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It’s an exciting time to be in science, says UWA graduate and astrophysicist Dr Jim Buckee who has created a UWA fellowship that will bring an additional smart mind to the team taking on the challenges posed by the world’s biggest radio astronomy project, the Square Kilometre Array. Simone Hewett reports.

According to rugby experts, the hooker is the player with the most responsibility: not only does he have to hook the ball for the scrum-half and throw it for the jumpers in the line-outs, but he works under intense pressure.

As President and CEO of Talisman Energy (formerly BP Canada), Jim Buckee’s skills honed as a hooker for UWA Rugby Club during the 1960s meant he was well-equipped to deal with the challenges of running such a large, highprofile company. And all this on top of his considerable academic accomplishments, including a Bachelor of Science (First Class Honours) at UWA, followed by a PhD in Astrophysics at Oxford University.

But after almost 40 years’ working in the petroleum industry around the world in nine different countries, Dr Buckee was keen to throw his support behind “big science” research. And the announcement last year that the world’s biggest radio telescope – the Square Kilometre Array project – was to be built in Western Australia’s Mid-West, provided a scheme that ticked all the boxes.

“I’ve always been interested in the issues the SKA will be tackling,” Dr Buckee said. “They are very fundamental, they are to do with our basic understanding of the universe and this will be a world-class project.

“Much as the Large Hadron Collider is the biggest thing at the little end, this will be the biggest thing for a long time at the large end so I’m very glad to be involved.”

Dr Buckee donated $2 million to support radio astronomy research at UWA in the form of a postdoctoral research position. The Jim Buckee Fellowship in Astrophysics will provide ongoing annual funding for a researcher to join the growing ranks of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at UWA.

“I think the SKA will be really important scientifically to the University and to the State. It has already attracted 120 new minds,” he said.

“As I understand it, the WA Premier Colin Barnett says the State can be great through science and this is a figurehead project.”

Dr Buckee said he would always be grateful for the financial support he received as a student, both from the Gledden Fellowship (at UWA) and later from Merton College (Oxford).

“They were very important...and really helped me through a critical point in my life and so I’m happy to do things for other people,” he said.

At the age of 12, Dr Buckee emigrated from the United Kingdom, with his family in 1958. He attended Wesley College before studying physics, chemistry and applied mathematics at UWA, living on campus at Kingswood College (now Trinity) for most of his student life.

“Wesley and UWA gave me a very good formal education and so I got a lot of the principles right,” he said. “That’s so important. You can be creative for the rest of your life but you’ve got to have the basic principles and I think UWA prepared me very well in that sense. “A lot of my memories of my time at UWA involve rugby training on James Oval. It was a lot of fun but I also worked hard.”

Winning a Gledden Fellowship to study astrophysics at Oxford University came at a crucial time for Dr Buckee – it meant he was not drafted into the army during the Vietnam War. “I had been called up to serve so if I had not won this scholarship, I would have ended up going to Vietnam,” Dr Buckee said. After Talisman had established a scholarship program in Canada and he had set up his own scholarship at Oxford’s Merton College, Dr Buckee was keen to offer support to his alma mater.

A conversation with Professor Peter Quinn, Director of ICRAR, during a UWA Alumni event in London created an opportunity to realise his ambition. “I got talking to Professor Quinn and asked what he needed and he said he’d love a postdoc fellowship. So I said, ‘OK I’ll do that’,” he recalls. Dr Buckee said it was an exciting time to be involved in science research.

“Peter Quinn, Lister Staveley-Smith and Ian McArthur have said they just wish they were starting out again in their careers so they could see what the future unfolds,” he said. “There was a feeling during the past 10 years that we’d done most of science and we’re just tidying up the loose ends and now it’s really clear we don’t understand anything. It’s breaking apart (knowledge) in the big end, the little end and in the middle as well. As Professor Ian McArthur [Head of the School of Physics] put it: ‘Seeing quantum effects on a relatively macro scale, that’s in the middle as it were, and we’re beginning to be able to do that’.”

With family members still living in Perth (including some UWA students), Dr Buckee divides his time between the UK and WA. He is delighted to be involved in bringing a super smart mind to Western Australia to work on the SKA project. “What I get out of it is a loose acquaintance (with the fellowship recipient) and the ability to keep up with the project. I’m not going to do any work myself but I’m really interested to see what the researcher will do and what the SKA project itself discovers.”

“It meant I couldn’t come back to Australia immediately afterwards; I needed an extension and Merton gave me some money so I was able to finish my PhD. At that time lots of companies were trying to recruit university leavers, and I was offered a number of positions but chose to go to Shell because they offered six months of practical training in the Hague, which sounded like fun so we did that.”

By the time he completed his PhD, Dr Buckee had married a fellow Oxford student Susan, and the newlyweds spent six months in the Hague before Dr Buckee went on to work in several northern European oil and gas hubs, including Norway, Aberdeen and Lowestoft.

Dr Buckee returned to Perth in 1973 to work on the fledgling North West Shelf project, including stints as a drilling engineer on the North Rankin A and Goodwyn and Angel gas discoveries.

He then moved to the Burmah oil company, based in ew Zealand, before joining BP in 1977, working in London, Calgary, Qatar, Norway and Alaska. He returned to Canada in 1991 and was made CEO of Talisman Energy in 1992 where he remained until his retirement in 2007.