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MELBOURNE CONGRESS – 01

WELCOME ADDRESS

A lecture given on 7 November 1959 [Start of Lecture]

Hiya! Hiya!

Well, I'm glad to see there's some people in Australia! You know there were a bunch of jokes before I left England about this is the first time I'll ever lecture standing on my head, you know, all that sort of thing. And we can say from here now — we can say from here, „How do they do their work standing on their heads?“

Now, actually — actually, I'm very, very glad to be here. It was a bit of a crush getting here because just at the moment I started to leave, of course, there were seventeen hundred and fifty-five emergencies and HASI Limited came through, just like that — bang!

This means a great deal to Scientology in general because what it does is tie up, under a public limited company status, all of the various branches and divisions of Scientology throughout the world. And you would be amazed how much that is. You would be amazed.

Well, I want to thank you and congratulate you here in Australia for the really tremendous job you are doing. You probably, just like in other parts of the world, are in there pushing up against the seeming carelessness, the feeling that it doesn't matter — we'll all be dead anyway in a short time, so why worry about it and — may seem to you occasionally that you're not getting anywhere, you know, that you're sort of stalled down or that you're progressing very slowly or something like that.

You have to have fairly exact statistics — fairly good statistics to really understand where we are getting and why. The tremendous amount of forward impetus that Scientology has had in the last five months in Australia, you Australians wouldn't believe. You just wouldn't believe it. Because it is considerable. But this is more or less true all around the world.

And I'm real proud of people that have been carrying on, particularly here. You know, we owe the people that have fought the good fight through here in Melbourne, in HASI Melbourne, we owe them a great deal, because it's not been easy. They've not had a good smooth run of it over the years. They've had some bad breaks. Originally, a HASI was set up in Melbourne that wasn't even authorized and there was no way to straighten it up or square it around or do anything for it at all, and it limped along and kept falling on its face and being set back up again and people would work at it and sacrifice their time, energy and so forth to keep it going. And several months now, they have had a very fine running organization and it's there for the long haul. I'm very proud of it and I want to thank everybody that's had anything to do with keeping HASI Melbourne alive these many years. Thank you.

I was extremely pleased, by the way, to walk in and see the building looking so good and see the staff looking so good and see everybody full of beans, and doing all the right things in the right directions. It was very pleasing indeed.

Once in a while you think, well, Scientology is basically — must be very mercenary, very mercenary: thinks about money. You bet it thinks about money! I'll tell you why it thinks about money. Because tradesmen think about money, because it takes money to pay the rent, because it takes money to pay staff. They have to think about money.

There are two points of agreement that Scientology has to maintain with the rest of existence. Just two, really. One is finance, and the other, unfortunately, is legal. In other words, they stay in agreement with the society where legalities are concerned — court orders, filings of changes of name and board minutes and bylaws and you have to go see solicitors and try to communicate with solicitors and... And then every once in a while, why, somebody will rush in and say, „Why haven't you paid this bill?“ you know. Have you ever had that experience personally? And they say — they say this, you know, and of course the basic impulse is just to say, „Ha! What are you talking about — bills. We're all in this together,“ and so forth. But they don't listen to this line at all.

So as a result the two points of agreement with a relatively — well, I don't like to say rough words about the society at large. There's no reason swearing at them. There's no reason to get down and say, „Well, they fffft, grum-grum-grum.“ You know? You know, in the comic strips where they have asterisks and exclamation points in the balloons — well, there's no reason to say that about society in general.

But it is rough to have to stay in agreement with some of the general procedures of society. Have you ever noticed that? It's rough. Because some of the things that they're now supposed to do and some of the things that they're absolutely certain are absolute fact are so far out in the middle of the ocean and so far away from anything necessary and truthful that it's quite amazing.

I don't know if you know anything about socialism or politics or anything like that, but give you an idea of how far out of agreement it all is: socialism, apparently, was something that was dreamed up — now I'm not talking about the political aspect, I'm talking about the pure theory — it was evidently dreamed up by a couple of tramps down alongside the railroad track who couldn't bum any more chow so they had to figure out some political philosophy by which to get somebody to — that did work to support them.

