Dave's Journey

Dave was born in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in East Africa during the Second World War in 1943, the third child of Frank Johnson and Marion Chalmers (who were both born in England). Dave's parents met while they were both at Oxford University before they headed off to work in Ghana (then The Gold Coast) and later in East Africa. Indeed nearly all of Dave's siblings were born in Africa. 

One memorable event in East Africa was seeing rain falling upwards onto the ceiling of the house (having presumably come in through the open windows). Another was at a birthday party where the children got to ride on horses and elephants - both of which terrified Dave. 

Dave managed to fall headfirst into a rubbish firepit only to be rescued by a terrified servant who rushed him to hospital many miles away. He also contracted a serious bout of measles which left Dave with translucent skin and left him very sensitive to sunlight for several years - this terrified his mother who had recently lost his elder brother to malaria. 

Shortly after the war had ended the family decided to move back to England as local politics in Kenya were getting quite nasty and a senior African politician told my parents to leave before the situation got too bad (the beginnings of Mau Mau). So in 1947, Dave's father Frank left for England to look for work - his first job was in the London area teaching at a school where Donald's eldest daughter taught many years later! 

Work was very difficult to find with all the returned service men also looking for work and so Frank moved to Lancashire and sought a teaching position in the Manchester region. He eventually gained a job as a teacher of biology at a grammar school in Chadderton, a few miles north of Manchester. He was able to find a house to live in and in mid 1948 sent for the rest of the family to join him. 

Growing up in Lancashire was a challenge for the family with a completely different way of life, a miserable climate, and not much money to feed the hungry children and clothe the rapidly growing boys. On top of all this it turned out that speaking with the locals was quite tricky as many spoke a very broad dialect which was almost incomprehensible to parents. The boys, having grown up speaking both English and Swahili, learned very quickly and within 3 weeks were able to translate between the local dialect and proper (Oxford) English. 

Primary school was in a very old building over a mile away, a distance that the older boys had to walk both ways every day. Donald managed to fall through the floor of the school one day and Dave was impaled sliding along on a wooden school bench - both events very embarrassing for all concerned. The senior years were being phased out gradually with Donald being one of the last senior student to stay there until he finished school. Donald's first job was working in an electrical workshop and then later he joined up for 21 years in the Royal Navy (a career move that really suited him). 

Younger brother Tony went to the same school and Dave remained there until 1954, going to   the local grammar school where his father Frank had been a teacher. At this time Frank went off to Huddersfield to learn about the (then) new audio-visual techniques which led to a challenging job in the Sudan. 

Dave was then sent to Hutton Grammar School, near Preston in Lancashire, where he was a boarder for the remainder of his schooling. The school was very good academically and Dave responded with excellent results in Physics and Maths. He found the boarding school life to be quite difficult - sport was not his strong suit so he became expert in unusual activities including archery, photography and scoring for the cricket team. Dave spent his first Christmas holidays at Durham with his uncle Alan (Marion's eldest brother) who was a single person living with his aunt Flora - a stubborn old lady with a really strong German accent - and Maud who was a live-in housekeeper. 

During the summer of 1955, Dave travelled with Marion and Tony to visit his father in the Sudan. At the end of the holidays, Tony returned with Dave to Hutton. Tony suffered badly from his treatment at the boarding school resulting in him not being able to enjoy a good life for the rest of his days. 

In 1961, Dave gained a place at Durham University to study geology with some physics. He gained a lower second class honours degree in geology - he was greatly disappointed not to have done better. University life was exciting and full of new experiences. Many activities were tried but most of the recreational time was spent exploring the north of England and further afield where possible. While at Durham, Dave renewed his relationship with his uncle Alan who was a senior academic in the Physics Department at the university. 

