People Australia

Harry Stewart Wragge (1929–2023), electrical engineer, was born on 23 November 1929 in South Melbourne, Victoria, to Harry Wragge and Lesley Sweatman. Home schooled on the family farm, Carnmallam, until he was eight, Harry was sent to Scotch College for his secondary education (1942-48). In 1944 he lost the sight of one eye in a chemical explosion at school. He excelled in physics and mathematics and joined the signals section of the school cadets, which stimulated his ambition to embark upon a career in telephony.

Upon matriculating, Wragge joined the Post-Master General’s Department (PMG) as a clerk in 1949, winning a cadetship. The cadetship enabled him to study for a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Melbourne while initially working at the PMG Workshops in South Melbourne. In his final year (1953) he topped the course, earning a first-class honours degree, despite his heavy commitments as chairman of the Melbourne University Engineering Students Club and as chairman of Clubs and Societies on the executive of the university’s Student Representative Council.

Wragge’s PMG cadetship was extended to allow him to study for a master of engineering science in 1954, in which he built the first analogue computer to be designed in Australia. In 1955 he began work as a research engineer at the PMG Research Laboratories in Melbourne. Within a year he was promoted to divisional engineer in the voice frequency transmission section. In 1957 Wragge married Shirley Ogilvie. They bought land in Seaford, where they built their own home together, and raised three daughters.

Up until the 1960s, the PMG’s national automatic telephony network was entirely based upon electromechanical equipment. Wragge began a process of knowledge transfer via technical reports on the potential of transistor-based electronics for PMG equipment. He then formed a small team to design and build a twenty-line experimental electronic Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX). Completed in 1963, it handled real telephone traffic directed to it from anywhere in the public telephone network.

In 1968 Wragge proposed the funding of a new project, the IST (integrated switching and transmission) project. Its aim was to boost in-house expertise in preparation for the PMG’s future network planning, manpower planning, and equipment purchasing. The key means for acquiring in-depth engineering expertise would be to design and build a next-generation, entirely electronic, stored program controlled, digital switch and install it in a live local telephone network. In 1974 it became the first such digital switch in the world to handle live traffic in a national network. Until 1978 it remained operational, carrying live traffic in the Melbourne telephone network. Working on the IST project gave several engineers the expertise to accelerate their careers beyond the Laboratories: most notably Mel Ward, future managing director of Telecom Australia, and Greg Crew, future managing director of Hong Kong Telecom.

Wragge’s ongoing knowledge of the global transition towards digital transmission and switching was underpinned by regular trips to leading overseas manufacturers and his participation in the relevant the International Telecommunications Union Study Groups. As a result he lobbied with confidence for Telecom’s future switching purchases to be fully digital, although his campaign was opposed by the very conservative head of Telecom’s Engineering Department. The first new AXE local exchange bought from L. M. Ericssons in 1978 was an analogue switch, remaining an orphan in the subsequent otherwise digital telephone network. Wragge was on the right side of history.

Wragge’s tenure as director of Telecom Research Laboratories (TRL) from 1985 to 1992 was notable for the considerable transfer of expertise in the new technologies of optical fibres, ISDN switching, satellite and terrestrial radio to the rest of the organisation. The latter included the Digital Radio Concentrator System invented at TRL and deployed widely in the outback of Australia.

In 1989 Harry was awarded an AM for his services to telecommunications technology. His support for telecommunications research in Australian universities had begun when he was appointed editor-in-chief (1967-1981) of TRL’s journal Australian Telecommunications Research, which was established to promote telecommunications research across the nation. As director of TRL he made it his mission to provide major funding assistance to promising university-based researchers. Four Australian universities benefited: the University of Adelaide in teletraffic research; the University of Melbourne through a new chair in photonics research, filled with distinction by Rod Tucker; Curtin University, to take their QPSX queued packet-switching patent through to an industry prototype stage, and thence to full commercialisation; and Monash University, with the funding of a chair by TRL in telecommunications engineering, filled by Fred Symons, a senior research leader from TRL.

In 1991 the Australian government merged Telecom with the much smaller, Sydney-based Overseas Telecommunications Corporation (OTC). David Hoare, chair of OTC, clearly saw it as his mission to change Telecom’s organisational culture top-down and proceeded to replace all but one of the former Telecom senior management team. Wragge was transferred in late 1992 from heading TRL, a nationally respected research organisation with over 500 researchers and support staff, to becoming chief technical advisor to the new American CEO, Frank Blount. He saw this as a non-job, and retired in early 1993, aged sixty-three.

Further honours were bestowed on Wragge in retirement: an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from Monash University in 2000, and a centenary medal in 2001. He had already been awarded the University of Melbourne’s top engineering honour, the Kernot medal, in 1990. He was inducted into the Pearcey hall of fame in 2009 for his pioneering work on the 1970s IST project and its 1960s predecessor, Wragge’s all electronic PABX.

Retirement gave Wragge more time for his love of yachting. He had been a member of the Frankston Yacht Club for fifty years, and commodore from 1978 to 1981. The annual open Harry Wragge trophy handicap race is named in his honour. In 2009, he was inducted into the City of Frankston’s hall of fame as a local hero.

Wragge died on 31 July 2023 at Frankston, Victoria, at the age of ninety-three, survived by his three daughters Sue, Jennie, and Kate Wragge, and by his sisters Anne and Elisabeth.