That's cruel of me to say that. But I never had — I never had a — a decided opinion on this before, not until the general election occurred in England. I got a fairly decided opinion on the thing. Because right away, the first thing that the socialists and laborers and so forth — the Labor Party are the people who don't work. And I got a tremendously new view of all of this when they said they were going to pay every person in the country who wasn't working 10 shillings more per week. Now of course, socialism, by which a person couldn't be worked to death, and would have something for his old age and couldn't be exploited left and right and so forth, was a grand dream. But socialism in actual practice is the ways and means of making enough people indigent so they'll vote for you, or something like that. It doesn't have very much to do with labor or production.

So, if we were to go into a total agreement with some of the leading trends of the world, we would have to go into agreement with socialism, which is to say, we would have to cater totally toward disabled people — unable people, and we would have to work very hard in order to keep these unable people unable. And we're not going in that direction. And every once in a while we get into a considerable argument.

Now you'll think I have decided political views. No, I don't have decided political views beyond this one point: I don't believe that the working man should be made the slave of all parasitic groups. I don't believe that. And actually I think that's a philosophy that the working man would agree with. In other words, the worker, or the person who does the work — and believe me, it's just as much work to manage as to sweep floors; I'm talking about work now — anybody who works has a perfect right to be assisted in his work by somebody else working. Right?

Audience: Yes.

Well, isn't that a new, novel, strange idea!

Here we have — here we have two nineteenth-century philosophies which are fighting it out now here on Earth, between the United States and Russia. They're fighting it out. Russia — communism, the worker, so forth. And the United States — capitalism, you know? They both belonged in the nineteenth century. They were — they're something that's covered with mold and moss: capitalism, communism.

Communism was something dreamed up in Germany a hundred years ago. The Germans knew it wasn't any good so they threw it across the border into Russia.

And capitalism was the basic idea whereby you took some money, preferably stolen, and loaned it to somebody at an exorbitant rate of interest so his labor would then support you. Now, that was basically capitalism. And both of these are old hat. They're total antiques.

And we have Russia fighting the United States because it's a capitalistic nation. (The United States isn't a capitalistic nation — just try and save some money in the United States today!) And the United States is busy fighting Russia because Russia's a communism. Boy, I don't know what it says in Russian, but when it comes down to it, I think if you asked any commissar to practice pure communism, he would be sure you were trying to start the counterrevolution; he'd probably have you shot. It's kind of — some kind of a laborers' fascism.

Both philosophies (communism and capitalism) and other such philosophies are actually simply parasitic upon the one producer. The person who produces, they try to figure some way — means to corral or monopolize this production or to get part of the production for no return, something like that — bunch of figure- figure-figure.

Now, that's an extreme view on my part. But that's all I believe in the field of politics. I don't care about any of the ramifications about it. I simply believe that the person who works should have help. He's entitled to have somebody else work too. And I believe that people that are not worth anything to the society and are not going to produce anything in the society and are just going to drag it down and so forth, I don't believe they need to be supported at all. The only thing I think you could do for those people is help them all you could to salvage them and bring them up to a point where they could pull their own weight in the society.

Now, there's — there's actually a different political philosophy, if you want to call it that. But it is a practical philosophy that if we've got to work at all, well, let's all work; and if we aren't going to work at all, well, let's not any body work. But if there's got to be work done and if that's the way the wheels are going to run, then, those that are a burden upon the economic structure of the society certainly could be promoted up into a status where they could pull their own weight. Now, don't you think it's a fairly workable philosophy?

Audience: Yes.

Well, but that philosophy, you see, is not actually a political philosophy. And I don't give it to you as the political philosophy of Scientology at all. I just give it to you as a practical statement of how to keep the show on the road. And does that agree with any existing philosophy on Earth today? Doesn't at all.

Money, for instance, should represent worth but worth should not be represented in money. You get the idea of a fellow has value to his fellow man — he is valuable to his fellow man; he's valuable to his society, his community and so forth. He performs service, he has value, he knows things and so forth. Well, now, that person should be recompensed and the money should represent his value. Well, the society at large has got this totally reversed.

You go down to the bank and you say, „How much is Mr. Jones worth?“ They say, „Well, Mr. Jones is worth 100,000 pounds.“ You couldn't sell Mr. Jones for 100,000 pounds! Couldn't be done. Couldn't be done at all.

No, capitalism, communism, this sort of thing, sort of out of shape today. But these political philosophies are more or less special interests, badly understood, used to serve the interests of people who don't mean the best for the other fellow. And so we have an enturbulance going on in the world today, which makes the Southern Hemisphere a very valuable part of Earth, since there's some possibility that it will be the only alive part of Earth within the next century.