After the award of his degree in 1964, Dave married his first wife Patricia (Pat) - a mathematics student from Leeds. Dave continued on at Durham to do a Masters degree in geophysics in which he did very well. However, the geophysical work included a marine survey on a very old boat which barely survived a bad storm in the Irish Sea - Dave didn't really like sea work after that terrible experience! 

After completing his Masters in 1965, Dave and wife Pat emigrated to Tasmania with Dave to embark on a PhD at the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Pat to start her maths teaching career. 

Dave and Pat arrived in Australia as "£10 poms" - English people who migrated to Australia for the princely sum of £10 and who signed up to stay for at least 2 years. The voyage ended in early 1966 in Melbourne, where Dave and Pat met Marcus and Nancy Kirsner (Nancy was the daughter of Marion's uncle Walter Rosenhain). Dave and Pat continued the journey flying from Melbourne to Hobart in an ancient DC3. In Hobart they were met by Peggy (Nancy's sister) and Ron Green who was to be Dave's supervisor at the University of Tasmania. 

The first few weeks in Hobart were quite an adventure learning how to cope with a completely new way of life including managing the shopping with no shops being open during evenings or weekends. A small group of friends helped the transition process and taught Dave and Pat how to drive on bush roads and sing all the Australian songs. 

Dave's university work started by him trying to understand the geology of Tasmania. Much of Dave's geological lessons in Durham had concentrated on the Carboniferous of the north of England but sadly it soon became apparent that there were no rocks of Carboniferous age in Tasmania! 

Soon afterwards the university received a visit from a team from the Bureau of Mineral Resources (known as the BMR and now part of Geoscience Australia). Tom Finney and Paul Shelley (Dave had much to do with Paul later in life) gave a talk on a high-altitude aeromagnetic survey of Tasmania that they were undertaking. Dave became very interested in this work and carried out some interesting studies which led to a better understanding of the deeper levels of the crust under Tasmania. 

Dave completed a gravity survey of Tasmania and this together with some seismic results from Operation BUMP and the high-altitude magnetic data were the basis of his PhD work.

Dave gained his first job in 1969 as Lecturer in Geophysics at the University of New South Wales. This new job and organising an International Conference meant that he did not complete the writing of his PhD thesis until 1972. To complicate matters he and Pat became divorced during this period. 

After 2 years at the University of New South Wales, Dave moved to Macquarie University in the northwestern part of Sydney. Macquarie was a relatively new university with some different ideas on teaching including holding classes for evening and external students. These additional groups of students tended to be older and more motivated. 

Dave was fortunate to be able to give courses to mature students with considerable experience and was able to build on their knowledge and observations when explaining the cause of features in datasets and images. 

The early years at Macquarie saw Dave getting married to his second wife, Carol Ann McGrath who was a tutor at Macquarie and came from Newcastle, NSW. In 1977, Ann gave birth to a baby girl, Alexandra McGrath Johnson who would later become the second Dr Johnson in the family and go on to do great work in the field of paediatric neurology. 

Dave undertook interesting research work at Macquarie in several fields including mapping the evolution of Gondwana as various continental fragments moved apart and interpreting the magnetic field observed at satellite altitudes. The latter work resulted in Dave receiving an award from NASA. 

Sabbatical leave was mainly held in the USA working with colleagues at the Goddard Space Flight Centre near Washington DC. Official trips to China and Japan provided opportunities to experience different cultures. Attendance at many international conferences took Dave to interesting locations meeting very interesting colleagues and making close friends. 

The publication of over 100 scientific articles and conference papers finally resulted in Dave being promoted to Associate Professor after the system managed to loose his application for a year. 

Life at Macquarie had become increasingly more challenging as pressures mounted to full- time contributions to teaching, administration and research. Dave became increasingly unsatisfied with the level of commitment that he was able to sustain. Then a colleague from Canberra visited to ask if a temporary position in Canberra's scientific research community would be of interest. Dave quickly took leave of absence for two years to work at the then Bureau of Mineral Resources (BMR) in Canberra. 

