jock.003- australian science archives project home page（运动员。003年澳大利亚科学档案项目主页）.docVIP

FIVE The Intellectual Hub Jock sailed out of Sydney Harbour once again in early January 1937. He was bursting with matriculation. In the six months they spent together on Espiritu Santo Tom had been giving him a spicy taste of a culture totally different from his own; and the more Tom deprecated it or made fun of its foibles, the more intrigued Jock became. Without giving up any of his own bravado he had been quietly absorbing a lot about the desirability of work, language, experience, form that would impress intellectual selectors. The larrikin was learning to be quieter - though never silenced. He had a long way to go academically, but he did not know it then. He was simply fired up with thoughts of becoming a scientist explorer; thinking of Charles Darwin, his extraordinary travels and the extraordinary results; and the great scientific names that surrounded Darwin and followed on seemed, through his reading, to be an almost familiar family. On the other hand, Australians viewed the English to be, with notable exceptions, totally uninterested in Australia except as a source of soldiers prepared to fight for what was then their empire, and cricketers who could raise their interest and partisan hackles. He was aware it would be hard work to further his own academic interests as well as those of the expedition. It was going to be a whole new and quite different adventure. He was excited by it. * From the moment the ship berthed in Colombo he was in a strange environment - tropical but a world apart from Melanesia and northern Australia. The sounds and sights of Asia pressed around him in a whirl of markets, rick-shaw boys appealing with dark soft eyes, so courteously persistent, bullock carts, cobras in the streets and carved above temple doorways, yellow-draped priests and galleries of art leading to the colossal statue of the reposing Buddha. He was fascinated. Then as they sailed on the Southern Cross slid below the horizon the Northern