You might be amused at a little anecdote that came to mind talking of Abe, and nitroglycerine. My job was to prepare the bullets, the things that we'd bang together, and then we would fit these into drop hammers and they would drop down and you'd get an explosion. And the device, a very smart idea for following the explosion, which I needn't go into now, but my job was to electroplate the brass bullets with lead so that you get a soft surface, and then to clear it off afterwards, decontaminate them by degreasing them and prepare for the next experiment. So I became, actually, an expert in photography because I had to photograph the results of the explosions and the blast patterns with side lighting and things like that. So another part of my job was, when we ran out of nitroglycerine, to go to the Munitions SupplyLlaboratory at Maribyrnong, which I suppose was about three miles away, and the way we transported... Do you know what gutta-percha is?

[Q] Yes, I do.

It's a sort of hardened rubber, before plastics came in. This had the advantage... nitroglycerine, as I said, is very explosive. If you have it in a glass or a metal bottle and you turn it it'll explode, but with gutta-percha it was soft enough not to explode. So my instruction was take this 200ml flask, go to Maribrynong, get it filled up with nitroglycerine and you sit in the back of the car cradling it in your lap. Now I don't have to tell you, if there'd been a traffic accident or if they'd stopped and I'd dropped it, quite a hole in the North Melbourne would have been formed, but that was safety during the war I suppose. But, fortunately, nothing like that ever happened.

[Q] You're a lucky man Norman because, you know...

Science wouldn't have been the same.