Now, you can scoff at that if you like. But these new things — missiles, atomic weapons — can lay waste a considerable stretch of country, just because somebody didn't understand or believe in or try to help his fellow man. Left in the hands of the incompetent, who is being parasitic upon somebody else's labor, atomic weapons sooner or later will be loosed on somebody somewhere. But it will happen in the Northern Hemisphere, not this hemisphere.

Your worry on the score of atomic fission, in my opinion, is an entirely different worry than it is in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Northern Hemisphere, the question is, „How long are we going to stay alive, and, if it happens, what can be salvaged out of it?“ That's the question up there.

As a matter of fact, the question is so burning, so weighty that nobody can confront it. You see a picture of an atomic bomb in a newsreel, and don't bother to look at the picture on the screen, look at the people in the seats. And they'll go this way. And people step out of their seats and walk up the aisle and leave the theater. There's nobody even talking about it. Nobody confronts this fact at all. They just not-is it and brush it off and say, „Well, we're all going to stay blind to this if we possibly can and maybe it won't happen.“ Although they know very well that it very probably will happen. If not in another dozen years, maybe a half-century, certainly within a century. Weapons of that magnitude cannot continue to exist on a planet with man in the state he's in without someday being used, unless, of course, we get there first. If Scientology got there first, we'd have some guarantee that no insane people would be in the Northern Hemisphere governments.

We're going in that direction, by the way, and that is our program. It's a very — it's a very complicated program. It's not very popular. So if Scientology misses, since there is no other organization, rationale, know-how or anything else that is even vaguely pointed in the direction of atomic fission — there are few little groups that hold meetings in towns, and occasionally get together and say nobody should use the bomb or we should stop manufacturing it or something. Very limp — very limp little groups. And everybody says, „Boo, boo, boo“ and go out and arrest somebody because they put up a placard or something of the sort, and said that atomic bombs are bad. You know, it's such a limp effort that it's hardly worth measuring at all. And it leaves Scientology with a job on it hands it never intended to have and didn't want and puts pressure on the line of dissemination and colors organizational actions, even colors the actions of individual auditors and so on, makes them hit pretty hard. It makes them try harder and it makes them feel defeated more easily.

They can't pull it smoothly and evenly forward, you see. They can't say, „Well, if we just get a PE going and if we get our friends interested in the PE and we just get people coming in — small groups — and eventually we'll make the grade.“ They realize that they're on some kind of borrowed time and it gives them the feeling like, „Well, we just haven't got time to get some people in and put them on a PE and straighten it out and get dissemination going in this way. We just haven't got time to do it.“ And they're always trying for the total effect. And you'll occasionally find them up at the US Senate or something like that, hammering on senators' doors and so forth. That's a very unpopular activity.

There was a fellow got a new thought into the US Senate one time or another and... I remember I talked to a US Senator about this one time. I said, „What are you doing about atomic fission, you personally, in your political campaigns and so forth?“ And he looked absolutely surprised like, should he have any ideas concerning this, you know? And I said, „Well, what are you doing to smooth down world tension, and so on, so that atomic fission wouldn't eventually come to be used to solve political problems and so on?“

„Oh, well, we have the answer to that, ho, ho.“

And I said, „Well, what are you doing?“

„Well, we've got the answer to that. We do that. That's our power here in the Senate and that's what we do and. . .”

I said, „Yeah, but what are you doing?“

And he said, „Fighting communism, of course!“

I said, „Well, how are you fighting communism? I mean, if you're going to fight communism.“

„Well, train up a young fellow and you put a gun in his hands and have him go shoot communists.“

Well, these programs — these programs that are originated in those particular spheres are not necessarily the programs that will win! That's an understatement if there ever was one!

So the — the Scientologist is in a slightly more tense frame of mind in the Northern Hemisphere if he looks in this direction at all. When he tries to do something he feels that, well, he won't get there quick enough; it won't be done fast enough. And he goes through cycles of being — snarling about it and being apathetic about it. But here you've got a longer, smoother pull. And this is an easy one, actually. And you're succeeding and you're succeeding very well. But you do have some share in this problem of the Northern Hemisphere.

Because — well, for one thing, if there's anything manufactured in the Northern Hemisphere that you have to use to keep this society going, you'd better be manufacturing it. And if there's a spillover of radiation one kind or another, which there very well might be, a tremendous amount of fallout, you'd certainly better know how to — to handle small amounts of fallout — the small amount you'd get. If you have any economic dependence on the Northern Hemisphere at all, you certainly better get over it. If the Southern Hemisphere is self-maintaining, if it is a total economic unit, if its know-hows and so forth are top-drawer, it'll continue to have a civilization that may very well be the only civilization left on Earth.

