Sunday 18/10/2009 Page: 18
THE solar car race across the continent from Darwin to Adelaide has always attracted worldwide attention. But the line-up of anniversaries and historic references imbedded in the timing and the make up of participating teams of next Sunday's event will have historians paying as much attention as the solar industry lobby. First off, we have the Darwin connection.
Although the famous naturalist never visited, the HMS Beagle, the ship that carried him to the Galapagos Islands, did cruise into the bay 170 years ago. That is where we got the Darwin moniker from. The Beagle's skipper, Lieutenant John Stokes named Port Darwin after the ship's most well-known passenger and his personal friend, Charles Darwin. And Charles Darwin is one of the more famous graduates of the UK's Cambridge University, which just happens to have been founded 800 years ago.
So what do the alumni do to celebrate the 800th anniversary of one of the world's venerable institutions of learning? Especially as this year is also the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth in 1809, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his controversial work, The Origin Energy of Species.
In the case of aerospace engineering graduate Anthony Law and 15 fellow past and present students of Cambridge, you knock up a solar car, christen it Endeavour and bring it to Darwin. It is a kind of "modern as tomorrow" way of celebrating some ancient history, Anthony and his fellow graduates explained over refreshments at The Coffee Club in Mitchell Street, the team's social headquarters in Darwin. But apart from the historic links between the University, the naturalist and Darwin City, there is some good old academic rivalry behind the Endeavour's solar challenge.
One of the Cambridge crew, Martin McBrien, did his post-graduate engineering studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. Teams from MIT have been involved in the Darwin to Adelaide Solar Car Challenge almost since its inception more than two decades ago. And of course, the weird combination of associations and anniversaries with this 2009 race cut in again. MIT is in the village of Cambridge, just outside Boston.
The idea of the Old World Cambridge competing against the New World Cambridge's MIT in a space-age race across the even newer world nation of Australia was irresistible. When engineer McBrien returned to the UK version of Cambridge just over 12 months ago, he fired up his former classmates to research and build a solar car for the 3000km challenge, starting from Darwin next Sunday. More than 40 solar cars will be competing against the British and American rivals, from China, Turkey, India, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil and the Nordic countries.
And of course the hometown favourite will be the Desert Rose, the entry from the students at Charles Darwin University. As CDU's Professor Dean Patterson told the ABC's World Today program earlier this month, the Rose has race form, both for speed and trouble. Last year, it led a major solar car challenge in a crowded field in tech-savvy Japan when it overheated and caught fire, costing the Territory team an irredeemable 90 minutes in a tight race.
But Professor Patterson is optimistic about the performance of the Desert Rose next Sunday. "We have some very new stuff in the vehicle right now - some really sophisticated new stuff," he told the ABC's Heather Hewitt. The strong international field that will cross the starting line next Sunday is in the best traditions of the solar challenge.
The race is the brainchild of Hans Tholstrup, a Danish adventurer who gave up the family's business legacy of a European energy empire founded on LNG, and another one based on the fermentation of Danish blue cheese. He came to Australia to prospect for gold, and wound up in the Top End as a buffalo shooter. Despite the Tholstrup family's involvement in the LNG industry, Hans had a fixation about the finite nature of all fossil fuels. The oil crisis of 1973 made him an early believer in the virtue of renewable energy.
He took time off from buffalo shooting to lobby Paul Everingham, the Chief Minister in the Territory's first elected government, to establish the transcontinental solar car race. In the late 1970s the idea seemed preposterous. But Hans Tholstrup was adventurous and had an impressive array of international contacts, and Everingham was game. With NT Government and local industry sponsorship, the first solar car race headed out from Darwin for Adelaide in 1981.
In the decades following 1859, Charles Darwin was at the centre of raging controversies about the creation theory, which formed the basis of most Christian religions, and what the collective priesthood took as the heresy of his evolutionary heresies. His first major work, On the Origin Energy of Species by Natural Selection, saw the rise of anti-Darwin forms of religion, and anti-religious forms of Darwinism. There is delicious irony in the links between the controversial naturalist, the Cambridge University solar team, Darwin City and renewable energy.
In its own way, Darwin has been at the forefront of the energy evolution since its post-war reconstruction. As far back as the 1970s, every house in Darwin had a solar hot water system on its roof. In the southern states, they are only now talking about such schemes as part of the doctrine of the planet's newest religion, the Cult of Climate Change. For decades, the Territory has been a major player in the evolution of the energy industry. We supply uranium oxide to fuel the greenhouse gas-free generation of electricity across the globe.
What an appropriate place for 40 solar cars to be flagged off, with some at least aiming to power their way across the continent by generating enough electricity from the sun to run a hair dryer!
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