John Malcolm Muir
John Malcolm Muir
(1928 - )
I was born at North Sydney in 1928 of a New Zealand mother Marion, née Owens and father, John Muir, a Scotsman from the Orkney Islands, who was a marine engineer and RAN Lieutenant Commander. My father died during the nadir of the Great Depression when I was 5 years old. This loss provided the spur and with the support and encouragement provided by my mother, I did well as a student and was successful in winning scholarships through secondary school and university.
At the selective North Sydney Boys High School, the grand old Headmaster Robert Harvey ruled. Although my years spent there were entirely during the Second World War, the quality of the teachers, all university graduates, and Harvey's leadership provided a liberal education of high standard. Equal weight was paid to the study of Latin, history and modem languages as well as the study of the specific subjects of English, maths and physics which are the basic tools of a civil engineer. I thrived in this environment and was top student every year. At Sydney University, I entered the Faculty of Engineering in 1945 some months before the end of the war. Our year was fortunate in being joined in 1946 by a batch of ex-servicemen whose maturity and sense of purpose provided a model for the recent schoolboys. In those days the first two years of the engineering course were common to all disciplines and gave us a breadth appropriate for the generalist engineering manager, which I later became. Professor Willie Miller was a cultured man who occupied the chair of Civil Engineering for about 35 years. His lectures were a model of intellectual rigour and precision and were delivered in a soft Scots accent. His examination questions in structures were very searching because they were designed to be answered by an "elegant solution". He looked at engineering as a broad profession, where practitioners should be involved in both design and construction.
I graduated in 1949 with an honours degree in civil engineering and with a special interest in concrete construction and control. Therefore, I felt fortunate to be employed as an assistant construction engineer, to work on the "remedial measures" at Burrinjuck Dam on the Murrumbidgee River, 35 miles from Yass, NSW. The dam had been completed originally in 1925, but had been subsequently overtopped by a flood, without damage or distress by the way. The wall of the dam was substantially improved, firstly leakage of water through the wall of the dam was practically eliminated by constructing a cement grout curtain. Secondly the uplift water pressures under the base of the dam were substantially removed by drainage holes drilled vertically from the top of the wall connecting to a hand excavated tunnel system in the base rock of the dam - this was in hard granite Fortunately common sense prevailed and small gelignite charges were permitted to fracture the rock. Thirdly, mass concrete buttresses were constructed on the downstream face to increase the cross section of the dam wall. But this was done the hard way, by pouring individual five feet concrete lifts in each buttress. The back of each lift was held a distance of two feet off the face of the original concrete wall by a small forest of twisted steel dowel rods. This gap was subsequently filled by pumped concrete, in a series of lifts to a total height of 250 feet above the base of the wall. The specification required that the stresses in the two adjoining faces of the concrete should be roughly equal at the time of filling the 2 feet space. When you consider that the stress in the new buttress concrete at any point was due to the weight of concrete above it, whilst on the other hand the stress in the adjacent old concrete in the downstream face of the dam was related to the depth of water in front of the dam at any time, you can realise what frustration there was in programming the infill concreting. The final remedial measure was to increase the height of the dam and to construct new spillways and fit these with steel gates.
During the two years that I was at Burrinjuck, I lived in the single officer’s quarters in the staff township on the edge of the lake formed by the dam, and at the bottom of a mountainside. It was a singularly beautiful spot. We could swim, fish and sail in the lake. Around the corner and about a mile further along the access road the wild gorge of pink granite rock started. The gorge was framed by Barren Jack and Black Andrew mountainsides and provided a classic site for a major dam.
The workers, some 150 in number, lived in a different village on flat ground about three miles further away from the dam, in barracks or in their own tiny houses which had cost about 800 pounds to build. There were still shortages of materials and labour in 1949 due to wartime legacy. Restrictive labour practices reduced production. The most irritating and costly one was the seniority system of the 12 or so plant operators, where the longest serving operator manned one of the two cableways across the damsite, the third a crane and so on through compressor stations to the most lowly who operated the front-end loader at the sand stockpile. When any operator was sick or AWL, his place was taken by the next senior operator, who was replaced in turn by the next senior and so on. Finally, a temporary operator was brought into the most junior piece of plant.
Probably due to the shortage of labour, in late 1949 Burrinjuck Dam was one of, if not the first construction job in Australia, to receive a large batch of "Displaced Persons" as workers. About 40 "Balts" that is Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Ukrainians, joined us as general construction labourers. At that time, only the AWU had sufficient generosity of spirit to welcome these migrants into its ranks. The carpenters’, metalworkers’ and plant operators’ unions would not yet admit the "New Australians".
Our migrants had been handpicked and generally had received better education and training than the equivalent Australian. However, the newcomers threw themselves into their work and production improved and the workers' camp became much more civilised. The desire of the newcomers to become proficient in English was so strong that I was rebuffed in my efforts to practice my schoolboy German on them. Australia owes a huge debt to these early "New Australians". The great engineering and mining projects of the 1950s and the 1960s could not have happened without them. Their conditions of entry were to work where directed for two years after arrival. For the migrant this often meant loneliness and separation from their wives and families who were in base camps such as Bonnegilla near Albury. A further benefit to the nation was that when the new migrants dispersed after their compulsory two years, they assimilated well, a large proportion stayed in the construction industry, they did not generally rush to a big capital city, and they did not form ghettos.
I haven't talked yet about my duties, or my boss and mentor the Resident Engineer Keith Davey, or the awe of watching a monster flood pouring down the spillway channels at night under floodlights whilst suspended in a man-cage midspan on the cableway, or the disaster when the temporary spillway weir collapsed taking nine men to their deaths At this point we have only covered two years out of a 46-year engineering career.
Two documents which were prepared for other purposes are enclosed. They do however give an outline of my career. The first is titled Career Statement (one page) and is devoid of detail. The second is titled Curriculum Vitae (five pages) and runs backwards chronologically giving all my professional activities and positions held, but is very sparse on the individual projects.
To access the Curriculum Vitae document please use this link:
To access an oral history interview with John Malcolm Muir please use this link:'