Now, that sounds like I'm just beating the drum and trotting out a horrible fact and hanging up a carcass and so on. But it's a fact you don't even dare say in the Northern Hemisphere today, because it's too true. It's just too true. It's too much truth.

If you were to destroy 50 percent of the facilities of the United States, 50 percent of its population, so on, with atomic fission, I promise you that the remaining 50 percent would be so pulled down and so overloaded with the — with the burden of trying to care for the injured and the sick and the tremendous epidemics that follow and so forth, civilization would just never survive it.

Nobody looks at that fact up to a point of where they don't even take precautions with civil defense. There's hardly even a store of bandages sitting outside of any metropolitan center up in the Northern Hemisphere. There's just nothing.

Old air-raid defense of the old days and so on, that's what they kind of fall back on. They've got it all planned out — all planned out in Washington that they have a warning — air-raid wardens, you see, and they're out on the outskirts of the city and they look up, you see, and they identify the guided missile and then they pick up a telephone, you see, and then they call somebody and then they tell somebody else and then somebody else gets everybody together and puts them into cars, I think it is, and takes them to various centralized parts of the city.

And I asked the chief of civil defense of Washington, DC (because I was trained in this work to some degree), and I ask him, I said, „How fast does a guided missile travel?“ He just changed the subject. See, by the time an air-raid warden put his telescope or binoculars on a guided missile, it, traveling at 30,000 miles an hour, would have exploded. There isn't any time to phone anybody up or evacuate any buildings or anything else.

Now, you say, „Well, you could have a far warning system.“ Well, I guess you could. You could have a far warning system and they could look up, boom! See? This is beyond — beyond the reality of the Northern Hemisphere.

So I wouldn't pay much attention to it if I were you, what the Northern Hemisphere thinks about atomic radiation and that sort of thing, what's released there or what the political promises or future is. I would just sort of think to myself, „Well, if it happens they've had it, and if it happens we better not have it too.“ Because the Southern Hemisphere, obviously, is the only area that will ever have a prayer in an atomic war. But it will only have a prayer if it is very definitely self-sufficient.

And that's why it's such good news all around that you're doing so well here with Scientology. Because we are putting all our chips on this bet here. There's a lot more depends on Australia than you would at first notice. I hate to have to bring it up.

But Australia — Australia is no stranger to me. I know your country very well. Before the Yanks came I was Senior Officer Present of northern Australia, not because I had any rank, but because there wasn't anybody else there. The — perhaps you're aware of the status of a Senior Officer Present, naval status. It's the flag ashore. Senior Officer Present ashore commands all Senior Officer Presents afloat. Now it's one of these interesting things.

Well, I got mixed up in the early part of the war and got detoured and that sort of thing, and I finally wound up falling back to Brisbane. And I was walking down the street in a bad state of dishabille — I'd saved some insignia, you know, and the army stopped me and said, „Who are you?“

And I gave my name, rank and serial number.

And they said, „Do you realize that there's no naval officer in this port or in Northern Australia?“ And I said, „Well, I hadn't realized it.“ Couldn't have cared less, as a matter of fact. I was thinking, „Gosh, it's nice to be alive!“

And — „Well now, in your regulations,“ the army said, „I'm sure you will find a clause that says, 'By exigencies of service on foreign station, the senior naval officer present shall take command of all naval activities.“

So I looked at my stripes. I said, „Okay. That's the way it is. I'll sit around and look pretty.“

„Look pretty! There's 17 merchantmen in Brisbane lower river; they haven't been brought in. There's 4 million dollars worth of jettisoned cargo laying on the docks that nobody has any responsibility for. There are 250 refugees who have just dropped back from Malaysia and Singapore that nobody's taking any responsibility for, and you have about 200 naval personnel drifting through this port that nobody's taking any responsibility for. There are enemy agents all over the place. Nobody's taking charge of naval censorship. Well, here's a sergeant and a girl and there's your office.“

