This
book captures the highlights of 50 years of research by Australia’s
premier research institution, the Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), bringing to light many of
the scientific endeavours that have underpinned Australia’s
development during the second half of the 20th
Century.
Australian
scientists have been leaders in numerous fields; from agriculture
and microbiology, to new building materials, new foods, air
navigation and the Instrument Landing System (ILS), and exploration
of the cosmos through pioneering radio astronomy. The nation, and
in particular the CSIRO, attracted some of the world’s most
brilliant minds in the first two decades after World War
II.
Although community
and political recognition of the country’s scientific capabilities
began to diminish with the rise of mined wealth from the 1970s,
scientists themselves were never far from the frontier of
knowledge. The CSIRO by the turn of the 21st Century was still one
of the world’s most prominent research institutions, particularly
when measured by the breadth of scientific fields it covered. It
had progressed from having an outstanding record in the application
of science to the development of Australian agriculture, to an
equally proud list of achievements in new high-technology,
industrial, and biomedical fields, including the now ubiquitous
polymer bank notes and wi-fi technology.
On
being commissioned to write this history, using the people focus
approach that I used for my Snowy history, my intention was to seek
out the undiminished spirit of discovery that drove men and women
to be bold enough to try and position a small, environmentally and
geographically challenged nation at the forefront of technical
endeavour. It sounds clichéd, but they were and are unsung heroes.
Often their greatest challenge has not been technical, but the
commercial, and intellectual limitations of their own country. Time
and again the results of Australian research has subsequently
appeared only in imported technologies and products because of an
entrenched sentiment in many Australian boardrooms that it is
simpler easier to buy than to develop.
A
single book cannot hope to cover every research project undertaken
by every laboratory, and regrettably the work of many dedicated
scientists is missing. I have tried to assuage this deficiency a
little by using chapter endnotes to provide additional information
or comment.
Also
I have not attempted to plot the many structural and administrative
changes that have taken place within CSIRO. These would be as much
as a distraction to the story as they were to
research.
Instead I have
attempted to draw together the more prominent fields of inquiry
into a historical narrative – a story dealing with real science,
real life.
Above all, I
attempted to shine a little light onto some quite extraordinary
people whose intellectual vigour, vision and passion for inquiry
was inspirational to encounter. They are people any nation would be
proud to claim as their own, for their achievements and sense of
duty to their community. Historian Donald Horne, author of ‘A Lucky
Country’, was once reported as saying it was time Australians
reappraised their myths – that as well as ‘The Man from Snowy
River’, there also ought to be ‘The Person from the CSIRO’. The
only obstacle to this laudable suggestion is there are so many to
choose from.
I hope this living history will continue to inspire a wider interest in science and its people, and their role in sustaining or improving the human condition and the condition of the natural world in which all life rests. It is only through science being explained, debated, and appreciated, that our way into the future can withstand the awesome power of ignorance.
Brad Collis
Extract:
The chatter of small-talk faded to a reverent hush
as the young Queen and her entourage made their regal entrance to
the garden. Guests curtsied and bowed in a rippling procession of
floral hats and sombre suits – but at the rear of the garden a
solitary figure stood aghast.
The Australian Queen, Elizabeth II, was giving the time-honoured Australian salute, that reflex flick of the hand which begins with the first flys of summer – and she shouldn’t have been. She ought to have been waving calmly to deferential subjects gathered in the shady garden of Yarralumla, the Governor-General’s official residence in Canberra, not taking defensive swipes at clouds of hovering flys.
Doug Waterhouse, Australia’s internationally renowned insect expert, was dumbfounded. There shouldn’t have a been a fly anywhere near her royal highness. The previous week he’d tested his new insect repellent thoroughly on himself and governor-general William Philip Sidney, first Viscount de L’Isle, and not a fly had bothered them. For the garden party, the premier social event during the Queen’s 1963 visit to Canberra, Waterhouse had arranged for an aide-de-camp to discreetly spray Elizabeth as she prepared to go outside.
Waterhouse hurried from the scene and learned that the aide responsible had lost his nerve, aiming the spray from such a distance that none reached her.
Government House staff, however, had no such qualms the following day when they met members of the royal party and journalists for 18 holes at the Royal Canberra Golf Club. They applied the substance liberally and it wasn’t long into the game before the visitors, especially journalists, noticed that as they flailed and choked their way through swarms of flys, their hosts were fly-free. ‘It’s a new formula developed by the CSIRO’ the visitors were told. Within days Waterhouse’s new bushfly repellent was making headlines and it prompted a phone call from the Mortein insecticide company, requesting the formula. “Back then,” Waterhouse recalled, “CSIRO policy was to make its discoveries freely available because they had been developed with public funding. Intellectual property rights hadn’t come in.”
And so it came to pass that the following summer a new fly repellent was launched and it quickly embedded itself into the Australian psyche. “Avagoodweekend” became a catchcry, and Waterhouse, for his role, was sent a dozen cans of the new product, Aerogard, for Christmas.