1. EARLY YEARS

I’ve attended two of the reunions organised by my Point Grey High School classmates since our 1970 graduation. I enjoyed renewing old acquaintances but found one aspect a little tiresome. When queried what I do for a living, the invariable response upon hearing that I’m a scientist was: what!?

I grew up in a middle class suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, attending the local public elementary and aforementioned high schools. There was surely a solid education to be had there but I instead spent those 12 years daydreaming, mostly of becoming a jet pilot. As evidence of my performance and state of mind, I offer Miss Rosene’s assessment on my first Grade 3 report card: “Mark is restless and inattentive in class. He is capable of better work if he would apply himself.” (Fig. 1.1). My second report not only suggested a lack of improvement (“Mark is still restless and inattentive in class. His work suffers from lack of concentration.”) but included a grade of U (for Unsatisfactory) in science explaining that “The child receiving this symbol (i.e. U) is not doing satisfactory work. Parents should discuss the matter with the principal (original emphasis)”. The request for such a meeting on the last page of the report is left unsigned suggesting that my parents already despaired of me ever catching on academic fire. As many left handers do (Schott and Schott, 2004), I initially wrote backwards¹ which they found worrisome and possibly a harbinger of future academic struggles.

By Grade 10 I had streamed into the ‘humanities’ track to avoid advanced science and math classes and graduated high school with a ‘gentleman’s C average’. On a happier note, that same year at age 17, I “soloed” (Fig. 1.2) and earned my private pilot certificate. Youth employment opportunities were so grim that Pierre Trudeau’s government opened the military reserves to virtually any enlistee and I started to build hours towards my commercial pilot certificate from money earned firing howitzers (not a skill easily transferred to ‘civvy street’) while attending community college. When I say ‘attend’, I do recall smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in the college cafeteria while debating the finer points of Marxism with my cronies but my first semester GPA of 1.0 testifies that class attendance was not a priority. At about this time I was due for my second aviation physical exam which delivered what to me was devastating news: the flight surgeon had detected a heart murmur. Although of no actual health concern, before airline deregulation and the explosion of air travel, this was a show stopper to a career with Air Canada.

As I was coping with the fallout of that aeromedical bombshell, my buddy Fred told me of his plan to move to Australia and suggested I join him. In 1971, any Caucasian² citizen of a fellow Dominion could gain residence in Australia simply by showing up with proof that you weren’t tubercular. I supplemented my artilleryman’s pay with the nightshift at the post office during Christmas rush and was able to purchase a one way air ticket to Sydney with a few bucks left over (airline travel was expensive back then!). We headed off to a nation that, unbeknownst to us, was entering a protracted period of stagflation and high unemployment. After several weeks looking, and with our few dollars dwindling, we found work picking pears outside Ardmona, Victoria. I recall that we were paid $2.85 per cubic yard (a bit over half a ton) of fruit picked and allowed to sleep in shacks in the orchard free but each charged daily board of $1.50. Initially we were each able to pick close to a cubic yard a day but Fred contracted dysentery (the water for our ablutions came straight from the irrigation canal) about the time they moved us to less mature trees. With just me working the 10 hour shift we were losing ≥15¢ a day. Clearly unsustainable, once Fred was ambulatory we executed what the locals called a ‘midnight flit’ and rode the rails to Melbourne.

As I browsed the classifieds in The Age newspaper the next morning, I happened on an ad (Fig. 1.3) for a ‘junior male’ (i.e. a teenaged guy) assistant to prepare rock thin sections in the Melbourne University geology department. It wasn’t that I thought I was particularly well suited to this position but simply that I met the rather minimal qualification (i.e. leaving standard = high school graduation). I called immediately, was told I’d snagged the last spot in their targeted pool of 45 applicants, and slotted for an interview with the lab supervisor the following week. That meeting with igneous petrologist Dr. Aldo Cundari (e.g., Cundari, 1979), a recently arrived Italian immigrant, went well although my principal qualification in his eyes seemed to be that I wasn’t, like the other 44 applicants, Australian. I started work just as the school year began and was permitted time off to attend Geology 1 lectures³. I had no way of knowing, but the trajectory of my life had just changed dramatically.

