John Paul Wild - Lowly Start in Australia

Lowly Start in Australia

From London, Wild had obtained an assistant research officer job with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR – precursor to CSIRO) at the Radiophysics Laboratory near Sydney. He described the position as "a humble one": to maintain and develop test equipment. But within a year he had, as he put it, "wheedled his way" into the new science of radio astronomy, and he described 1948–50 as

a tremendously exciting time .... The only two really powerful groups in radio astronomy were the Australian one and Cambridge; and ... we all thought we had the edge over the Cambridge group. Joe Pawsey was the sort of father of radio astronomy in Australia. He was a wonderfully inspiring leader, very self-effacing and taking no credit for himself, and he was a delight to work under. And he did something which I appreciated greatly: he left me alone to do my own research but I could come to him at any time and get his advice.

This advice, Wild acknowledged, "was often very perceptive, very good". Pawsey’s approach became a template that Wild would follow.

In the 15 years from 1949, the solar group that Wild had joined and which he soon came to lead achieved an international reputation in solar radiophysics. Their instruments revealed for the first time the presence of charged particles and shock waves travelling through the solar corona, and their potential effects on "space weather". The group's innovative design of observation equipment and ground-breaking investigations into the nature of solar radio bursts and the disturbances that gave rise to them cleared the way to classifying most types of bursts by their spectral appearance and presenting models to interpret their characteristics.