confirming not only the passing of winter, but also the imminent opening of the annual Royal Adelaide Agricultural and Horticultural Show.

The Town Hall event was attended by the most eminent figures from the city’s sole university, among them Antarctic pioneer Sir Douglas Mawson, then Professor of Geology and president of South Australia’s Royal Society. Mawson’s discoveries upon earth’s last, vast unexplored continent more than a decade earlier afforded him significant renown. But now a new generation of intrepid explorers, led by Rutherford at the Cavendish, was gaining similar fame by probing sub-atomic territory that could not be seen, much less traversed.

Adelaide’s Lord Mayor, Charles Glover, could not resist the opportunity to indulge in a little cultural appropriation by decreeing that Australians might ‘advance some sort of claim to nationhood’ over Rutherford through his New Zealand pedigree. Mawson, in turn, showered praise upon the slightly self-conscious guest of honour, who responded to the rapturous applause by describing himself ‘as a comparatively insignificant unit – an atom of the universe as I am today’.¹

Mawson would have none of it. ‘No-one [is] more distinguished in the realm of science today than Sir Ernest Rutherford,’ he declared. ‘In fact, I doubt there has ever been anyone more notable – he is so fundamental, so thorough and complete that his work will stand for all time.’²

But if Rutherford needed confirmation of just how fleeting eminence can be, it came when the reception concluded and he waited beneath the Town Hall’s heavy stone portico for a taxi to the South Australian Hotel, where a bundle of correspondence sent on from Cambridge awaited. As a local newspaper later revealed, ‘It was about one o’clock and hundreds of people were hurrying to lunch, unaware that they were passing one of the world’s most distinguished scientists. If he had only been Jack Johnson, the pugilist, or a cricketer, it would require a posse of police to clear the footpath, exclaimed an attendant at the reception to his companion.’³

Accompanying Rutherford as local liaison agent was Kerr Grant, Adelaide University’s Elder Professor of Physics. Grant well knew of Rutherford’s hectic Australian itinerary, yet he also understood how rarely such an esteemed figure set foot in his domain. Seizing his chance, the professor asked Rutherford if he would consider making an informal visit to his physics department the following day – Friday, 4 September. To his delight and surprise, Rutherford agreed without hesitation.

This unexpected, unscripted engagement would reshape the future.

* * *

Such was Rutherford’s celebrity at that time that details of his landing, his welcome reception, and his inaugural lecture were recounted in studied detail by the next morning’s newspapers. Mark Oliphant found those accounts so engrossing that even the rattle and roll of his daily steam-train commute to Adelaide University was not sufficiently severe to prise his eyes from the newsprint. Oliphant habitually spent the half-hour journey from his new marital home at Glenelg thoroughly immersed in the latest international science journals, or studying textbooks that informed his work as a researcher and demonstrator in the university’s physics department. On this Friday morning, however, as spring dawned and the city readied for its showpiece annual carnival, the twenty-three-year-old’s attention was reserved exclusively for the story on Ernest Rutherford.

While his fellow travellers buzzed with chatter about the next day’s round of football matches, or craned for glimpses of the recently finished fairgrounds where the Royal Adelaide Show would come alive over the weekend, Oliphant’s interest was strictly academic. And the topic that captivated him was the man he knew well from Rutherford’s myriad published works, but whose presence he never envisaged he might one day share.

On having reached his destination at Adelaide’s railway terminus and climbed down from his carriage, Mark Oliphant neatly folded the pages of newspaper into perfectly proportioned rectangles and tucked them snugly beneath the arm of his tweed jacket. As he struck out on the gentle, ten-minute walk to the university, he carried no inkling that that ‘one day’ had dawned. And that his life would soon be irrevocably changed.

* * *

That very morning, Rutherford paid his promised visit to the physics department, then located on the ground floor of what is now Adelaide University’s Mitchell Building. Kerr Grant proudly detailed work being undertaken at the new biochemical laboratory, and showed off the dedicated physics and engineering building that was nearing completion a short walk from the current, confined physics quarters. Some students and laboratory staff who were tinkering with purpose-blown glassware and antique brass calibration tools immersed themselves in their tasks so as not to stare at the famous visitor wandering among them. Others, doubtless startled by Rutherford’s thunderous voice and booming laugh, which bounced off the worn wooden floorboards and bare stone walls, attached themselves to Kerr Grant’s tour group. The party numbered around 200 by the time it reached the new building, where Rutherford launched into an informal address that featured animated updates on the work being carried out by his ‘boys’ at the Cavendish Laboratory.

When Rutherford spoke, the excited hubbub that had built behind him during his inspection of premises old and new was stilled to silence. Even the artisans adding the finishing touches to the pristine experimental space downed tools as the famed physicist explained the latest sub-atomic secrets and how they had been revealed. He detailed how particles previously unknown to humankind were being violently collided at the Cavendish, and the resultant pieces forensically examined. The stories that Rutherford told carried his hushed audience from credulity to unshakeable belief, such was the passion and authority with which he spoke.

