Happy New Year to all the TPHS BLOG readers and here is the first one for 2012 and hopefully not the last before the reunion!

This one is from Paul Gottlieb:

School: I loved school and, with the exception of Grade 6 at Yarralumla Primary after the introduction of area schools, spent my entire school life at Telopea Park.

I have fond memories of three teachers. Earle McGann who showed me what fun Mathematics and Physics could be and who knew full well that caning the class record holder for “cuts” was pointless. Doug Webster introduced me to Latin and gave me my love of Grammar and foreign languages. And finally, my 5B English teacher, whose name escapes me, who through her enthusiasm, inspired me and Jill Moore to get an A in English to spite Bill Price (sorry Sue) who had demoted no-hopers like me from his precious 5A class.

After School: I spent three fun years at ANU getting a degree in Mathematics and Physics with the likes of Malcolm McIntosh, Bill Wilson and others where we majored in baiting the “cordies”, drinking, rugby and  dangerous driving. I soon realized that I was not cut out for academia and went to Sydney University in 1966 to study Electrical Engineering. With my BSc, I had a lot of exemptions and a very small workload and majored in Cryptic Crosswords in the morning in the Buttery, lunch time movies in the Union Theatre and boozy evenings at the Forest Lodge hotel with the occasional lecture thrown in. This life of leisure was interrupted in 1967, when I spent a year working as a caterpillar tractor driver on a Kibbutz in Israel after the six day war carrying my trusty UZI and avoiding land mines. I returned to Sydney University in 1968 to complete engineering and start a Master’s Degree in computer hardware design. I met my life’s partner Kay Pearse, a Geneticist from Queensland, in 1968 at Sydney University’s International House.

Work: It was time in 1972 to stop being a perennial student. When I couldn’t defer my Cadetship bond with Defense, Science and Technology any longer, Kay and I moved to Melbourne to work at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories. I didn’t use any of my previous training in developing computer simulations of F111 bombers. Simultaneously Malcolm McIntosh was working at another DSTO organization in Adelaide. In 1980, Kay and I spent six months travelling the USA in a camper van – fantastic experience!

More Work: I finally put my engineering skills to work in 1983 when I moved to CSIRO Mineral Chemistry in Melbourne to develop a mineral analyzer. Since then, I have worked developing and applying that technology around the world in the mining and oil & gas Industries. Despite burning down the prototype and its entire laboratory later that year, it was a great success. In 1992 CSIRO moved us to Brisbane to set up a new research facility for the mining industry.

Even More Work: In 2003, a few of us formed a spin-out company to commercialize the technology. We lasted until the GFC in 2008, when the mining industry shut down and so did we. Subsequently, the technology was acquired by a US company. We have set up a “Center [sic] of Excellence” in Brisbane and I have worked for them for the last three years going “back to the bench” inventing stuff. I am enjoying it tremendously and have earned the nickname “never retire”.

Most of those nearly 30 years have been spent travelling the world to mines and oil rigs in weird and wonderful places.

 

Family:  Kay and I eventually got married in 1980 “to make my parents happy” - and we have two wonderful sons and one granddaughter –one son works for Ausaid, and tragically, lives “On the Northside” in Turner. The other is a sports journalist at Fox Sports in Sydney. Both parents’ science genes were lost somewhere along the way.

Thanks TPHS for giving me a great start in life.

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