Beginnings
In 1905, a research student named Geoffrey Duffield from Adelaide, South Australia, attended a meeting of the International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research in Oxford, England. It was here that he had the idea to establish a solar observatory in Australia. Duffield graduated with a BSc from the University of Adelaide in 1898 and received multiple scholarships to study at Cambridge and Manchester. He believed establishing a solar observatory would fill the gap in observations that existed between India and the United States. It would take 18 years of passionate lobbying and advocacy for Duffield’s idea to become a reality.
After his initial idea was met with little enthusiasm, Duffield put forward a resolution at a meeting of the International Union of Solar Research in Paris in 1907. Presented by Sir Norman Lockyer, who discovered helium in the Sun, the resolution read…
“That this International Congress hears with great satisfaction of the proposal to establish a Solar Physics Observatory in Australia and expresses its decided opinion that an observing station in that part of the world would fill the gap which now exists in the system of observatories distributed over the Earth and yield contributions of great value to the study of the solar phenomena.”
The Australian Federal Government was not supportive, but that year, the estate of Lord Farnham offered Duffield a 15cm Grubb refractor to get started. This was followed in 1909 by the gift of a 22cm Grubb refractor from wealthy amateur astronomer James Oddie, who had built his own observatory in Ballarat, Victoria. Oddie offered the refractor as a gift to the Federal Government on the understanding that it be used as the nucleus of a solar observatory. The Oddie refractor was soon joined by a coelostat from Franklin Adams and a pyrheliometer from James Fowler.
Duffield gathered support from the Royal Society, British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Australian Solar Physics Committee, of which he became secretary. Importantly, he gained the support of Governor General Lord Dudley, and finally Prime Minister Alfred Deakin approved the observatory’s establishment and initial funding.
In January 1910 a board comprising Robert McDonald (New South Wales Undersecretary of Lands), R.P. Sellors (New South Wales Geodetic Survey), Henry Hunt (Commonwealth Meteorologist), Charles Scrivener (Commonwealth Director of Surveys), and Pietro Baracchi (Government Astronomer for Victoria) advised on potential sites for the new observatory. A site at Mount Stromlo in the southwest of what was to become the Australian Capital Territory was chosen for testing and land was leased from grazier Frederick Campbell to establish a very simple observatory building to house the Oddie Telescope in 1911. The first observations made using the Oddie Telescope were made on 8 September 1911 and over the years it was used for many research projects including a detailed study of the asteroid Eros and to search for remnants of supernova in our galaxy.
With Duffield back at University College in Reading, Pietro Baracchi and his assistant J.M. Baldwin made observations from the Oddie Telescope at Mount Stromlo to test the site’s suitability. Henry Hunt also built a meteorological station on the site. The observations were presented at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1914. Duffield intended to use the meeting to pressure the Federal Government to move forward with the observatory, but this proved unnecessary, with the Federal Government committing in principle to the establishment of a permanent Commonwealth Observatory. When interviewed about the announcement, Walter Duffield stated…
“It was important that Australia should participate in this work, because there is no observatory of the kind in the same latitude between America and India, and such an institution would fill the gap in the chain already existing around the Earth and enable the Sun to be kept under continuous observation.” (Adelaide Advertiser, 4 August 1914).