There was no-one, among the enthralled audience, more moved by Rutherford’s presence and propositions than the young man who stood silently on the group’s perimeter, a tall, looming presence, with a vertiginous plume of rust-coloured hair. His eyes, framed behind gold-rimmed spectacles, sparkled at each of Rutherford’s wholehearted jokes, and grew wider with every revelation of the boundaries being pushed at Cambridge.

Like that day’s eminent guest, Mark Oliphant hailed from humble origins with no ancestral connection to higher learning, and had overcome numerous obstacles to win a place at university. In the almost three years since graduating under Kerr Grant’s guidance with a first-class honours degree, he had held positions as physics department researcher and demonstrator. But as he stood impassively among the freshly installed workbenches and few pieces of scattered apparatus that Friday afternoon, Mark Oliphant was rendered as awestruck as any first-year novice.

Amid the buttoned-down sensibilities of Adelaide University in the 1920s, where students – save for the sizeable female cohort – routinely sported suits and ties, Mark Oliphant showed a free spirit. While the young man’s skill at crafting equipment and conducting experiments had won the attention of senior staff within the small physics faculty, his manner had distinctly polarised his peers. From the outset, some of his fellow students had regarded him as a high-spirited prankster. He had proven himself adept at hurling water bombs and firing ‘grape guns’ – narrow glass tubes from which the fruit could be forcibly expelled, like a blunted blow dart. In those varsity play fights, he was also known to discharge the foaming contents of a fire extinguisher on his enemies, if such a weapon was conveniently at hand. During his early student days, he had once leaped from a low-rise rooftop with only a home-made parachute to arrest his descent.

Others described Oliphant as aloof and prone to flashes of temper that would quickly subside, one fellow student claiming: ‘In the laboratory he was often bossy, abrasive and rude. He used to give orders, I thought him over confident, yet he could also be a pleasant enough chap.’⁴ Another, Walter Schneider, described him as a ‘big, burly, almost bearlike boy – a pleasant companion, but a loner’.⁵ Predominantly, Oliphant was seen by his peers as a larger-than-life figure. What was also obvious in the independently minded student was his preparedness to challenge accepted wisdom.

Yet when Sir Ernest Rutherford carried out his tour of the physics department, Mark Oliphant was rendered a mute onlooker. As Oliphant would later recall of that epochal meeting, ‘at that time, members of the University as humble as I, were not introduced to such illustrious visitors’.⁶

It was Rutherford’s character and conviction more than any polished presentation or rhetorical flourishes that won over Oliphant that portentous day. Indeed, during the years to follow, Oliphant learned that Rutherford’s presentations were often as likely to infuriate as illuminate. What made them resonate so clearly with those who understood his vision, however, was the unashamed love he felt for his sub-atomic subject matter.

‘Rutherford was not a good lecturer,’ Oliphant would reflect. ‘He hummed and he erred and he haa-ed, and he stood back from the blackboard and looked at it for periods of time, but there was something about him that made you feel that he cared. That this subject of physics generally, of understanding nature was something that really mattered to him. It was his life. It was inspiring in that sense.’⁷

That inspiration was indelibly transmuted to Mark Oliphant during that brief encounter. As Ernest Rutherford sketched a vivid word picture of his Cavendish Laboratory and the history being written within it, Oliphant found himself deeply drawn to the world of atomic investigation – a field for which Cambridge University had become internationally famous, but in which Oliphant held little direct experience at that point. He knew enough, however, to understand immediately where his destiny resided.

‘It was so inspiring to hear a man of that calibre talk when I’d been taught by . . . ordinary sort of professors who were quite good in their way but not Presidents of the Royal Society . . . the man who had unravelled the whole story of the way in which uranium changed, over time, into lead,’ Oliphant recounted years later. ‘He was so generous in giving his praise to the people who were his students, who worked with him and [were] doing the jobs, that I thought to myself then, That’s the man I want to work with. So from then on, my efforts were directed towards trying to get a scholarship to go to Cambridge.’⁸

Even though they did not exchange a word during Rutherford’s short visit, Oliphant intuitively felt their futures would become entwined. He sensed that the great physicist was someone from whom he could learn not only about science, but about the world and its vast complexities. As Oliphant would later confirm: ‘He became a hero to me and, later on, much more than a hero. He was a man that I grew really to love . . . he was so inspiring. Wherever he was, he always was the dominant figure. Not in any sort of domineering way, but simply through sheer personality.’⁹

* * *

Within three years, Ernest Rutherford and Mark Oliphant would forge a partnership that transcended that of master and pupil, and, over the subsequent decade, grew more akin to that between father and son. These two men, born thirty years and 3000 kilometres apart – Rutherford on the South Island of New Zealand, Oliphant in the similarly progressive settlement of South Australia – shared more than a passion for science and a drive to unlock the deepest mysteries of nature. They were also shaped by the mutual experiences of colonial settlement, modest upbringing, rudimentary education and unfettered curiosity for their respective worlds.