Aldo was a more than understanding boss and tolerated my late adolescent hijinks up to a point. One incident worth mentioning here crystallises in time both my general naiveté and then view of our field. As winter set in, my fellow technicians were keenly anticipating taking a ‘sickie’ one Friday for a day in the snow at Mt. Donna Buang. They spoke so openly about the concept that I phoned Aldo while awaiting pickup telling him “I’m taking a sickie today to go to the snow and won’t be in”. He laughed, told me to enjoy myself, and said we’d have a talk first thing Monday. But after a few such incidents, he grew weary and took me aside for a scolding: “Mark, I don’t have time to watch you all day…I am a scientist” to which I reflexively blurted out: “You’re not a scientist, you’re a geologist”. If there is a larger theme to this essay, and my career for that matter, it is grappling with both the truth and inaccuracy of that statement.

When not annoying Aldo, I chatted with those Honours and grad students using the thin section facilities. They shared several traits, the two most salient being a Y chromosome and their origin in an eastern Melbourne suburb. In the absence of highly endowed private universities, the bourgeoisie seemed to have taken ownership of the old ‘sand-stone’ Tertiary institutions⁴. This somewhat insular culture appeared to breed a sense of entitlement, although in fairness Fred and I had just a few weeks earlier been picking fruit with chaps who had been rejected from volunteered military service in Vietnam. So we were going through some perspective adjustments as we literally fraternised with the other end of the socio-economic spectrum of Australian youth. One fellow who stood out from the rest was a first year Ph.D. student named Andrew Gleadow. Andy also hailed from the eastern suburb/grammar school set but appeared unaware of the upstairs-downstairs culture separating academics from the technician class. We shared several lunches at a local pizzeria where we discussed mutual interests in aviation and sci-fi. It was there – a year before Martin Dodson would publish his foundational paper (Dodson, 1973) – that I learned of Andy’s idea for something called thermochronology. I was captivated by his vision that a mineral date would one day be translated to reconstruct the denudation history of a mountain belt. Suffice to say that Andy would go on to become the doyen of the fission track geochronology community (e.g., Gleadow et al., 1986) and has remained a mentor and friend for over fifty years.

The Vietnam War, mentioned in passing above, would come to limit my time down under. Australia’s deep involvement in that war included a lottery-based conscription that, I learned from my new employer, included resident British subjects (e.g., Canadians). Melbourne Uni sent me repeated requests throughout that year to register for the draft and warned of the consequences of not doing so, including termination. But if the Royal Canadian Artillery had taught me anything it was that military service wasn’t for me – and no one was shooting at Canadians at the time! My regiment travelled annually to Ft. Lewis, just outside Tacoma, Washington, for an artillery competition with our U.S. Army counterparts. It felt odd crossing the border in our tractors trailing 105 mm howitzers – we joked about our silent invasion. But Lewis was a key transport hub for the Vietnam theatre⁵ and late evenings in the enlisted mess listening to horror stories from just returned vets cemented my view of what an absurd tragedy the war represented for young men on both sides⁶. Despite the unlikelihood of me ending up in a remote jungle trying to put down a popular uprising on Australia’s behalf, I had surely not traveled 8,000 miles to find myself back in anyone’s army. Fred and I departed Australia for southeast Asia by boat late that year ahead of my termination but, as it happened, just a matter of weeks before Gough Whitlam was elected Prime Minister. His Labour government quickly abolished both the White Australia policy and conscription and gave amnesty to draft resisters such as myself. A new look Australia was on the rise and I was free to return to it one day.

By this time Fred, like Aldo, had enjoyed enough of my company and we travelled separately through Southeast Asia, or at least to the extent that the deep rut in the ‘hippie trail’⁷ permitted. As evidence of just how localised it was, we ran into each a month later in the American Reading Room that the U.S. Embassy in Nepal then maintained in Kathmandu. A few days later, I was robbed overnight in my teahouse room. In an extraordinary turnabout, we were able to track the thief down in northern India and recover some of our possessions and currency but now had neither sufficient funds to get home nor the desire to return just yet. We decided to take a boat from Bombay (where I was treated for ‘blood poisoning’ in St. George Hospital) to Mombasa, Kenya, and then travel overland toward South Africa, which was the nearest nation that in principle would permit us to work. South Africa?

Growing up in the leafy suburb of Kerrisdale during the 1960s, we all shared an easy condemnation of American race relations that led to the violence, first in small southern towns and then in major cities, that exploded nightly on our TV screens. I recall feeling quite secure in my disapproval of Americans – a Canadian birthright⁸ – until my high school put on a production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. This theatre of the absurd play explored the power of conformity in the rise of fascism and invited me to query who I was in a new way (e.g., I’m a Berlin resident the morning after Kristallnacht; what am I doing?). It was easy to judge others growing up in an essentially mono-racial community without the social challenges attendant to a legacy of slavery but how could I know how I would respond to the social pressures exerted by, say, apartheid? On the other hand, I am by nature a contrarian. If my peer group couldn’t instill in me the need to pay attention at school, what chance did the Afrikaner National Party have? I mention this here as this personality quirk appears to have been an important component in my emergence as a scientist.