For ensuing months, why, I had a ball. Forgot what it was like to sleep. I remember vividly — you see, Australia had already been written off the books by the US Navy. I don't know if you knew that — very early in the war. In the US entrance into the war it had been — it had been written off the books. I opened up the trans-Pacific telephone line and called the Bureau of Naval Operations, Navy Department, Washington, DC, because I'd sent them already ten messages without any single reply. One of them had to do with what the hell did they want me to do with a heavy cruiser? So I just phoned them up clear, straight through. Got the officer of the day right in the Navy Department in the Pentagon in Washington, and I said, „This is Hubbard, Senior Officer Present in Northern Australia. I want to talk to somebody — who will give me orders for certain vessels in these waters.“ And he said, „Just a moment.“

And I waited. And the Australian telephone company that I was working with, they waited. Everybody waited. And the voice came back and said, „Well, I'm sorry. There's nobody of that name here.“ And hung up. Australia didn't exist.

The ship in question — the ship in question was a heavy cruiser and its four-stripe captain had first come ashore and had looked at me, you know, „What! You're Senior Officer Present ashore?“ and had sniffed. And I was trying to get him orders and he was trying to get orders and everybody was trying to do something to get it out of here, because the Japanese might strike in the north at any time.

He finally came in the office, you know, all four stripes and gold braid and so forth, and he said, „Mr. Hubbard,“ he said, „if you will sign — if you will sign sailing orders for me, I'll sail.“

So I scribbled out: „You are hereby detached from this station and shall proceed upon your way as befits your duties and missions. Signed, L. Ron Hubbard.“

A couple of years later I was kicking around — I had command of a squadron over on the other side of the war — I was kicking around an officers' club and I was — just been introduced to somebody and this officer sat there and all of a sudden he went into a brown study, you know. „Did you say your name was Hubbard?“

„That's right.“

„Hubbard. Hubbard.“ He says, „L. R. Hubbard?“

I said, „That's right.“

He says, „Good God,“ he says, „you're that fellow from down in Australia!“

And, actually, through the remainder — they had kept this set of orders framed on the wall of this US heavy cruiser for the remainder of the war. And actually, throughout the remainder of the war I was known as that fellow who was in Australia. So you see, I must be one of you.

All very funny. Very funny. I sent four ships to MacArthur and everybody says, „You mustn't send them.“ Refugees all over the place, everybody says, „They're probably all spies. You mustn't do anything with them.“ I'd keep rounding them up and shoving them aboard ships and people would say, „We can't take them. Have no orders.“ I'd say, „Yes, you have. You've got my orders. Take them.“

I remember reading at that time — I remember reading a US newspaper story. It says, „Where is the US fleet? Where is the US fleet?“ And there's a big picture, you see, of battleships and a map of Australia. „It is guarding the shores of Australia.“ The US fleet was on the bottom at Pearl Harbor — thud. And what was guarding the shores of Australia was a six-inch gun in charge of some naval — Australian naval reservists down at the mouth of the Brisbane River, a few territorials with Lee-Enfields and Hubbard with a submachine gun. I was the antiaircraft battery. Actually had bullets for the thing! That was before the Yanks came.

The — this is very, very amusing. One of my officers, some years later, told somebody, „Yes, he's the fellow who was down in Australia. He was relieved by a million men.“ Well, we had a ball.

One of the jobs I had was keeping enough rumors on the line. Every time we'd find a spy, why, naval intelligence and army intelligence and so forth — I've actually received orders: „Take him out in the middle of the harbor and drown him,“ see, spy. Oh no. Oh, I'd just tell them, „Well now, listen, I've got something for you to do,“ you see? And I'd give them all the data on all the batteries. I'd tell them I was privately a German spy, you see, and I wanted him somehow or other to get the dope to the Japs: all the tremendous massed batteries and the airfields and the tremendous numbers of troops and the battleships and everything that were down here ready to knock the Japs off. Anything to keep the Japanese high command totally convinced that there was something here. I'll never know — I'll just never know why Australia came through it at that time. I just never - I'll never know the facts.

I finally figured out why the Allies won the war over the Japs: because the Jap high command was stupider than ours. And that's the only — only real reason for it.

But Australia had shipped everything it had overseas at that time. And there was nothing left in the country and there was just a handful of troops and so forth here just to make some kind of a show. Any boatload of Jap marines could have taken the country. That was up till almost the end of spring of 1942. Maybe you didn't even know it was in that condition. But it was really rough. It was something to perspire about quite heavily.