There was nobody whom Ernest Rutherford came to trust more implicitly, or rely upon more completely, than Mark Oliphant. In turn, there was no-one Oliphant more unashamedly revered, or whose approbation he sought more than that of Rutherford. It was Rutherford who ignited Oliphant’s research passion when happenstance brought the pair together at Adelaide University. It was Oliphant’s vision and pragmatism that immediately endeared him to Rutherford upon their first meeting in the sanctum of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. It was Rutherford who ushered Oliphant into the hallowed ranks of nuclear physicists, and who earmarked him to continue his peerless legacy. And it was to Oliphant that Rutherford turned in his private moments of self-doubt and personal grief.

Their friendship was fundamental to the last true golden age of institutional science, when the race to crack the secrets of nuclear physics and harness their frightening force gripped the globe. That quest, of which Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory was the core, would ultimately yield breakthroughs unimaginable a century ago – television, computers, smartphones, wireless technology, satellite tracking, cancer treatments, medical imaging and the internet among them. It also produced an arsenal of weaponry that bears the two men’s distinct fingerprints, and which continues to cast a malevolent shadow over the planet’s very future.

Rutherford and Oliphant’s story is that of the nuclear age’s conception and birth. Yet its roots took hold in a time of similarly bold ideas and unbending spirit – an age when Britain’s utopian nineteenth-century vision was transplanted into its furthest colonies.

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.’¹

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’.²

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.³

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 like-minded 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’.⁴ 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.

Beatrice became the stable domestic presence in her eldest son’s life. ‘My mother had far more influence on me in reality than my father,’ Mark would recall. ‘I’d been brought up in a family where the mother was a very important person indeed, and for us children . . . much more important than our father.’⁵

The other influential figure during his time at Mylor Primary School was the head teacher, Bernard McCaffrey. When in 1973, as Governor of South Australia, Mark returned to his former school to open its new library, he lavished praise on McCaffrey, who had introduced him to the words of Coleridge, Stevenson and Tennyson, and nurtured within him a deeper love of literature than that already instilled by his parents. The ruddy-faced Irishman taught his pupil ‘to distinguish the good from the bad, the works of genius from the mediocre. It was here in Mylor that books became not only my companions, but my very life.’⁶

New Zealand, 1883 to 1886

Similar influences were wielded upon Ernest Rutherford at a comparable age. On landing at Havelock in 1883, the Rutherford children found themselves under the tutelage of the school’s sole teacher, Jacob Reynolds, aged just twenty-seven. With James Rutherford’s work at the remote flax mill requiring his presence on site for six days of every week, Ernest developed a close rapport with his charismatic young schoolmaster.

The singular focus that had characterised Ernest Rutherford’s childhood was channelled into organised study, as the twelve-year-old student began to understand that academic achievement offered him the surest path away from his dad’s life of relentless physical toil and economic uncertainty. What also became apparent at this time was Ernest’s capacity to block out all distractions and narrow his concentration to the single task in front of him. This was likely honed in a household shared with so many siblings, and then at Havelock school, which was so oversubscribed that its senior students took their lessons in the town hall.

The previously self-absorbed boy responded to the tough academic benchmarks set by Reynolds, and the methods his teacher employed to help him reach them. Reynolds’s unapologetic quest for excellence saw him criticised by some indignant Havelock parents for demanding that students complete homework during their summer holidays. Yet despite being two years younger than others who sat the standard six examinations to provide the qualification, if not the means, to progress to secondary school, Ernest passed with quiet certainty.

South Australia, 1910s

At around the same age that Ernest Rutherford was nearing secondary school, Mark Oliphant’s horizons were also broadening. The fascination for the world, and curiosity as to his place within it, that grew as he approached teenage-hood had been nurtured by what was in some ways an unconventional upbringing.

As Baron Oliphant sought escapism from his stifling desk job, his political views had become increasingly shaped by the Fabians’ social-democratic ideologies. His search for further answers had taken him beyond the High Anglican Church and into the faddishly popular Theosophy movement. For years, Baron served as president of Adelaide’s Theosophical Society, which promoted the revival of ancient Hindu wisdom as a panacea to growing global materialism and societal fragmentation.

The Oliphant boys would later recall visits to their home by a parade of eclectic souls. Faithful to Theosophy’s central belief that followers could be reincarnated in human form, these men and women gathered around Mark’s hand-made kitchen table in spectral light, attempting to contact the departed. Their means of communication was a wooden planchette, fitted with a writing implement that would scratch and dance across the table top under the lightest touch from the wide-eyed participants, supposedly scribbling notes from the spirit world.

It was one of several episodes during Mark’s developmental years that had helped galvanise his abhorrence of fundamentalist religious or political ideologies. It had put paid to any thoughts of following his father’s wish for him to pursue a calling to the High Anglican priesthood – a wish that meant Mark had taken additional Latin classes at primary school.

During their flirtation with Theosophy, Beatrice and Baron Oliphant had also embraced vegetarian eating. When Mark and his younger brother Nigel visited the farm of a schoolfriend