We’d heard along the hippie trail that entry into South Africa required 1) white skin, and 2) proof of return to your home country. As already noted, Fred and I didn’t have a return ticket or equivalent funds but reasoned that we were more likely to be permitted to stay as a fait accompli arriving at Johannesburg International Airport than if we simply pitched up at one of the several land borders to be easily turned back. Once again, our intuition proved faulty; the Jo’burg airport was one of the few entry points staffed by actual immigration personnel rather than the national police (who, we later learned, didn’t ask many questions before literally and figuratively rubber stamping your passport). We thus used most of our remaining money (airline travel was expensive back then!!) on one way tickets from Zomba, Malawi, to Jo’burg, spending the hour and a half bus ride to the airport getting to know Peter Glenshaw⁹, who was sitting across the aisle from us. Peter, a South African working for the World Bank, told us he was in Malawi assessing the economic value of pine forests planted by the British prior to independence in 1964. We were seated well apart on the airliner so didn’t further interact. At Jo’burg airport, Fred and I chose different immigration queues to enhance the odds that at least one of us would slip through but were both deemed ‘prohibited immigrants’ to be detained until Air Malawi’s next flight back in the morning.

The prospect of being penniless in Malawi was dawning on us when Peter, who had hung back in the baggage claim area while he watched our little farce unfold, stepped up to inquire what all the fuss was about. He claimed to the authorities (in Afrikaans) to have known us for a year, vouched for our characters, signed a bond of 1,000 rand for each of us (the total equivalent today of US$17,000!), and dropped us at the Jo’burg youth hostel. It was well past closing but Peter had called ahead for dispensation and the hostel manager had in turn asked a group of female residents if one would stay up to let us in. Susan, an Aussie redhead¹⁰, volunteered apparently intoning: “Oooo, eye loike Can-eye-dians”. A relevant detail: while visiting a farm in Zululand two weeks earlier, she had been thrown from a horse lacerating her scalp so badly that the sisters at the local mission hospital had given her a buzz cut in anticipation of stitches…before deciding it wasn’t so bad after all. So, Fred and I were greeted at the hostel door in the early hours by a baldish twenty-something with a pronounced gravel rash across most of her lower face. Of course we were instantly intrigued and both set about wooing this distinctive looking woman in the weeks that followed. Fortunately for me, Fred’s only employment option was a job at a gold mine in the far western portion of the Witwatersrand reef thus dropping him out of contention. I was able to use my experience at Melbourne Uni to get a job running a shift on the electron microprobe in the Anglo-American/De Beers research lab¹¹ just outside town (see Harrison, 2023). Susan and I settled in together in a one room flat at 247 Jeppe Street, would marry two years later and, in May 2024, celebrated our 49^th wedding anniversary.

My year in South Africa was perhaps the most stimulating of my life. The contrasts were extreme; a ruggedly beautiful country in which I encountered street violence most days (granted, we lived on Jeppe St.). The indigenous African employees in our lab were curious to engage with an outsider and we befriended many of the group shown in Figure 1.6. We visited these friends in Soweto several times (once legally; Fig. 1.6) and learned their nuanced views of the social dynamics that permitted a small minority to dominate the overwhelming majority. But rather than being challenged by my white (largely Anglophone) co-workers to conform to their racial norms, I found them generally uninterested in my socialising with black African co-workers but instead critical of my cohabitation out of wedlock. What a combo: a society of prudes who looked askance at fundamental human rights violations.

My duties were split between analysis of gold alloys and kimberlitic mineral surveys, the latter in an attempt to identify geochemical correlations with diamondiferous pipes that could be used as an exploration tool. I recall some excitement when knorringitic garnet appeared to strongly correlate but it later became clear that diamonds were more abundant than that particular garnet variety. The work quickly became routine and uninteresting. As the technicians with whom I shared electron microprobe shifts all had some form of university qualification in geology, it occurred to me that not only was I going to have to go back to school, but I would have to stay there a long time if I wished to have a stimulating career in the field. The 1^stInternational Conference on Kimberlites was held in Cape Town that year and a number of the foreign delegates dropped by to tour the lab. I sought advice from several of them¹² as to how I might proceed and all stated that my hometown university was as good a place as any to start. I thus returned to Canada and community college (via South America) to make up my deficiencies in the math and science courses that I’d shirked in high school.