Bill Burch

Geophysicist, Wilkes 1961

A brash young, just 22 year-old, and very raw Geophysicist, Bill was appointed to run the Geophysical Observatory at Wilkes for the year 1961.  A lecture from John Bechervaise had fired his passion as a schoolboy, and the Director of the Bureau of Mineral Resources, as it was then, responded to his plea to go to Antarctica and gave him the job when he finished his basic degree at Uni. Bill was sent to the Mundaring Geophysical Observatory near Perth WA for most of the year in 1960 to learn how to drive the instruments and interpret the seismic and magnetic traces they produced.

Read about Bill’s Club Berth Voyage on Aurora Australis – January 31 – March 20, 2008 on the Club website.

George Cresswell remembers a particularly interesting BSA ride:

Bill Burch, who wintered at Wilkes in 1961, was riding a BSA Bantam  on thin ice and saw a wave following him. “I remember that the only reasoning that I was capable of at the time was: keep the throttle wide open, turn in a very wide arc for shore and look out for thicker ice to get home on.  It seemed important to psyche myself to prepare for the machine to break through and to try to make as slow and as spread-eagled a descent to the ice as possible, in the hope I would not follow it through.  After another mile or so – which felt like an eternity – the wave vanished and clearly both the bike and I made it back.”