Chapter 66: Homer & Denver Part 1

In the Australian summer of 1958, Homer Joseph Calham, ham radio operator and enthusiastic night sky watcher, was driving home with his ten-year old son, Denver, who had earlier performed in an end of year school play.

So enthusiastic was he about astronomy that he had moved his family from the USA two years earlier to the Australian Northern Territory. After six months of exploration, they settled in a tiny but close community northwest of Renner Springs, on the Barkly Tablelands, around five hundred kilometers north of the famed Alice Springs. His family got on well with the locals, and he was fascinated with the uniqueness of the world’s flattest continent, and the land of “sprung loaded rats.”