Culture
A star is reborn
by Denis Welch
Beatrice Hill Tinsley was a brilliant New Zealand astronomer, recognised worldwide as a leading thinker in cosmology, yet most of us haven’t heard of her, until now.
She is I think the most exceptional woman I have ever met, except I’ve never met her.” With these words Christine Cole Catley sums up her tumultuous feelings about Beatrice Hill Tinsley, the woman with whom she has lived in imagination for 20 years, writing the biography she never dreamt she would write. Now it’s done. Tinsley was a brilliant astronomer who made her career abroad, a great New Zealander unrecognised in New Zealand. That may change with the publication of Bright Star*.
“It has taken quite an emotional toll on me, this,” says Cole Catley, who talks about Tinsley as though she were a dear friend. “My great hope is that in this book I’ve done her something like justice.”
You have, Christine, you have. Read it and weep: for the loss of a life so young – Tinsley died of a melanoma in 1981, aged 40 – for the black hole of ignorance here as Tinsley’s star shone in the US, for the barbaric rules that thwarted women in those days: the promising young astronomer was denied a job at Canterbury University in the early 60s because her husband was already employed there.
Cole Catley’s a writer, a critic, someone embedded in the arty side of life – literature and all that fancy stuff that wouldn’t stand up to a moment’s experimentation in the lab. For most of her life, science has been alien territory. Plus, she’s getting on a bit these days and has a publishing company to run, among other things.
“I had no intention of writing anything like this, but my old school, which was Beatrice’s old school – New Plymouth Girls’ High School – asked if I would write their centennial history for 1985. Well, I thought I would try to make this quite honest, let everyone have their say, so I did, and I got some marvellous stories from a lot of people, but I got absolutely infuriated when I heard about Beatrice because I had never heard about her before, nobody else had.”
The book was widely reviewed, she wrote a piece for the Listener headed “The girl who did something else”, and then Tinsley’s father, Edward Hill, asked if she would write his daughter’s biography.
“I said no, no, no, because my background is arts, I’m not a scientist – and then he came again and said he knew I was going to England so why didn’t I call in at Austin in Texas, because in December 1985 they were having a big function to honour Beatrice.
“I say this in my author’s note: it absolutely electrified me when I found how all these people so looked up to her, tears, grieving for her, what she meant. Extraordinary. Okay, I thought, I’ll take notes and hand them over to the person who does this.”
Ha ha. Twenty years and considerable personal expense later …
True, Creative New Zealand did give her $9000 for travel, but she’d asked for $35,000. “They were not accustomed to giving money to people who want to do scientific things.”
“So it’s been quite a time,” says Catley, remembering this extraordinary journey late in her life (she is now 83). “But all people fortunately when we got to know one another have been extraordinarily generous and very candid. Her second main lover, James Gunn, extraordinary fellow at Princeton …. I’ll never forget. Jill, his wife, was on one side of him, holding his hand. I was on the other. Slow tears were running down Jim’s face at the very thought of Beatrice. She really was quite exceptional.
“A number of scientists in New Zealand and elsewhere have said she’s the one, never mind Rutherford. I mean, this is absurd, because Rutherford is up there, but she’s as important and we don’t know about it. This is one of our great stories – New Zealand’s and the world’s.”
Dispel from your mind, however, the image of Tinsley with telescope clapped to eye, gazing keenly into the night sky. She was a theoretical astronomer whose life-work was the evolution and formation of galaxies. She was working her way back to the formation of the universe itself. At the time of her death she was professor of astronomy at Yale University, recognised worldwide as a leading thinker in cosmology. Gunn has called her a genius, the inventor of the very concept of galactic evolution.
Did she get any press for all this in New Zealand? “Hardly any at all,” says Cole Catley. “She came out at one stage, one of her many passions which she had – environment, social justice and feminism were some of the others – was zero population growth, because she thought [growth] was destroying the world, so she gave a number of interviews, and occasionally they’d get on to her scientific background, but it was usually pretty garbled.”
Page 1 2 
