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by Berenice Nyland (Author)
This book is about Don Atkinson, an electrical engineer and political radical who combined his engineering skills and Marxism to lead a full and exciting life. He was involved with one of Australia's first electric car projects and became an advocate for solar and wind power as early as the 1960s. He was a unionist, a member of the Communist Party and dedicated years to supporting the Gurindji struggle for land rights. He was an admirer of Kwame Nkrumah and went to post-colonial Ghana to work with a renowned English physicist who had been jailed for giving atomic research secrets to the Soviet Union. He worked intermittently in Northern Nigeria between 1966 and the 1980s. In his last decade he became interested in designing brushless motors. This interest led to an Australian Research Council grant. The book is based on accounts Don left including letters, official and personal, minutes of meetings, campaign materials, financial records, newspaper cuttings, journal articles, newsletters, personal memories and his ASIO files.
This is a story of how a working-class lad from the western suburbs of Sydney, born in 1927, could leave school at 15 and gain a world view that enabled him to live a life of ideas and combine his philosophy with his everyday work. This is a bitter/sweet story because most of the things he believed in and spent his energies on, did not come to pass. He kept going until the end. The day before he died he chose two songs to be played at his funeral, Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday and Joe Hill as sung by Paul Robeson. He was also worried his wife, Daphne, might be stingy about drinks at the after party.