I thought I was going to come back to Australia at the end of 42. They shipped me home and within a week gave me corvettes, North Atlantic. And I went on fighting submarines in the North Atlantic and doing other things and so on. And I finally got a set of orders for the ship. By that time I had the squadron. And I got a set of orders and these orders said, „You will proceed through the Panama Canal to Auckland and then Melbourne.“ And I thought, „Isn't that nice! Now that the place is in good shape and everything, why, maybe I can go back because I think Australia's wonderful.“

And I called all the officers together in the wardroom and I said, „Well, here we go, and isn't this swell and everything's fine. And this is all supersecret and you're not supposed to tell anybody but your girls.“

About 24 hours later I myself got a set of orders and it said, „You are hereby detached as commander of the squadron and you will proceed to the training center in Florida for preparation to take command of a new war vessel.“ Reason, you see — the reference was „All NAV (something or other, something or other)“ which the — any officer who had served in these waters and area up to the beginning of summer of 1942, would not be returned to these waters for a year. Now you tell me why. I don't know why. But that was the order they put out because there actually weren't many people got home from the Asiatic fleet. Maybe you noticed that. There was a few casualties around. And so I got detached and I went to Florida, not Melbourne. This is the first time I've had a chance to be back. So I'm awfully glad to be here.

Well, I actually didn't mean to tell you all that. Probably not particularly interesting as far as Scientology is concerned. But it's interesting as far as Australia is concerned because I feel this is — this is one of the — the country, perhaps, with the greatest and brightest future on the face of Earth today.

I believe what political philosophies are adopted and followed, what governing principles are put into effect here, the care — of utilization of the land, the supervision of immigration and all of these various concerns are of tremendous importance. Any one of them could make or break the future of this country to some degree. There's some bad mistakes could be made along this line someplace and the future of the country could be muddied up rather easily. But I think it's going along fine.

The only thing I see it doing right now that worries me — and it's very funny that I would be worried about it, but I am worried about it — is I hate to see inflation occurring. Where sterling is stable and where money is stable more or less everyplace but the United States, to see Australian money inflating slightly and going up the line and so on, is a worrisome thing. Because it means only one thing — it means the production isn't up here.

Now, all you have to know about economics is that in a period where you have low production — per capita production — you don't have enough goods — where money won't buy anything, then money inflates. Where goods are missing, money inflates. And where goods are there in too great a number, money deflates. And that's — beside from the law of supply and demand, which is part of that — that's about all you need to know about inflation and deflation and economics.

I don't care what some special interest tells you, if you see money inflating it means there isn't enough production, that's all. And it means that somewhere along the line — somewhere along the line, why, either Australia isn't getting enough construction machinery or it isn't getting enough raw materials of some sort or it isn't aligned economically in some fashion in order to keep it stable. Because inflating money is a very, very dangerous symptom. It makes a country liable to many political consequences. It makes it a target for many things. It's not terribly dangerous in the state that it's in, but if the money inflated up to a point where it cost a thousand pounds to buy a loaf of bread, you'd have raw, red revolution here. Because an economic stress of this sort is something that a country can't possibly afford to have.

As I see it right now, the role of Scientology would be to assist the increase of production in any way that it could. And, of course, the best way to assist production is to just bring about more able people. There must be — it isn't necessarily true that there are people dragging on the lines, but it is true that by increasing the production of individuals, you would tend to halt an economic chaos sometime in the future.

Probably the only thing that faces Australia now that looks the least bit dangerous to me is just this slight inflationary trend. And I'm sure somebody's going to get hold of that. But if they don't, why, we ought to. And I got so darn used to protecting Australia that I worry about it.

But here's — whether the political future is good or bad or — or whether we're going to have atomic war or not, all that's beside the point. The point is, right now, is I'm awfully glad you're here and I'm awfully glad to be here, and I hope by this time you've got a congress. Have you?

Audience: Yes.

All right. I want to take up a lot of, oh, technical material and odds and ends and so forth, but I thought I'd just better ramble on this first hour and tell you hello and tell you I was glad to be here and tell you I wasn't exactly a stranger to it. Because many of you probably didn't even know I'd even seen Australia before.

Oh, you knew — knew I'd been down here? Do you also know I was the fellow from Australia?

Well, later on we'll get into some more interesting stuff. I was up all night writing materials for these lectures, you see. And I made a tremendous pile of notes about it, and I had all the notes all set up and all ready to go and the chambermaid threw them out this morning. So you'll just have to bear with me on what data I can manage to remember from my notes in these next few lectures.

And until the next lecture, thank you.

[End of Lecture]