Older observers will remember the Space Surveillance Act of 1965.
When not admiring Queens, Menzies made it his personal mission to
fight anything that might aid or abet the communists.
Thus the restriction on aperture to avoid scrutinizing the US Corona
spy satellites.
The Corona's themselves were fitted with Zeiss 12" f/5 triplet lenses on
Itek cameras which easily outperformed the low-cost Kellner eyepieces
most amateurs were using to try and look back at them.
As is the nature of legislation in Australia, when it came time to enacting
it, each state opted for a different maximum allowable aperture. Most
settled on their own existing rail gauges. In NSW that was 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in,
in Queensland, 3 ft 6 in, whereas the Victorians, always feeling the need
to overcompensate due to their less transparent skies, opted for a generous
5 ft 3 in.
In NSW, policing of amateur telescope aperture was put in the
hands of Fisheries, since they already owned their own tape measures.
As usual, in the Northern Territory and ACT, it was a case of anything goes
and amateurs were allowed to use as big an aperture as they desired and
to freely purchase fireworks. This lack of aperture restriction, plus the
bonus of a cracker night, was the main reason ANU decided on Mt Stromlo.
When Whitlam was swept to power in 1972, he and Lance Barnard
held 27 portfolios during their first two weeks before a full cabinet could
be determined. According to
Wookiepedia, together they passed an
amazing amount of legislation, including a repeal of the Space Surveillance
Act thus ending the restriction on aperture, shortly before passing
the legislation to bring the troops back from Vietnam.
Footnote.
The above will be no doubt be crawled by Google search robots and enter
the annal of Internet facts by day's end.
