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In Memory
Bob Prickett
In January 2017 we farewelled a very dear friend, an iconic
Churchill Fellow, Queenslander and Australian.
Robert (Bob) Prickett captured the essence of what it really
means to be a Churchill Fellow. He was an inspiration to many
people, making an extraordinary impact on everyone who
crossed his path, particularly those who have had the privilege
and honour of being a Bob and June Prickett Churchill Fellow.
Bob, who came to be known as ‘Dusty Bob’ and then as ‘Tropical
Bob’, made maximum use of his 1967 Churchill Fellowship
opportunity. He enriched the Australian community and for
twenty years inspired others to do the same through his (and his
wife June’s) sponsorship of Churchill Fellows in the field of health.
Bob’s impact on the Churchill Trust
and the lives of ordinary Australians
has been profound and it will be
everlasting.”
Bob Prickett’s Churchill Fellowship enabled him to study at the
University of California’s School of Public Health and Sanitary
Engineering. It was at conferences and meetings that he gained
access to experts in water-borne disease prevention, as well as
many other public health aspects of water and waste water.
Bob worked hard, doing 12-hour days, but he enjoyed it,
contributing to the building of the Northern Territory water supply
and sewerage systems, the roads and the schools. He made
efforts to establish stringent standards of construction in the
water and sewerage works in Darwin.
Bob was born in 1926. He recalled spending much time outdoors
during his childhood and he loved ‘messing about on boats’,
however he also recalls the hardship of the Depression, such as
eating bread and dripping.
Towards the end of 1974 the people of Darwin had been warned
of a cyclone building up but there had been other recent warnings
that had come to nothing..
Bob qualified as a Civil Engineer and went on to have a varied
career, always passionate about his work. In New Zealand he
spent some time in soil conservation and river control work. He
met June and after they married they travelled to England, where
Bob worked for the Navy in the dockyards for two years.
When he and June left for New Zealand, they decided to stop off in
Australia. Bob said ‘I looked around for jobs either in New Zealand
or Australia and the one up in Darwin came up first, so I went
stream gauging in Darwin for a few months and then a job came
up in water supply engineering and I took that on – for 27 years’.
It was 1956 when they arrived there. At the time, Darwin’s
population was about 10,000. Bob recalled ‘…you knew
everybody. It was great walking down the street on a Friday night
and meeting your friends. It was a very sociable place at that
time’.
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Pictured above
Nicholas Smith, Bob, Rachel Kirby
But from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day, 1974, the 240
kilometre per hour winds blasted Darwin. The Bureau of
Meteorology categorised it as a Category 4 Severe Tropical
Cyclone. Seventy-one people died, 80 per cent of houses were
destroyed, and $837 million worth of damage was done to the
city – equivalent to $4.45 billion today.
The Prickett family home was one of the few that fared well
during the cyclone. Bob had put angle iron over the roof and
secured it to the roof trusses that ran down to the ground. He
recalled, ‘…so after Cyclone Tracy I had a roof and the neighbours
didn’t, so they came and stayed with us. … We were like a lot of
sardines in the living room that night’.
The entire city was without water and without electricity. Most
people were rendered homeless in an instant. For the next week
Bob was so busy he was able to snatch only a few hours of sleep
during the whole seven days.