Monica Oliphant (nee Kammer) has honoured life in science shaped by her migrant family experience in the 1950s
Monica Kammer at her graduation in 1960 from Adelaide University, where she was an honours science student in physics. With her is husband and scientist Mark Oliphant and his father Mark Oliphant, a nuclear physicist and later governor of South Australia.
Image courtesy Monica Oliphant
Monica Oliphant (nee Kammer), a member of both the South Australia energy and environment halls of fame, had her distinguished service to the renewable energy sector honoured as an officer of the Order of Australia in 2015. In 2016, Oliphant was named senior South Australian of the Year, recognising her life’s links with the state that were extraordinary on several levels from the start.
Monica Kammer was the daughter of an Austrian father and Hungarian mother who met during a walk in the Vienna woods in the late 1930s. They married and briefly lived in Vienna before her father’s work as an electoral engineer took him to France and then England in the mid 1930s.
Monica was born 1940 at Ilford, London, at the start of World War II when her father was sent, as an enemy alien, to an internment camp in the south of England. While in hospital awaiting Monica’s birth, my mother was told her husband was on a ship en route to Canada that had been bombed and sank with no survivors. She also was a told after the birth that Monica was “mongoloid” – a term used then for Downs Syndrome. Without real friends, poor English and often discriminated against, Monica’s mother firstly disproved the diagnosis about Monica by home schooling her with the Montessori method. She also received the good news that her husband hadn’t been killed.
After the war, Monica’s father worked for electrical engineering company Plessey but later joined a start-up firm that failed. This prompted their decision to go to Canada or Australia. They left for Australia, and Adelaide, on the Otranto in 1949. Their first impression of Adelaide, on the train trip from Outer Harbor, wasn’t good but was preferred after her father’s second job interview in Melbourne in winter without electricity during a coal miners' strike.
With her father taking a job (until he retired) at Adelaide’s Philips Electrical Industries in Hendon, Monica’s first family home was a rental room in Port Road, Bowden, house. Monica was enrolled at Hindmarsh Primary School. After a few months, her parents bought a home for £1,300 in a housing trust estate in Blair Athol. She later described the “wonderful” life “later added to, by the purchase of our first car – a Holden sedan …The house had a copper washing trough heated by gas and a hand wringer – one up on the wash board and kitchen sink we had in England. We also initially had an ice box fridge and the ice man delivered ice every few days. There was one power point per room and the milkman delivered milk to a billy can – that I still have – and Golden Crust bakery drove past in a horse drawn cart selling either white bread or brown bread.”
Monica walked three kilometres to Blair Athol Primary where she met another English girl, Joyce, “still my best friend”. They went later to Enfield High where the headmaster and Latin teacher was Maurice Pyne – grandfather of future federal politician Christopher Pyne. Monica loved Latin but her passion for science, through astronomy, was ignited in 1958 by joining Adelaide Moonwatch Group and tracking the first artificial satellites, Sputnik (Russia) and Explorer (USA), from the Adelaide University physics building roof.
Monica gained a scholarship and studied physics at Adelaide University, graduating with honours as the only female in her year. It was also where she met and married, aged 21, her physics demonstrator Michael Oliphant, five years older than her and son of nuclear physicist and future South Australian governor Mark Oliphant.
Monica tried work experience in astronomy at Mount Stromlo Observatory, Canberra, but found it "too abstract". Her first full-time job in physics was at the then-Weapons Research Establishment at Salisbury, north of Adelaide, working on the first laser produced in Australia in 1961. A whole room of equipment was devoted to creating a ruby laser – the start of hundreds of laser applications.
