Esteemed Australian best-selling author and historian Roland Perry OAM was incensed when he went to see the 2023 film Oppenheimer to discover there was no mention of Sir Mark Oliphant the Australian genius who developed radar and showed Oppenheimer how to build the bomb.
“I had interviewed Oliphant at length in 1994 so I saw the film almost 30 years later and I had a vision of him having done all that work with him,” Roland tells Have a Go News from his Melbourne home.
“There was another book, The Fifth Man, which I published in 1994, Sir Mark was most helpful because he had equipment stolen by the KGB double agent Lord Rothschild and, at that point, I wanted to talk to him about it. He was very open and fantastic about it.”
Roland Perry’s latest book, Oliphant, tells the fascinating story of this little recognised Adelaide born man, the true genius behind the atomic bomb, a maverick Australian scientist who changed the course of history.
August 6, 1945, saw the United States launch the world’s first nuclear attack on Japan. Oppenheimer will be remembered as the father of the bomb, but it was Australian physicist Sir Mark Oliphant who discovered how it could be done.
Oliphant, the greatest experimenter among the top physicists – explained this bomb, small enough to be carried on an aircraft – to Oppenheimer in 1941. Yet the award-winning film starring Cillian Murphy has written Oliphant out of this essential history.
Roland says leaving Oliphant out of the story of Oppenheimer is almost the same as leaving Winston Churchill out of the narrative of World War II.
Mark Oliphant won over Churchill, brought the leading American scientists on board, was a key player in the Manhattan Project and influential in explaining it to President Franklin D Roosevelt to secure ongoing support. He also made radar possible, saving Britain from Nazi invasion.
Roland traces Oliphant’s life from humble beginnings in Adelaide, early academic triumphs and collaboration with Sir Ernest Rutherford, his crucial involvement in radar and the Manhattan Project, to establishing the Australian National University and serving as a highly controversial Governor of South Australia, later falling out with then Premier Don Dunstan.
“My research for the book took me almost everywhere,” Roland says. “You can imagine the UK was my main source because Oliphant spent much of his early years there and there were the Churchill cabinet papers, but the main source was Oliphant because he gave me so much of his time and the information was so detailed.
“When I spoke with Oliphant back in 1994 he was slightly crusty to start but when he realised I wasn’t out to skewer him, he opened up quite a bit. And very close to the end, I asked: why aren’t you with the government, why isn’t the government using you?
“And that was a sad moment because I realised that he wasn’t being used and he wanted to be used.
“At that time, Sir Mark was living in Canberra, an old man who would have been reading and keeping up with stuff. He introduced me to cold fusion which is now about to hit worldwide and it’s been hammered and bashed and suppressed by those who don’t want the free energy and the Tesla-type energy to emerge.
“Everyone I’ve spoken to over the past 30 years have said Oliphant was the driving force of nuclear energy,” Roland says. “Then Australian Prime Minister Ben Chifley wanted him back here in the 1940s but British Prime Minister Clement Attlee refused because he was so important over there.”
On a personal note, Oliphant was married to Rosa, a devoted wife who accompanied her husband to Britain. Tragedy struck the household in 1933 when their son, Geoffrey, contracted meningitis and died. The couple went on to adopt two children, a boy and a girl who achieved great things in adult life.
He was mindful of his family’s safety during the war and sent them back to Adelaide in 1940.
Oliphant faced a moral reckoning in the bomb’s aftermath and became a vocal advocate for peace and nuclear disarmament.
Roland Perry has written a remarkable, well researched book about an authentic, Australian genius who should be better recognised.
The author of 41 books, Roland Perry, a former journalist on The Age newspaper, was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2011 for services to literature as an author.
His sports books include biographies of Sir Donald Bradman, Steve Waugh, Keith Miller and Shane Warne. He is the bestselling author of Monash: The outsider who won a war.
Although a keen cricket follower, Roland won’t be in Australia this Christmas. He will be in Singapore researching material for a new book and then at his home in the remote mountains of Thailand where he goes to write in peace.
Oliphant by Roland Perry ($34.99, Allen & Unwin) is available now at most good bookstores.
