Fears for the future of Parkes's CSIRO radio telescope as the budget axe looms over the NSW town’s famous observatory

“Parkes’ Biggest Event Since Gold Discovery”, screamed the headline of the Parkes Champion-Post one August day in 1958.

It reported that the previous evening, Richard Casey, the minister for Australia’s science agency, the CSIRO, had announced that a sheep paddock outside Parkes in western New South Wales would be the site of Australia’s new, £500m giant radio telescope.

Casey said that Australia had already played a pioneering role in the burgeoning field of radio astronomy. “With the aid of this giant radio telescope, Australian scientists will be able to maintain for us a prominent position in this new and important branch of science,” he said.

The telescope has spent more than half a century since picking up signals, perhaps none more important than a faint transmission in the late hours of 20 July, 1969. Famously, one-fifth of the world’s population watched Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon in grainy footage beamed from right here in rural NSW.

This month, the telescope featured in another Champion-Post front page, but it was a glummer story. It read that the Parkes observatory would not be spared from a $111m cut to CSIRO funding in the May federal budget. Staff numbers would be “scaled down” and more scientists would have to use the telescope remotely.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest CSIRO cuts are front-page news in Parkes. Photograph: Julian Chung/Guardian Australia

The cuts have seen unprecedented nationwide protests by scientists, who warn nearly 20% of the CSIRO’s staff will be shed in the next two years. With no science minister to appeal to, scientists are seeking urgent meetings with the industry minister, Ian Macfarlane, and hoping to convince incoming crossbench senators to soften the budget blow. In Parkes, only a skeleton staff, likely fewer than 20, will be retained to carry out essential functions.



The Parkes radio telescope seems to erupt quite suddenly out of a landscape of wheat fields, sheep and green pastures along the Newell Highway. Up close it hums incessantly, its 64-metre wide saucer straining to capture the radio waves emitted by the celestial objects above. Below, the scientists have planted apple trees, scions of the tree that stood in Isaac Newton’s garden from which the famous apple reputedly fell.

The town of Parkes, 20km down the road from the observatory, is telescope country. Pictures of the dish are pinned up in shop windows and on stickers in the back windows of cars. The local rugby team is called the Spacemen. The sleepy town of 10,000 is named after the “father of federation”, Henry Parkes, but it is the telescope that appears on the town logo.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A souvenir T-shirt celebrates Parkes' famous landmark. Photograph: Julian Chung/Guardian Australia

Still, not everyone in Parkes is concerned about the possible impact of budget cuts. At the pub, Tony, a local resident, declares that the dish is “a pain in the arse”. “I live nearby and you can’t use a mobile phone around it,” he said.

He gives a potted, apocryphal history of the telescope. “They all talk about when the Cold War was on, there was a nuke pointed at Parkes,” he said. “Not many people know that.” (Not true.)



“They won’t tell you this either, but if you Google Earth it, you can only zoom in so far. You can’t go right down. It’s got a restricted area around it,” he said. (Also untrue.)



Lives in small country towns tend to intermingle; in Parkes, lives intermingle with the dish. Isabel Monday remembers her mother, in the local Country Women’s Association, catering for the official opening of the telescope. “It was a big thing, of course. People didn’t really understand those things. But I knew it was a big thing,” she said.

Her granddaughter, Louise, did work experience at the observatory visitors’ centre and used to ferry a group of Chinese scientists between the telescope and the town once a week. “It’s definitely an icon. It’s put Parkes on the map,” she said.

The NSW town is named after the 'father of federation', Henry Parkes. Photograph: Julian Chung/Guardian Australia

David Cooke, a former director of the observatory, was still a junior engineer when Nasa enlisted the observatory to help broadcast man's first walk on the moon. “We were waiting with the telescope pointed in the correct direction, just waiting for the moon and the lunar module to rise into our view,” he recalls. “Then suddenly, this great big windstorm came, and it looked like we might possibly have to stow the dish and miss the signal.”

Winds as Armstrong prepared to walk reached 110km/h, more than four times what was then considered a safe speed to use the telescope. But staff gambled on keeping the dish in place.

Contrary to the 2000 film about the telescope, The Dish, Parkes did not broadcast Armstrong’s famous first steps. Instead, it picked up the signal eight minutes in. Nobody ever played cricket on it, either. “No, no,” Cooke said. “I think the director would have been very, very angry if anyone got up there and did that.”

Cooke says he’ll never forget that day in 1969. “When we had all finished, I went down and stood outside. I think the telescope had been stowed. I looked up and saw the moon, and thought, well, you know, there are three people up there. And we helped to put them there.”

The presence of world-class scientists and engineers so close to the remote town has also had its benefits. “Our churches have some of the best sound systems and lighting systems in the world,” Parkes mayor Ken Keith said. “The scientists have cross-pollinated the town and married in and become part of the community.”

Despite the looming job cuts, Keith is optimistic about the future of the telescope. At a minimum, he says, someone will be needed to maintain the enormous structure. “After all, there’s 1,000 tonnes of steel in that dish floating above people’s heads,” he said.



Exactly how many jobs will be lost at Parkes remains unclear, but staff are anxious. “No one believes that it would become a completely unmanned operation overnight,” a senior astronomer within the CSIRO, familiar with the observatory, said. “But everyone is holding their breath.”

“Obviously, it’s very poor for morale, because people hear nothing. And when they hear nothing, they’re concerned for their positions, and for the positions of their colleagues,” he said.

Among the jobs on the line are electronics technicians, electricians, mechanical fitters and turners, and operations scientists. “Maybe the axe won’t fall as hard as they fear, but who would know?” the astronomer said.

He said that despite the assurances of CSIRO officials, there’s little doubt that staff cuts would impact on the telescope. “It will mean less scientific capability, maintenance of the telescope could be compromised, downtime could be increased,” he said.

Remote observation from an office in Sydney would also mean that “students who would normally be dragged along to the telescope no longer will be", he said. That robs astronomy of one of its key recruiting tools: the chance to plant young scientists under the dish and let its hum capture their imagination.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jobs could be on the line at 'the dish' as the CSIRO faces budget cuts. Photograph: CSIRO/AAP Image

The CSIRO has quarantined from funding cuts the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, a next-generation network of 36 antennas working as a single telescope in the West Australian outback.

Other telescopes have to bear a heavier brunt of the cuts as a result. Another telescope, at Coonabarabran in central NSW, has already been slated for closure.

Fernando Camilo, the director of astronomy at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and a regular visitor to Parkes, says it would be a shame for the dish to go the same way.

“Parkes is deemed to be the most productive radio telescope in the world, when you consider the number of citations,” Camilo said. “The Parkes telescope is responsible for the most successful pulsar survey ever done. It has discovered approximately two-thirds of all the pulsars ever found.”

He worries that reduced funding might spell a slow death for the Parkes observatory. “As a scientific instrument, it’s still world class … But if you have a 50-year-old telescope and you stop investing in it, in a few years it’s not going to be much good. It’ll stop returning world-class science.”

It might be bad news for Parkes, too. One hotel owner said further job cuts at the telescope could cost him up to $20,000 in lost business. And reduced prominence for the telescope could impact on the 120,000 visitors who take the Telescope Road exit off the Newell Highway each year.

“This town has two things going for it,” the hotelier said. “The Elvis festival and the dish. And the Elvis festival goes for one week a year.”

