Fellows' biographical memoirs

Adrien Albert introduced and firmly established the discipline of medicinal chemistry within Australia and contributed greatly to research in heterocyclic chemistry.

Sir Alan Walsh was the originator and developer of the atomic absorption method of chemical analysis, which revolutionised quantitative analysis in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sir David Rivett was a physical chemist, science administrator and Foundation Fellow of the Academy.

Bert Main was one of Australia's leading zoologists and a gifted naturalist whose legacy includes the creation of some of Western Australia's most important national parks and nature reserves.

Alex Boden was a manufacturing chemist who succeeded in that most difficult of industries; through his texts, he was an exceptionally successful educational author; and he was a publisher who relished editing, a man of some privacy and reticence who made deep and continuing friendships across the world, a singularly devoted husband, parent and grandparent, and a philanthropist in an age when philanthropy had almost dropped out of sight. His life was one of remarkable richness, variety, originality and generosity. It is unlikely that there has been another Australian of his kind.

Alexander George Ogston, the first of six children, was born on 30 January 1911, in Bombay, India, where his father, Walter Henry Ogston, of firmly Aberdonian ancestry, was a businessman for twenty years. His mother, nee Josephine Elizabeth Carter, fourteen years younger than her husband, trained at the Froebel Educational Institute as a teacher, won silver and gold medals at University College, London, studying biological sciences, but married before completing her degree.

Alexander Killen Macbeth was an Irish-born organic chemist who became a major figure in Australian chemistry.

Ted Ringwood was born in Kew, an inner Melbourne suburb, on 19 April 1930, an only child in a family which identified strongly with Australia and with Melbourne in particular. Both his parents were Australian, but his mother's parents had come to Australia as Presbyterian emigrants from Ulster.

With the passing of Alfred Gottschalk on October 4th 1973, at Tübingen, West Germany, in his 80th year, there ended a life of extraordinary dedication to research in biochemistry. He died acclaimed as the leading authority in the ever-expanding field of glycoprotein research.

Professor A. David Buckingham CBE FAA FRS made fundamental theoretical and experimental contributions to the understanding of optical, electric and magnetic properties of molecules.