Early in 1944 Keith was posted to the north western area with headquarters not far from Darwin. Most of the time he lived in a tent he shared with another officer. Later he stepped up to a tin shack.

At this time there were far more met sections in the northern half of Australia than there are today because of fighter defence network against the Japanese.

In 1945 Keith was back at Mascot as OIC of a RAAF met section and two years later he was back in civilian clothes.

As a senior met and second-in-charge of Sydney RO for the next seven years, Keith faced one of the most strenuous and testing periods of his career.

"There had not been time after the war to assess just what was known about the new dynamic meteorology," he said. "Staff and understanding were at times inadequate to face successfully the problems of the great east coast cyclogenesis and the great flood rains of those latitudes."

In 1954 Keith was promoted to Melbourne as supervising met of the Central Analysis Office (now NMAC).

In 1959 he become Regional Director Victoria. Since then Keith has seen the bureau greatly expand, Particularly in met knowledge resulting from new technology and new methods of communication.

Since becoming RD Vic, Keith has participated in international met conferences on monsoons, tropical cyclones and Antarctica. He has contributed a number of papers for publications—the first of these in 1939. He has represented the bureau at WMO technical commissions and given more than 100 lectures to community groups of all kinds.

Mascot

Keith believes his was the best time to have a career in the bureau.

"It was a period of great change," he said "When I went to my first appointment at Mascot in 1938 I had to do the lot on my own—the surface observations, then the balloon ascent, work it out and phone it to the post office; then get the incoming reports by phone from the post office, decode and plot them; then analyse the situation, and finally prepare the forecast and then brief the pilot. This was even before teleprinters, for Heaven's sake!"

Farewell

Keith wishes to convey a message of greeting and farewell to all his friends throughout the Bureau by way of "Weather News"; hoping that the well-known spirit of closely-knit friendliness for which the Bureau is famous will continue forever.

Bureau of Meteorology