Sadly this period of time also involved another divorce. 

Escaping to Canberra was quite an experience as the system regarded the secondment to Canberra as a new employment. Hence they had to pay for moving costs, which meant that all items had to be catalogued - including every teaspoon! 

Dave was given a fairly free hand in his work at BMR and was able to make considerable progress with increased understanding of the magnetic field satellite fields and their cause. Australia turned out to be one of the few countries where features in the field could be positively related to geology rather than to causes high above the ground. Large scale geological regions, particularly in western Australia, could be identified in the fields and this was used to assist investigations of large scale geology and even diamond exploration. 

At the end of the first year with the BMR it became increasingly apparent that the end of the two-year secondment would result in Dave returning to Macquarie. This was so unappealing that he then asked if there were any opportunities of becoming a permanent employee of the organisation. As it happened an advertisement was just then being prepared for a senior position within the organisation which would be of real interest. 

Dave was successful in his application and became head of a very small group involved in database research for the BMR. He was able to develop concepts that would lead to information being centrally managed - in contrast to the earlier situation where just about everyone had their own private versions of datasets (including the coastline of Australia). 

Dave's developing role in the organisation changed again when he was transferred to help establish a new organisation within the department to manage resources information of interest to the BMR and its sister agency the Bureau of Rural Sciences (BRS). It soon became apparent that much of the information was the responsibility of state government agencies who did not want to give away their data to Canberra. 

The concept of developing a directory of resources information collected and managed by all state and federal government agencies was formulated and resulted in the development of a directory system. Maintaining good relationships between state and federal agencies was deemed to be of critical importance to the project and hence Dave and his senior colleagues travelled extensively. Surprisingly this effort was unusual among federal agencies at the time. 

A new director of the agency was employed and Dave took the opportunity to leave the public service and become a consultant. Dave had finally risen to heights where he was given a new car for his use - this perk lasted 6 weeks before he resigned. 

The initial few years of being a consultant proved to be quite challenging. The task of finding enough work quickly turned into one of managing too much work and eventually being in the position of needing to turn down offers. 

Dave joined two other ex-BMR senior staff who had set up a consultancy to assist the geological exploration industry. He was responsible for establishing and maintaining the computer network. He also developed three-dimensional imaging techniques for viewing data collected during open-pit gold mining operations. 

The next venture was with a friend who had established a business of selling photographs and publishing guides to the NSW National Parks. Dave became heavily involved in this activity and taught himself to use a desktop publishing system to upgrade and improve the production of the guidebooks. 

The group were also able to help government agencies to develop websites, the most interesting of which involved building a resources atlas for Australia supporting a wide range of interests including mining, agriculture, forestry and water. Paul Shelley, who Dave had met in Hobart many years previously, played a key role in keeping our group going through increasingly difficult times. 

A change of government, lead to changing priorities and major changes to resource management in Australia. Many consultancy groups, including ours, suffered a major downturn as a result.

Fortunately, Dave was able to gain work with some Brisbane colleagues who were reviewing Queensland government agencies in their development of super-computing systems. !" 

Dave and a colleague from Canberra shared motel accommodation near to a train station and to the location of the government laboratories. The consultancy team comprised the two of us from Canberra and the two local consultants, one of whom ran the project. 

Several weeks of intense activity resulted in a major presentation and report which guided the agency's future acquisition and use of super-computers. The role of the agency came under question as their requirements depended heavily on expectations of state government. 

Dave moved all his goods and chattels to Brisbane and rented a house. This move enabled him to bid for a follow-up contract to continue the work. The consulting work was very rewarding in many aspects as well as getting to know Brisbane and how the state government agencies operated. 

During his time in Brisbane, Dave spent much of his free time exploring walking trails in the Scenic Rim and on the coast.

 Sadly this work came to an end and calls from Anne to help manage Irene in her decline meant that eventually Dave decided to move to Port Macquarie and retire (again).