Some Stories by Colourful Freddie Soutter

Fred Soutter operating the 277F radar at Townsville, Queensland, in 1958.

The old balloon filling room at Townsville was a model for lack of safety having boxes of caustic soda stored on one side and, on the other, boxes of ferro silicon, both chemicals used for the generation of hydrogen; and the balloon was filled between those boxes with their sharp edges. The hydrogen was brewed in two A size cylinders mounted on tripods out in the open on the edge of a gutter used to drain water from the swampy area surrounding the building. It was often necessary to walk around in mud up to the ankles in both making the hydrogen and releasing the balloon. One actually got to the building from the built-up road by a built-up path and once off that path it was swampy ground. Snakes were and possibly are still prevalent on Townsville aerodrome; I had many an encounter.

Cyclone Agnes on 6 March 1956 provided my first experience of a tropical cyclone. It was also a first for the Bureau's evolving radar network. I learnt much about radar observations from Cyclone Agnes along with Tom Sleath. Tom had his camera with him and we mounted it on a Magnetron transit crate sitting on a chair and, with the operations room packed with RAAF officers, took photographs until the power failed.

I was instrumental in processing that film and making enlargements of the photographs. Tom and I also carried out height measurements of the outflow of rain cloud in the eye of the cyclone; these measurements were later confirmed by the crew of a DC4 en route from New Guinea to Brisbane. However, being the Senior Observer (Radio), I was initially reprimanded by Head Office for these experiments despite them being efforts to gain an insight into the cyclone; I should, instead, have been concentrating on the very difficult method of coding up the information. However, after Head Office had completed an analysis of the radar data, my reports and photographs, and data from other sources, I was acknowledged and requested to submit further details of the work that Tom and I had done. The Bureau's handbook of Cyclone Detection by Radar evolved from these reports and photographs. Tom and I were also acknowledged in name at a world wide Cyclone Symposium held in Brisbane in 1956. I later developed a method of calculating the wind velocity to a high order of accuracy in the rain bands of a cyclone.

Bureau of Meteorology