New Assistant Director Facilities is Keith Henderson

If it's all a far cry from Keith's early days with the Bureau 15 years ago, it's an even farther cry from growing up on a dairy farm at Warrnambool in Western Victoria, through Warrnambool High School and then on to joining the PMG in 1942 as a technician in training. Keith spent 18 Years with the PMG in the radio and telegraph engineering section, moving from technician, to engineer through internal examinations. Virtually all his time was spent in Melbourne, apart from four years at Shepparton with Radio Australia.

Then came his time with the Bureau - a time that has encompassed the life cycles of three communications rooms starting with the move from the overcrowded Pink Palace (2 Drummond St) to Tilleys basement, then four years later to Exhibition Street, and finally (hopefully) from there to Lonsdale Street in 1974.

At Tilleys, Keith worked for Ralph Holmes (then SRCF) at about the same time as ADM Allen Bath came down from Brisbane to start as SRCP. Keith's one-man band gradually built up as the Bureau's need for more and better communications and engineering facilities increased and as such innovations as satellite imagery came to the fore. Keith's seen his fair share of 'happenings' in the Bureau but the advent of satellite pictures is fixed in his memory.

Back in 1963, after Keith had been with the Bureau as an engineer for about three years, the big move into APT equipment began. Ray Birch, then with WRE (now a physicist in SROP) had the job of getting the first satellite antenna and receiver set up, and the antenna was duly installed on the roof of Tilleys building with the rest of the gear down in the basement. Keith recalls that Graham Kelly, then a tech. assistant, was another driving force in the APT experiment.

Tiros-8, the first U.S. meteorological satellite to carry an APT camera, was launched on 21 December 1963 and four days later, the Australian Bureau received its first satellite picture. Keith was there to see it happen at about 1 pm on Christmas Day. The orientation was wrong, the picture quality was not the best, (the image was on paper fax), but it did show the curvature of the earth and when the members of the press gathered at the Bureau a few days later to inspect the wonderful new device, they were presented with perfect pictureand APT was acclaimed as a major step forward for meteorology.

Bureau of Meteorology