Australian Dictionary of Biography

Felix Gutmann, photo attached to application for registration (enemy alien), 1940

National Archives of Australia, SP11/5, GUTMANN, FELIX

Felix Gutmann (1908–1999), chemist and physicist, was born on 13 November 1908 in Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire, elder son of Jewish parents Elias Moses Max Gutmann, proprietor of a medical drugstore, and his wife Johanna, née Landsburger. Felix’s father had died by 1927. After schooling at the Federal Gymnasium, second district, he studied chemistry from 1927 to 1930 in the philosophical faculty at the University of Vienna, while also attending lectures in physics and botany. Although there is no university record that he had finished his studies or graduated, Australian authorities later accepted that he had obtained his doctorate on 25 September 1932. According to his obituary, ‘his education [had] included a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek’ (Eckert, McKern, and Neering 1999, 29). From 1931 to 1938 he was employed by the department of commerce and telecommunications in Austria.

In 1932 Gutmann married Salomea Gelbrand. She died in 1934, and on 7 December 1935 he married Gertrude Erika Pick in a civil ceremony. The marriage apparently ended in divorce in 1938. He had left Vienna in April that year for Zurich, Switzerland, where he applied unsuccessfully for a visa to the United States of America. In January 1939, however, having obtained a visa to travel to Great Britain, he arrived in London, where he worked as a designer for John E. Dallas Ltd, a manufacturer of gramophones and musical instruments. It is believed that his mother was deported to Sobibor extermination camp, Poland, in June 1942, where she was killed; the fate of his younger brother, Otto, is not known.

When interned as an enemy alien on 23 November 1939 Gutmann was living at Lancaster Gate, London. He was described in Australian records as a wireless engineer, whose religion was Church of England, and who was five feet eight inches (173 cm) tall, with a ‘fair’ complexion, ‘brown/black’ hair, and ‘brown’ eyes (NAA MP1103/2). Giving his marital status as single, and naming Eileen G. Fosterne, of Sloane Square, as his fiancée and next of kin, he made several applications to remain in England, but these were refused. He was deported aboard the commandeered liner SS Arandora Star, carrying some 1,299 internees and prisoners of war destined for Newfoundland and Canada. When the vessel was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland on 2 July 1940, he was one of some 586 enemy aliens who were rescued and returned to Britain. With some of the other survivors he was transferred to HMT Dunera, which sailed from Liverpool on 10 July bound for Australia.

Reaching Melbourne on 3 September 1940, Gutmann was taken to Tatura internment camp. Here he was ‘one of the instigators’ (Inglis, Spark, and Winter 2018, 262) and secretary of the Collegium Taturense, an educational venture teaching a wide variety of subjects to inmates. He also delivered lectures in ‘Advanced Radio.’ On 26 April 1943 he was released in order to join the 8th Employment Company, Citizen Military Forces, with which he served in Melbourne and at Tocumwal. By August 1943 he had come to the attention of Australian authorities as possessing ‘exceptionally high qualifications in Theoretical Physics’ (NAA SP1714/1). That month Wallace Wurth, the director general of manpower, sought a security report on Gutmann, as he had been urged to place him in a position ‘which will utilise that knowledge and experience’ (NAA SP1714/1). Gutmann was discharged on 21 February 1944 ‘on the grounds of Reserved Occupation’ (NAA SP1714/1) and immediately moved to Sydney where he took an appointment with the engineering company G. H. Sample & Son, Castlereagh Street, while also working part time at the University of Sydney with Bruno Breyer, a fellow Dunera refugee and Collegium Taturense colleague. In September he was a designer of scientific equipment in the university’s department of organic chemistry and in November he was engaged to test the properties of tanning oils at Crown Chemical Co. Pty Ltd, Alexandria. By 28 May he was employed as a research physicist by Vane Electric Instruments Ltd, back in Castlereagh Street.

On 13 October 1945 at the district registrar’s office, Paddington, Gutmann married Irene Glaser, an Austrian-born chef. He was naturalised on 25 July 1946. From 25 July 1949 he was employed as a research officer (research lecturer from 1951) in the school of electrical engineering at the New South Wales University of Technology (later the University of New South Wales). The university had employed him without documentary authentication of his claimed qualifications, which were said to have been lost in transit to Australia due to enemy action. Promoted to senior lecturer in 1955—by which time he was working in the school of applied chemistry—he retired as associate professor in 1967. In 1966 he had visited the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, United States, where he worked in the jet propulsion laboratory, which was sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He then spent several years as an independent researcher. From 1975 until his death he was an honorary associate in the school of chemistry at Macquarie University, Sydney. With Harry Bloom, in 1978 he was honoured by the creation of the Bloom-Gutmann prize of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute.

‘A man of high moral principles,’ Gutmann was ‘never happier than when entertaining with his wife, a genial host plying his guests with food and wine’ (Eckert, McKern, and Neering 1999, 29). He died on 6 May 1999 at Wahroonga, survived by Irene, and was cremated. In a productive career, he had published numerous scientific papers and books, and become an internationally recognised authority on electrochemistry in general and on organic semiconductors in particular. A man with a gift for scientific collaboration and a knack for devising instruments, as well as a flair for laboratory experimentation, he was one of a generation of European scientists, many Jewish, who did much to modernise and internationalise Australian science.