TheBanyanTree: The proud dad reports

[Peter Macinnis]

I have shared with a few Tree friends the news that my daughter Cate got
her PhD yesterday: here is a bit more detail.

Just afterwards, we ran across one of Cate's teachers from second grade,
whose son got his bachelor's in the same ceremony -- she hadn't recognised
Cate, and asked me "what did she graduate in?".  Luckily she is also a
friend -- she taught all three of our kids, and drank in the same
illustrious circles.  "Red," I said, but I suppose I have to give more than
that. Cate is a botanist like her parents, but she did stuff with sea
grasses and their responses to pollution and other nasties. Under her full
name of Catriona Meredith Olwen Macinnis-Ng, her thesis is listed as "In
situ moniotoring of toxic pollutant impacts on the photosynthesis of the
seagrass Zostera capricorni Aschers."

Angus the older brother and barrister had a conciliation meeting called for
2 pm, and that precluded his arrival -- he also missed the dinner, as there
was a Bar and Bench (read "schmoozing with judges") dinner he needed to be
at. Well, his bad luck, I say. Julian, Cate's husband, is of Chinese
extraction, and knows Chinatown even better than Chris and I, and he found
a restaurant we did not know, and we had Peking Duck, where the skin and
juice is served on a flat pancake thing with sauce and a bit of shallot,
eaten by hand, salt and pepper squid, a couple of sweet and sours, the rest
of the duck with noodles, a Szechuan beef, monster prawns with severe
salting, satay pork, an unidentified spicy chicken and a rather unusual
fried rice with PINEAPPLE.

Duncan, a budding biotechnologist was there, and Cate's two thesis
supervisors came along -- we have known Peter Relph for some years, and I
used to work with his brother at the Australian Museum, and Ken Brown is an
Associate Professor who had been given a major teaching award at the same
ceremony, so he was pretty happy, and it turned out we had plenty of
friends in common -- there aren't THAT many botanists in Sydney, and he had
worked for some years at our old alma mater which we all happily pulled
apart and slammed as an irrelevant disaster.  Peter Relph is planning
another trip to Antarctica, and was discussing the tribulations of being a
phycologist (an algologist) in such parts -- the diatoms grow  on the under
surface of pack ice, which means you have to be set down on ice that may
start breaking up at any time, meaning people need to grab their gear and
run like hell, and if that doesn't work, they have to hope a crane can lift
them off.  Not your average dinner conversation, especially when we got
onto poisons, my current major interest.  I added four new items to
research, including an Edinburgh med. student who drank formaldehyde and
died, preserved from the inside out, providing some of the best tissue
samples known to science -- hey, we were six biologists and one who has
learned to get used to our ways, and the tables around us would have had no
idea, given the noise, what we were discussing.

The big thrill for us, though, was that an Australian Nobel laureate, Peter
Doherty (Physiology or Medicine, 1996) was getting an honorary doctorate
and doing the occasional address. I will be interviewing him, week after
next, if I have time to get to a conference in Canberra. It is a miserable
cold hole for thin-bloods like me, so I may miss out, but Doherty is a
good-value no-nonsense bloke who says it like it is.  "Most of you got
there by hard work and application," he told the new graduates. "A few of
you got there by doing the minimum, but you still fooled them, and that
means you have a worthwhile skill.  Go into politics where you can use it
-- we need more science-minded people in politics."

Both he and the chancellor, Sir Gerard Brennan, made a point of
acknowledging that the land we are on was originally the property of the
Eora and Guringai peoples -- Sir Gerard was formerly a High Court (think
Supreme Court if you are American) Chief Justice, and his son, Father Frank
Brennan, SJ, is another wonderfully decent man who cares for humanity -- I
met him at Woomera in the outback last year, where I had gone for rockets,
he for refugees, held in a prison camp in the desert -- he was in the
company of an old university mate.  With all the stick that the churches,
especially the Catholic church, and most especially the Jesuits get, it is
good to know that there are people like that out there.  Old Gerard is a
real white ant, who gets people with a passion for honesty and decency to
talk to the young people at graduation (we have now been to four at UTS)
and send them forth with perhaps a bit of hope burrowing through the cynicism.

I would like to get one of the Brennans to live in our spare room, so I
could chat to them or just listen to them. All in all, a memorable day --
now Chris and I just have to restrain ourselves from chasing Cate and
Julian to breed.

peter



  _--|\     Peter Macinnis, science gossip and wordsmith, pet and
 /     \    transport adjuster, specialising in miniature dogs and 
 \.--._*<-- vehicles, especially 3 kg St Bernards and bonsai trams     
      v     http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm