Written by H. Trevor Clifford.

• Family background
• Career outline
• Post retirement activities
• Scientific contribution
• Musical ability
• Other interests: Theatre, radio and television
• Personal characteristics
• About this memoir
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Bibliography

Family background

Bill Williams was born in Fulham, London, on 18 April 1913, the only child of Thomas and Clara Williams. His father suffered from asthma and so had left Wales, where he had been a coalminer, to work in London but at what has not been ascertained. Whatever it was, his mother found it necessary to work as a midwife and charlady to ensure that Bill received a good education. Having no siblings, Bill spent much of his childhood at the home of his lifelong friend and scientific colleague David Goodall, whose family he sometimes accompanied on their annual holidays.

Bill's mother was vivacious with an enquiring mind and a spirit of adventure. She was deeply interested in religion but, as judged by the number of Christian denominations she espoused and abandoned, none were to her satisfaction. Neither was the Buddhism that she went to India to investigate. In later life, to the amusement of her son, Clara took to holding séances. She followed Bill to Australia in 1966 where, in both Brisbane and Townsville, the two shared houses that had been subdivided so each could lead an independent life. Nonetheless in later life they shared a housekeeper and, following his mother's death in 1976, Bill offered her the now unoccupied flat. The arrangement was mutually satisfactory for as it happens she was obliged to move from her usual accommodation and he still required a housekeeper.

Bill was an excellent cook and in Townsville gave his neighbours Christmas puddings and treated a select group of friends to a very formal traditional Christmas dinner.

Career outline

With the assistance of scholarships, Bill was educated first at the Stationers' Company's School in north-east London, where he was a brilliant student, and then at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, where he graduated BSc with First Class Honours in 1933. He obtained a PhD in 1940 and in 1956 was awarded a DSc by the University of London. He was also an Associate of the Royal College of Science (ARCS 1933) and a Diplomate of the Imperial College (DIC 1940). In 1973 he was awarded a Doctorate of Science (honoris causa) by the University of Queensland in acknowledgement of his unstinting advice to its postgraduate students.

He was a member of the Society for Experimental Biology whose journal he for a short time edited and a member of both the Biometric and the Classification Societies in addition to being a Fellow of the Institute of Biology and of the Linnean Society (London). On moving to Australia he became a member of ANZAAS and in 1966 served as President of Section M. In 1980 Bill was admitted to the Order of the British Empire. The citation accompanying the award noted that he was retiring as a 'Research Fellow, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Division of Tropical Crops and Pastures', and 'was a pioneer in the application of computer science to agricultural and biological problems'.

Bill's professional life fell into two separate but overlapping phases. One was played out in England and the other in Australia. His only forays elsewhere as a scientist were a visit to Lahore in 1962 to attend a conference on 'The Role of Science in the Development of Natural Resources with Particular Reference to Pakistan, Iran and Turkey' and in 1968 a short lecture tour to South Africa where he was attached for five weeks to the Department of Botany at the University of Cape Town.

In England, except for a period of four years in the Army, Bill was an academic botanist and taught at Imperial College (1933-36), Sir John Cass Technical College (1936-40), Bedford College for Women (1946-51) and the University of Southampton (1951-65) where he was Professor and Head of Department. His fourteen years in Southampton were busy and happy times. He enjoyed his teaching and built up the Department by attracting active and able staff and postgraduate students of whom several became collaborators. In the early days at Southampton Bill maintained his research interest in plant physiology, but he encouraged others to pursue their individual interests while promoting collaborative projects in which he was often involved. He also supported his staff with their own courses and regularly visited Port Erin as a member of the annual algology excursion. The Department expanded under his leadership and at the date of his resignation he was involved in planning new accommodation. However, his life was not all work and no play for he organized at least one staff-student revue in which his involvement included teaching many of the cast to dance. At about this time he also successfully engaged in competition ballroom dancing for which he won a silver medal.

Concurrently with his teaching and other university duties Bill served on the Agricultural Research Council, being a member of its Potato Marketing Board Research and Development Committee, and of the Governing Body of the Glasshouse Crops Research Institute.

Notwithstanding this busy life, Bill also made time to indulge an interest in logic. He was fortunate in that Anthony Manser of the Philosophy Department at Southampton was a keen supporter of the controversial logician and metaphysician F.H.Bradley whom they both much admired. In his Principles of Logic Bradley had been unorthodox in beginning with a chapter entitled 'The General Nature of Judgement' and then going on to reduce the standard tripartite division of logic into terms, propositions and inferences to two, namely judgement and inference.(1) When Bill turned to the study of numerical classifications he found in Bradley a rationale for abandoning statistical tests as a basis for determining the validity or otherwise of classifications.

Bill also found in Bradley a philosophical ally who was a fellow logical positivist. The two shared many ideas in common including the one expressed by Bradley as follows: 'In the sciences we know, for the most part the end we aim at; and, knowing this end, we are able to test and to measure the means. But in religion it is precisely the chief end on which we are not clear'.(2) Bill expressed similar ideas in several of his Australian radio broadcasts.

Shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939, Bill enlisted. He did not declare his academic qualifications and so began his military career as a private. Not surprisingly, his scholarship could not be disguised indefinitely, and on 20 October 1941 he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. A year later he was appointed Acting Captain at the Ministry of Supply's Air Defence Research and Development Establishment. Early in 1943 he transferred to a new service, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, which was concerned with the development of radar, and in August 1944 he was appointed a war substantive captain and temporary major in what was now known as the Radar Research and Development Establishment.(3) One task of this Establishment was to train radio maintenance officers, many of whose backgrounds were in the biological rather than the physical sciences.(4)

In 1963 Godfrey Lance, who had co-operated with Bill at Southampton from the mid-1950s until 1960, was appointed Chief of CSIRO's Division of Computing Research in Canberra. The Division had sections located in all state capitals but as a matter of policy all computing research was carried out at the Division's headquarters in Canberra. Lance appreciated that Bill's talents would be invaluable to Australia and in 1965 invited him to visit for a few months. During this visit Bill lectured and met many scientists during numerous visits to CSIRO Divisions, including one to the Division of Irrigation at Griffith in New South Wales. There Eric Hoare, also an erstwhile Englishman, 'beered' and dined Bill and took him on an extensive trip into the outback. On waving 'Goodbye' at the end of Bill's visit to Australia, Lance promised to keep in touch but was pleasantly surprised when, within a week, Bill wrote asking if he could come to CSIRO on a permanent basis. The Executive was easily persuaded to offer an appointment at DCR in Canberra as a Principal Research Scientist. Bill accepted this offer and in 1966 he migrated to Australia.

On his appointment to CSIRO Bill signed an affirmation of allegiance, thereby becoming an Australian citizen. This move he never regretted and in a letter to DrVictor Burgmann following his election as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science wrote: 'The Fellowship gives me great pleasure, Australia has been very kind to me, and I have always been anxious to repay the debt'.

With Bill's departure from Southampton, the University lost an able professor and the Agricultural Research Council lost a valued member. In response to a request for a reference for the Canberra position, Sir Gordon Cox, Chairman of the Agricultural Research Council, wrote: 'In my work I have to learn whether I can rely on the scientific judgement of others, and I can say without hesitation that I know no one in whose scientific judgement I have greater confidence than Williams'.(5) These words were a signal tribute to the high esteem in which Bill was held in England. In Canberra, however, he found the climate too cold and after two years he transferred to the Division of Tropical Pastures in Brisbane where he worked for five years until his retirement. He then moved to the warmer climes of Townsville. When Les Edye heard of Bill's plans to go north, he kindly offered to help in any way possible. 'Well there is just one thing I'd appreciate', said Bill, 'Could you find me a glasshouse please?' 'Of course', replied Les, 'do you plan to return to experimental botany after this long break?' 'No!', retorted Bill, 'I want to live in it'.

A thorough planner, before moving to Townsville from Brisbane Bill learnt to swim along with a group of children at the early morning classes held at the Toowong Public Pool. However, having acquired the skill, it was never put to use when he travelled north. He claimed that, like cats, he had an aversion to water. Although Bill officially retired at 60, during the following twenty years his research publication rate scarcely declined. This productivity resulted partly from his having been appointed a consultant to the Davies Laboratory in Townsville. This was a branch of the Division of Tropical Pastures and so he was familiar with its research programme. The consultancy supplemented his pension and also enabled him to complete projects begun in Brisbane. In addition he was a consultant to the Australian Institute of Marine Science and informally offered advice to students and staff of the James Cook University of North Queensland.

Post retirement activities

Although Bill's contribution to most of the publications that appeared in his retirement was methodological, his collaboration with Les Edye was an exception in that it was closely allied to agricultural problems akin to those with which he had been involved in England as a member of the Agricultural Research Council. In a series of seventeen papers dealing with introductions of Glycine and Stylosanthes, they demonstrated the power of clustering analysis for making agronomic sense of the variation observed in field trials. The economic importance of this research was recognised when Les Edye was successfully nominated for the prestigious Sir Ian McLennan Achievement Award and the Cattleman's Union Industry Research Medal for his role in effecting pasture improvement in northern Australia.

Bill's research output as judged from his publications was prodigious, especially when it is realised that he normally worked only office hours. That his opinion was widely respected and sought is indicated by the many papers of which he was co-author. In general Bill and his collaborators were careful to ensure that credit was given where credit was due so, for example, a paper by 'Lance and Williams' would normally be one in which the computational methodology was developed mainly by Lance whereas one by 'Williams and Lance' would be an application of the methods to some scientific subject, Williams being most influential in how the techniques were applied.

Scientific contribution

Plant physiology and stomatal behaviour

Bill's research interests were broad but fall into two quite separate categories, plant physiology and pattern analysis.

Aside from brief encounters with urease metabolism and the role of aerenchyma, Bill's studies in the former discipline were mostly concerned with leaf expansion and stomatal action, topics into which he had been indoctrinated by Professor O.V.S. Heath at Imperial College. Bill's research on these subjects was competent and meticulously quantified but nonetheless somewhat pedestrian by subsequent standards, for at that time the transmission electron microscope was not generally available and the refined biochemical tools available today had not been developed. For one usually so far-sighted, it is surprising that when he proposed a new theory of stomatal mechanism, Bill did not support his views with adequate original data. Instead he raised objections to the classical theory on the grounds that although the carbohydrate and aperture changes were roughly correlated, the correspondence was not exact, a discrepancy he regarded as 'most unanswerable'. As Levitt noted shortly afterwards in a review, carbohydrates include sugars as well as starch and at the time the 'exact measurements of carbohydrate changes in the guard cells, have not as yet, been achieved'.

Bill's analysis of the available data was adequate but reads a little like a Conan Doyle short story. The similarity is not unexpected for Bill was a great admirer of Conan Doyle whom he regarded as a competent scientist. Although listed in several publications as a sometime secretary of the Sherlock Holmes Society, no record of his membership can be located.(6) Therein lies a mystery worthy of the great detective himself.

Once given the opportunity to employ his mathematical as well as his biochemical skills, Bill did so with finesse, as in a paper dealing with the transpiration of Pelargonium leaves undergoing wilting. Noting that the process involved the loss of both heat and mass to the surrounding air, he undertook a series of experiments that measured only the water loss. His neglecting heat loss may indicate that he regarded this as of negligible significance compared with that of water loss, or it may reflect an unconscious but persistent preoccupation with stomatal mechanisms. Nonetheless the experiments performed were elegant and enabled physical meanings to be given to the arbitrary constants in a series of transpiration equations proposed by Hygen.(7) It is a testimony to Bill's unfailing courtesy that his paper, in which he was mildly critical of Hygen, was published with that author's knowledge and approval.

Notwithstanding Bill's appreciation of the physical sciences, it is clear that by the mid-1950s he had become concerned that modern technology 'had persuaded many botanists that all science is measurement and that nothing else was respectable [and] that botany should in Whitehead's words "ape the manner of physics", in that we should first study the simple system and move on to complex systems only after their simple counterparts were fully understood'. This he regarded as the latest but by no means the least of the great fallacies of science. Bill also became disillusioned with 'the increasing tendency to insist that teachers spend a period undergoing diploma courses in Education, and the occasional suggestions that lecturers should be taught how to lecture'.

Statistical ecology and pattern analysis

After ten years of studying stomatal behaviour, Bill was growing tired of the subject. Therefore when approached by his colleague Joyce Lambert for advice on how to 'take unbiased samples of vegetation and sort them without any preconceived ideas as to how they should be grouped', he readily agreed to co-operate. So began the second stage of his scientific career.

As an undergraduate Bill had attended Eric Ashby's lectures on statistical ecology(8) and so was familiar with the subject as it had been grappled with up to that date. Furthermore, because he exchanged reprints with David Goodall, a botanist inclined to statistics, he had a copy of his friend's brilliant paper(9) in which a solution to the problem raised by Joyce Lambert was offered.

Random sampling within an area selected for study will take care of bias in the choice of sites from which to collect data. Such sampling was commonly practised at the time but was used largely as a basis for the description of vegetation that had been selected visually for its apparent uniformity. A few ecologists had counted the numbers of individuals of species in their quadrats and shown that, with rare exceptions, they were not randomly distributed. In general the lack of randomness was ascribed to the biology of the species rather than the diversity of the environment, which by definition was assumed to be uniform.

However, non-randomness of species distributions, especially if considered in pairs, would confirm that the environment was non-uniform. This theory had been tested by a number of ecologists, especially in Scandinavia, and was employed by Goodall in his study of mallee vegetation in Victoria. Using chi-squared as a measure of association between species, based on their presence or absence in randomly placed quadrats, he demonstrated that the area was vegetationally diverse since more significant correlations were present than would be expected by chance alone, were the species randomly distributed. Having established that the area under study was heterogeneous, Goodall then subdivided the total number of quadrats into subsets on the basis of a number of objective criteria. Here was an answer to the question that Joyce Lambert had raised.

Bill, however, although in sympathy with the general principle proposed by Goodall for subdividing the total quadrat number into subsets, found it to be inadequate because the results were not clear-cut. Whereas Goodall generally employed the presence or absence of the commonest species as the basis for constructing subsets, Bill hit upon the idea of using the species for which the chi-squared values summed over all other species was a maximum. Such a decision-making procedure involved all rather than one species. Initially he was unaware of the additive property of chi-square and employed it only on intuition, prompted by his familiarity with the methodology of factoranalysis.

Bill rapidly mastered the art of writing programs for the then recently installed Ferranti Pegasus Computer at Southampton. Furthermore, he was highly skilled in the art, as was shown by his Association Analysis program which, written in machine language, had only one bug and this one that appeared only when more than 38 species were to be considered.

In Godfrey Lance, at that time the Director of the Computer Centre, Bill found a congenial colleague. The two went on to collaborate fruitfully for nearly thirty years and to co-author many joint papers. The last of these was a note in which they commented upon the success of their 'mixed data classificatory program' which had been published in the first volume of the Australian Computer Journal and had become a 'citation classic', having been quoted more than 145 times in a period of twenty years.(10)

As a logical positivist, Bill found in classificatory problems a perfect outlet for his interest in logic and an opportunity to apply his considerable mathematical skills. He soon expanded from the manipulation of binary to continuous and multistate variables, and became immersed in multivariate analysis where the psychologists had already developed a formidable array of techniques centred on factor analysis and principal components (eigen vectors). Information measures soon joined his armoury of techniques.

Quite early in his studies, Bill suspected that several of the clustering strategies then in common use were related in a simple fashion. This suspicion proved to be true and with the co-operation of Godfrey Lance he showed that five of the strategiesnearest and furthest neighbour, median and group average, and median (but only when similarities were based on distance-squared)were variants of a simple linear model. This model involved four variables, one of which was the difference between a single pair and one of the other three. Each variable was weighted by a constant (a1,a2,b,g). Varying the magnitude of the constants altered the clustering strategy and if their values were restricted to ± ½, ± ¼ or 0, a suitable choice of these constants would generate one of the five strategies mentioned above.

As each of the strategies results in a different intensity of clustering, the linear model was later amended to allow the user to obtain clustering intensities intermediate between those commonly employed. Such 'flexible sorting' was achieved largely by fixing the values of a1 and a2 whilst allowing b to assume a value between -1 and +1 (Lance & Williams 1967). It was later shown that when b was positive, the space in which the clusters formed contracted during the clustering process, when zero the space was conserved, and when negative it was dilated as in clustering strategies based upon information measures. Because 'flexible sorting' leaves the choice of clustering intensity to the operator, it removes some of the objectivity from the methodology although the results are still reproducible provided b is defined.

From the beginning, Bill and his collaborators appreciated that the classificatory strategies being developed were applicable not only to ecological data but to almost any set of objects for each member of which a series of comparable observations was available. Accordingly, he and Joyce Lambert wrote on the application of multivariate methods in taxonomy and shortly afterwards, when he visited Australia, Bill undertook a numerical classification of the algal genus Chlorodesmis. Bill's enthusiasm was infectious and extended to others in the department at Southampton. Amongst these was Leslie Watson who was interested in higher-level classifications where it was easy to become overwhelmed with data. The two collaborated in a study concerning angiosperm classification. Shortly after Bill's migration to Australia, Watson took up a position at the Australian National University where he considerably extended the application of numerical methods to the classification of the world's grasses.(11)

It is perhaps surprising that, as one who was a pioneer of the subject, Bill did not write a substantial text. However, that he did not do so is explained by his response when asked if he would care to be listed as a co-author of An Introduction to Numerical Classification,(12) during the writing of which he had given unstintingly of his time and expertise to the authors. He declined on the grounds that he had contracted to write a larger treatise for Wiley, the prestigious American publisher.

That book was never written for, as he once said to me, he was incapable of writing more than ten pages on any subject. Instead, he edited a set of conference papers that were published as a book.(13) To this he contributed twelve chapters dealing with methodology. They varied in length from five to twelve (7.33 ± 2.19) pages, thereby falling within his self-assessed limit of ten pages on any topic. Published shortly after his retirement, the book is an excellent summary of his views on the use of pattern analysis for investigating multivariate data.

Seeking patterns in other people's data suited Bill's temperament and became central to his research in Australia. It led to the production of many co-authored papers, few of which he initiated unless the topic involved extending the application of the methodology of classificatory strategies that he had helped to devise.

In general, Bill was little interested in the source of the data. According to Len Webb, who once inveigled him into the field to become personally acquainted with the vegetation they were jointly describing, Bill said the scene meant nothing to him and it was only the data that were meaningful. This indifference may have resulted from his being interested solely in numbers, or it may have stemmed from his colour-blindness. However, the latter disability is not necessarily a serious hindrance to field work as shown by Professor Desmond Herbert who, although colour-blind, was for many years an active field botanist in Queensland.(14) Bill's indifference to the source of data was almost certainly associated with his interest in logic as expressed in algebraic formulations: he once told Norm Duke at the Australian Institute of Marine Science that he was almost blind to diagrams.

The modesty and willingness with which Bill applied himself to data collected but not analysed by others is remarkable. Through his ability to detect patterns in a very wide range of data, especially that collected by agriculturalists, he rescued from oblivion a vast amount of valuable research not amenable to standard statistical analysis. His appointment to the then Division of Tropical Pastures of CSIRO was largely predicated on the understanding that he would look through their unpublished files and extract anything publishable. So successful was he in this regard that on any cost-benefit analysis his appointment must be regarded as akin to a bargain.

Bill's analyses were not always appreciated, however, by those whose view of research was to set up testable hypotheses. Whilst there is some justification for such criticism, his claim was that it was better that patterns, no matter how weak, be detected than that the data remain unresolved. Bill regularly stressed that computer classifications are in no sense absolute and carry no authority but suggest 'to a user, what boundaries between groups might repay further study'. That is, the classifications should be seen primarily as 'hypothesis generating'. Since it is possible to provide a limitless number of classifications for the same set of data, it is important that there be some guide as to which are useful. The decision must always be made by the user but nonetheless an attempt was made to evaluate selected classifications in terms of their profitability. The concept was criticized by Goodall(15) who suggested, as an alternative, the utility of a classification.

Although neither of these concepts has persisted in a formal sense, that of utility is still recognised, albeit unwittingly, for once patterns have been detected it is often possible to collect further data suitable for statistical analysis. The ability of a program to locate groups in a set of data depends primarily upon the similarity measure chosen and the clustering strategy employed. Standardization of the data as when combining attributes into a single index automatically leads to the weighting of characters and in some circumstances the numbers of closely similar individuals in the sample may influence the order in which the groups unite. Both of these phenomena are basically properties of the data rather than of the clustering strategy.

There is a classic example that illustrates the over-riding role of the data. It involved the classification of quadrat data collected in the Norfolk Broads in England and recording the presence or absence of species at a number of localities. Surprisingly, the results highlighted the parish boundaries rather than any of the more obvious environmental variables. No-one believed that the Pegasus computer was divinely inspired and so Bill asked Joyce Lambert to review her data. It transpired that each parish had treated its land in a unique way. For example, some had done drainage work and others had used fertilizer. These differences in historical land treatment had influenced the environment sufficiently to affect where the species were growing. The present pattern of species distributions therefore provided the demarcations that showed the parish boundaries. Pegasus was not, after all, divinely inspired! Here was an example of the computer producing a classification that led to the testable hypothesis that the observed species distributions reflected different patterns of historical land usage.

Although many of the earlier practitioners of numerical classification stressed that the methodology was free of bias in that they did not weight the characters employed, Bill, because of his mathematical insight, appreciated that bias could arise as a consequence of the similarity measure employed and the clustering strategy adopted. To both of these problems he brought new insights. The 'Canberra Metric' was developed for combining quantitative characters into a single index in such a way that no single character could completely dominate the others. The Metric is particularly useful for handling data such as annual rainfalls where a record for a single year may differ markedly from the remainder. The concept of 'group-size dependence' contributed to a clearer understanding as to how it came about that composition of a group depended not only on the similarities of its members but also on the numbers in the groups. The matter was particularly significant when information measures were involved and made it clear that the branching pattern of the dendrogram was often as important as the composition of its terminal branches. Having found groups in the data it is important to determine their relationships, and here, too, Bill displayed inventiveness in devising methods for comparing the pathways by which the groups are linked. These pathways are usually presented as rooted tree structures, where the root is the sum total of objects to be classified and the tips of the branches are the individual objects. The number of groups recognised is usually determined arbitrarily by truncating the tree. The relationships between the tips of the branches (individuals) may be expressed in terms of the number of nodes passed in travelling from one tip to another. If the individuals are taxa it is tempting to treat the dendrogram as if it reflected an evolutionary tree. That it does not is clear for the tree root represents the total population under investigation.

However, when the individuals are taxa the differences between them may be treated as phylogenetic distances and the minimum spanning tree linking them could be regarded as reflecting their evolutionary relationships, taxa near to one another being more closely related than those further apart. The choice of root for such a tree is problematical for any branch tip may serve this role. The problem is resolvable only in terms of evolutionary concepts and, in particular, which taxa or characters are accepted as primitive.

Here there is an opportunity to unite numerical methods of classification with evolutionary theory. However, although aware of the development of cladistics as a taxonomic tool, Bill remained an onlooker rather than a player in this new field. That he stood on the sidelines rather than enter the fray supports the view that, at least in later life, he was basically interested in the detection of patterns rather than the mechanisms by which they were generated.

This interest in the search for patterns, together with his genial personality and penetrating insight, made him an attractive colleague to a very diverse group of scientists. The range of topics on which he wrote is astonishingly broad. It includes papers on temperate and tropical ecology, benthos, bird and foram distribution, the taxonomy of grasses, algae and monocotyledons, grazing and fertilizer trials, crop and silage chemistry, the ripening and packaging of fruit, the behavioural outcome of parental deprivation, and the qualities of travel agents. This list does not include the numerous methodological papers he wrote.

An alternative explanation of his indifference to cladistics may be that the development of the subject came at a time when he was committed to the very time-consuming process of acquiring the qualifications necessary to practise as a professional musician.

Musical ability

Bill's passion for music manifested itself at an early age. He taught himself to play the piano and enjoyed singing, as did his friend David Goodall. The two used often to sing duets to Bill's accompaniment on the Goodall family piano. Bill also taught himself to read and write music. David's sister Joyce remembers him writing a simplified version of 'Rhapsody in Blue' for her twelve-year-old friend Connie, who still plays the tune seventy years later at meetings of her local 'Pensioner's Athletic Club'.

However, it was not until he came to Australia that Bill studied the piano seriously, electing to take lessons from Larry Sitsky of the then Canberra College of Music. From then on he was a dedicated musician. After transferring to Brisbane, Bill continued his keyboard studies with Alan Lane of the Queensland Conservatorium. The two quickly found common interests, particularly in their regard for twentieth-century music, and their weekly meetings became more than just instrumental instruction. Alan says: 'Bill's mixture of talent, intelligence, character and open self-criticism was an ideal platform for rapid progress and the development of professional awareness. His wealth of experience and understanding allowed his piano studies to be absorbed within a much wider framework than is usual.' It is interesting to note that the one style of music that was quite alien to his personal outlook was that of the early Romantics, while he never quite came to terms with the particular performance demands of Chopin.

Although in Queensland there are no government requirements or registration for setting up as a private music teacher or performer, Bill was well aware of the usefulness of publicly recognised credentials and he gained both his AMusA and LMusA performance diplomas with very high results. Once resident in Townsville, he took pupils and was for a time chairman of the Townsville Music Teachers' Association. As a result of these activities he discovered a number of local pianists who would be delighted to play a concerto movement in public but could not afford the costs associated with entering the nearest competitions, which were held in Brisbane. In 1980 Bill overcame their problem by organizing the first North Queensland Piano Competition, choosing Alan Lane as the adjudicator. The concept was popular and in 1988 it expanded into the North Queensland Concerto and Vocal Competition, with Bill as patron.

He also fostered the musical life of the city by being deeply involved in the affairs of the Townsville Community Music Centre, by serving as a music presenter on Radio 4TTT, and by arranging musical evenings at his home. In appreciation of these services, Bill in 1991 received a Townsville City Council Arts, Culture and Entertainment Award. Furthermore, he was generous with his extensive library of books, scores and records and gave many people a key to his house so they could use the collection in his absence. Fortunately the collection has been preserved, for Bill bequeathed it to the James Cook University of North Queensland where it is available in the Department of Music and Fine Arts.

Because it was Bill's custom to play mezzo piano, he was in demand as an accompanist. This preference for mezzo piano was in stark contrast to that of his friend and near neighbour, the distinguished concert pianist Nancy Weir, who preferred the forte piano. In consequence they rarely played duets though they were often soloists on the same program.

Other interests: Theatre, radio and television

In addition to music, Bill in his younger days was active in the theatre. In about 1930 he and David Goodall played the roles of Bottom (DWG) and Oberon (WTW) in a North London production of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. The two were members of the Imperial College Musical and Dramatic Society of which Bill, who had now abandoned the name 'Willie' by which he was known until entering university, was President. As always he took the position seriously and not only played roles, including that of Hahalaba in Lord Dunsany's 'The Jest of Hahalaba', but also directed Patrick Hamilton's 'Rope' in which David Goodall played a role.

The Thespian skills acquired during these years were often employed, for example at Southampton where he and Tony Manser jointly produced 'Age Cannot Wither', a student-staff revue. The book and the lyrics on which the revue was based were written by Bill and David Cook, while the music was written by Bill and Kenneth Brooks. Unfortunately the book has not been located but a recording was produced of which there is a copy in Townsville. Thereon Bill is recorded as a performer in three items. These same Thespian skills contributed to his fine lecturing style and stood him in good stead whenever he appeared on television shows or performed impromptu on the piano in the bars of innumerable pubs.

Given the great diversity of Bill's activities, it would be easy to overlook that his was an ordered life in which he assumed the role of critic and communicator. Whether the scene was set on the concert platform, stage, lecture podium, television or radio studio, the pages of a scholarly journal, the columns of a newspaper or the public bar in one of his favourite pubs, Bill had an opinion to offer. Stomates, pattern analysis, science education or fiction and politics were all grist to the mill.

In England, Bill for many years took part in BBC television and radio programmes including the 'Brains Trust'. In Australia, the ABC radio series 'Insight' and 'Ockam's Razor' gave him the opportunity to display his wit and penetrating insights into many controversial issues on which a scientist might be expected to have an informed opinion. He was at his best when producing short pithy articles such as those published in The Listener, and the Australian radio talks reproduced in his book, The Four Prisons of Man, and Other Insights.

In one of his last broadcasts, 'The Tape of Many Colours', he tackled two controversial topical issues where he felt emotion rather than logic had gained the upper hand. Logic, his lifelong companion, compelled him to be critical of both the 'Green Lobby' and those concerned about the preservation of 'sacred sites'. The former did not appreciate his view that, without management, the character of vegetation will change, his comments being based upon English experiences where strict conservation had led to the extinction of the endangered species. The latter were offended by his remark, 'I am not convinced that development should ever be held up by religious scruples'. In taking these positions Bill realised he was being contentious, but he stuck to his belief in the power of logic. The word 'belief' is appropriate here, even though it carries a religious connotation. While Bill regarded 'all religious beliefs to be irrational'(16) and therefore the antithesis of the logical positivism he espoused, his attachment to logic was almost dogmatic. However his views were never presented dogmatically.

Personal characteristics

Amiable at all times, Bill was nonetheless eccentric in several aspects of his behaviour. His reluctance to wear shoes or a tie in Queensland and elsewhere could be regarded variously as an affectation, an indifference to dress codes, or a conscious desire to be unconventionalto name a few of the possibilities. On one occasion he was not allowed to eat breakfast at the Hotel Windsor in Melbourne because he was deemed to be improperly attired. At the 'Royal Exchange' in Brisbane, however, he always wore sandals and so conformed with the pub culture he so much admired. Such conformity was in marked contrast to his behaviour in Mareeba where, after leaving the pub, he repaired to the median nature strip, divested himself of his shirt and lay on the lawn to sleep in the sun. He always feigned surprise that he was questioned by the police for this action, although a person of his education and the holder of a commission in the British Army is unlikely to have been ignorant of the law appertaining to vagrancy.

Bill's eccentricity may have reflected a personality in which living and acting unconsciously intermingled so that all the world became a stage. When living in Southampton, he breakfasted at a Truckies' Cafe where he kept his own jar of marmalade. In Townsville he shunned the RSL Club of which he was entitled to be a member in favour of a local pub, and in later life took to leading his dog around the streets clad in shorts and a singlet. These very visible actions are befitting of an actor. A love of the theatrical was also reflected in his habit of crawling down the corridor of the Botany Department in Southampton so as to go to lunch without being seen by Joyce Lambert whose half-glass door he had to pass.(17)

An intensely private person, Bill revealed little of himself in letters or conversation. Still, he was not reticent, as may be seen from his writing to fellow dog-lover Nancy Weir on the death of his dog, and his sending Joyce Lambert transcripts of his Australian radio broadcasts and detailed accounts of his dogs. That he had difficulty in personal relationships is nevertheless suggested by his going to the pub rather than to the wake after his father's funeral.(18)

Such behaviour was surprising considering his close relationship with his mother, but reflected his deep attachment to the 'pub culture' that he discussed so eloquently in the third of his talks in the ABC Insight series, 'The Three Cultures'. Therein he described 'the direct personal culture of the working man's public bar. It is a culture that has been much reviled, but little understood.' Bill saw it as a 'culture of great honesty' and 'great kindness to all frail and helpless things: to small children, dogs and especially aged parents'. He also described it as a 'gladiatorial culture' but one 'of fierce loyalties'. Furthermore, he said, 'It is a unisexual culture, such as would have been understood in ancient Greece. It is in no sense homosexualthough I suppose the Freudians would try to make it sobut it is understanding of such things and is tolerant.' It was perhaps this tolerance that he so much appreciated, for in the public bar he would have found few people with whom to share anything of his professional life.

It is unfortunate that Bill's account of 'The Bernie-and-Bill Pub Pilgrimage' was distributed privately and then to only a select few. Therein is 'The Record of a Remarkable Journey by B. McMullen and W.T. Williams from Brisbane to Cooktown and Return in a Morris 850 Mini-Minor, covering Twenty-nine Days (12 June 1971 to 10 July 1971), Three Thousand Four Hundred and Seven Miles, and Two Hundred and Sixty-Three Pubs'. No hotel was included in the pilgrimage unless it had a genuine public bar, at which the travellers consumed at least one five-ounce glass of beer or one half-Scotch.

In contrast to his apparent feelings of insecurity with people, Bill had no hesitancy in accepting the companionship of dogs. He spoke at length about this in a broadcast entitled 'A Man and His Dog' wherein he wrote: 'But a dog offers silent companionship; and in that gracious silence there need be no more than a gentle scratch behind the ear, acknowledged by an affectionate lick. No more is asked, and no more is needed.' Later in the broadcast he gave a poignant account of his feelings after agreeing to have his dog put down on account of its infirmity: 'There comes the dreadful day when the vet shakes his head, and says he's sorry, but there is nothing more he can do. And so, fighting back the tears, you bow to the inevitable, give a last caress and murmur of farewell, as, desolate, you watch an important part of your life being led away. I suppose it might help if you were religious; for then the possibility of reunion would not be quite inconceivable.'

In the middle of the afternoon a few weeks after this broadcast, Bill tripped over a panel of wire fence lying on a pathway in the grounds of the Causeway Hotel. In falling he sustained serious injuries and died five days later. Joyce Ashby remembers the teenaged Bill as a 'kind, thoughtful, amusing person'.(19) These admirable qualities he retained throughout a long and highly productive life. Bill never married.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, Vol.12, No.1, 1998. It was written by H. Trevor Clifford, Department of Geology, Queensland Museum.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following for the advice and information they gave so cheerfully during the writing of this memoir: Mike Dale, Les Edye, David Goodall, Merv Hegarty, Brian Hopkins, Jiro Kikkawa, Joyce Lambert, Godfrey Lance, Alan Lane, Pat Newman, Mary-Lou Schönfeldt, Kathy Stephens, Anne Tuppack, Les Watson, Len Webb, Nancy Weir, Robyn Williams. The photograph was taken by Patti Holden in Townsville on 14 July 1988.

Notes

1. A. Manser, Bradley's Logic (1983), p.63.
2. F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (1995), p.399.
3. National Army Museum, Chelsea.
4. B.B. Kennett and J.A. Tatman, Craftsmen of the Army: The Story of the Royal and Mechanical Engineers (1970).
5. Both this and the previous quotation came from CSIRO staff file, W.T.Williams.
6. Information from Honorary Secretary, Sherlock Holmes Society of London.
7. G. Hygen, Physiologia Plantarum 4 & 6 (1951, 1953).
8. Information from Ilma Brewer, a former student of Lord Ashby.
9. D.W. Goodall, Australian Journal of Botany, 1 (1953).
10. Current Contents, 17 March 1986.
11. L. Watson and M.J. Dallwitz, The World's Grasses (Wallingford: CAB International, 1992).
12. H.T. Clifford and W. Stephenson, An Introduction to Numerical Classification. (New York: Academic Press, 1975).
13. W.T. Williams, W.T. 1976. Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science (Melbourne/Amsterdam: CSIRO/Elsevier, 1976).
14. H.T. Clifford, 'D.A. Herbert ', in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 14 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997).
15. D.W. Goodall, Nature, 211 (1966).
16. W.T. Williams, 'A Biologist Grows Old', ABC broadcast, 7 February 1993.
17. Information from Palmer Newbold, aSouthampton colleague.
18. Information from Joyce Lambert, aSouthampton colleague.
19. Information from Joyce Ashby (née Goodall), a friend from childhood.

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1947

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1948

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1952

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1953

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1954

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1955

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1956

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1957

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1959

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1960

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1961

• (With D.A. Barber) The Functional Significance of Aerenchyma in Plants. Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, 15: 132-44.
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1962

• (With M.B. Dale) Partition Correlation Matrices for Heterogeneous Quantitative Data. Nature, 196: 602.
• Computers as Botanists. Proceedings of the Royal Institution, 39: 306-12.
• (With J.M. Lambert) Multivariate Methods in Plant Ecology. IV. Nodal Analysis. Journal of Ecology, 50: 775-802.

1963

• The Biological Importance of Soil Aeration. In E.K. Woodford, ed., Crop Production in a Weed-Free Environment: Symposium of British Weed Control Council, Number 2 (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications), pp. 83-9.
• The Computer Botanist. The Listener, 70:983-5.

1964

• Man in Future. The Listener, 71: 779-81.
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• Experimental Botany in Agricultural Development. In M.L. Smith, ed., The Role of Science in the Development of Natural Resources with Particular Reference to Pakistan, Iran and Turkey (London: Pergamon), pp.252, 262-9.
• (With M.B. Dale and P. Macnaughton-Smith) An Objective Method for Weighting in Similarity Analysis. Nature, 201: 426.
• (With P. Macnaughton-Smith, M.B. Dale and L.G. Mockett) Dissimilarity Analysis: A New Technique of Hierarchical Sub-Division. Nature, 202: 1034-35.

1965

• (With S.C. Ducker and G.N. Lance) Numerical Classification of the Pacific Forms of Chlorodesmis (Chlorophyta). Australian Journal of Botany, 13: 489-99.
• (With G.N. Lance) Logic of Computer-Based Intrinsic Classifications. Nature, 207: 159-61.
• (With G.N. Lance) Computer Programs for Monothetic Classification ('Association Analysis'). Computer Journal, 8: 246-9.
• (With B.R. Buttery and J.M. Lambert) Competition between Glyceria maxima and Phragmites communis in the Region of Surlingham Broad. II. The Fen Gradient. Journal of Ecology, 53: 183-95.
• (With M.B. Dale) Fundamental Problems in Numerical Taxonomy. Advances in Botanical Research, 2: 35-68.

1966

• (With J.M. Lambert and G.N. Lance) Multivariate Methods in Plant Ecology. V. Similarity Analyses and Information-Analysis. Journal of Ecology, 54: 427-45.
• (With J.M. Lambert) Multivariate Methods in Plant Ecology. VI. Comparison of Information-Analysis and Association-Analysis. Journal of Ecology, 54: 635-64.
• (With G.N. Lance) Computer Programs for Classification. Proceedings of the Australian National Committee on Computing and Automatic Control Conference, Canberra. Paper 12/3. pp. 304-6.
• (With G.N. Lance) Computer Programs for Hierarchical Polythetic Classifications ('Similarity Analyses'). Computer Journal, 9:60-64.
• (With G.N. Lance) A Generalized Sorting Strategy for Computer Classifications. Nature, 212: 218-9.
• (With J.T. Tharu) Concentration of Entries in Binary Arrays. Nature, 210: 549.
• (With L. Watson and G.N. Lance) Angiosperm Taxonomy: A Comparative Study of Some Novel Numerical Techniques. Journal of the Linnean Society (Botany), 59: 491-501.

1967

• The Computer Botanist. Australian Journal of Science, 29(8): 266-71.
• Numbers, Taxonomy and Judgement. Botanical Review, 33(4): 379-86.
• (With G.N. Lance) A General Theory of Classificatory Sorting Strategies. I. Hierarchical Systems. Computer Journal, 9:373-80.
• (With G.N. Lance) A General Theory of Classificatory Sorting Strategies. II. Clustering Systems. Computer Journal, 10:271-7.
• (With G.N. Lance) Mixed-Data Classificatory Programs. I. Agglomerative Systems. Australian Computer Journal, 1: 15-20.
• (With G.N. Lance) Note on the Classification of Multi-Level Data. Computer Journal, 9:381-2.
• (With R.G. Fisher and G.N. Lance) An Application of Techniques of Numerical Taxonomy to Company Information. Economic Record, 43: 566-87.
• (With L. Watson and G.N. Lance) A Mixed-Data Numerical Approach to Angiosperm Taxonomy: The Classification of Ericales. Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Botany), 178: 25-36.
• (With L.J. Webb, J.G. Tracey and G.N. Lance) Studies in the Numerical Analysis of Complex Rain-Forest Communities. I. A Comparison of Methods Applicable to Site/Species Data. Journal of Ecology, 55: 171-91.
• (With L.J. Webb, J.G. Tracey and G.N. Lance) Studies in the Numerical Analysis of Complex Rain-Forest Communities. II. The Problem of Species-Sampling. Journal of Ecology, 55:525-38.

1968

• (With A. El-Gazzar, L. Watson and G.N. Lance) The Taxonomy of Salvia: A Test of Two Radically Different Numerical Methods. Journal of the Linnean Society (Botany), 60:237-50.
• (With G.N. Lance) Mixed-Data Classificatory Programs. II. Divisive Systems. Australian Computer Journal, 1: 82-85.
• (With G.N. Lance) Note on a New Information-Statistic Classificatory Program. Computer Journal, 11: 195.
• (With G.N. Lance) Choice of Strategy in the Analysis of Complex Data. The Statistician, 18(1): 31-43.
• (With G.N. Lance and P.W. Milne) Mixed-Data Classificatory Programs. III. Diagnostic Systems. Australian Computer Journal, 1:178-81.
• (With W. Stephenson and G.N. Lance) Numerical Approaches to the Relationships of Certain American Swimming Crabs (Crustacea:Portunidae). Proceedings of the United States National Museum, 124: Number 3645.

1969

• The Problem of Attribute-Weighting in Numerical Classification. Taxon, 18: 369-74.
• (With V.R. Catchpoole) The General Pattern in Silage Fermentation in Two Subtropical Grasses. Journal of the British Grassland Society, 24: 317-24.
• (With H.T. Clifford and G.N. Lance) A Further Numerical Contribution to the Classification of the Poaceae. Australian Journal of Botany, 17: 119-31.
• (With G.N. Lance) Application of Computer Classification Techniques to Problems in Land Survey. Bulletin of the Institute of Statistics, 42: 345-55.
• (With G.N. Lance) Choice of Strategy in the Analysis of Complex Data. The Statistician, 18(1): 31-43.
• (With G.N. Lance, L.J. Webb, J.G. Tracey and M.B. Dale) Studies in the Numerical Analysis of Complex Rain-Forest Communities. III. The Analysis of Successional Data. Journal of Ecology, 57: 515-35.
• (With J.G. Tracey and L.J. Webb) The Australian Flora. In L.J. Webb, D. Whitelock and J. LeGay Brereton, eds, The Last of the Lands (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press), pp. 74-81.
• (With L.J. Webb) New Methods of Numerical Analysis of Rainforest Data.Malayan Forester, 32(4): 368-74.
• (With L.J. Webb, J.G. Tracey and G.N. Lance) The Pattern of Mineral Return in Leaf Litter of Three Subtropical Australian Forests. Australian Forestry, 33(2): 99-110.

1970

• (With M.B. Dale, P. Macnaughton-Smith, and G.N. Lance) Numerical Classification of Sequences. Australian Computer Journal, 2(1): 9-13.
• (With L.A. Edye and A.J. Pritchard) A Numerical Analysis of Variation Patterns in Australian Introductions of Glycine wightii (G.javanica). Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 21: 57-69.
• (With W. Stephenson and G.N. Lance) The Macrobenthos of Moreton Bay. Ecological Monographs, 40: 459-94.
• (With G. Vilks and E.H. Anthony) Application of Association-Analysis to Distribution Studies of Recent Foraminifera. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 7: 1462-9.
• (With L.J. Webb, J.G. Tracey and G.N. Lance) Studies in the Numerical Analysis of Complex Rain-Forest Communities. V. A Comparison of the Properties of Floristic and Physionomic-Structural Data. Journal of Ecology, 58: 203-32.
• (With W. Stephenson) Computer Analyses of Petersen's Original Data on Bottom Communities. Ecological Monographs, 42:387-415.

1971

• (With G.N. Lance) A Note on a New Divisive Classificatory Program for Mixed Data. Computer Journal, 14: 154-55.
• Principles of Clustering. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 2: 303-26.
• The Four Prisons of Man, and Other Insights. Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission. 72 pp.
• Strategy and Tactics in the Acquisition of Ecological Data. Proceedings of the Ecology Society of Australia, 6: 57-62.
• (With R.L. Burt, L.A. Edye, B. Grof and C.H.L. Nicholson) Numerical Analysis of Variation Patterns in the Genus Stylosanthes as an Aid to Plant Introduction and Assessement. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 22: 737-57.
• (With H.T. Clifford) On the Comparison of Two Classifications of the Same Set of Elements. Taxon, 20(4): 519-22.
• (With H.T. Clifford and G.N. Lance) Group-Size Dependence: A Rationale for Choice between Numerical Classifications. Computer Journal, 14(2): 157-62.
• (With M.B. Dale and G.N. Lance) Two Outstanding Ordination Problems. Australian Journal of Botany, 19: 251-8.
• (With C.T. Gates and R.D. Court) Effect of Droughting and Chilling on Maturation and Chemical Composition of Townsville Stylo (Stylosanthes humilis). Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 22: 369-81.
• (With P. Gillard) Pattern Analysis of a Grazing Experiment. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 22: 245-60.
• (With K.P. Haydock, L.A. Edye and J.B. Ritson) Analysis of a Fertility Trial with Droughtmaster Cows. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research,22: 979-91.
• (With J. Kikkawa) Altitudinal Distribution of Land Birds in New Guinea. Search, 2(2): 64-65.
• (With J. Kikkawa) Ecological Grouping of Species for Conservation of Land Birds in New Guinea. Search, 2: 66-69.
• (With G.N. Lance) Note on a New Divisive Classificatory Program for Mixed Data. Computer Journal, 14(2): 154-5.
• (With G.N. Lance, M.B. Dale and H.T. Clifford) Controversy concerning the Criteria for Taxonometric Strategies. Computer Journal, 14: 162-65.
• (With W. Stephenson) A Study of the Benthos of Soft Bottoms, Sek Harbour, New Guinea, using Numerical Analysis. Australian Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 22(1): 11-34.
• (With L.J. Webb) Australia's Oldest Asian Heritage. Hemisphere, 15(2): 2-7.
• (With L.J. Webb) Island of Sand. Hemisphere, 15(12): 2-6.
• (With L.J. Webb, J.G. Tracey and G.N. Lance) Prediction of Agricultural Potential from Intact Forest Vegetation. Journal of Applied Ecology, 8: 99-121.

1972

• The Problem of Pattern. Australian Mathematics Teacher, 28(3): 103-9.
• Partition of Information. Australian Journal of Botany, 20: 235-40.
• (With R.D. Court and M.P. Hegarty) The Effect of Mineral Nutrient Deficiency on the Content of Free Amino Acids in Setaria sphacelata. Australian Journal of Biological Sciences, 25: 77-87.
• (With D.A. Hedges and J.L. Wheeler) Sources of Variation in the Number of Lambs Born in a Grazing Experiment. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 23: 839-49.
• (With E.M. Hutton and L.B. Beall) Reactions of Lines of Phaseolus atropurpureus to Four Species of Root-Knot Nematode. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 23: 623-32.
• (With J. Kikkawa and D.K. Morris) A Numerical Study of Agonistic Behaviour in the Grey-Breasted Silvereye (Zosterops lateralis). Animal Behaviour, 20: 155-56.
• (With G.N. Lance) Practicalities of Numerical Classification. Proceedings of the 5th Australian Computer Conference, Brisbane, pp. 432-6.
• (With D. Schoorl) Prediction of Drop-Testing Performance of Apple Packs. Queensland Journal of Agriculture and Animal Sciences, 29: 187-97.
• (With L.J. Webb and J.G. Tracey) Regeneration and Pattern in Subtropical Rain Forest. Journal of Ecology, 60: 675-95.

1973

• Partition of Information: The CENTPERC Problem. Australian Journal of Botany, 21:277-81.
• What is a Scientific Education? Australian Physicist, 10(2): 32-4.
• (With H.T. Clifford) Classificatory Dendrograms and Their Interpretation. Australian Journal of Botany, 21: 151-62.
• (With L.A. Edye, R.L. Burt and B. Grof) The Use of Ordination Techniques in the Preliminary Evaluation of Stylosanthes Accessions. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 24: 715-31.
• (With L.A. Edye, R.L. Burt, R.J. Williams and B.A. Grof) Preliminary Agronomic Evaluation of Stylosanthes Species. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 24: 511-25.
• (With C.W. Ford) In vitro Digestibility and Carbohydrate Composition of Digitaria decumbens and Setaria anceps Grown at Different Levels of Nitrogenous Fertilizer. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 24: 309-16.
• (With C.T. Gates and K.P. Haydock) A Study of the Interaction of Cold Stress, Age, and Phosphorus Nutrition on the Development Lotononis bainesii Baker. Australian Journal of Biological Sciences, 26: 87-103.
• (With D.A. Hedges and J.L. Wheeler) The Efficiency of Utilization of Forage Oats in relation to the Quantity Initially Available. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 24: 257-70.
• (With G.N. Lance, L.J. Webb and J.G. Tracey) Studies in the Numerical Analysis of Complex Rain-Forest Communities. VI. Models for the Classification of Quantitative Data. Journal of Ecology, 61: 47-70.
• (With D. Schoorl) Robustness of Model Predicting Drop-Testing Performance of Fruit Packs. Queensland Journal of Agriculture and Animal Sciences, 30: 247-53.
• (With W. Stephenson) The Analysis of Three-Dimensional Data (Sites x Species x Times) in Marine Ecology. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 11: 207-27.
• (With R.L. Burt and J.F. Compton) Variation within Naturally Occuring Townsville Stylo (Stylosanthes humilis) Populations: Changes in Population Structure and Some Agronomic Implications. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 24: 703-13.
• (With L.J. Webb) SynecologyCinderella Finds Her Coach. New Scientist, 59: 195-96.
• (With L.J. Webb, J.G. Tracey and J. Kikkawa) Techniques for Selecting and Allocating Land for Nature Conservation in Australia. In A.B. Costin and R.H. Groves, eds, Nature Conservation in the Pacific (Canberra: Australian National University Press), pp.39-52.

1974

• (With L.A. Edye) A New Method for the Analysis of Three-Dimensional Data Matrices in Agricultural Experimentation. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 25: 803-12.
• (With L.A. Edye, R.L. Burt, and D.O. Norris) The Symbiotic Effectiveness and Geographic Origin of Morphological-Agronomic Groups of Stylosanthes Accessions. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 14: 349-57.
• (With L.A. Edye, R.L. Burt, C.H.L. Nicholson and R.J. Williams) Classification of the Stylosanthes Collection, 1928-69. CSIRO Australia, Division of Tropical Agronony. Technical Paper No. 15. 28 pp.
• (With R.L. Burt, L.A. Edye, P. Gillard, B. Grof, M. Page, N.H. Shaw, R.J. Williams and G.P.M. Wilson) Small-Sward Testing of Stylosanthes in Northern Australia: Preliminary Considerations. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 25: 559-575.
• (With A. Chang and S. Faine) Cross-Reactivity of the Axial Filament Antigen as a Criterion for Classification of Leptospira. Australian Journal of Experimental Biology and Medical Science, 52(3): 549-68.
• (With K.M. Koller) Early Parental Deprivation and Later Behavioral Outcomes: Cluster Analysis Study of Normal and Abnormal Groups. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 8(1): 89-96.
• (With W. Stephenson and S.D. Cook) The Benthic Fauna of Soft Bottoms, Southern Moreton Bay. Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, 17: 73-123.

1975

• Pattern Analysis in Field Experiments. In V.J. Bofinger and J.L. Wheeler, eds, Developments in Field Experiment Design and Analysis. Commonwealth Bureau of Pastures and Field Crops. Bulletin No. 50. pp.107-17.
• (With G.N. Lance) REMUL: A New Divisive Polythetic Classificatory Program. Australian Computer Journal, 7: 109-12.
• (With R.L. Burt) Plant Introduction and the Stylosanthes Story. Australian Meat Research Committee Review, No. 25: 1-26.
• (With L.A. Edye) The Analysis of Reproductive Records with Use of Labelled Sequences, and Its Application to a Grazing Experiment. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 26: 665-72.
• (With L.A. Edye, P. Anning, A.McR. Holm, C.P. Miller, M.C. Page, and W.H. Winter) Sward Tests of Some Morphological-Agronomic Groups of Stylosanthes Accessions in Dry Tropical Environments. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 26: 481-96.
• (With G.N. Lance) POLYDIV: A Divisive Classificatory Program for All-Numeric Data. Australian Computer Journal, 7: 144.
• (With I. Noy-Meir and D. Walker) Data Transformations in Ecological Ordination. II. On the Meaning of Data Standardization. Journal of Ecology, 63: 779-800.
• (With J.H. Schottler) The Effect of Early Weaning Brahman Cross Calves on Calf Growth and Reproductive Performance of the Dam. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 15: 456-9.
• (With J.H. Schottler and P. Efi) Behaviour of Beef Cattle in Equatorial Lowlands. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 15: 725-30.

1976

• Matrix Terminology. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp.3-7.
• Manipulation of Matrices. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp.8-15.
• Determinants: The Inverse of a Matrix. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp. 16-21.
• Latent Roots and Vectors. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp.22-28.
• Attributes. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp. 31-36.
• Ordination: Principal Component Analysis. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp. 47-58.
• Other Ordination Procedures. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp. 59-69
• Types of Classification. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp.76-83.
• Hierarchical Agglomerative Strategies. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp. 84-90.
• Hierarchical Divisive Strategies. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp. 91-95.
• The Meaning of Pattern. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp.124-29.
• Pattern Analysis and Statistics. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp. 130-36.
• (With R.L. Burt and R. Reid) Exploration for, and Utilization of, Collections of Tropical Pasture Legumes. I. The Relationship between Agronomic Performance and Climate of Origin of Introduced Stylosanthes spp. Agro-Ecosystems, 2(4): 293-307.
• (With S.J. Campbell) Factors associated with 'Maturity Bronzing' of Banana Fruit. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 16: 428-32.
• (With H.T. Clifford) Similarity Measures. In W.T. Williams, ed., Pattern Analysis in Agricultural Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier/ Melbourne: CSIRO. pp. 37-46.
• (With L.A. Edye, G. Bishop, R.L. Burt, B.G.Cook, R.L. Hall, C.P. Miller, M.C. Page, J.H. Prinsen, S.L. Stillman and W.H. Winter) Sward Tests of Some Stylosanthes guyanensis Accessions in Tropical and Subtropical Environments. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 27: 637-47.
• (With P. Gillard and L.A. Edye) An Improved Numerical Method for the Analysis of a Floristic Pasture Survey. Australian Journal of Ecology, 1: 237-43.
• (With R.L. Sandland and K.P. Haydock) Statistics and Pattern Analysis in Pasture Research. In N.H. Shaw and W.W. Bryan, eds, Tropical Pasture Research: Principles and Methods. Commonwealth Bureau of Pastures and Field Crops. No.51. pp. 354-77.
• (With L.J. Webb) Nurseries of the Sea. Hemisphere, 20: 27-30.
• (With L.J. Webb and J.G. Tracey) The Value of Structural Features in Tropical Forest Typology. Australian Journal of Ecology, 1:3-28.

1977

• At 'The Pub'. Hemisphere, 21(8): 20-24.
• (With L.A. Edye, R.L. Burt, B. Grof, S.L. Stillman and W.H. Winter) The Assessment of Seasonal Yield using some Stylosanthes guyanensis Accessions in Humid Tropical and Sub-Tropical Environments. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 17: 425-34.
• (With C.A.P. Boundy and A.J. Millington) Effect of Sowing Date on the Growth and Yield of Three Sorghum Cultivars in the Ord River Valley. 2. The Components of Growth and Yield. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 28: 381-7.
• (With G.N. Lance) Attribute Contributions to a Classification. Australian Computer Journal, 9: 128-29.
• (With G.N. Lance) Chapter 11. Hierarchical Classificatory Methods. In K. Enslein, A.Ralston and H.S. Wilf, eds, Statistical Methods for Digital Computers (New York: Wiley).
• (With A.J. Millington, M.I.K. Whiting and C.A.P. Boundy) The Effect of Sowing Date on the Growth and Yield of three Sorghum Cultivars in the Ord River Valley. 1. Agronomic Aspects. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 28: 369-79.
• (With J.H. Schottler and A. Boromana) Comparative Performance of Cattle and Buffalo on the Sepik Plains, Papua New Guinea. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry,17: 550-54.
• (With W.H. Winter, L.A. Edye and R.G.Megarrity) Effects of Fertilizer and Stocking Rate on Pasture and Beef Production from Sown Pastures in Northern Cape York Peninsula. 1. Botanical and Chemical Composition of the Pastures. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 17: 66-74.
• (With W.H. Winter and L.A. Edye) Effects of Fertilizer and Stocking Rate on Pasture and Beef Production from Sown Pastures in Northern Cape York Peninsula. 2. Beef Production and Its Relation to Blood, Faecal and Pasture Measurements. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 17: 187-96.

1978

• (With S.J. Campbell) Predictive Varimax Rotation. TOME, 18: 75-81.
• (With S.J. Campbell) Mineral Relationships in 'Maturity Bronzing' of Banana Fruit. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 18: 603-8.
• (With M.B. Dale) A New Method of Species-Reduction for Ecological Data. Australian Journal of Ecology, 3: 1-5.
• (With L.A. Edye and W.H. Winter) Seasonal Relations between Animal Gain, Pasture Production and Stocking Rate on Two Tropical Grass-Legume Pastures. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 29: 103-13.
• (With E.M. Hutton and C.S. Andrew) Differential Tolerance to Manganese in Introduced and Bred Lines of Macroptilium atropurpureum. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 29: 67-79.
• (With E.M. Hutton and L.B. Beall) Evaluation of Bred Lines of Macroptilium atropurpureum. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 18: 702-7.

1979

• Letter to the Editor.Australian Computer Journal, 11(3): 114.
• (With G.N. Lance) INVER: A Program for the Computation of Distance-Measures between Attributes of Mixed Types. Australian Computer Journal, 11: 27-28.
• (With R.L. Burt and R.F. Isbell) Strategy of Evaluation of a Collection of Tropical Herbaceous Legumes from Brazil and Venezuela. I. Ecological Evaluation at the Point of Collection. Agro-Ecosystems, 5: 99-117.
• (With R.L. Burt) Strategy of Evaluation of a Collection of Tropical Herbaceous Legumes from Brazil and Venezuela. II. Evaluation in the Quarantine Glasshouse. Agro-Ecosystems, 5: 119-134.
• (With R.L. Burt) Strategy of Evaluation of a Collection of Tropical Herbaceous Legumes from Brazil and Venezuela. III. The Use ofOrdination Techniques in Evaluation. AgroEcosystems, 5: 135-46.
• (With R.A. Date and R.L. Burt) Affinities between Various Stylosanthes Species as shown by Rhizobial, Soil pH and Geographic Relationships. Agro-Ecosystems, 5: 57-67.
• (With E.M. Hutton) Cold Tolerance in Siratro and Bred Lines of Macroptilium purpureum. Journal of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science, 45: 248-50.

1980

• Twonet: A New Program for the Computation of a Two-Neighbour Network. Australian Computer Journal, 12(2): 70.
• (With J.S. Bunt) Studies in the Analysis of Data from Australian Tidal Forests ('Mangroves'). I. Vegetational Sequences and Their Graphic Representation. Australian Journal of Ecology, 5: 385-90.
• (With J.S. Bunt) Studies in the Analysis of Data from Australian Tidal Forests ('Mangroves'). II. The Use of an Asymmetric Monothetic Divise Classificatory Program. Australian Journal of Ecology, 5: 391-6.
• (With R.L. Burt and G.N. Lance) A Method for Establishing Character Inter-Relations in Plant Collections, and Its Possible Application to Plant Improvement Programs. Euphytica, 29: 625-33.
• (With R.L. Burt and B.C. Pengelly) Network Analysis of Genetic Resources Data. III. The Elucidation of Plant/Soil/Climate Relationships. Agro-Ecosystems, 6: 119-27.
• (With R.L. Burt, D.F. Sinclair, P. Harrison and B.C. Pengelly) Preliminary Agronomic Evaluation of Some Perennial Urochloa Species over a Range of Environments. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 20: 439-46.
• (With R.L. Burt and R.J. Williams) Observation, Description and Classification of Plant Collections. In R.J. Clements and D.G. Cameron, eds, Collecting and Testing Tropical Forage Plants (Melbourne: CSIRO), pp. 40-51.
• (With R.L. Burt, B.C. Pengelly and P.J.Robinson) Network Analysis of Genetic Resources Data. 1. Geographical Relationships. Agro-Ecosystems, 6: 99-109.
• (With R.L. Burt, P. Gillard and B.C. Pengelly) Variation within and between Some Perennial Urochloa Species. Australian Journal of Botany, 28: 343-56.
• (With R.L. Burt and B. Grof) StylosanthesStructure, Adaption, and Utilisation. In R.J.Summerfield and A.H. Bunting, eds, Advances in Legume Science (Kew: Royal Botanic Gardens), pp. 553-58.
• (With H.T. Clifford) Interrelationships amongst the Liliatae: A Graph Theory Approach. Australian Journal of Botany, 28:261-68.
• (With A.C. Done and I.M. Wood) An Assessment of Variation of Kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus) and Roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa) using a Multivariate Numerical Analysis Technique. SABRAO Journal, 12:31-42.
• (With P.J. Robinson and R.L. Burt) Network Analysis of Genetic Resources Data. II. The Use of Isozyme Data in Elucidating Geographical Relationships. Agro-Ecosystems, 6: 111-18.

1981

• (With D.J. Abel) NEBALL and FINGRP: New Programs for Multiple Nearest-Neighbour Analyses. Australian Computer Journal, 13(1): 24-25.
• (With D.J. Abel) Program INVER Revisited. Australian Computer Journal, 13(1): 26.
• (With J.S. Bunt) Vegetational Relationships in the Mangroves of Tropical Australia. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 4: 349-59.
• (With J.S. Bunt and N.C. Duke) Mangrove Litter Fall in North-Eastern Australia. II. Periodicity. Australian Journal of Botany, 29:555-63.
• (With J.S. Bunt, R.D. John and D.J. Abel) Community Concept and the Phytoplankton. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 6: 115-21.
• (With N.C. Duke and W.R. Birch) Growth Rings and Rainfall Correlations in a Mangrove Tree of the Genus Diospyros (Ebenaceae). Australian Journal of Botany, 29: 135-42.
• (With N.C. Duke and J.S. Bunt) Mangrove Litter Fall in North-Eastern Australia. Australian Journal of Botany, 29: 547-53.
• (With J. Kikkawa, L.J. Webb, M.B. Dale, G.B. Monteith and J.G. Tracey) Gradients and Boundaries of Monsoon Forests in Australia. Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia, 11: 39-52.
• (With R.L. McCown, P. Gillard and L. Winks) The Climatic Potential for Beef Cattle Production in Tropical Australia. Part II. Liveweight Change in relation to Agro-Climatic Variables. Agricultural Systems, 7:1-10.
• (With I.L. Miller) Tolerance of Some Tropical Legumes to Six Months of Simulated Waterlogging. Tropical Grasslands, 15: 39-43.
• (With W.A. Shipton and R.L. McCown) Influence of Weather on Mouldiness and the Mycoflora of Legume Pasture during the Dry Season in Tropical Australia. Australian Journal of Botany, 29: 59-69.
• (With E. Wolanski and M. Jones) Physical Properties of Great Barrier Reef Lagoon Waters near Townsville. II. Seasonal Variations. Australian Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 32: 321-34.
• (With C.W. Wrigley and P.J. Robinson) Association between Electrophoretic Patterns of Gliadin Proteins and Quality Characteristics of Wheat Cultivars. Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, 32: 433-42.

1982

• (With J.S. Bunt) Standing Stocks of Organic Carbon associated with Sessile Reefal Communities in the Bahamian Region. AIMS Data Report RS-82-1. Australian Institute of Marine Science.
• (With J.S. Bunt and H.J. Clay) River Water Salinity and the Distribution of Mangrove Species along Several Rivers in North Queensland. Australian Journal of Botany, 30: 401-12.
• (With J.S. Bunt and N.C. Duke) Mangroves Distributions in North-East Australia. Journal of Biogeography, 9: 111-20.
• (With R.L. Burt) A Re-appraisal of Hartley's Agrostological Index. Journal of Applied Ecology, 19: 159-66.
• (With H.J. Clay and J.S. Bunt) The Analysis, in Marine Ecology, of Three-Dimensional Data Matrices with One Dimension of Variable Length. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 60: 189-96.
• (With J.C. Coll, S. La Barre, P.W. Sammarco and G.J. Bakus) Chemical Defenses in Soft Corals (Coelenterata: Octocorallia) of the Great Barrier Reef: A Study of Comparative Toxicities. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 8: 271-8.
• (With J.G. McIvor, P. Anning, R.L. Clem and M.C. Finlay) The Performance of Introduced Grasses in Seasonally Dry Tropical Environments in Northern Australia. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, 22: 373-81.
• (With N. Revelante and J.S. Bunt) Temporal and Spatial Distribution of Diatoms, Dinoflagellates and Trichodesmium in Waters of the Great Barrier Reef. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 63:27-45.
• (With D.F. Sinclair, D. Ratcliff and P.J. Robinson) Comparison of Two Sets of Nearest Neighbours with Application to Pedigree and Non-Pedigree Information for Australian Wheat Varieties. Biometrie-Praximetrie, 22:15-28.
• (With C.W. Wrigley and P.J. Robinson) Associations between Individual Gliadin Proteins and Quality, Agronomic and Morphological Attributes of Wheat Cultivars. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 33: 409-18.
• (With C.W. Wrigley and P.J. Robinson) Relationships between Australian Wheats on the Basis of Pedigree, Grain Protein Composition, Grain Quality and Morphology. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 33: 419-27.

1983

• Analysis of Plant Evaluation Data. In J.G. McIvor and R.A. Bray, eds, Genetic Resources of Forage Plants (Melbourne: CSIRO), pp.293-98.
• (With D.J. Abel, P.W. Sammarco and J.S. Bunt) A New Numerical Model for Coral Distribution. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 12: 257-65.
• (With R.L. Burt) A Multidisciplinary Approach to Tropical Pasture Improvement. In R.L. Burt, P.P. Rotar, J.L. Walker and M.W. Silvey, eds, The Role of Centrosema, Desmodium and Stylosanthes in Improving Tropical Pastures (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press), pp. 257-87.
• (With R.L. Burt and D.J. Abel) A New Graph-Theoretic Technique for the Analysis of Genetic Resources Data. Agro-Ecosystems, 8:231-45.
• (With M.M. Mullin) Spatial-Temporal Scales of Zooplanktonic Assemblages in Three Areas of the North PacificA Further Analysis. Deep-Sea Research, 30(5): 569-74.
• (With C.J. Rose) Ingestion of Earthworms, Pontoscolex corethrurus, by Village Pigs, Sus scrofa papuensis, in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Applied Animal Ethology, 11:131-9.
• (With J. Williams, R.E. Prebble and C.T.Hignett) The Influence of Texture, Structure and Clay Mineralogy on the Soil Moisture Characteristic. Australian Journal of Soil Research, 21: 15-32.

1984

• (With D.J. Abel) PREPOL: A Method to Convert a Mixed Data Set to All Numeric. Australian Computer Journal, 16(1): 33-35.
• (With J.S. Bunt and H.J. Clay) Detection of Species Sequences across Environmental Gradients. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 24: 197-99.
• (With N.C. Duke and J.S. Bunt) Observations on the Floral and Vegetative Phenologies of North-Eastern Australian Mangroves. Australian Journal of Botany, 32: 87-99.
• (With R. Slaughter and K.G. Boto) Growth and Survival of the Oyster Crassostrea echinata in Tropical Mangrove Waters: Preliminary Studies in Subtidal Tray Culture. AIMS Technical Bulletin No. AIMS-CS-84-1. Australian Institute of Marine Science.
• (With J.G. Tracey) Network Analysis of Northern Queensland Tropical Rainforests. Australian Journal of Botany, 32: 109-16.
• (With L.J. Webb and J.G. Tracey) A Floristic Framework of Australian Rainforests. Australian Journal of Ecology, 9: 169-98.

1985

• (With D.J. Abel) Re-examination of Four Fusion Strategies. Computer Journal, 28(4): 439-44.
• (With J.S. Bunt and E.D. Bunt) Mangrove Species Distributions in Relation to Tide at the Seafront and up Rivers. Australian Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 36: 481-92.
• (With J.S. Bunt and H.J. Clay) Detection of Species Sequences across Environmental Gradients. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 24: 197-9.

1986

• Marine Science. In H.T. Clifford and R.L. Specht, eds, Tropical Plant Communities (Brisbane: Department of Botany, University of Queensland), pp. 199-204.
• (With E.H. Bradbury, Y. Loya and R.E. Reichelt) Patterns in the Structural Typology of Benthic Communities on Two Coral Reefs of the Central Great Barrier Reef. Coral Reefs, 4: 161-7.
• (With G.N. Lance) This Week's Citation Classic. Current Contents, 17(11): 16.

1988

• (With R.L. Burt) Plant Introduction in Australia. In R.W. Home, ed., Australian Science in the Making (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press), pp. 252-76.

1991

• (With J.S. Bunt and H.J. Clay) Yet Another Method of Species-Sequencing. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 72: 283-287.
• (With J.S. Bunt, J.F. Hunter and H.J. Clay) Mangrove Sequencing: Analysis of Zonation in a Complete River System. Marine Ecology Progess Series, 72: 288-94.

1995

• (With H.J. Clay and J.L. Rutledge) Nearest-Neighbour Techniques in Tourism Research. Annals of Tourism Research, 22(4): 931-40.
• (With J.L. Rutledge) Analysis of a Comparative Study of Travel Agents. In R.N. Shaw, ed., Proceedings of the National Tourism and Hospitality Conference (Melbourne: Council for Australian University and Hospitality Education), pp.278-91.

Written by T.G. Vallance, with contributions by E.S. Hills.

William Rowan Browne was born on 11 December 1884 at Lislea, County Derry, Ireland, the sixth of eight children born to James and Henrietta Browne, National School teachers. On both sides he descended from families long-established in that country though, by his own account, without particular eminence for learning or public service. His paternal grandfather, who had fought the rebels in 1798 as a yeoman volunteer, he presumed was a farmer; Henrietta's father was an architect and contractor chiefly concerned with the building of country churches in Ulster. Throughout his life, Browne stayed true to these loyalist, devout Church of Ireland (Anglican) origins.

From his parents' school young William Browne moved in 1897 to the Academical Institution at Coleraine where he distinguished himself and, rather unexpectedly in view of his later lack of interest in sport, played in the Rugby 1st XV. With first place at matriculation for all Ireland, the Clothworkers' Scholarship from his school as well as a Junior Exhibition, Browne entered Trinity College Dublin in October 1903 intending to read a classical Arts course. These hopes were dashed when he was found to be suffering from tuberculosis; progress of the disease forced him to withdraw before completing a term.

In those days long sea voyages were commonly prescribed for British sufferers of tuberculosis. Some responded to the 'treatment', and Australia has good reason to be grateful for this particular medical fashion. The debt we owe such enforced immigrants deserves the attention of some student of Australian culture. Among geologists, poor health gave us men like W.B. Clarke, Edgeworth David, and Walter Howchin. Howchin, in fact, reached Adelaide so afflicted that he had to be carried ashore, yet survived to within a couple of months of his 94th birthday. Browne loved to recall that example and, one suspects, hoped to do better. His sudden death in Sydney on 1 September 1975 after a life here with remarkably robust health robbed him by just three years of that triumph; but in that long life he became the foremost exponent of Australian geology to the generation which succeeded Edgeworth David.

Browne set out for Australia in February 1904, and by the time he reached Sydney the tuberculosis was so far advanced he went directly to a private sanitorium at Leura in the Blue Mountains. There, remarkably, his health soon began to improve. After five months he was allowed to leave and take work at Inverell coaching a lad for matriculation. Early in 1906 he moved to Wollogorang, a grazing property near Goulburn, as tutor to the Chisholm children. There Browne learned to ride and to love the open spaces of Australia. Towards the end of 1906 he was considered well enough to commence studies in the University of Sydney.

At the matriculation examinations of 1906, Browne secured both the Cooper (classics) and Barker (mathematics) Scholarships. He had planned to continue the sort of course abandoned four years earlier, but a friend suggested he might try Science rather than Arts. Browne did so. As a science student he could develop his mathematics but the rules required him to read natural science subjects. For a fourth subject after mathematics, chemistry, and physics, he chose geology. He knew nothing of it but the professor was said to be good value and the excursions great fun; such deep considerations determined a career.

Professor Edgeworth David, as usual, lectured to the First Year geology class of 1907 and lived up to Browne's expectations. Encouraged by the award of the University Prize for Geology and the prize for fieldwork, Browne decided to continue with the subject but had to do so without benefit of professor. Late in 1907 David went off, ostensibly to spend the long vacation voyaging south with the Shackleton expedition, but managing to over-stay his original leave by a year. During that absence care of the department devolved upon W.G. Woolnough, a man in some ways the very antithesis of his chief. A bit unbending and not immediately inspiring as a lecturer, Woolnough nevertheless was a scholar with a deep and critical concern for research as well as a sincere interest in students. His influence on the young Browne was little less than that of David. Browne went on to take the prizes for the Second and Third Year courses in geology, graduating early in 1910 with honours class I in both geology and mathematics. For geology he shared the University Medal with his fellow student and friend A.B. Walkom.

When Walkom secured the only geological post then available, a junior demonstratorship in the Sydney department, Browne looked to his other subject. The mathematics course had included lectures in astronomy, and thus experienced, he became First Assistant to G.F. Dodwell, South Australian Government Astronomer, at the Adelaide Observatory. Duties there were mainly routine – observing time-stars with a transit telescope and measuring earthquake records from a Milne seismograph, though the latter exercises on one occasion were enlivened by Dodwell's cow chewing part of a seismogram Browne had set out to dry on the observatory fence. An expedition to Bruni Island, Tasmania, in April-May of 1910 brought unexpected variety. On the initiative of Pietro Baracchi, Victorian Government Astronomer, arrangements had been made to observe a total eclipse of the sun; Browne went along with Dodwell to help. In fact, the event was seen only at Queenstown, normally about the wettest spot in Tasmania and quite by chance on his way back to Adelaide Browne encountered a man who had witnessed it. The observer was induced to write an account and to make a sketch. He did better, procuring the negative of a photograph taken at totality. Thus provided, the Adelaide astronomers were able to report something more than a journey to set up instruments for nothing.

Browne's career as an astronomer came to an end early in 1911 when David offered him the junior demonstratorship vacated by W.N. Benson, who had won a scholarship to Cambridge. By the end of the year Browne and Walkom had completed a paper on the rocks of the Pokolbin district, an area they visited first on an excursion in 1907. It was the first of many works each was to publish on the Hunter Valley region and on problems of Carboniferous geology.

In 1912 Browne returned to Adelaide, this time to the university in locum tenens for Douglas Mawson, then lecturer in mineralogy and petrology, who had been granted leave to resume exploration in Antarctica. The call gave Browne opportunity to see more metamorphic rocks and, incidentally, to make what he once described only half in jest as his greatest discovery, a student by the name of Tilley. This young man responded warmly to the newcomer. Tilley acted as Browne's assistant in the field at Victor Harbour; eventually he followed Browne to Sydney. There in due course he took a degree with University Medals in both geology and chemistry. Tilley's attachment to Browne is tribute enough to the young teacher's quality. They remained life-long friends.

Woolnough's appointment in 1913 to the foundation chair of geology at the newly-established University of Western Australia left a vacancy in Sydney that was filled by promotion of L.A. Cotton. Browne, in turn, moved to the tenured post of assistant lecturer, and thereafter his career was firmly linked to the University of Sydney. In 1916 he became lecturer and by 1923 had the title Assistant Professor, an honour which Browne once claimed came to all lecturers who completed ten years of trouble-free service, though one can think of exceptions to that dismissive explanation. Until 1924 he taught mainly petrology but with the succession of Cotton to David's chair, Browne's duties expanded. There was not only the work that came the way of a second-in-command but also new courses in agricultural geology and even economic geography. When new staff was found for these subjects Browne concentrated on teaching Australian stratigraphy (generously interpreted) and general petrology. He retired in December 1949 with the rank of Reader.

For the quarter-century after the retirement of Edgeworth David, Browne really led the university department of geology in Sydney, not indeed as professor – others occupied that office – but by strength of intellect. Browne was the man with information and ideas. Students turned to him as their leader in science but first he had to be discovered, Browne made no particular effort to advertise himself or attract a following. Indeed, a student's first impression would often enough suggest the reverse. To the beginner Browne could appear formal, even stern, the model of a teacher who stands no nonsense. But the awed respect thus commanded was usually in this case soon replaced by a genuine admiration for the quality of Browne's lectures. What seemed the driest subjects came alive when touched by his mastery of organization, his fluent economy with words, and an apparently endless store of gentle, if rather astringent quips and apt anecdotes. The student soon found also that Browne was more than a gifted exponent of information from textbooks. In Australian stratigraphy for instance, one discovered on consulting the library that Browne himself was the authority and that the class was being led to knowledge not yet imprisoned by print.

Impressive as Browne was in the lecture room, it was on excursions he seemed most in his element. If the outfit, apart from well-worn boots and puttees of uncertain but motheaten antiquity, made few concessions to the field, the wearer certainly did. Many students first discovered there that the stern teacher was, in fact, a remarkably approachable and patient man. Browne made excursions memorable; even those who have long since forgotten the science he taught them still treasure the jokes and stories he would tell by the campfire. They will hardly forget, either, the cracking pace he set on traverses or the fact that nothing seemed to escape his notice. All was carefully recorded in a note-book though, as one came to know him better, one wondered why he took such exemplary trouble. His extraordinary memory seemed to grant facility to recall almost every line he had read and every place seen. Localities not visited for years could be described to the last detail; anyone seeking some outcrop was likely to find Browne's recollected description a sure guide.

For all his tidy-mindedness Browne managed to work in surroundings that appeared reassuringly confused. His field books may be models of careful record but his office notes were more often than not jotted on any piece of paper that chanced to be handy; tied or pinned in bundles they became his files. Thin-sections found their way into a multitude of old tobacco tins that served the place of more orthodox storage. It may have seemed chaotic but Browne knew where to find things. Those files too reveal an unexpected facet of the man who was so fluent in speech and in his published writings. Draft manuscripts full of deletions and substitutions bear witness to the painstaking attention that lay behind what seemed like native skill. For Browne, the written presentation of his researches demanded every bit as much care as the making and recording of his observations. Among Australian geologists, he was a rare stylist.

The pattern of Browne's original investigations owes much to the influence of his teachers, David and Woolnough. Browne's debt to both men is particularly evident in the period to about 1934. Thereafter petrological studies, to which he had been guided by Woolnough, play a diminished role. For the first 15 years of this later period, Browne was largely occupied in realizing David's book, the work that now serves as a splendid memorial to two great scientists who devoted their careers to an adopted homeland. The last phase of Browne's scientific work occupied the years of his so-called retirement and was concerned largely with problems of Quaternary geology.

The Adelaide visit of 1912-13 gave Browne his first sight of Broken Hill, a district he was soon to know well. At the invitation of E.C. Andrews, Government Geologist of New South Wales from 1920 to 1931, Browne joined survey parties there during the university vacations of 1918, 1919, and 1920. Browne was assigned the petrological study of country away from the line of lode, work on the rocks associated with the main ore-bodies being entrusted to F.L. Stillwell. Their reports, with opposed interpretations on a number of points, appeared as appendices to Andrews's memoir, a classic in Australian geology. Browne's contribution formed the basis of 'The petrological evolution of the Willyama complex', a thesis for which he received the Sydney DSc with University Medal in 1922. The argument with Stillwell continued for years, both men holding tenaciously to their views. If Stillwell was no match in the cut-and-thrust of debate for the articulate, quick-witted Browne, the honours must now be rated even. Both were distinguished men who deserve respect for their intelligent contributions to problems which even today have not been resolved.

Browne's first published work on a metamorphic terrain, however, came from his introduction to the Monaro region of New South Wales by Woolnough. Those parts were to attract Browne for the rest of his life. Part I of his account of the Cooma district is dated 1914; 30 busy years passed before readers had the next instalment. The first paper in particular is a landmark among Australian metamorphic studies. Rocks of the Cooma area had long been regarded as being of Precambrian age, mainly on the traditional grounds that such metamorphic materials must be of high antiquity. Through his discovery of graptolites in the lower-grade slates, Browne demonstrated that that part, at least, of the complex could be no older than late Ordovician in age.

David's discovery in 1914 of signs of late Palaeozoic glaciation in the Seaham area of the Hunter Valley led Browne, and others, to investigate problems of the age of the glacial beds. At first thought to be Permian, Browne's work near Maitland showed these strata to be of Carboniferous age. Subsequently study of the glacigene products led him northwards into the New England region. Eruptive rocks of late Palaeozoic age, like those described in the Pokolbin paper, continued to attract Browne during the 1920s. He was particularly fascinated by the phenomena of secondary mineral-adjustment evident in these volcanic materials, an interest that led also to valuable studies of the Prospect intrusion near Sydney and Permian lavas at Port Kembla. Browne's researches in this field broke new ground for Australian petrology.

While Andrews led the New South Wales Geological Survey, Browne maintained a close connection with the group. He was able thus to visit many remote parts of the state in the company of Survey officers and had unrestricted access to the collections of the Mining Museum in Sydney, then the responsibility of his friend G.W. Card, a petrographer for whom he had great respect. The fruits of this experience can be seen in Browne's presidential address of 1929 to the Linnean Society of New South Wales. His theme was the relation between crustal movements and igneous action in New South Wales to the close of Palaeozoic time. It is a pioneer's synthesis, much of it based on original observations. If the germ of the idea came from David and Andrews, Browne made it his own, refining and polishing the scheme on a number of later occasions. Perhaps even greater petrological interest attaches to his presidential address of 1933 to the local Royal Society. There, in his consideration of the products of post-Palaeozoic igneous action in New South Wales, Browne recognized the existence of contrasted types of basalts thereby anticipating concepts of tholeiites and alkali basalts made fashionable by others in the past couple of decades.

To this period also belongs a paper on batholiths (or bathyliths as Browne insisted, confident of etymology) that continues to be quoted in textbooks. Its interest lies in the elegant exposition of time-relations between tectonic action and emplacement of granitic bodies and the criteria whereby such relations can be recognized. In addition, subjects as remote from igneous and metamorphic petrology as soils, erosion, and physiography were also considered in original researches during those early years. If we now see them as expressions of a concern that was to dominate the last phase of Browne's research, they also demonstrate the breadth and versatility that must have led David to look on him as his heir in science.

Anyone familiar with Browne's own achievements must regard the circumstance that he is most widely known for another's book, The Geology of the Commonwealth of Australia, as perhaps unfortunate. Browne never shared that view. He was a man of intense loyalties. Loyalty to local societies kept him publishing in their journals rather than seeking wider attention abroad. But above all it was a loyalty to Edgeworth David, for him ever The Professor, that coloured the whole of Browne's scientific life. Nowhere did that find happier expression for Browne than in the work for which he claimed only that credit due to an assistant. The sight or sound of references to 'David's Geology... by W.R. Browne' was a sure means of rousing his ire. Browne maintained staunchly the book was David's; he had the privilege merely to realize what The Professor began. Indeed, the introduction to the book is so packed with acknowledgments to others that an uninformed reader might take Browne at face value. Therein lies another story: some colleagues who had helped David felt slighted by the generality of his thanks in the Explanatory Notes... he published in 1932. Browne decided to do the job thoroughly.

David had long planned to compile a Geology of Australia and after his retirement in 1924 tried to settle down to the task. But other matters, not least the unfortunate business of Precambrian 'fossils', kept getting in the way. The book was to have been a sort of cooperative venture for which many friends and colleagues, Browne among them, were asked to prepare essays on particular topics. But as material accumulated, David's health declined. By 1930 Browne was devoting many free hours to the work. David, meanwhile, had resolved to concentrate on finishing the geological map and issuing it with explanatory notes, a decision that may have expressed a doubt in his capacity to complete the book. At the time however, David kept counsel but by March of 1934 he had to admit defeat. A few words – 'Oh, by the way, Browne, I want you to finish the book' – determined Browne's work for the next 15 years. Within a matter of months, David was dead and Browne, despite his previous involvement, was left with no clear idea of what had been done or of what remained.

In November 1935, the New South Wales Government having bought the manuscript from the David estate, formally asked Browne to complete and edit the work. It came to him as bundles of paper in dozens of cardboard boxes. A few parts, those sent in by colleagues, seemed reasonably presentable but David's contribution was scattered throughout as miscellaneous jottings. For many chapters there was no sustained writing at all. With no way of estimating how long the task would take, a period of two years was agreed upon though this was soon recognized as inadequate. On secondment from the university, Browne gave all his time to the work. With no sight of an end, the government in 1939 reviewed its support but decided to continue and, indeed, to add the services of a graduate assistant and a draughtsman. By 1941, however, the Lands Department could no longer spare the draughtsman and as the war seemed likely to continue, Browne suggested he resume academic duties until hostilities ceased. Nevertheless, work on the book continued as a spare-time occupation with the result that by the end of 1944 writing was practically completed. Browne then sought and was granted study leave (the only 'sabbatical' he ever took) to make a comprehensive revision. That done, the government committee in charge of the work resolved in 1946 that Browne personally should deliver the typescript to the London publishers (Messrs Edward Arnold & Co.) with whom David had made an agreement some 20 years earlier. Galleys had been checked and the first page proofs coming through when Browne returned to Sydney in May 1948. The rest of the work on proofs, the making of an index and so forth were done while he carried a full load of teaching and supervision. Browne had already retired from the University when the book finally appeared in July 1950 in an edition limited by the number of sets of the map kept since 1932 to form part of the work.

The long-awaited book, the first ever to draw together the scattered experience of Australian geology, quickly went out of print. No doubt most copies went to libraries but its present rarity suggests that those who bought copies in 1950 have had little inclination to part with them, despite the considerable growth of our geological knowledge since. That growth, which may well have taken the subject beyond the grasp of one individual, underlines the special quality of this book – the distillation largely of one man's thought and experience. Future historians of Australian geology will find it a rich and complex quarry. Any work so long in the making could scarcely be other than complex. One perceptive reviewer in 1951 expressed wonder that the labours of two men so opposed in temperament as the classical is to the romatic should have been fused so harmoniously. If few signs of the romantic Davidian resonance survive in the generally austere prose, that is hardly strange but the fusion is there, in matters of arrangement and even argument. One has only to look back to the Explanatory Notes of 1932 to see how Browne followed David's plan. Likewise the models uniting stratigraphy, tectonism, and igneous action owe something to David in their conception, but the refinement of the synthesis was due to Browne. His recognition of the Benambran and Bowning revolutions, for instance, served to complete the David/Andrews picture of orogenic divisions in the Palaeozoic history of southeast Australia. The words 'edited and much supplemented by W.R. Browne...' on the title-pages of the book fail to inform the reader as to the nature of Browne's contribution. Browne had to write David's Geology... – and he did it magnificently.

It was during the period when Browne made several visits interstate, chiefly to resolve problems of geological correlation which had become intractable due to the parochial attitudes of State officialdom and academic schools, that many young geologists first became closely acquainted with him and experienced the delight of meeting with a man of high intellect and culture, with the charm of a sensibility that his erudition and seniority failed to conceal. In achieving correlations across State boundaries, Browne had to deal with many so-called 'boundary faults' where the same formation was regarded as being of a certain age in one State, but different in the other, the opposing views being 'official' as the States were very jealous of their territorial rights. While David had dealt with such problems by royal decree, Browne achieved his results by reasoned argument and sensitive arbitration, even where, as sometimes happened, his own prior views could be called in question. If Griffith Taylor, in an atmosphere of vicious political antagonism, had shown us Australia as a continent geographically, and David's rhetoric had done the same for geology in his Explanatory Notes, Browne's scientific arguments and enormous capacity for detail paved the way for much subsequent collaborative work on Australian regional and tectonic geology – a situation to which he undoubtedly was emotionally committed [E.S.H.].

While still engaged on the book, Browne occasionally would express a hope to resume petrological research when the task was done. But the advances in petrology over the many years spent gathering and arranging the data of Australian geology seemed finally to daunt him. Instead, he turned to a subject to which, in 1945, he had devoted another of his notable presidential addresses, that of the Quaternary history of Australia. The tentative chronology then proposed has been considerably refined in later years, not least through increasing use of radiometric methods for dating, without destroying the logic of Browne's scheme. These modern developments he followed with keen and critical interest, an interest dominated by geological sense. Problems of relatively recent geology, the origin of terraces and the like, continued to hold Browne's attention in his later years but really this last period was dominated by Kosciusko.

A visit to Kosciusko in 1942 revived interests dormant since the 1920s and was followed by a more extensive survey in 1946 under the auspices of a joint advisory committee of the Linnean and Royal Zoological societies of New South Wales. Sponsored by the newly-formed Kosciusko State Park Trust, the work resulted in a useful reconnaissance report. Retirement brought opportunities to extend these investigations and each summer from 1951 to 1955 Browne led parties of biologists and geologists in the field at Kosciusko on behalf of the joint committee. Browne's main scientific concern there lay in the evidence of Pleistocene glaciation, a study made urgent in his view by spoliation of the landscape through human agencies. He saw himself, as citizen as well as scientist, in the role of 'trustee for posterity'. His advocacy of restrictions on the use of the summit area, eloquently expressed in the David Memorial Lecture of 1952 and elsewhere, attracted vehement criticism from those like the graziers who had long enjoyed rights to snow-leases. But Browne was a doughty fighter for causes he believed in and Kosciusko, to him, was indeed a precious heritage. Proclamation in 1962 of the primitive area, though in extent less than half that allowed by the park Act of 1944, owes much to Browne's efforts as a publicist. When the joint committee was disbanded, Browne and his wife continued to work privately in the region until advancing years and failing health put a stop to their annual pilgrimages after 1965.

The real measure of Browne's work on the record of Pleistocene glaciation at Kosciusko is yet to be taken. His starting point, not surprisingly, was where David finished. David had demonstrated evidences of glacial action in the high country and related these to a three-fold pattern. An early ice-sheet glaciation was held to have been the most extensive, later activity being confined to carving the present valleys and finally to deepening of cirque-heads. Browne adopted this view with deep conviction and over the years proceeded to document details of the Kosciuskan landscape in such terms. Few parts escaped his scrutiny on the ground even after aerial photographs became available to make the work of survey easier. No one had a closer familiarity with the terrain than Browne but his work, and in particular that part relating to the extent of what he took to be the earliest glaciation, has attracted criticism from some geomorphologists who argue that the influence of an ice-sheet was far more limited than Browne had it. The problem is still not resolved though one must add that latterly Browne found few supporters. He did not welcome the criticism but what troubled him more was the virtual abdication of interest in geomorphology by the geologists of his home state. Almost single-handed in New South Wales, and with little success, he sought to re-kindle among geologists something of that concern for the study of landscape David had left his generation. Landscape, Browne argued, depended on geology yet geomorphology was being abandoned to geographers, many of whom in his view were inadequately trained in matters of geology. The experience saddened his last years but he went out fighting; he was at work on a new paper describing glacial features and their distribution until a few days before his death.

Finally, another side of Browne's original work must be mentioned, that relating to the practical applications of geology. As long ago as 1911 he had joined his colleague Cotton in a visit to central Queensland to investigate and report on coal prospects for the Mt Morgan Gold Mining Co. Thereafter from time to time his expert advice was sought by various authorities in charge of railways and roads, chiefly in connection with materials problems. In his retirement he accepted some commissions for consultancy work and thus prospected for uranium and molybdenum in the New England region as well as advising a syndicate interested in the petroleum resources of the Illawarra district but these were minor compared with Browne's involvement in engineering geology. In 1943 the Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board began work for a major new storage dam on the Warragamba River west of Sydney. Browne and his colleague L.L. Waterhouse were engaged to advise on the proposed site. Fortunately, manpower problems during the war restricted the pace of constructional work for Browne and Waterhouse soon discovered the chosen site was geologically unpromising. A dam constructed there would be subject to considerable lateral drainage through shallow fractures along the gorge. After detailed investigation by boring confirmed these suspicions, they reported adversely on the site and their opinion was supported by American consultants. Browne and Waterhouse were then commissioned to extend their work and search for a more suitable site. Waterhouse had to withdraw for reasons of health soon after this phase began, leaving Browne to continue with the support of Water Board staff. By 1946 a satisfactory location that met all engineering and geological requirements had been found further up the gorge. The capacity of a dam at this new site would be slightly less than that originally planned but in making public the Board's acceptance of the geological advice the president, T.H. Upton, on 30 May 1946, paid tribute to the efforts of both Browne and Waterhouse, adding that their research had already reduced the estimated cost of construction by £2 million. Browne's services as geological adviser were retained until the dam was finished in 1960. Other, less well known, facets of Browne's work as an engineering geologist include his extensive investigations regarding a site for the single-arch Gladesville Bridge over the Parramatta River, Sydney.

Browne's contributions to Australian science through work for scientific societies are no less worthy of note than those made by his research and teaching. His record of effort is indeed impressive. On committees and councils he was admirable. Browne knew his own mind and expressed his opinions with clarity and logic. His good manners combined with a sensitive intelligence, that splendid memory and a deep concern for precedent would gently restore sanity to a discussion rendered aimless by colleagues with more zeal than sense. Perhaps there lay the key to his notable contributions to knowledge – a formidable grasp of his subject and great skill in reasoned argument rather than any dependence on intuitive flashes. But, for the societies he supported, Browne gave far more than wise advice; he gave unsparingly of his time and effort.

A member of the Linnean Society of New South Wales for 64 years, Browne served on its council from 1924 almost continuously until 1973 when he retired as councillor emeritus. During that time he was twice president and at a difficult stage in the society's history offered to act as honorary secretary, holding the post from 1951 to 1966. The Royal Society of New South Wales enjoyed his membership since 1913 and elected him an honorary member in 1969. On its council from 1929 to 1942, Browne was president of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1932-3 and for a session acted as editorial secretary. Volume 99 of that society's Journal and Proceedings was issued as the W.R. Browne Volume, containing papers contributed by colleagues and former students. Earlier he had received from the Royal Society of New South Wales the Clarke Medal (1942) and its own medal for distinguished service (1956), and had delivered to it the Clarke Memorial Lecture in 1949.

The Australian National Research Committee and ANZAAS claimed his devoted support. Browne held the presidency of Section C (Geology) at the Hobart congress (1949), was David Lecturer (1952) and Mueller medallist (1960). For many years the Australian Journal of Science profited from his work as an assistant editor. Again, when the Geographical Society of New South Wales was founded in 1927 Browne accepted a place on its council and remained a councillor until 1945. He held its presidency for two sessions (1929-30 and 1948-9) and was long an active member of the society's research committee. At the time of his death Browne was an honorary member of the Geographical Society of New South Wales. He was also a founder-member of the Geological Society of Australia, its second president (1955-6) and an honorary member since 1957. Browne's distinguished contributions to Australian geology were recognized too in his election to fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science.

Browne was elected to fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science in 1954, in the first elections to be held after the granting of the Royal Charter which established the Academy. He immediately took a leading part in stimulating the fellowship and Council to recognize the need for a high level scientific study of the Kosciusko region so as to provide an objective basis for determining the effects of past land-use practices and future policy for this and other alpine areas in southeast Australia. In 1956 he was one of five who petitioned the Council to set up a committee 'charged with the duty of enquiring into, and if possible establishing, the immediate causes of the deterioration, suggesting means of halting and remedying it' for the Kosciusko Tops country. A committee was appointed in December 1956 to investigate the Snowy Mountains area and the high mountains of Victoria, and reported back in May 1957. Thus it was during Browne's membership of Council from 1957 to 1960 that the Academy became involved in discussions and negotiations with government agencies, graziers, and other groups which, despite the acrimony at many times evinced, did result in much improved grazing and other land-use practices in the high country being established by regulation [E.S.H.].

In June 1915 at Neutral Bay, Sydney, William Rowan Browne married Olga Marian Pauss, daughter of Olav Pauss, then Consul for Norway in Sydney. There were two daughters of the marriage, Margaret Rowan (born 1916) and Helen Rowan (born 1919). Margaret Browne graduated BArch (Sydney) in 1940 and practiced as an architect in London. Helen Browne followed her father into science, taking a Sydney BSc with first class honours and University Medal in botany (1942). Following postgraduate research in botany she joined the Women's Australian Air Force, and after demobilization moved to the CSIRO in Canberra. Married in 1947 to F.H. Morley, a geneticist also with CSIRO, Helen Morley died tragically in December 1976.

Olga Marian Browne died in September 1948. Later her husband and daughters donated a sum of money to the University of Sydney to establish a memorial prize in geology. The Olga Marian Browne Prize is awarded for proficiency in fieldwork during the Second Year course given in the department, of which the late Mrs Browne was a graduate and from 1913 to 1915 curator of the geological collections.

In 1950 Browne married Ida Alison Brown, senior lecturer in palaeontology in the University of Sydney. Dr Ida Browne resigned from the university staff shortly afterwards but both she and her husband continued their active interests in research. Many scientifically fruitful years were thus shared, she helping him in the field at Kosciusko, he helping her with stratigraphical investigations at Yass and on the south coast of New South Wales, until Dr Ida Browne's health gave way. Her last years passed under constant medical attention and the equally constant care of a devoted husband whom she survived by little more than a year.

To conclude this record of a great Australian geologist, mention ought to be made of the resolution by the Geological Society of Australia to institute a W.R. Browne Medal. Appropriately, this memorial medal will be awarded for distinguished service to Australian geology. Steps are now being taken in the matter of design and were a motto required one could hardly improve on Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit. Dr Johnson's epitaph for his friend Oliver Goldsmith applies equally to another native of Ireland, one who also loved Latin but who came to enrich science and learning on the other side of the world.

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. Horace Ep. I. xi. 27.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Records of the Australian Academy of Science, vol.4, no.1, 1978. It was written by Thomas George Vallance BSc PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Sydney.

Written by D.A. Denton and M.H. Ryan.

The formative years

William Ian Potter, known as Ian, was born in Sydney on 25 August 1902 to James W. Potter and Louisa McWhinnie. He was the third of four children­ – three boys and a girl. James Potter was a well-established wool merchant of Bradford, England, and he and Louisa were visiting Australia in connection with the Potter family wool business interests here.

As a result of the Potters' business involvement in both countries, Ian became exposed to different environments while young. His school education was received in Bradford and then at Dumfries Academy in Scotland. When the family moved to settle in Sydney after the First World War, Ian entered the University of Sydney. Leon Glezer has suggested that 'an early alternation between Britain and Australia left him with a sense of being part of each society, yet distant from both'.^[1] Over the years he travelled frequently, and in later life maintained an apartment in New York; his bearing was such that he was thought by some connections in England to be an American with Australian interests, and in America to be an Englishman with Australian interests.

Although his father had hoped Ian would become a lawyer, he was drawn to business. At university he read economics and history, and topped his class in graduating Bachelor of Economics. He was a man of parts. An interest in medieval English literature led to a capacity to read and speak it freely and to quote Chaucer extensively. His intellect and social ease allowed him to develop good relations with a range of people including students of different political views from his own conservative position. He came second in a University five-mile run. He entertained on his boat on Sydney Harbour. There was charm, wit, energy and hints of resolve.

On graduating in 1929, he joined the staff of Edward Dyason, a Melbourne stockbroker to whom he had been recommended by R.C.Mills, his economics professor. He was one of the first economists to be engaged in stockbroking; at that time, few graduates were employed in Australian financial institutions. In October 1931, he confirmed his interest in markets by buying, for £700, a seat on the Melbourne Stock Exchange.^[2]

In consequence of his role as an economist, and a bright and sociable one, he became noticed in political circles. In 1933 he was invited by R.G. Casey, then Assistant Treasurer in the Commonwealth Government, to move to the Treasury in Canberra as Casey's economic adviser. Although he remained there for less than two years, the connections he gained continued his formation of significant personal networks. His work brought him in close contact with a range of politicians, and gave him experience in lending and taxation policy and in negotiation with Australian and overseas bankers.

In 1935 he returned to Melbourne to pursue a career in business. He was offered employment in the leading stockbroking houses of J.B. Were and E.L. and C. Baillieu, but elected to set up as a sole trader. He founded the firm Ian Potter & Co. in 1936. In much later years, after he retired from the partnership, the firm became Potter Partners, then Potter Warburg Limited, and is today part of SBC-Warburg Australia Limited.

Thus were gathered the ingredients for the development of innovation, wealth, influence and philanthropy, and a remarkable and varied contribution to national life over the next 60 years.

Stockbroker

While still a sole trader, working from an office in the basement of the Bankers and Traders Building in Collins Street, Potter made his first foray into commercial underwriting. In September 1936, in competition with J.B.Were, who were the dominant brokers of that time and always a major competitor of Ian Potter and Co., he bid successfully and somewhat boldly for the underwriting of a £1 million issue of preference shares by the company Electricity Meters and Allied Industries Ltd, later known as Email. In the same year he underwrote his first semi-government issue, for the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works. These and smaller contracts helped to bring forward his name and reputation.

To penetrate and find a place in the Melbourne establishment, controlled by several families and their connections, was a formidable challenge. Potter's credentials of early market success and evident acumen were enhanced by his considerable social skills – a readiness and ability to move easily among leaders in business, politics and other fields in Australia and elsewhere. He engaged energetically with business society, and later remained accepted despite the publicity attending three divorces.

War service from 1940 to 1943 with the Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve in Australian waters interrupted his business activities, but during the '30s and '40s he progressively extended and consolidated his market involvements and his networks. With his connections in mind the Committee of the Melbourne Stock Exchange elected him as a Committee member in July 1942, to assist in dealing with a difficulty with the Commonwealth Government. He continued as a member of the Committee for 20 years, to November 1962.^[3]

Prominent acquaintances included Leslie McConnan, general manager of the National Bank of Australasia. When the Chifley Government announced in August 1947 its intention to nationalise the private trading banks, McConnan, who was also chairman of the Associated Banks, called upon Potter to assist with the strategy and publicity for the campaign of resistance mounted, ultimately successfully, by the industry. Each such engagement created an increased flow of business from individuals and companies who were seeking the services of a broking house.

Potter's adeptness in building networks was matched by his shrewdness in selecting his partners. He had taken Henry A. Pitt into Ian Potter and Co. as his first trading partner in January 1938. J.H. McColl followed in October 1943. With the rapid expansion of the firm in the 1950s, others were added: C.T. Looker, N.K. Miller and G.D. Brown (1953), A.L. Shilton(1954), K.W. Pring (1956), G.R. Stuckey and J.L. Taylor (1960), and K.W. Halkerston and L.M. Muir (1962). His policy in seeking partners was to attract high quality and relevant experience. Pitt was a former under-secretary to the Victorian Treasury, a background which enhanced the firm's potential for underwriting semi-government loans. Miller was head-hunted from Were's, where he had set up the first company analysis and statistical research service in an Australian broker's office. Brown, a former secretary to the Stock Exchange, was an expert on prospectuses; Stuckey came from the Commonwealth Bank; Looker, pre-war, was private secretary to Menzies.

He took the same approach in hiring key staff. Charles Smith had been trained in Were's, and joined Potter as general manager, bringing order at a time when Potter's office had few systems and little up-to-date office equipment. The firm's first operator on the floor of the Exchange was not hired until 1947, when Laurie Day, acknowledged as the then finest operator in the House, was attracted from Were's.

His firm's business burgeoned post-war, when economic growth, commercial development and the demand for capital provided the context for expansion. Capital issues controls were removed in 1949. The banks, hitherto the mainstays of capital provision, did not have the capacity to satisfy the growth pressures by debt financing, and would suggest that capital might be raised by issues of equity shares. Potter's, especially Ian Potter and Cecil ('Peter') Looker, had themselves actively canvassed corporations to alert them to their wider post-controls options; known favourably by the banks, the firm was not infrequently recommended to companies to handle their equity issues. Its reputation was also enhanced by success in flotations which, to other contending brokers, had seemed technically too difficult. From the outset, Ian Potter took a creative and entrepreneurial view of his business opportunities as a broker, ready to extend beyond normal broking into related services.

Ian Potter and Co.'s underwriting of semi-government loans was aggressively pushed forward in this period, and reached market dominance in the early '50s, though later in that decade increased competition made inroads into the firm's market share. To support his underwriting, Potter arranged a consortium of institutional sub-underwriters, whose confidence in his judgment was such that he was able to set and offer terms of issues rather than negotiate them with the sub-underwriters in advance. Success in semi-government underwriting was complemented by leadership in facilitating and underwriting equity issues and company flotations to the Stock Exchange. Of 33 companies listed on the Melbourne Exchange in 1950, 16 were underwritten by Potter's, easily the largest number by one broker. The firm also sometimes underwrote major equity issues jointly with E.L. and C. Baillieu.

Such was the momentum of this business and the robustness of competition, particularly between Potter's and Were's, that terms tended to be cut fine. Potter's successes substantially outweighed shortfalls, though the firm incurred some considerable losses. Ian Potter read economic and market trends astutely, and he knew who had funds available to invest.

Although the major financial institutions had held equities, especially the life companies with their requirements for long-term investments and investment spread, the proportion of institutional assets held in equities prior to the '50s was small. Ian Potter was one of the first brokers to encourage institutional managers to move more significantly into the equity markets. Later, in the '60s, he went further, in encouraging direct institutional investment in the mining industry.

Potter's services extended to the provision of a merchant banking facility. For example, he bought the share capital of Email and then placed it with institutions and others as a solution to difficulties between Australian and UK interests. Similarly, he reconstructed the capital of the shipping company, McIlwraith McEacharn. His firm's operations were not without occasional controversy, as might be expected in a highly competitive business, but the dynamic was overwhelmingly constructive.

The firm became the preferred stockbrokers for an increasing number of clients, and grew rapidly. It developed the investment research pioneered by Miller when with J.B.Were's, and produced a book for investors entitled Selected Australian ordinary shares; this also introduced to Australia the analytical concepts of growth in earnings per share and the making of adjustments for distributions and share issues. In response to the demands of the '60s, at the time of the nickel boom, a night staff was employed; total staff rose to 560 by 1970 but with the post-boom correction the firm reduced its overdraft and culled its staff numbers, which settled back to around 200.

Financier

The considerable growth of Potter's business was not merely a response to detected opportunity, but to a degree was the result of making and then exploiting opportunity. Glezer observes that '[Ian] Potter's role as a catalyst pervade[d] most of the important developments in the financial sector in the two decades after 1945'.^[4] It was a conjunction of unusual personal capacities with the relaxation of financial conservatism and regulation and the introduction of new investment instruments to meet commercial needs. Backed by his partnership, Potter became 'the pre-eminent Australian financier from the early 1950s to the late 1960s'.^[5]

In 1955, Cecil Looker, later Sir Cecil, who was the firm's debt financing expert, went to London to study the discount market, and returned to advocate to the Federal Treasury that such a market be established in Australia. There was a demand for improved day-to-day management of the flows of very short-term funds, for example those in the hands of semi-government bodies and hire purchase companies, and generally for institutions public and private where money flows were uneven. The new market, approved by the government and the central bank, opened in 1959 for short-term trading in bonds, with the central bank as lender of last resort. Potter's were involved as a partner in one of the initial four official dealers. An 'unofficial' market in short securities, without central bank cover, was also developed.

Potter established the investment vehicle Australian United Investment Company Ltd (AUI), which became the principal source of his personal wealth and remains a listed investment company to this day. In conjunction with the Commercial Bank of Australia, he also established one of the first public unit trusts, the Australian Capital Fund.

Ian Potter's assistance was sought by Anglo-Australian Corporation (AAC), a merchant bank owned by British merchant bankers, which had faced some resistance in its attempts to break into the Australian market. After protracted debate in Stock Exchange circles and then prolonged negotiations with Potter's, shares were exchanged between Ian Potter's investment and banking companies and AAC, with the outcome that Australian United Corporation (AUC) was formed in 1960, in conjunction with Morgan Grenfell Ltd and Lazard Brothers of the UK and J.P.Morgan of the US. This organisation became the major Australian merchant bank of the '60s and '70s. It gave financial stimulus to the rise and growth of some of Australia's principal industrial, commercial and media corporations, and of resources companies such as Conzinc Rio Tinto and Hamersley Mining. Debt issues were arranged for BHP, CSR, and Carlton and United Breweries. AUC's subsidiary, United Discount Corporation, became a major and profitable participant in the short-term money market.

Ian Potter's merchant banking approach was such as to build wealth through new development, company floats to secure capital growth, and amalgamations to obtain economies of scale and greater productive effectiveness. His way was not the way of takeovers for asset-stripping, which reached notorious levels in the '80s.

He displayed a constant alertness for new ideas, including overseas techniques that might readily be applied in the maturing Australian context. He travelled overseas three or four times each year and became well-known in London and other European financial centres and in New York. He had long done arbitrage business through firms in London, and finally opened a branch there during the boom in Poseidon shares. He also developed a New York business, in 1957, in association with Carl M. Loeb Rhoades and Co.

It was perhaps inevitable that Ian Potter's skills and reputation in stockbroking, corporate floats, merchant banking and advisory services (sometimes for companies that were in competition with one another) led to numerous invitations to join company boards. His contribution was not limited to financial advice but also went to practical operational issues. His directorships ranged across industry; for example: in finance he was chairman of Commercial Union Assurance Co. of Australia, as well as his companies AUC and AUI; in mining he was a director of Consolidated Gold Fields and Bellambi Coal; in general industry he was on the boards of Formica, Boral and TNT, and chairman of Email. His associations had consequences for relationships between companies, which strengthened their own financial well-being.

In consequence of his international connections Ian Potter became adviser or director, frequently chairman, of the Australian boards of a number of overseas corporations. For example, he was an Australian director of Time Life International, and a member of the international advisory council of the New York Chemical Bank. He formed a particular association with the Wallenburg banking family in Sweden, and through it and in other ways became involved with two Swedish corporations operating in Australia, ASEA and Atlas Copco, and a number of Swiss corporations – CIBA-GEIGY, Nestlé, and various insurance companies. A list of his directorships is given in Table 1.

Table 1: Company directorships held by Sir Ian Potter

• The Ian Potter Foundation Ltd
• McIlwraith McEacharn Ltd
• Australian United Investment Co.Ltd
• Western Bulk Carriers Ltd
• Atlas Copco Australia Pty Ltd
• Email Ltd
• Boral Ltd
• Diversified United Investment Ltd
• Petro-chemical Holdings Ltd
• Commercial Union Assurance Co. of Australia Ltd
• CIBA-GEIGY Australia Ltd
• Associated Steamships Pty Ltd
• Bulkships Ltd
• ASEA Electric (Australia) Pty Ltd
• The Nestlé Company (Australia) Ltd
• Time Life Australia Pty Ltd
• Consolidated Gold Fields Australia Ltd
• Renison Ltd
• R.W. Miller Ltd
• Union Steamship Co. NZ Ltd
• The Bellambi Coal Company Ltd
• TNT Ltd
• Coca-Cola Bottlers Ltd
• Formica Ltd

Source: Who's who in Australia, 1995 (company names have been edited).

Note: This is an indicative list of Sir Ian's directorships over the years. The form of some company names may not be wholly correct as at the time of his association.

He was also in demand as a commentator on Australian economic and financial questions, and he gave numerous addresses on such topics as the role of directors, overseas ownership, and immigration, and wrote articles for the press.

A special personal interest from the mid-1940s, perhaps sharpened by his Navy days, was the shipping industry. Potter joined the board of McIlwraith McEacharn Ltd in 1946 and was elected chairman in 1957. This was one of the first shipping companies in the world to use containers. He encouraged the building up of the fleet, culminating in 1963 in the amalgamation of the company's interstate shipping business with that of Adelaide Steamship Company to become Associated Steamships, of which he was first chairman. He joined the board of Bulkships in 1962 and was elected to the chair.

After Ian Potter retired from Ian Potter and Co., in June 1967, he continued to take a direct and innovative interest in financial markets, somewhat to the concern of his erstwhile partners. After much negotiation, the firm's name was changed to Potter Partners. As a practical vehicle for continuing his merchant banking, he established in 1970 the company Tricontinental, in which overseas financial connections took equity positions and which operated successfully while he remained involved. He sold most of his shareholding in 1979, and the remainder when he retired from its board in 1985.

Citizen

Ian Potter's early breadth of interests as a student foreshadowed his later participation in various non-business fields­politics, education, the arts, the sciences­and his widespread philanthropy. Just as in business he played a hands-on role in creative development, networking and negotiations, so he engaged directly in other areas of civic and cultural life.

Following his entry into political circles as a bright young man, reinforced by his service in Treasury in the '30s, he developed and maintained significant political connections. He was associated with the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944, as a founding trustee, and remained a major influence in party affairs including fund-raising over the next 30 years. He enjoyed friendship with R.G. Menzies, who sought unsuccessfully to recruit him into politics, and had close relationships with senior politicians on both sides of the parliament: Holt, McMahon, and Fadden; Chifley, Calwell and Whitlam.

Potter served as Commonwealth Representative at the Conference on Rural Debt Adjustment, 1934–­35, and later as the Australian Member of the War Reparation Council. In 1956–­62, he was a member of the Commonwealth Immigration Council. During the '50s and '60s he represented Australia at World Bank meetings. His political skills and networks were a salient factor in his success in public sector fixed interest markets.

In 1964, his personal wealth having grown through his business achievements, he established the Ian Potter Foundation. This would be a vehicle through which his personal philanthropy could quietly be contributed and given continuity, with a Board of Governors (of which he was one) to husband its growing assets and set the direction of its grants. By 1994, the year of Ian Potter's death, the corpus of assets accumulated by the Foundation, from Ian Potter's donations and from returns from investments, had risen to some $50 million; a bequest in his will took total assets to $100 million in 1995.

Grants made by the Ian Potter Foundation during Potter's lifetime amounted to some $22 million, and in the early '90s were running at over $2 million annually. Over the years more than 50 institutions or organisations were supported, in the arts, academia, business education, the sciences, environment and heritage conservation, social welfare, and travel opportunities for young people. A list of major beneficiaries is shown at Table 2. Gifts always tended to be made discreetly, 'to the point', says Charles Goode, 'of anonymity'.^[6] In addition to philanthropy through the Foundation, Potter continued to make donations personally.

Table 2: Grants made by the Ian Potter Foundation

Major beneficiaries during Sir Ian Potter's lifetime include:

• The Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology and Medicine
• The University of Melbourne
• Monash University
• La Trobe University
• Deakin University
• The University of Sydney
• The University of New South Wales
• The University of Queensland
• The Australian Academy of Science
• CSIRO
• The Potter Farmland Plan
• The State Library of Victoria
• The Museum of Victoria
• St Patrick's Cathedral Restoration Appeal
• St Paul's Cathedral Restoration Appeal
• The National Trust of Australia
• The Zoological Board of Victoria
• The Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney
• The National Gallery of Victoria
• The Ian Potter Sculpture Commission
• The Victorian Arts Centre
• The Museum of Modern Art at Heide
• Regional Galleries of Victoria
• The Salvation Army
• The Children's Welfare Association of Victoria
• Ballarat Children's Homes
• St Luke's Family Care
• The Smith Family
• Foodbank Victoria
• The Ecumenical Migration Centre
• The Victorian State Opera
• The Australian Ballet School
• The Australian Chamber Orchestra
• The Bell Shakespeare Theatre
• Birds Australia (formerly The Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union)
• The Centre for Independent Studies
• The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
• The Baker Medical Research Institute
• St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research
• The Microsurgery Research Centre
• The Advisory Council for Children with Impaired Hearing
• The Royal Australasian College of Physicians
• The Royal Eye and Ear Hospital
• The Peter McCallum Cancer Institute
• Austin Hospital
• Royal Melbourne Hospital
• Prince Henry's Institute of Medical Research
• Monash Medical Centre

Source: The Ian Potter Foundation.

Ian Potter contributed not only financially but also, and frequently, by direct application of his personal skills. For example, he was a member of the Council of the University of Melbourne from 1951 to 1971, and influenced Council to invest a significant proportion of its superannuation funds in equities. In addition, the University, its Graduate Business School and colleges received grants from the Foundation, and medical research was supported as described later in this memoir. Among other universities that received support, his alma mater, the University of Sydney, was also liberally assisted by the Foundation for 30 years, especially through travel grants for academics and contributions to building restoration.^[7]

Potter's association with the arts, especially the performance arts, was extensive. He was involved in the construction of the National Gallery of Victoria, was a member of the Gallery and Cultural Centre from 1957, and was responsible for negotiating between the Victorian Treasury and the Centre's Building Committee for the financing of the whole arts and theatre complex, with bipartisan political support.

He succeeded his friend Dr H.C. ('Nugget') Coombs in 1968 as chair of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust when Dr Coombs became the first chair of the Australia Council for the Arts. Potter retired from this role in the Trust in 1984, and was elected to the honorary post of its President. The importance of the Trust in the development of the performance arts in Australia cannot be overstated. It had a generative role in the formation of the Australian Opera, the Australian Ballet Foundation and School, the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and several theatre companies. Potter was a member of the boards of both the Opera (1970–­1980) and the Ballet Foundation (1965–­1983).

It is appropriate in this memoir to give special acknowledgement to Ian Potter's interest in Australian science. He could appreciate the state of scientific knowledge and sense opportunity for real advance. This capacity, coupled with his drive, his alertness to how finance might be arranged, and his networks, was well exemplified in his first major act of philanthropy. He had for some time shown curiosity about the work of the Howard Florey Laboratories of Experimental Physiology and Medicine in the University of Melbourne, and he and Ken Myer had visited to see what was being done. (I was the Laboratories' Director and Ian, Ken and I were mutual friends – ­D.D.). Interest came to a head over a dinner in 1960, when discussion turned to the urgent need for upgraded space and facilities for the Laboratories, which were then in a nineteenth-century building that provided poor conditions. During the meal, Ken Myer suggested that Potter might like to join him and his brother, Baillieu Myer, through their newly-formed Myer Foundation, in financing what was intended to be a state-of-the-art laboratory building. Potter's immediate response was: 'Yes, ­and we'll go halves for the major sum', and after a short pause, 'and furthermore we'll underwrite the total so the scientists can go now and get an architect'. By Friday night of the same week, the architect, Garry Patten, was chosen. The four days it took to move from the germ of the idea to a commitment to construct what was to become a nine-floor international centre of scholarship and medical research may well be something of an Australian record, if not an international one.^[8]

The funds for the centre were found successfully, including a federal Government grant secured through Ian Potter's friendly access to Menzies and Holt. Around the same time, by personal intervention through his World Bank connections and in conjunction with Coombs, Potter also assisted in removing an administrative blockage in the US National Institutes of Health to the passage of a large grant to the Laboratories following their discovery of a new hormone bearing on the control of salt balance.

Potter's active interest in the Laboratories continued. He lent his weight to securing their incorporation in 1971, by Act of Parliament, as an independent Institute affiliated with the University. When this step was mooted, Potter remarked: 'We don't want any University sherry party committee ­– we want responsibility!'.^[9] Up to the date of writing (mid­-1997), some $4 million has been paid or committed to the Howard Florey Institute by the Ian Potter Foundation, for studies in molecular biology, hormones and mechanisms of instinctive behaviour, and for a recent extension to the Institute's building.

The Florey's sister body, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and its close affiliate the Ludwig Institute, were also beneficiaries of Potter's generous grants. The wide range of institutes and university research departments assisted by Ian Potter Foundation donations is included in Table 2.

Potter's interest in and support for the science community were manifest perhaps most symbolically by his association with the peak learned society of scientists in the country, the Australian Academy of Science.

Academician

In the 1950s the Academy successfully negotiated with the federal Government to secure a home site near the Australian National University campus under a special-purpose lease for a nominal rent. The Academy's 'Dome', an imaginative copper-sheathed structure designed to house a fairly large auditorium, with offices and meeting rooms, was completed in 1959, and became a landmark in Canberra and a well-recognised icon in the Academy's coat of arms.

Ian Potter had taken a 'benevolent interest in the Academy of Science from the inception of the Dome proposition'.^[10] From 1961 over the following 10 years a very significant donor to the Academy's development had been Sir Ellerton Becker. In 1965, the Academy's bye-laws were amended to make available two places in the Academy's Finance Committee for lay persons who could provide financial counsel, and Becker and Potter were appointed to the Committee by the Academy's Council. Ian Potter's influence was immediately felt in the Committee's deliberations and in an increase in the operating authority delegated to it.

In April 1978, against a background of long and significant philanthropy and direct, personal interest in scientific institutions in Australia, Ian Potter was elected a Fellow of the Academy by special election –­ a distinction reserved for persons 'who (have) rendered conspicuous service to the cause of science or whose election would be of signal benefit to the Academy and to the advancement of science'.^[11] He was one of only 10 distinguished persons to have been so recognised up to that time.

All Academy activities had been carried on in the Dome until 1968, when it became necessary, through growth in the Academy's affairs, to lease additional office space elsewhere. By 1981, about half the staff were located in rented premises. Negotiations with government were then commenced, to obtain title to the adjoining building, Beauchamp House, constructed in 1927 as a hostel for female public servants who had been transferred from Melbourne. It later became a public meeting place and offices for community use. The building had generally deteriorated and was slated for structural restoration and refurbishment.

Negotiations for the title succeeded, subject to certain conditions relating to progress with restoration and to ultimate use. An appeal for funds was launched by the Academy in 1982, directed to the Fellows and more widely. In November 1982 the Ian Potter Foundation supported the appeal with a seeding grant of $50,000, payable in two instalments, which was later described by the President of the Academy as a critical factor in the decision of the Academy's Council to proceed with refurbishment.^[12] This grant was supplemented in 1984, bringing the Foundation's total donation to $250,000. The further support was seminal to the Council's decision to push forward to finish the building, which was achieved by 1987.

In 1984 Council honoured its two principal benefactors by resolving to rename the two buildings in the Academy's island precinct. The Dome became 'Ellerton Becker House' and Beauchamp House 'Ian Potter House'. A bronze plaque acknowledging the history and naming of Ian Potter House was installed in 1988 beside the walkway between the two buildings, under the magnificent wisteria growing over the pergola at the entrance to the Academy's offices. Ian Potter House is listed in the register of the National Estate.

Ian Potter's longstanding friendship with Marcus Wallenburg of the Enskilda Scandinavica Bank led to support by the Ian Potter Foundation, jointly with the Wallenburg and Wenner Gren Foundations, for Australian–Swedish scientific conferences on neuroscience, circulation, botany and connective tissue biology. The first Australian–Swedish scientific symposium, on integrative mechanisms in neural function, was held in Melbourne in March 1987, sponsored by the Ian Potter Foundation. In 1989, Potter visited Stockholm for the 250th anniversary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, where he was treated with honour and became a signatory of the scientific exchange agreement between the Swedish and Australian Academies.

Potter maintained a working association with the Australian Academy of Science as a member of its Finance Committee until his retirement from the Committee in 1993. He remained a Fellow until his death.

The man

Though he moved in international circles of influence, Ian Potter was a private man. Urbane and elegant in presentation, with an ease, connections and a steady blue eye, he nonetheless avoided publicity. Graeme Adamson notes that he was 'never known to grant an interview with any newspaper'.^[13]

He spoke and wrote eloquently, and with spareness. Goode observes that 'while he was active in business he maintained an office and a secretary in both Melbourne and Sydney and frequently a work schedule that involved spacing his appointments at 15 minute intervals. One could be in his office and after the discussion had been concluded in an unhurried manner one realised that it had only taken ten minutes'.^[14]

He not only knew how to select his colleagues but also how to allow them delegated freedom, how to multiply his own capacities through others. His own leanings were creative, analytic, strategic and interpersonal rather than bureaucratic. In the early days, his office, with few systems, bordered on administrative chaos, but he remedied this through well-targeted recruitments and, after some reluctance, permitted the adoption of such technology as seemed justifiable, until eventually the firm became a leader in the introduction of technology to the trading floor and in inter-office communication.

To Alwynne Shilton, his 'brilliance was not so much as a share man as a financier in floats and in amalgamations ...'; Laurie Day described him as 'an enigma and a genius'.^[15] His negotiating skills, his relationships and networks, a remarkable memory and grasp of detail, and a resolve in pursuing a project to a conclusion, marked his path to success. Adamson writes that 'Potter's attitude was: somebody has got to do it, and there must always be a way'.^[16] He made mistakes, but pressed forward. His application of these qualities in financial markets, politics, the arts and the sciences, influenced the course of national development.

His private interests included reading, tennis, and – an echo of his love of the sea and ships – yachting and swimming. He enjoyed trolling for fish at Lake Eucumbene, where he had a lodge that he himself designed and built. There and in Melbourne he was an amiable host, with a reflection of the international in his wine, his schnapps and his martinis, around the fire. His humour was dry and occasionally, with his friends, provocative.

He is survived by his wife, Primrose (Lady Potter, AO), two daughters from earlier marriages, Robyn Potter and Carolyn Parker Bowles, two grandchildren, Luke and Sam Parker Bowles, and his stepdaughter Primrose Krasicki and her daughter Zofia. Lady Potter herself is a longstanding and well-known contributor, on boards and in other ways, in the fields of the arts, education and community philanthropy.

Ian Potter was knighted by the Queen in 1962, for public services in the field of finance – the first Australian stockbroker to have been knighted with that citation. In 1973, the University of Melbourne bestowed on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. In 1989, he received from the King of Sweden the honour Knight Commander of the Polar Star (First Class). The Melbourne Stock Exchange, the base for his rise to distinction, elected him an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Stock Exchange in 1991. He was an Honorary Life Member of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, the Australian Ballet Foundation, the Australian Opera and the National Gallery of Victoria, a Member of the Royal Society of Victoria, a Fellow of Queen's College in the University of Melbourne, and a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Sir Ian Potter died at home on the evening of 24 October 1994, after a long illness. He was 92. On 22 November, his many contributions to his country, his profession and so many sectors of society, were celebrated at a memorial service of thanksgiving in St Paul's Anglican Cathedral in his home city.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, Vol. 11(4), 1996. It was written by:

• D.A. Denton, The Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology and Medicine, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic 3052.
• M.H. Ryan, 6/36 Musgrave Street, Mosman, NSW 2088.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the comments and corrections of those who kindly read the draft of this memoir, including: Lady Potter; Charles Goode and Patricia Feilman of the Ian Potter Foundation; Peter Gray and Noel Miller of SBC-Warburg Australia; Rosanne Walker of the Australian Academy of Science.

References

^[1] Glezer, L., 1988, 'Sir Ian Potter and his generation', in R.T. Appleyard & C.B. Schedvin (eds), Australian Financiers, Macmillan, South Melbourne (a collection of biographical essays commissioned by the Reserve Bank of Australia as part of its contribution to Australia's Bicentenary), p. 402.

^[2] The Stock Exchange of Melbourne, card record of membership.

^[3] Ibid., and Glezer, op.cit., p. 405.

^[4] Glezer, op.cit., p. 402.

^[5] Glezer, op.cit., p. 420.

^[6] Goode, C., 1994, 'Sir Ian Potter - an appreciation', The Ian Potter Foundation, Melbourne, unpub., p. 8.

^[7] Obituary, Sydney University Gazette, April 1995, p. 29.

^[8] Denton, D.A., 1994, text of eulogy given at the memorial service for Sir Ian Potter in St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne, unpub.,p. 3.

^[9] Ibid., p. 5.

^[10] Letter from the President of the Academy, Arthur Birch, to Sir Ian Potter, 27March 1984, Academy archives file 4096.

^[11] Academy Bye-law II:10.

^[12] Letter from Birch, op.cit.

^[13] Adamson, G., 1984, A Century of Change ­ the First 100 Years of the Stock Exchange of Melbourne, Currey O'Neil, South Yarra (commissioned by the Committee of the Stock Exchange), p. 137.

^[14] Goode, op.cit., p. 4.

^[15] Adamson, op.cit., p. 139.

^[16] Adamson, op.cit., p. 136.

Beyond the specific references given above, the information in the text has been substantially drawn from the named works of Leon Glezer, Charles Goode and Graeme Adamson, and from the archives of the Australian Academy of Science, especially files 417, 4096, 4270 and 4423.

Written by Bruce Holloway and Paul Broda.

• Introduction
• Early years
• Indian years
• The years of revolution
• The years of the medical research council units
• The Australian years
• Personality
• Honours
• About this memoir
  • Acknowledgments
  • References

Introduction

William Hayes, physician, microbiologist and geneticist, made his own special contribution to modern genetics and molecular biology in a manner quite different from that of any of his contemporaries. Bill, as he was universally known, was an unlikely candidate for such distinction. It is interesting to speculate on the events that transformed someone likely to have had a distinguished but still traditional medical career into a world renowned scientist who influenced a whole generation of microbiologists and geneticists. He did not come from a family with a history of scientific or academic activities, nor did he study at the centres of biological research. Moreover, at the beginning of his meteoric rise to eminence, he did not have the support of the scientific elite or access to research resources. It is likely that had he been born twenty years later his originality that he brought to microbial genetics would have been lost to us. Perhaps the situation he encountered in India during the Second World War and the relative freedom of the research system operating in the United Kingdom in the fifties ideally suited the talents of Bill Hayes. He was a dedicated experimentalist with a talent for improvisation, and his major contributions were through experiments that he did by himself, rather than with the aid of an assistant or graduate student. He would not have described himself as a leader, although his associates willingly gave him their loyalty and support. Nor would he have thought of himself as having charisma – indeed, he was unusually self-effacing. When he gave up experimental work to write his outstanding and extraordinarily influential book, The Genetics of Bacteria and their Viruses, he typed all the first draft himself. Administration and the power it can provoke were anathema to Bill. Nevertheless, he created first at Hammersmith Hospital in London and then at the University of Edinburgh research groups that were the envy of his peers in terms of their productivity and innovation.

Early years

Bill was born in 1913 at Edmondstown Park, Rathfarnham, Co Dublin, to William Hayes and Miriam Hayes née Harris, the only child of his father's second marriage and when his father was aged 73. William Hayes senior was given £3000 by his own father, which he used to establish a pharmaceutical business known as Hayes, Conyngham and Robinson Ltd that prospered and became a chain of chemist's shops in Dublin. William Hayes senior became President of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland. Bill's mother, the daughter of a Church of England clergyman, was aged in her thirties when he was born. A much older first cousin, A.D. Barton, was Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. Sir John Crofton, sometime President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, was the son of another first cousin.

Bill was brought up in a large Georgian house in Dublin and apart from during the war he lived there until 1950 when he moved to London. His father died when he was five, so that most of his upbringing was undertaken by his mother and grandmother. Bill has written (in an unpublished memoir that has been of great value to us) of this time as one which encouraged his introspection and liking for solitude. There was a strong religious aspect of his life at this time with family prayers twice a day, and because his mother was steadfastly Protestant he did not mix with the predominantly Roman Catholic local population. He was tutored by a governess from the age of eight until in 1923 he went to a preparatory boarding school for boys, Castle Park, Dalkey, Co Dublin. Bill disliked this experience but the education he obtained must have been satisfactory in that he did well in the entrance examination for his secondary school, St Columba's College, Rathfarnham, Co Dublin. During his time at Castle Park he associated with a classmate, the writer Patrick Campbell, who stuttered badly, and Bill found this infectious to the point that he developed a life-long stutter, although it never prevented him from giving excellent lectures.

Bill entered St Columba's in 1927 and at about that time he began to develop an interest in science, particularly radio and electronics. He constructed his own crystal set and was able to receive signals from Daventry 5XX until the set was destroyed during a storm when the aerial collapsed on to an uninsulated DC electric cable, which started a fire in his dormitory. He continued to build more complicated radios, and retained this enthusiasm for many years. His formal training did not include science but, as was the custom of the day, focused on the classics. In 1929 he won the Lord Pembroke Prize for Mathematics. Bill particularly appreciated the efforts of one master, Dr Sandham Willis, who encouraged willing students to read beyond the school curriculum. He introduced Bill to Galsworthy, Shaw, H.G. Wells and Sir Arthur Eddington and this created a love of the English language that served Bill well for the rest of his life. At about this time he lost his faith in orthodox Christianity.

Towards the end of his time at St Columba's, Bill responded to an advertisement to compete in an International Oratorical Contest sponsored by the newspaper, The Washington Star. He was selected to represent Ireland at the competition, and his mother arranged for him to have elocution lessons from Frank Fay of the Abbey School of Acting. In Washington DC the audience turned out to be some 5000 strong, including President Hoover. Bill did not win but he did receive an invitation to Hollywood for a screen test, an invitation that he refused. Who knows what the movie world lost and science gained?

Bill then chose to study medicine, partly as a result of peer pressure and indecision, but also because of its scientific content and prospect of financial security. He entered Trinity College Dublin in 1981 and enjoyed studying the various science subjects, but it was not until his third year that there was any indication of his future career activities. He started to learn bacteriology and immunology under Professor J.W. Bigger, which stimulated his interest to the point that he enrolled to take an extra year to read for an Honours Degree (Moderatorship) in Natural Science in which he could specialize in bacteriology. This was Bill's first real exposure to research, studying aspects of streptococcal fibrinolysin and he obtained First Class Honours. He continued with his medical course but was not attracted to the clinical aspects. He was no ordinary student in that he won the Haughton Prize for Medicine, was awarded the Silver Medal of the Dublin University Biological Association, read three papers to the Dublin University Biological Association and was awarded the Adrian Stokes Memorial Travelling Fellowship which he never took up because of the outbreak of war.

After graduating in medicine, Bill was retained by Bigger at Trinity as a General Assistant (1938-1939) and then Senior Assistant (1939-1941). At this time a distinguished refugee from Nazi Germany, Professor Hans Sachs, came to work in the laboratory, typing blood for the Irish Medical Research Council. Sachs had been Professor of Bacteriology at Heidelberg University and was well-known for the Sachs-Gyorgy precipitation test for syphilis. He had also been an intimate friend of Paul Ehrlich. Bill wrote in his memoir as follows:

Sachs initiated me into the mysteries of serology and it was from him that I first learnt that what the text books say and the latest hypotheses proclaim are usually grossly over-simplified approximations to reality. Together we studied the nature of an unusual human serum that was falsely positive in the Wassermann Reaction; when heated to destroy the human complement, this serum inactivated the haemolytic properties of the standardised guinea pig complement used in the test. All the ideas in this research came from Sachs's great knowledge and experience, but he generously insisted on my being senior author of the paper that followed – my second publication.

Another refugee from Germany at that time was the noted theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger, invited by de Valera to work in Dublin. I occasionally met him at lunch in the College but did not know of his developing interest in biology until much later, when I got to know Max Delbrück at the California Institute of Technology in 1953.

As part of his medical training, Bill had house physician posts in Dublin and at the Victoria Hospital in Blackpool, where he met his future wife, Nora Lee, daughter of Joseph and Margaret Lee of Oldham. They were eventually married in 1941 but almost immediately had to separate for four years due to the war. Nora Hayes, who died in 1996, was a remarkable person in her own right who provided a lifetime of extraordinary support for her husband and also devoted herself to the many people who worked with Bill in various capacities. They had one son, Michael, now practising medicine in Sydney.

Indian years

In late 1941, Bill was accepted by the Royal Army Medical Corps, and after an initial period as a pathologist was trained in tropical medicine and pathology at Liverpool and eventually arrived in India in late 1942. His first post, with the rank of Major, was the command of the Army Enteric Reference Laboratory at Kasauli near Simla and subsequently at the new Central Military Pathology Laboratory in Poona. He spent ten months at Kasauli, where his functions were to identify numerous salmonella strains isolated from Army personnel, and also to provide standardized diagnostic sera and agglutinable salmonella suspensions to military laboratories throughout India and Ceylon.

His time at Kasauli revealed his gift for improvization. The demand for these reagents could no longer be satisfied by producing anti-sera in rabbits and suspensions from Petri dish cultures. He therefore obtained a small herd of goats for the former, which proved a success, and large metal trays for the latter. Agar was very scarce since it had largely come from Japan and it therefore needed to be recycled. Bill allowed the harvested nutrient agar to reset in the trays after autoclaving, cut it into cubes and then washed these in running water. The agar was finally separated from the water in which it was dissolved by exposure on the laboratory roof at night, and was then standardized by hydrolysing samples for glucose assay.

The four senior staff of the Central Laboratory included Bill as bacteriologist and Douglas (now Sir Douglas) Black as biochemist. They ran three-monthly courses in clinical pathology, and by several accounts Bill was an outstanding teacher. One of their notable students was Michael (now Sir Michael) Stoker, who was retained at Poona as a member of the Typhus Research Unit, a decision that launched him into rickettsial research and thence into virology.

Bill also became responsible for assaying every batch of penicillin imported for army use. The methods he adopted depended on inhibition of staphylococcal growth and Bill improved the reproducibility of these methods. He was also sent to the UK, via flying boat, to obtain the latest information on the laboratory aspects of penicillin from Florey and Fleming and their groups. Following this trip, he wrote a booklet on the laboratory control of penicillin therapy that was circulated to all the laboratories of India Command. While in London he had himself transferred to the Indian Army so that Nora could join him in India. In the event, she spent nearly ten months there; he was demobilized in 1946 and they returned to Dublin.

Other work in India provided the basis for Bill's interest in bacterial genetics. He later wrote as follows in his unpublished memoir:

The Salmonella work was a source of constant interest from several points of view. For example the number of species and types received offered much scope for ecological and epidemiological studies. One of the most interesting of these was the frequency of strains of S. enteritidis  isolated by blood culture from cases of septicaemia on the Burma front. S. enteritidis, which is enzootic among ducks, is normally non-invasive in man and causes simple gastroenteritis. Similar invasive variants were first reported during the Paraguayan-Bolivian war in 1932-1938 (the Chaco War) and designated S. enteritidis var. chaco. The evidence suggested that the Indian strains were introduced into Burma by the Japanese. I tested them for the presence of an alkali-labile 'virulence Vi' antigen, analogous to those demonstrated by Felix in S. paratyphi A,B  and C but failed to find one.

Another example was the isolation of a novel salmonella from the stool of an African cook in Chittagong (now in Bangladesh). Dr E.S. Anderson, who was working in London at the time (early 1946) writes: 'It proved to be a salmonella which seemed to be new. The organism was passed to me by Dr Joan Taylor, Director of the Salmonella Reference Laboratory. Its antigenic formula, which was a hard nut to crack, proved to be (I).III.X.(XIX).XXVI.;b«Z35, 'Z35' being at that time a new antigen. It had been reported that three strains of the paracolon group of organisms, isolated from snakes, had flagellar antigens closely related to phase 2 of Salmonella chittagong. It seemed possible that the serotype may have originated from a snake, because West Africans ate these reptiles, which were commonly found in their kitchens in India'. It was only after Bill's arrival at Hammersmith in 1950 (where be inherited Anderson's laboratory) that he and Anderson first met in person.

Bill also wrote of this time:

S. enteritidis  posed problems of a different nature which, much later, were to determine my ultimate research interests. High titre antisera prepared against the somatic (O) antigens of some strains, which we may call A, agglutinated other (B) strains to only a relatively low titre: conversely, antisera to these B strains agglutinated both A and B strains to roughly the same titre. Strains were then found in which all the cells were agglutinated to titre by B antisera, but only a proportion of the cells by A antisera. When such strains were plated and individual colonies tested some behaved like A and others like B strains. Finally if, say, an A-like colony was plated and daughter colonies tested, with some strains as many as 5% might have reverted to B-type and vice versa. This, therefore was a high frequency diphasic variation involving a somatic antigen which later turned out to be what was then termed antigen XII₂: this antigen was highly antigenic and was present in phase A but absent from phase B. Since it is also one of the major antigens of S. typhi, its striking variation was clearly a potential source of error in the preparation of agglutinable suspensions for use in the Widal Test, and of diagnostic antisera. However what really interested me was the mechanism of diphasic variation and I seemed to have a good system to study it. I took up this research again five years later when it led me into the then embryonic field of bacterial genetics.

To sum up, it is fair to say that I enjoyed my war service which gave me considerable experience of teaching and the responsibilities of administration, and initiated me into the pleasures and rewards of independent research that resulted in eleven publications. The war as such hardly touched me and I never heard a shot fired in anger.

The years of revolution

With the ending of the war with Japan, Bill was demobilized in August 1946 and returned to Trinity College Dublin, as Lecturer in Bacteriology. During this time he was able to do little research, since his time was largely taken up in teaching and routine diagnostic work. In 1949 he used his presidential address to the pathology section of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland to explain the recent developments in bacterial genetics and their significance for medicine. He submitted his accumulated published work for the degree of Doctor of Science and this degree was duly conferred by Dublin University in 1948. However, he was only runner-up for a College Fellowship and was also disappointed by the lack of opportunity for research there. When the opportunity arose he therefore applied for and was accepted for the position of Senior Lecturer in Bacteriology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith in London in 1950.

With his arrival at Hammersmith, Bill again had the opportunity to do research, since his teaching duties were light. The Head of Department, Lord Stamp, put no constraints on his topic of research, and so Bill chose to return to the mechanism of somatic phase variation in Salmonella enteritidis. He had begun to realise the potentialities of genetic analysis inherent in the recent discovery by Lederberg and Tatum [iv] of conjugation in Escherichia coli, and wondered whether its relatives, the Salmonellae, could also conjugate. He recorded in his research notes of March 1950 the design of an experiment involving growth in mixed culture of a pair of genetically marked Salmonella strains, stabilized in each phase, and the selection and examination of recombinants for restoration of the variation. The experiment itself was never attempted.

An opportunity arose to become acquainted with conjugation in E. coli when, towards the end of 1950, he went on a course on bacterial chemistry at Cambridge, organised by E.F. Gale. At that course he met L. Cavalli (later Cavalli Sforza), who had worked with Joshua Lederberg on conjugation at Wisconsin, and who was currently a visitor in R.A. Fisher's Department of Genetics at Cambridge. Cavalli provided him with the basic E. coli  K12 auxotrophic parental strains, and Bill started to work with them early in 1951.

Bill was initially interested in the kinetics of the mating process, in particular at what time recombinant cells were formed after mixing and plating the parent strains. He therefore spread a mixture of a streptomycin-resistant mutant of one parent (A) and a sensitive strain of the other (B) on several minimal plates, and at intervals thereafter respread the plates, in turn, with a lethal concentration of streptomycin. No colonies arose when streptomycin was added prior to two hours after mating but thereafter they increased in number with time. To confirm this result, Bill did a similar experiment in which a sensitive strain A was mated with a resistant strain B. This time the results were quite different. About the same number of recombinant colonies emerged from all the samples, even when streptomycin was added immediately after plating the mixture.

Bill writes in his unpublished memoir: 'I discussed these results with Denny Mitchison and I think it was he who first suggested that one of the parents, A, might be acting as a gene donor and the other, B, as a recipient'. Bill tested this hypothesis by treating each sensitive parent with streptomycin to a survival of less than 10^-6 colony-forming cells, and then mating with an untreated suspension of the other. The crosses in which strain B had been treated were invariably sterile while treated A suspensions always generated recombinants although their numbers might be markedly reduced as compared with normal crosses.

It was from this experiment that the concept of asymmetry in bacterial sexuality arose. Parent B was the recipient or 'female', the continued viability of which was essential for the whole process of recombination and segregation, while the A donor or 'male' cell was dispensable once genetic transfer had been effected. Bill suggested that the male cell extruded a surface 'gamete' that was taken up by the female cell on contact, and that blocking male protein synthesis by streptomycin did little to inhibit its fertility. This hypothesis, and the experiments supporting it,, were published under the title 'Recombination in Bact. coli K12: unidirectional transfer of genetic material'. It was also presented in a paper at the April 1952 meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Oxford. The meeting featured a symposium on 'Virus Replication' and was attended by André Lwoff and Gunter Stent from the Pasteur Institute and the young James Watson who had recently come to work on DNA structure with Francis Crick at Cambridge.

Bill's next step was based on a report four years previously (Haas et al 1948) that ultra-violet irradiation of a mating mixture markedly increased the number of recombinants. Was this due to stimulation of the male or of the female? Experiment showed that exposure of the male before mating to a dose of UV, permitting about 50% survival, resulted in a 5- to 10-fold increase in the frequency of recombinants. In contrast, irradiation of the female led to a fall in the number of recombinants that paralleled that of the survivors. In the previous year, Lwoff and his colleagues had described the UV induction of a Bacillus megaterium prophage (Lwoff et al 1950), and Weigle and Delbrück (1951) had investigated a similar induction of the E. coli  K12 prophage lambda. Since both phage induction and the enhancement of male fertility required post-irradiation-incubation in a rich medium, Bill thought it possible that the male 'gamete' might be 'a gene-associated virus', although this was unlikely to be phage lambda, which lysogenized both male and female cells. Later studies of a non-lysogenic male obtained from Elie Wollman confirmed this. At that time Zinder and Lederberg had not yet published their discovery of transduction in Salmonella.

In September 1952, Bill was invited to the Second International Symposium on Microbial Genetics, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and held at Pallanza on the shores of Lake Maggiore, Italy. There he met most of the rather small numbers of Europeans in the field at that time, as well as some of the Americans including Jim Watson. He therefore had the opportunity to present his donor-recipient hypothesis to a well-informed and critical audience, while Cavalli-Sforza supported the more orthodox homothallic viewpoint. This occasion was recalled for a larger public by Watson in his book, The Double Helix (Watson 1968). In it, he remarks that 'Bill's appearance was the sleeper of the three day gathering; before his talk no one except Cavalli-Sforza knew he existed. As soon as he had finished his unassuming report, however, everyone in the audience knew that a bombshell had exploded in the world of Joshua Lederberg!'

It should, however, be noted that this dramatic account is a simplification since Watson, Lwoff and Stent had all been present at the Oxford meeting, and Bill's work had already appeared in Nature in January 1952. Gunther Stent has written to us: 'I heard him (i.e. Bill Hayes) give a talk...on the polarity of K12 crosses as revealed by UV and antibiotic treatment of either parent strain. It was on my instigation that Elie (Wollman) went to visit the then totally unknown Bill at Hammersmith, and that the Hayes-Wollman-Jacob axis...came to be formed. At the summer l952 Royaumont Phage Colloquium, I managed to persuade Max Delbrück, who trivialised Bill's results as reflecting no more than a differential radio- and drug-sensitivity of the parent strains, that Bill was for real. The 1952 Microbial Genetics meeting, in Pallanza, to which Bill was invited, was held in the fall of 1952. Watson errs, if he claims that no one except Cavalli knew of Bill before that meeting. Jim and Max certainly knew of him, and Elie was already collaborating with Bill.'

Dr E. Wollman has written of this time (Wollman 1966): 'in the Spring of that year I visited William Hayes for the first time in his laboratory at the postgraduate medical school in London. His working conditions were then so modest that they made our musty attic in the Pasteur Institute look almost luxurious by comparison. I was particularly impressed by his tiny petri plates, 3-4 cm in diameter and cut out from the bottom of vials, and by the watchmakers eye lens with which he counted the minute colonies of recombinants appearing on these plates. Shortly after this visit, I gave an account of the new developments in recombination in bacteria, and of the genetic basis of lysogeny, at the first international conference on Bacteriophage, held at Royaumont. Max Delbrück, who was present at Royaumont and who had been all along somewhat suspicious of genetic recombination of genetic bacteria, listened with interest to my description of his work. Though still far from convinced that there was anything to this sexual polarity business at all, he decided to invite Hayes to give a paper at the following Cold Spring Harbor symposium on viruses.'

Bill's next achievement was to elucidate the nature of the agent responsible for sexuality, and this arose by serendipity. At about the time of the Pallanza meeting, a friend of his in London, Dr Clive Spicer, who had worked with the Lederbergs and with whom Bill had discussed his hypothesis, told him that he had a pair of parental K12 strains, similar to Bill's A and B parents, that on storage had lost their capacity to produce recombinants. Bill had been attempting without success to isolate a male strain that had lost its postulated vector, by looking for A colonies that were no longer fertile with the R female; perhaps Spicer's strain was one such infertile male. To test this possibility, Bill crossed Spicer's strains with his own; the outcome showed that it was indeed the male strain that was defective.

Bill's most crucial experiment was to ask whether the fertility that had been lost could be infectively restored by contact with a normal male. Accordingly, he labelled the defective A (Spicer) strain with two independent markers (resistance to sodium azide and to streptomycin), and then grew it overnight in mixed culture with his own (fertile) strain, sensitive to both agents. Before he knew the result he wrote to Cavalli, who was now working with the Lederbergs at Wisconsin. He explained what he had done and remarked that if the experiment worked he (Cavalli) would have to accept the fact of infectious transfer. The experiment did work; 25% of the colonies of the re-isolated strain A (Spicer) were now normally fertile. When he got Cavalli's reply, it was to say that he already knew the result of this experiment, since he and the Lederbergs had done basically the same experiment three weeks earlier, but using a quite different approach. Their experiment showed that the fertility character was transferred by a transmissible agent, which they called F or the sex factor, at a frequency some 10,000 times greater than that of recombinant formation. Thus two quite different modes of experimentation and thinking converged in the coincidental discovery of the first transmissible plasmid, the F factor (Lederberg  el al  1951). The Lederberg/Cavalli interpretation was that the sex factor conferred on the parents of a cross what they termed 'relative sexuality', which they did not attempt to explain in mechanistic terms. As with the earlier demonstration of unidirectional transfer, Bill was, by contrast, thinking in precisely such terms.

A limited survey by Bill showed that F⁺ and F^- cells as defined by the Lederbergs and Cavalli corresponded unambiguously to donors and recipients respectively. The ability of infectivity to convert recipients to donors meant that it was possible to study the genetical efforts of 'reversal of F polarity' by comparing the outcome of A.F⁺ x B.F^- crosses and B.F⁺ x A.F^-. If, as Lederberg and his colleagues believed, the two parents contributed equally to the zygote, both crosses should give the same result. They did not. First, the recombinants inherited most of their characters from the F^- parent. Secondly, the characters inherited from the F⁺ parent were limited to a few linked ones and were quite different in the two crosses. In Hayes' opinion, everything behaved as if the F⁺ donor transferred only part of its genome to the F^- recipient, the particular part being that selected to make good the auxotrophic defect of the F^- recipient which, of course, differed in the two crosses.

Joshua Lederberg's explanation was quite different. He still did not accept the donor recipient hypothesis and proposed instead that complete zygotes are formed (as everywhere else in biology) but that a fraction of the F⁺ genome is then eliminated – the 'post-zygotic exclusion' hypothesis for which a precedent was known in Cheironomus. It was not until the hypothesis of one-way partial chromosome transfer was proven beyond reasonable doubt by the work of Wollman and Jacob four years later that Lederberg accepted it. Hayes' own comment was that he 'had the great advantage of knowing virtually no genetics while Lederberg knew too much'!

One result of the Pallanza meeting was that James Watson began to take an increasing interest in E. coli genetics, and when he was in Cambridge he would visit Bill on visits to London to discuss x-ray diffraction analysis of DNA. Watson considered that the results of Bill's genetic analyses provided good evidence that the E. coli genome comprised three linkage groups. Lederberg  et al. (1951) had already defined three sets of linked genes that showed non-linear interactions, the nature of which they did not understand. Watson and Hayes submitted a joint paper to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, through Max Delbrück, in which they presented their model. This was that the three linkage groups reflected discrete chromosomes, only one of which normally became associated with the transmissible F vector at any one mating event, and thus was carried over to the recipient cell. However, they supposed that occasionally the F factor became associated with two chromosomes, so that both were transferred in the same pairing, and that this provided an explanation of Lederberg's non-linear interactions.

At this time, Bill also made the accidental discovery of the Hfr (for high frequency of recombinants) strain, HfrH (H for Hayes). This arose spontaneously in a static culture of the A.F⁺ donor strain and yielded about 1000 times more recombinants in crosses with B.F⁺ than did the ancestral strain. As Bill points out in his unpublished memoir, this discovery was not original since Cavalli had first described the Hfr state (Cavalli, 1950). However, Bill discovered a number of important new features in terms of mechanism, since he showed that the fertility of HfrH was relatively unaffected by streptomycin treatment. Thus it was its donor ability that was enhanced compared with the parent. Moreover, UV-irradiation did not further increase the frequency of recombinants that could be formed, implying that this frequency was already maximal. The third observation was that the donor state was no longer transmissible at high frequency. Fourthly, only one of the three linking groups was transferred at high frequency. Markers on the other linkage groups could be selected at low frequency, and a proportion of the recombinants that were formed were found to be Hfr donors like the parent strain.

All these observations seemed to fit well with the model that Hayes and Watson had put forward, proposing that a mutant F factor had become stably associated with one of the three chromosomes that they had proposed. Bill commented in his memoir that 'this hypothesis, of course, turned out to be basically incorrect although not a bad approximation to the truth...'. It was indeed incorrect in supposing the existence of three chromosomes, but the observations show how Bill was always thinking mechanistically about his strains. The value of these observations was in illuminating the nature of the F⁺® Hfr event.

The second half of the sentence quoted above reads'...but the main importance of HfrH was that I gave it to Elie Wollman and François Jacob of the Institut Pasteur, Paris, with whom I had already established a close liaison, in whose hands it played a key role in the many experiments of their brilliant series that revealed the true nature of E. coli sexuality'. This comment exemplifies for us Bill's grace, modesty and generosity.

It was through Watson and Wollman that Bill was invited by Max Delbrück to contribute to the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium in 1953, on Viruses (at which Watson also gave an historic account of the structure of DNA). It was in the publication that emerged from this meeting that Bill gave the most definitive account of his experiments and hypotheses. Rather characteristically, he chose to finish what was a very substantial and thoughtful article as follows: 'Increasing evidence of the role of temperate phages as genetic carriers enables the concept that F fulfils a similar all more specialised and efficient, function in E. coli to be fitted into a gene evolutionary picture. Perhaps Hilaire Belloc's poem 'The Microbe' can express, better than I can say, my feelings on this matter.

'All these have never yet been seen –
But Scientists, who ought to know,
Assure us that they must be so...
Oh! Let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!'

During the meeting Delbrück invited Bill to visit him for six months at the California Institute of Technology, which came about that autumn. It had been suggested that Bill should work with Watson on  E. coli  conjugation. However in the event Watson, fresh from the DNA triumph, chose instead to work on RNA structure. Dr Watson has written to us as follows: 'I felt guilty about not interacting more with him when he came to Caltech during the fall of 1953. But then I cared only about the RNA structure, believing bacterial genetics would never again get exciting. How wrong I was, with Bill's work leading into that of Wollman and Jacob and soon afterwards to the Monod-Jacob ideas about gene expression in E. coli.'

At Caltech, Bill took over equipment and culture medium reagents from Marguerite Vogt, who had been working with E. coli K12 F⁺ x F^- crosses but was about to change topics. With these materials Hill's work had 'an interesting but initially embarrassing denouement' since no recombinants arose from crosses plated on the appropriate minimal media. The Caltech media, highly purified, were not supporting the process of recombination as had Bill's materials in London. Bill showed that crosses became fertile when aspartate was added to the medium. This observation led to the first analysis of the energetic requirements for conjugation, by K.W. Fisher, who became Bill's first PhD student in London in 1954 (Fisher 1957).

Bill then returned to his initial project, on the kinetics of the mating process, this time using his Hfr strain. His method also involved the use of high multiplicities of the virulent phage T6 instead of streptomycin. He was therefore able to kill the sensitive donor at intervals after mixing with a resistant recipient in broth, and the results were clear-cut and reproducible. When untreated samples were plated, recombinants began to appear immediately after mixing the parental cultures. On the other hand, the treated samples yielded no recombinants if phage was added at times less than ten minutes after the initial mixing. Recombinants then began to appear and their numbers increased linearly with time until a plateau was reached about thirty minutes later.

Bill had supposed that the donor genome, which he visualised as a discrete 'nucleoid', would be transferred en bloc over a very short period. Therefore he expected that the donor  lac⁺  and phage T6^s alleles, which were located on the same linkage group as the selected markers  (thr⁺ and  leu⁺) would be inherited among these recombinants. He ascribed their absence to killing of the T6^s recombinant segregants by the phage. It was only with the publication by Wollman and Jacob (1955) of their interrupted mating experiment that the correct explanation emerged.

Bill had succeeded in producing 'zygote suspensions' from which Hfr bacteria had been eliminated by the treatment with phage. He used this system to study the kinetics of segregation. Thus if a suspension of newly-formed zygotes was diluted and incubated in fresh broth and samples then plated at intervals for recombinants, the time at which the number of recombinants began to increase indicated the commencement of division among the recombinant segregants so that in this way the time of segregation could be assessed. Furthermore, if zygotes were plated on media containing the inhibitory or lethal substance, only those in which the resistance gene is dominant can segregate resistant recombinants, so that a comparison of the kinetics of segregation and of expression distinguished dominant from recessive alleles.

These new methods were developed at Caltech and the definitive experiments were completed during 1954. An abstract was published in 1955 but the work was not published in full until Wollman, Jacob and Hayes collaborated on a joint paper that was presented at the 1956 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium (1956).

The years of the medical research council units

In 1957, Bill was invited by Sir Harold Himsworth to set up a Medical Research Council Unit, the Microbial Genetics Research Unit, at Hammersmith Hospital, where a generation of to-be-successful British, European and North American bacterial geneticists established themselves. The initial members of the Unit were Ken Fisher, Neville Symonds, Royston Clowes and Stuart Glover. They were joined by Robert Pritchard and Julian Gross, and later by Kenneth Stacey and Elinor Meynell. The initial postgraduate students were John Scaife and Donald Ritchie, followed by Marilyn Monk and Paul Broda. There was also an extensive list of visitors, who included Raymond Devoret, Jeff Schell, Jon Beckwith, Simon Silver, Millard Susman, Gerard Venema, Robert Weisberg, David Goldfarb, and Stephen Cooper. Bill preferred to let people get on with the job so as to give him time to do his own scientific work rather than being an administrator and manager, which he detested. However, his hopes of returning to the bench were never realised since he set himself the all-consuming task of writing a book. In the words of Neville Symonds: 'The Genetics of Bacteria and their Viruses published in 1964, was the first comprehensive textbook on microbial genetics and became a trusted companion to students and research workers all over the world. In many ways the book typifies the character of the author. It evokes a kind of old-world charm, talking with a sense of wonder about the ideas it is portraying, and being scrupulously fair to the scientists under discussion. Nonetheless behind it all is the ability to see through the often complex experiments and confusing theories and expound them simply: it is this which made the book so successful.'

Nora Hayes recalled later how for several years she lived in a silent house, as Bill worked day and night on his book. The book emerged more than three years later and three times the expected length. However, coming so soon after the heroic decade of molecular biology from 1952 to 1962, it appeared at the perfect time. Bill wrote in his memoir: 'shortly after publication the book came to the attention of J.B.S. Haldane when he was recovering from his cancer operation not long before his death in 1964; he told me that he proposed to review it. He seemed especially intrigued by the final chapter on transmissible plasmids but wrote me a number of letters criticising my amateurish accounts of "classical" genetics which I found most valuable when I came to write the second edition. One letter began, "Dear Hayes, in this letter I am going to give you hell" – and did!'

The book had been reprinted four times by 1967 and in 1968 a second edition appeared. The fact that the first edition had 740 pages and the second had 925 pages and almost twice as many references shows both the scale of the undertaking and the rate at which the subject was growing. It is not surprising that Bill never attempted a third edition. The effort involved in creating this book, the changing nature of science, and his other duties together frustrated his expressed hope to return to the laboratory.

Characteristic of Bill's open style, it was decided to promote molecular genetics (and the Unit) at the international level. Bill had a special interest in links with Eastern European countries, which had been so deprived of modern molecular genetical developments during the Lysenko period. The principal means chosen was a series of courses of about four weeks duration, comprising lectures and practical classes; they were roughly modelled on the Cold Spring Harbor course. Four courses were held between 1960 and 1964; each was attended by about twenty students, ranging from professors to postgraduates, from diverse disciplines with a fair proportion coming from other countries. Hayes and Clowes edited a book, Experiments in Microbial Genetics, that was based on the courses. The Unit also made available stocks of the strains used in the course and produced an international registry of laboratories that were willing to help in disseminating these strains. These activities made Bill and the Unit very well known and valued.

In 1964 Bill was elected FRS and in short order Symonds, Stacey and Pritchard left to be founding professors in the Universities of Sussex, Kent and Leicester respectively, whilst Clowes and Fisher departed for the USA. Also at this time Martin Pollock, who headed a biochemistry group at the National Institute for Medical Research, proposed that their two groups should merge as a new university department of Molecular Biology. This appealed greatly to Bill since such an integrated department would be the first of its kind in Britain and would attract undergraduate students into the field. Moreover, most of the Unit staff welcomed the idea of some teaching. These ideas came to fruition through the good offices of Michael (later Lord) Swann at Edinburgh. It was finally agreed with the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Edward Appleton, that the new department would be allocated the top three floors of an extended eight-storey Forestry building that was being planned. The MRC agreed to this, the first example of an MRC Unit being an integral part of a university department with full teaching responsibilities. The Unit acquired the new title of Molecular Genetics Unit. Bill was appointed to a personal chair in the university and the Unit moved to Edinburgh in May 1968.

In Edinburgh Bill again did little research of his own, his time being consumed by teaching and organization, invited lectures and trips abroad, and a very heavy burden of committee work for the Royal Society, the University Grants Committee and the recently-funded European Molecular Biology Organisation. He was also President of the British Genetical Society in 1971-1973.

In 1971 he accepted an invitation to tour New Zealand and he spent three months there and then visited Australia on the way home. He felt an immediate affinity with Canberra and the Australian National University, and told Nora that this was where he would like to spend the rest of his professional career. John Langridge, then Professor of Genetics at the Research School of Biological Sciences, asked Bill if he knew of anyone who would like to come and take up an appointment at the RSBS. Bill said he would like to come, and Langridge replied that they really weren't looking for anyone so distinguished. However, the seed was sown and in 1973 when Langridge left the Department of Genetics and returned to CSIRO, Bill was invited to be the next Professor of Genetics at the Research School of Biological Sciences of the Australian National University. He duly arrived in early 1974, just a few days after he turned 61. Before accepting the position, Bill wrote to one of us (BH) asking if he was also a candidate for the chair (which was not the case) and if that was so, then he would not accept the position – a typical example of Bill's constant generosity and concern for others.

Bill's departure resulted in the closure of the MRC Unit rather than its continuation with a new Director. After a period of great uncertainty, four of the untenured staff were granted tenure after application to the Council by Bill as one of his final acts. Together with two borrowed tenured staff, these individuals joined the University Department, with their salaries and other support provided by the MRC. The Unit had published 253 papers during the period 1957-1973.

The Australian years

Bill's first impressions of Canberra were happily confirmed. He was finally able to return to laboratory work, he loved the lack of traffic, the ease with which the nearby high country could be reached and the warm Australian climate. He travelled to most parts of Australia in the first three or four years. Always, this travel was an interlude from his laboratory work, his major activity. He continued to gain great satisfaction and enjoyment from classical music, particularly opera and piano works. He loved walking in Canberra, both in the city and in the surrounding bush, and was an enthusiastic but in his own words not very competent swimmer. Bill and Nora found the emphasis on home entertainment in Canberra very much to their liking. Bill was somewhat disdainful of dining and good food, and frequently suggested that he would prefer to be supplied in the form of capsules or pills so that that part of living could be got over and done with quickly. On the other hand, conversation after a meal was an entirely more serious pursuit. In 1976 he was elected to the Australian Academy of Science and in 1977 invited to give the prestigious Burnet Lecture at the Academy's annual general meeting. He was not a regular participant at such meetings because he didn't much like dressing up and one of the features of Australian life he enjoyed was the informality. He only ever attended one Academy dinner, on the day that he was formally inducted into the Fellowship, because these are traditionally black-tie functions.

Bill's research work at the Research School of Biological Sciences was focused on the nature of an E. coli temperature-sensitive mutant called tif-1, which had a pleiotropic phenotype affecting induction of the lambda prophage and formation of filamentous shaped cells. This was done in collaboration with Dr Erela Ephrati-Elizur, who had been a visitor to the Hammersmith MRC Unit and who happened to be in Canberra because she was the wife of the Israeli ambassador. This work resulted in a few publications, but with her departure the activity gradually diminished.

On retirement from the ANU in 1979, Bill was invited to Caltech by Max Delbrück and awarded a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar appointment there for about eighteen months, reinforcing the contacts that he had made there 25 years earlier. He enjoyed the Pasadena social life and Nora and Manny Delbrück, Max's wife, shared the shopping and cooking so as to provide home entertainment for the international Delbrück research group. At the end of his period at Caltech, Bill was offered appointments at many prestigious universities, including Edinburgh and a variety of locations in the USA, but he had no hesitation in accepting the offer of an Emeritus Professorial appointment at the Australian National University.

He did not want to work in the Research School of Biological Sciences, considering that he would be an inhibition to the new Professor of Genetics, so he insisted that he be located in the School of General Studies in the Department of Botany headed by Peter Gresshof. He did some teaching and spent a lot of time working on his undergraduate lectures and with research that was a continuation of his work with Max Delbrück at Caltech. In about 1985 be decided that he had had enough, and announced that he had given his last lecture and discontinued his work in the laboratory. At about this time he became aware of memory deficiencies. These changes were the forerunner of a dementia that gradually diminished his faculties over the years. Characteristically, he participated in a brain donor programme and it would have appealed to his sceptical nature to know that a clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease was not confirmed pathologically. He spent more time with Nora, he walked, and – what for Bill must have been a new experience – he relaxed and did not involve himself with scientific activities. As his health deteriorated, Nora sold their Canberra home and moved to Sydney to a retirement village where he could get increasing medical care. Michael Hayes, in a eulogy delivered at Bill's funeral service, said of this time: 'During these last difficult years he was lovingly cared for by both my mother and the staff at Bowden Brae. Within the last couple of years we were able to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of an exceedingly happy marriage and more recently Dad's eightieth birthday.'
 

Personality

In his personal life Bill had simple tastes. He listened to music almost every day of his active life. He loved poetry, mainly the Romantics, and was a competent though only occasional painter. We have already referred to the central importance to him of his marriage, which was to be the fixed point in his life. Together Nora and he were magnificent hosts.

Michael Hayes, again from his eulogy, said 'From a personal viewpoint, if I had to single out the most striking features of Dad's personality, I would nominate both his honesty and his modesty. As a father he adopted something of a laissez-faire attitude and was both generous and accepting. He never attempted to impose his own ideas, and if he disagreed he would carefully expound his reasons. By nature he was a sceptic. As a boy I remember being taken aback at his professed admiration for Doubting Thomas and by quoting G.B. Shaw that faith was one of the seven deadly sins. He was equally unsympathetic to the atheist tradition.

For him, the great appeal of science was as an expression of the creative process. To have an original idea and to then set about rigorously examining its validity was the great endeavour.... He once described his favourite pastime in Who's Who as "doing nothing" which was based more on whimsy than reality. As for his intellect, the achievements speak for themselves and his peers remain the best judge.'

Possibly as a result of his period in India, Bill loved the sun and with the international success of his book he decided to buy a house on the Maltese island of Gozo, where he spent part of the summers. He did not maintain close links with Ireland, and seemed to find it easy to move from London to Edinburgh and then to Australia.

Bill's life has encompassed the span of the 'short twentieth century' to a remarkable degree. His childhood was still a world of horse-drawn carriages, family prayers morning and evening, addressing his father as 'Sir', and education by a governess. There was an old-fashioned, almost courtly, element to his make-up that no doubt came from his upbringing. To Naomi Datta his demeanour seemed paradoxical: 'He looked soldierly in being very upright and with shortcut hair. One could imagine him in uniform, but his sandals and open-necked shirts did not fit that image. Also, the Army is hierarchical and Bill's unit was absolutely not – it was very friendly and egalitarian.' To others he seemed shy, but it was a universal view that the most striking features of his personality were his intellectual curiosity and his modesty. He was informal in his dealings, easy to get on with and endlessly helpful. These characteristics served to make him probably the most popular microbial geneticist of his generation, and he will be remembered with affection in countless laboratories. Many of his colleagues can attest to his acts of kindness, support and understanding, tendered in a most unobtrusive way. In 1968, in his book's second edition, he wrote about two colleagues who had died: 'I could not allow this edition to go to press without paying tribute not only to their key contributions to molecular biology, but also to their endearing qualities and personality and their many acts of kindness for which they will be long remembered by their friends.' This was his own combination of attributes.

Honours

Bill was elected to the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland (1943), the Royal Society of London (1964), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1968) and the Australian Academy of Science (1976). He was awarded Honorary Degrees from the University of Leicester – Doctor of Science (1968), the University of Dublin – Doctor of Laws (1970), the University of Kent – Doctor of Science (1973) and the National University of Ireland – Doctor of Science (1973). His awards included the Royal Society Leeuwenhoek Lecture (1965), the Genetical Society Mendel Lecture (1965), the first Griffith Memorial Lecture (1965), the Burnet Lecture and Medal of the Australian Academy of Science (1977), and Fellowship of the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, University of London (1985).

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in  Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.11, no.2, 1996. It was written by:

• Bruce Holloway, Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Monash University, Victoria.
• Paul Broda, Department of Biochemistry and Applied Molecular Biology, UMIST, Manchester, UK.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to record their sincere thanks to Michael Hayes for his help in compiling this memoir. Bill, in his characteristically modest but effective way, provided a detailed personal memoir, self-typed, that contained many details of his life unobtainable in any other way. He told one of us (BH) after preparing the biographical memoir for Max Delbrück that he would make it much easier for whoever did it for him. We are also indebted to the many individuals who offered reminiscences of their interactions and experiences with Bill. Some are mentioned in the text.

References

• Cavalli, L.L. (1950). La sessualita new batteri.  Boll. Ist. Sierotera Milano, 29, 281-289.
• Fischer, K.W. (1957). The nature of endergonic processes in conjugation in Escherichia coli  K-12.  J. Gen. Microbiol., 16, 136-145.
• Haas, F., Wyss, O., and Stone, W.S. (1948). The effect of irradiation on recombination in Escherichia coli. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. Wash., 34, 229-232.
• Lederberg J. and Tatum, E.L. (1946). Gene recombination in Escherichia coli. Nature, 158, 558.
• Lederberg, J., Cavalli, L.L. and Lederberg, E.M. (1952). Sex compatibility in Escherichia coli. Genetics, 37, 720-731.
• Lederberg, J., Lederberg, E.M. Zinder, N.D. and Lively, E.R. (1951). Recombination analysis of bacterial heredity  Cold Spring Harbor Symp. Quant. Biol., 16, 413-441.
• Lwoff, A., Siminovitch, L., and Kjelgaard, N. (1950) Induction de la production de bacteriophages chez une bactérie lysogéne. Ann. Inst. Pasteur, 79, 815-859.
• Watson, J.D. (1968) The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. Wodenfield and Nicolson, London.
• Weigle, J.J. and Delbrück, M. (1951) Mutual exclusion between an infecting phage and a carried phage. J. Bacteriol., 62, 301-318.
• Wollman, E.L. (1966). Bacterial Conjugation. In Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, ed. J. Cairns, G.S. Stent and J.D. Watson, pp. 216-225 (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology, Cold Spring Harbor).
• Wollman, E.L. and Jacob, F. (1955). Sur le mécanisme du transfer de matériel génétique au cours de la recombination chez E. coli  K12.  Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci., 240, 2449-2451

Written by L.M. Clarebrough and A.K. Head

• Introduction
• Early years 1904-1938
• University of Melbourne 1938-1947
• CSIR/CSIRO 1947-1969
• Post-retirement years 1969-1982
• About this memoir
  • Acknowledgements

Introduction

The death of Walter Boas on 12 May 1982, after a short illness, came as a shock to a very large number of friends and colleagues in the scientific, university, metallurgical and engineering communities. To all these communities Walter Boas had made outstanding contributions since his arrival in Australia in 1938.

Early years 1904-1938

Walter Boas was born in Berlin on 10 February 1904 and was the only child of Adele (née Reiche) and Arthur Boas. Arthur Boas was a doctor with a general practice centred on his home in western Berlin and he died of a heart attack at the age of 49 when Walter was fifteen. Walter lived with his widowed mother in the family home until he left Berlin in January 1933. Adele Boas remained in Berlin until 1939 when she came to live with Walter and his wife Eva in Melbourne. She lived with them until her death in 1953.

The early days in Berlin were difficult ones for the Boas family and the young Boas often went cold and hungry to bed due to severe shortages of food and coal towards the end of the first world war. Boas' parents were of Jewish origin, but the family did not practise the Jewish religious traditions and the young Boas was baptised in the Lutheran Church. His schooling from 1911-1922 was in the classics at a typical German Gymnasium, where he studied German, Latin, Greek, French, History and Mathematics with very little science and no English. He had fond memories of his father during these early school years, a father who took him on Sunday morning visits to museums and who gave him considerable help with his studies of Latin and Greek, subjects for which his father had a greater love than Walter.

After matriculation, Walter Boas started a course in electrical engineering at the Technische Hochschule Berlin in October 1922. It was compulsory for students at the Technische Hochschule to spend a full year working at the 'shop-floor' level in an approved factory as part of their course and Walter spent from October 1923 to September 1924 working at Siemens and Halske Ltd., learning techniques and taking part in all stages of the manufacture of telephones and electrical measuring equipment. He recalled this time as an important stage in his growth as, coming from an intellectual background, he had no previous knowledge of the hardships in the lives of factory workers at that time. At the completion of this year of practical experience, and following a desire for a more solid grounding in the fundamentals of science, he changed his Diploma of Engineering course from Electrical Engineering to Applied Physics. Before the final examinations for the Diploma of Engineering (Applied Physics) it was necessary for candidates to complete a research project and Walter asked Professor Richard Becker, recently appointed professor of theoretical physics at the Technische Hochschule, if he would accept him as his first research student. Becker agreed and Walter considered this the most important decision involved in his professional career as Becker directed him to the field of plastic deformation of metals, a field which remained at the centre of his scientific interests throughout his life. Having successful]y completed a research project on the influence of load and temperature on the creep rate of metals, which resulted in his first scientific publication, co-authored with Becker, Boas graduated with the Diploma of Engineering (Applied Physics) in February 1928. Of his first experimental research project, Boas recorded that all was not well with his initial results and that the advice from his supervisor Becker was: 'You must apply yourself with all your love and your whole soul to your project, otherwise no experiment will ever succeed'. The young Boas never forgot this early advice from a man he greatly admired, and it was the spirit of this advice that he took on and managed to convey so successfully to a great many of his students and young research colleagues in later years.

Following graduation, Boas wanted to commence work in industry as the depression was already hitting hard in Germany and jobs were very difficult to get. However, Becker persuaded him to stay in research and arranged for him to work with 'a young fellow called Schmid' who had just been appointed to the position of head of a new section for physics in the Kaiser Wilhelm-Institut für Metallkunde at Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, which was the centre for several institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. He commenced working with Schmid in March 1928 and a most successful research career concerned with the plasticity of crystals was underway.

Boas' first research project involved the verification of the law of critical resolved shear stress for the onset of plastic deformation using single crystals of cadmium grown from the melt. Due to the extreme softness of these crystals, the tensile tests were very sensitive to external vibrations and he had to do most of his experiments in the early morning hours between 3am and 6am. As an extension of this work, he showed that plots of shear stress vs shear strain were independent of crystal orientation and he also studied the influence of temperature on the critical resolved shear stress and the form of the stress-strain curve. The results were submitted as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Engineering (Dr Ing.) at the Technische Hochschule of Berlin early in 1930. In printed form, the thesis was only 15 pages long and was received with some scepticism in the faculty, as it was the shortest thesis that had ever been submitted for a higher degree. The oral examination of the thesis was conducted by all members of the faculty, but Boas 'survived the gruesome ordeal with flying colours' and was awarded his doctorate in July 1930.

Boas continued to work with Schmid and others in Berlin until Schmid moved to Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1932 to take up the chair of physics that he had been offered there. At this stage, Boas had published 15 papers, 10 of them with Schmid, on the results of his research in Berlin. Already in 1930 Boas and Schmid had started to write a book on the plasticity of crystals, but progress was slow due to the fact that they were both actively engaged in research. Boas joined Schmid in Fribourg in January 1933 and there they completed Kristallplastizität which was published in 1935. It is of interest that an English translation of the book was published in 1950, without the knowledge or approval of the authors, and was reissued without change in 1968. The continuing demand for the book in 1968 marks it as a classic work of continuing interest to scientists and engineers concerned with the plastic behaviour of crystalline materials. In the translators' preface to the English translation, the publishers correctly comment on Kristallplastizität that 'This book, with its lucid exposition and wide range, is cited as the first reference in innumerable metallurgical papers, and became a classic within a year or two of its publication'.

Boas often commented that he had great regrets on leaving Berlin in 1933 but that, at the time, he had no idea how lucky he was to be leaving Germany before Hitler came to power. In this connection, he has fondly referred to his colleague Günter Wassermann, of Schmid's group in Berlin, who with his wife arranged for Boas' mother Adele to live with them during the weeks in November 1938 when thousands of Jews in Berlin were arrested.

During his student days, and afterwards as a research worker in Berlin, Boas had the opportunity to meet and to be present at colloquia given by many of the great men of physics including Einstein, Von Laue, Planck and Schrödinger. In the later years of his life he was much sought after to give talks on the scientific scene in Berlin in those early days.

Boas' term in Fribourg finished in December 1935 and he was invited to join Professor P. Scherrer in his Department of Physics at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zürich. This move to Zürich marked the end of eight years of close collaboration with Schmid, a period in which the output resulting from the collaboration of these two scientists was remarkable and set the pattern for research in fields such as plastic deformation of metals and alloys, deformation twinning, preferred orientation and recrystallization for many years to come.

Boas had discovered in Berlin that he could obtain Laue back-reflection diagrams from metal crystals that were too thick for transmission of X-rays and he and Schmid developed the technique of determining crystal orientations from such diagrams. In the course of this work, they became interested in the change in shape of diffraction spots that resulted when the crystals were plastically deformed, and Boas continued this work in Zürich. His experimental and theoretical results convinced him that lattice strain was the cause of the observed effects. An alternative explanation was favoured by W.A. Wood of the National Physical Laboratory of the UK, in terms of the breakdown of the crystal by plastic deformation into small crystallites so that the diffraction effects resulted from small crystal size. Boas and Wood never reached agreement on their differing interpretations and seeking a solution to this problem remained one of Boas' scientific interests for many years. In fact the solution, which proved to be a compromise between the two positions, was not arrived at until the direct observation of the dislocation structure of deformed metals by transmission electron microscopy in the late 1950s.

In 1937 Boas' stay in Switzerland was becoming difficult as the number of German immigrants increased. The legal situation in Switzerland at that time was that the right of permanent residence was obtained automatically by any foreigner who had lived in the country for a continuous period of five years. However, the Swiss government was becoming worried that too many foreign nationals, particularly Germans, would satisfy these conditions. To prevent this, a new law was introduced specifying that all foreigners had to leave the country after a period of residence of four years and nine months, for at least three months, so that any rights of permanent residence under the old rule would lapse.

It was clear that Boas could not remain permanently in Switzerland and in September 1937 Scherrer contacted his friend Dr A. Muller, who was Swiss by birth and Assistant Director of the Royal Institution in London, on Boas' behalf, to enquire whether Boas could be admitted as a worker in the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory of the Royal Institution. Boas was advised that he should write directly to Sir William Bragg and Bragg's response in November 1937 was: 'We shall be very pleased to see you at the Royal Institution and to find opportunities for putting you in touch with the work that is done'. Boas' invitation to work at the Royal Institution was for the Lent Term from 17 January to 9 April 1938. During his time in London Boas took lessons in English three times a week, which he found very hard work but profitable. At the Royal Institution he met E.N. da C. Andrade, Mrs (later Dame Kathleen) Lonsdale, J.M. Robertson, A.R. Ubbelohde, M. Blackman, Bruce Chalmers, G.W. Brindley, W.L. Bragg (later Sir Lawrence) and many others. Several of these people became friends and international contacts in later life. W.L. Bragg was the director of the National Physics Laboratory and it was he who introduced Boas to W.A. Wood who was mentioned earlier.

Before the approach to the Royal Institution had begun, Boas was in contact with Dr Demuth of the 'Association of German Scientists in Foreign Countries' and with Walter Adams, secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (formerly the Academic Assistance Council), both with headquarters in London, with a view to obtaining an academic post outside Germany. It was through these bodies that the possibility of a position at the University of Melbourne was first raised in September 1936. Walter Adams advised Boas on 12 January 1937 that 'although there is no position in Melbourne, the authorities are prepared to make an application to the Carnegie Corporation for a grant if they feel that you are a suitable candidate. They have asked their representative in England, Professor Irvine Masson of the University of Durham, to interview you and he informs me that he could do so on the 29th January'. A further quote from the correspondence between Boas and Adams illustrates the difficulties that scientists and others in Walter Boas' position were having in the unsettled Europe of those days. In a letter of 16 January 1937 Adams asked: 'Can you give me detailed and official information about the police regulations in Switzerland which make it difficult for you to stay there. I should like this information because otherwise a suspicion might arise that you are having to leave Switzerland because you have engaged in political activities'.

Boas, in recalling in 1973 his trip from Zürich to London for the interview with Masson, wrote:

This trip to London was the first time I left the continent and the crossing of the Channel from Dieppe to Newhaven was a nightmare. My lack of knowledge of the English language and English eating habits made life rather difficult (e.g. eating puffed wheat without milk and sugar in spite of the advice offered by the waiter). I had prepared myself for an interview on my scientific work and ideas for future work and was shocked when Professor Masson pointed out that a talk on my work was useless, since he was a chemist, and I should rather tell him about my hobbies, which sports I was playing, which books I was reading, whether I was interested in art, music, theatre etc. With my very poor knowledge of English and no experience in speaking it, I must have made an appallingly bad impression and it would be interesting to read Masson's report on the interview. I certainly was very depressed and did not expect to hear from Melbourne again.

Contrary to the information from Adams that there was no position available in Melbourne, an advertisement appeared for a position of Assistant director of (Physical) Metallurgical Research at the University of Melbourne and Boas applied for this post on 1 February 1937. It is of interest that part of the funding for this position was to be supplied by CSIR, following a decision of the Commonwealth government to subsidise research work in certain subjects in several Australian universities. The occupant of the new position would be required to carry out research, under the general direction of Professor J. Neill Greenwood, on the application of X-ray techniques to the atomic structure of alloys and to instruct research students in these techniques. A limited amount of lecturing on this topic would also be required. It was specified that the applicant should be a graduate in physics and must have had experience in the application of X-ray techniques to alloy problems. It was also mentioned that a Metropolitan Vickers X-ray set was to be installed in the Metallurgy Department at the University. Boas must have been delighted on seeing this advertisement as the specifications for the position seemed to have been written to fit him and his experience. However his application was unsuccessful, the successful applicant being Dr H. Hirst of the Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company Ltd., the suppliers of the X-ray equipment.

All was not lost, however, as correspondence was now occurring between Boas in Zürich, Adams of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning in London and Professor J. Neill Greenwood in Melbourne concerning the possibility of a Carnegie Fellowship for Boas in Melbourne. Greenwood was keen to arrange for Boas to come to Melbourne, but he was reluctant to initiate moves for a grant from the Carnegie Corporation because of delays in building the laboratory to house the new X-ray set which, in July 1937, was still under construction at Metropolitan Vickers. In a letter to Adams in September 1937 Greenwood wrote: 'I am now in a position to say that the laboratories and X-ray equipment for which I have been waiting are in the course of erection and will, I hope, be ready for occupation about the beginning of next year. Without this accommodation it would have been useless to take further steps with regard to Dr Boas as we should have no facilities for him to work with. I have now asked Dr Priestley (Vice Chancellor, University of Melbourne) to take up the matter with the Carnegie Corporation and I shall inform you later of the decision' .

Boas had moved from Zürich to take up his position at the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory when, on 22 January 1938, Adams received the following cable from the Registrar of Melbourne University: 'Please inform Walter Boas appointed lecturer here on Carnegie Grant of twenty two hundred dollars a year for two years ask him cable acceptance and address'. A few days later Boas had a phone call from E.N. da C. Andrade of University College, London, offering him a position there. After many months of uncertainty in Zürich, Boas now had two offers of appointment and he sought the advice of Sir William Bragg to help with the decision. He recalled that Bragg 'told me of his happy twenty three years as Professor of Mathematics and Physics in Adelaide, how much he had enjoyed the unconventional, open air life in Australia and said he was sure I too would be happy there and he would advise strongly that I accept the offer'. Boas accepted this advice and on 31 January 1938 the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning cabled the Registrar of Melbourne University: 'Boas accepts but cannot leave until the end of March. Address c/o this office. Send contract letter and please arrange immigration Canberra authorities'.

Thus, fortunately for Australian science, the die was cast for Walter Boas' future in Australia. Walter proposed to Eva Orgler, a friend of five years who lived in Berlin but who had made several holiday visits to Switzerland during his time there. They were married at the Registry Office in Hampstead on 22 March 1938 and two days later set out from London for Melbourne. Because the Spanish civil war made shipping unsafe in the Bay of Biscay, they travelled by train via Paris to Toulon where they embarked on the ss. Ormonde for Melbourne on l April.

The Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, through its General Secretary Walter Adams and its Assistant Secretary Esther Simpson, had played a crucial role as intermediary in all the negotiations associated with Boas' appointment in Melbourne and the story of Boas' arrival in Melbourne is best told by his letter of 6 July 1938 to Walter Adams:

Dear Mr Adams,

Being here now nearly two months I should like to give you a short report.

The journey was very nice. The sea was calm, we saw Pompeii, Aden, made a trip by rickshaw in Colombo and arrived here on the 2nd of May. Professor and Mrs Greenwood met us on the boat and took us to the boarding house where all was prepared for our coming. After staying there for a month we moved into a flat where we are feeling very comfortable and at home.

Professor Greenwood and the other people in the Metallurgical School are very kind and help me always. I am lecturing now on 'Fatigue of Metals' and will have to lecture in the next year on 'Physics of metals'. Naturally I met the other Carnegie Fellows of whom you gave me the addresses. Heymann is now Senior-Lecturer, about Loewe nothing is definitely decided till now nor about Duras. I hope that there will be found some permanent position for me in the next year.

After all we read in the newspapers we are very happy to be here so far from Europe. I should like to thank you again very much for your endeavour to place me here.

With best regards also to Miss Simpson,
Yours very sincerely,
Walter Boas

University of Melbourne 1938-1947

In recruiting Walter Boas to the Metallurgy Department at the University of Melbourne in 1938, J. Neill Greenwood gained a staff member who already, at 34, had a very high international reputation in science, having published some 25 papers on his research and the book Kristallplastizität. Boas was under the impression, from discussions with Adams in London, that his job in Melbourne as Carnegie Lecturer would be concerned mainly with research. However, on his first day in the department, he was informed by Greenwood that he would be required to start a lecture course on the fatigue of metals in six weeks' time. Boas had no experience of lecturing in English and, at that time, no detailed knowledge of the topic, and he said of those weeks 'I do not think I ever worked as hard ever in my life before or after' .

In the first term of 1939, Boas commenced his lectures on the physics of metals to students taking metallurgy as one of their subjects for the BSc degree and to students working for their BMetE degree. The course was the first of its type to be given in the British Commonwealth and treated crystallography, plastic deformation of single crystals and polycrystalline metals and alloys, theory of alloys and diffusion and phase transformations in the solid state. In the beginning, spoken English was a problem in Boas' lectures for teacher and students alike. However, he went to great pains to prepare a set of detailed lecture notes for distribution to his students. These notes formed the basis for his second book, An Introduction to the Physics of Metals and Alloys, which was published by the Melbourne University Press in 1947. Boas generously acknowledged that 'the book could not have been written without the great unselfish help given by J.S. Bowles'. Bowles, who has recently retired from the position of Research Professor of Metallurgy at the University of New South Wales, was a demonstrator and then lecturer in the Metallurgy Department at Melbourne during the period the book was in preparation.

Throughout his nine-year association with the University of Melbourne, Boas was an inspiration to his students. It was a unique experience for students in those days to be taught from their first year by a man with such a high international reputation in science and to realise that the definitive papers on the subject being studied were the work of their lecturer. Walter Boas' enthusiasm for his subject was contagious and it was his teaching and inspiration that formed the base for successful careers in science by so many of his students. For all his students, it was a delight to find that aloofness was not a characteristic of this top-line scientist, and Boas' approach to students was such that they came to regard him as a friend as well as a teacher, a friend who was always willing to help with further explanations of difficult topics and to give a word of encouragement when it was needed. He acted as a friendly counsellor for any of his students with personal or study problems, long before student counsellors were part of the university scene, and he and Eva frequently entertained students in their home. Walter Boas believed that close association between staff and students was of mutual benefit to both. He took a great interest in the activities of the student Metallurgical Society and could be relied on to tell the best joke at the annual dinner of this group.

Boas was appointed as a Senior Lecturer in Metallurgy in September 1939, a member of the Faculty of Science in May 1940, elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in May 1943 and admitted to the degree of Master of Science without examination in December 1943.

When war broke out in 1939, Boas was automatically classified as an enemy alien. However, this made no difference to the friendships that were developing on the Melbourne campus and Boas has recorded his thanks to many, among a large number of people, who helped him and Eva to feel settled and welcome in their new land. They were Professor Greenwood, Professor (later Sir Samuel) Wadham, Professor (later Sir Kenneth) Bailey, Harold Hunt, Frank Sublit, Mansergh Shaw, Sydney Rubbo, J.S. Anderson, Haughton Dunkin, Mervyn Willis and Vic Hopper. These men and their wives were very supportive of Walter and Eva and the friendship they offered made assimilation into university life at Melbourne a very happy experience. Walter and Eva were determined to become Australians and Walter was granted 'refugee alien' status in 1943. His application for a certificate of naturalization, supported by the Vice-Chancellor, J.D.G. (later Sir John) Medley, was approved by the Minister of the Interior in March 1944. The Boas' children, John Frank, born on 27 February 1941, and Anne Catherine, born on 20 September 1944, were, of course, Australian citizens by birth, and neither of them learnt any German from their parents. This was the case because of the decision by Walter and Eva to sever connections with their German past by speaking only English at home, a decision that was marked by a ceremonial burning of their German passports shortly after arriving in Australia.

Boas' first few years of lecturing in the Metallurgy Department coincided with the second world war and shortened courses in the Faculty of Engineering. The normal engineering degrees in specialities such as civil, mechanical, electrical and metallurgical engineering, usually awarded after four years' study, were deferred during the war years for all but a few selected students, and the degree of BEngSc was awarded after a compressed course of three years. For students and staff alike, many more lectures and practical classes had to be fitted into the working week which was extended to include Saturdays. Academic postgraduate research ceased during these years and students were moved as quickly as possible into industries associated with the war effort. An annexe was built on to the Metallurgy Department for the production of tungsten wire and the output from this small 'factory' became the sole source of tungsten in Australia, with many graduates from the Metallurgy Department becoming 'factory hands' associated with this production instead of moving on to postgraduate research.

Boas was frustrated by the lack of opportunity for research in the Metallurgy Department and he kept his research interests alive by co-operating with members of the CSIR Section of Lubricants and Bearings, which had been set up by F.P. Bowden in the neighbouring Chemistry Department at Melbourne. A very practical problem in the Section at the time, that was under investigation by R.W.K. Honeycombe (one of Boas' first students and later professor of metallurgy at Cambridge), was the failure of tin-base bearing alloys. Honeycombe consulted Boas about this problem and they were able to show that the failure resulted from plastic deformation in the polycrystalline tin-base alloy resulting from the anisotropy of thermal expansion of tin. The failure mechanism was called 'thermal fatigue' and Boas and Honeycombe published four papers on the topic, two of them in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Boas' co-operation with the CSIR Section of Lubricants and Bearings was put on an official footing in December 1943 in a letter from Lightfoot, Secretary of the CSIR, in which he stated, 'I have been in communication with the Vice-Chancellor and with Acting Professor Dunkin regarding our desire to obtain your services on a part-time temporary basis to assist in work in our Lubricants and Bearings Section on thermal and mechanical fatigue of bearing alloys'. Boas' part-time appointment with CSIR commenced on 3 January 1944 at a salary of £200 per annum.

With the end of the war, Boas' hopes for initiating research activity in the Metallurgy Department continued to be frustrated. Professor Greenwood had received a grant from the Baillieu family to set up a Research Chair in Metallurgy. He vacated the teaching chair and became Research Professor of Metallurgy late in 1945. Boas applied for the vacant teaching chair in March 1946 but was unsuccessful, the appointment going to H.K. Worner. Life in the Metallurgy Department was becoming more difficult for Boas as new research laboratories were being set up in the former tungsten annexe and equipment from the teaching department was being transferred to the research department so that opportunity for research by the teaching staff was further reduced. It was at this time that Boas was thinking of leaving Australia to work in England and he made tentative enquiries of Sir Lawrence Bragg and C.H. Desh concerning research posts in the UK in June 1946. However, in writing to Bragg and Desh, Boas was also thinking of a possible research career in CSIR as he wrote to them 'The only research which I have been able to carry out was in collaboration with Dr Bowden's Section of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. There is probably no need to say that I enjoy that collaboration very much indeed, and it seems in fact that I could if I so desire, obtain a research position with CSIR...'.

While changes were occuring in the Metallurgy Department, great changes were also occurring in the CSIR Lubricants and Bearings Section next door. S.H. Bastow replaced Bowden as leader of the Section in 1946 and established its new name, Tribophysics. Bastow's aim was to broaden the research activities of the Section from practical problems associated with friction, lubrication, bearings and explosives into more fundamental studies on the plastic behaviour of metals and alloys and the chemical reactivity of surfaces. In looking for a leader for this new research activity, the obvious choice was Walter Boas who had an outstanding international reputation in the field, was keen to get back to full-time research, and had been collaborating so successfully with staff of the Lubricants and Bearings Section since 1943. A position of Principal Research Scientist (Physicist) for the CSIR Section of Tribophysics was advertised in November 1946 and it was specified that the applicant should have the 'highest qualifications as a physicist combined with considerable experience in the initiation and direction of physical research'. The duties required were 'to undertake, and assist in direction of research on the physics of solids'. Boas was offered the appointment on 31 December 1946 and accepted on 15 January 1947; his resignation from the position of Senior Lecturer in Physical Metallurgy was accepted by the Council of the University of Melbourne on 22 January 1947. Thus ended Boas' nine years with the University of Melbourne, first as Carnegie Lecturer and then as Senior Lecturer.

CSIR/CSIRO 1947-1969

On his appointment as a Principal Research Scientist in the CSIR Section of Tribophysics, Boas received a welcoming letter from the Chairman, Sir David Rivett, in which he wrote: 'I only hope that we shall succeed in providing not only the facilities, but also the freedom and happy atmosphere which are essential...Dr Bastow and his colleagues are, I know, delighted to have you in the family circle'. Boas found freedom, facilities and a happy atmosphere under the leadership of Bastow and he wasted no time in building up a research group on the physics of metals, adding to existing staff by recruiting new staff mainly from among his former students. Research projects were quickly under way on, for example, plastic deformation of alloys consisting of two phases, the destruction of order by plastic deformation and its recovery on annealing and the inhomogeneity of deformation of crystals in polycrystalline aggregates. Before a year had elapsed, the Section of Tribophysics was redesignated as a Division in CSIR with Bastow as Chief.

In 1948, Boas went overseas for six months. Most of this time he spent in England and Europe and returned via America. This was the first time he had left Australia since 1938 and was the opportunity, which he had looked forward to for some time, to renew contacts with his many overseas colleagues of pre-war days. He attended conferences on metal physics in Amsterdam, applied mechanics in London, surface properties of metals in Paris and X-ray diffraction in Pittsburgh; the annual conference of the Institute of Metals (London) in Cambridge, and the summer school on metal physics in Cambridge. Although this trip was the first of ten that he made during his time in CSIRO, it was probably the one that he had looked forward to most.

During this trip he spent a few days in Germany. He was one of the first civilians allowed to visit post-war Germany without wearing a military uniform but he was under military control, staying at officers' hotels, reporting regularly to commanding officers of the occupation forces, and travelling in an army car. He was shocked by the destruction of German cities and in particular the railway system. Of special significance on this trip were visits to his former research supervisor, Professor Becker, in Göttingen, and his colleague Günter Wassermann, formerly of Schmid's group, in Clausthal.

A commentary on his probable feelings during this return to Germany can be seen in correspondence of the previous year, first from the Chairman of CSIR to the Australian Scientific Research Liaison Officer in London:

Yesterday I had a visit from Dr W. Boas...He has just received a letter asking that, as an old pupil of Richard Becker, he should contribute a paper to the special volume of the Zeitschrift to celebrate Becker's 60th birthday.

Naturally Boas was a little bit dubious as to the wisdom of sending a paper to Germany, seeing that he was practically driven out of the country not so very long ago. He is, however, greatly attached to Becker who, he assures me, was strongly anti-Nazi during the war. I told Boas that if I were in his position, I would not hesitate about sending a paper as a tribute to his teacher; but after talking it over I promised to ask you whether you could find out the attitude of people somewhat similarly placed to Boas...

It seems to me that the sooner we renew fraternal scientific contact with the right type of German scientist, particularly with those who kept to their principles during the war, the better for all of us; but one can understand Boas' diffidence.

The reply was as follows:

...on account of his personal connection with Becker, Orowan will contribute while Mott, having no similar personal connection, will not. It appears that the people at Göttingen desire to reestablish fraternal scientific contact, but there is some small tendency towards propaganda behind it. However Becker was always anti-Nazi and is undoubtedly a distinguished scientist. Dr Orowan is very grateful indeed for the indication of your opinion, which I passed on to him.

I hope that this information will be adequate assistance to Boas to make his decision.

Boas did not, in the end, produce a manuscript for the Becker Zeitschrift volume, probably because of the short time available before his departure for Europe in 1948.

On his return to Australia, changes were underway in CSIR. In May 1949, CSIR was reorganised as CSIRO and Bastow became a member of the Executive. Boas recalled that, when he arrived in the laboratory on the morning of 19 May, Bastow was packing his personal papers and told him that he would have to 'hold the fort' until a new Chief was appointed, 'So I was left suddenly with the administration of the Division, a field in which I had no experience. That I managed this was due to Bastow's secretary (Miss E. Angus) and the co-operation and team spirit of my colleagues' .

Before the position for the new Chief of Division was advertised, Boas received a hand-written letter from Sir David Rivett, former Chairman of CSIR, who was on his way to London. This letter, the text of which is given below, was posted in Aden on 8 June 1949.

My dear Boas,

Being now able to enjoy a sense of complete irresponsibility, I can wnte and say how much I am hoping to hear that my former colleagues have asked you to take Bastow's post. I feel certain they will – and am anxious that you should not hesitate one moment in accepting the job.

The loss of B. in the Division will be severe, but I am personally convinced that he is essential to the Executive if the new 'Organization' (I still dislike the implications of the word) is to keep itself on the right track. If you take his place he will feel less sad at leaving research work, for he will know that his ideals will be perfectly safe in your hands and that there will be no surrender to the influences that may seek to drag you away from the frontiers. There are four Divisions in CSIR of which I have no fear for the future. Tribophysics will remain one of them if you take over the reins from Bastow: but you may have to do some fighting!

Every good wish,
Yours ever,
David Rivett.

Despite this encouragement from Rivett, Boas was reluctant to apply for the position of Chief as his wish was to do research rather than direct it. Applications for the new post were to close on 12 September and at the beginning of September Bastow rang Boas to enquire why he had not applied. On hearing Boas' response, that he would rather continue doing research than take on permanent administrative duties, Bastow advised him that 'one could not be sure of the attitude of a new Chief' and that he should discuss the matter with Ian Wark, then Chief of the Division of Industrial Chemistry. Wark's attitude was a definite one, that senior scientists had an obligation towards their younger colleagues to make a sacrifice and undertake administrative duties. He strengthened this argument, Boas recalled, with the points that 'if you don't apply and get a nasty boss it is your own fault...and anyhow it is better that science is administered by scientists rather than by...clerks'. Boas was persuaded and submitted his application four days before the closing date. He was appointed Chief of the Division of Tribophysics on 27 October 1949, a position he held until his retirement from CSIRO on his 65th birthday in February 1969.

As the new Chief of the Division of Tribophysics, Boas continued and advanced the policy initiated by Bastow of redirecting the research programmes of the Division towards more basic science. In a relatively short time Boas and his young research colleagues were publishing results on basic investigations of the influence of crystal lattice defects on the properties of metals and alloys and on the physics and chemistry of surfaces. In redirecting the research effort in this way, Boas put into effect his philosophy concerning science and industry, namely that Australian manufacturing industry needed the back-up provided by first-class research on the structure and properties of materials. Although the main output of the Division was a steady flow of scientific papers, the annual reports of the Division recorded advice given to industry on a range of physical and chemical problems and approximately 100 outside enquiries were handled each year. The evolution of the scientific work of the Division in Boas' time resulted in a clear distinction between the early work of the Lubricants and Bearings Section and the more basic studies that were initiated by Bastow and Boas in 1947-1949 and developed vigorously by Boas from 1949.

As Chief of Division, Boas was responsible for a research team of young scientists (physicists, metallurgists, chemists, electrical and mechanical engineers) all in their twenties and on the threshold of their research careers. He encouraged them to work together on projects where their differing backgrounds and skills complemented one another. This multi-disciplinary approach to problems, where teams came together for particular problems and then reformed in different ways when these were finished, was very successful. Boas believed strongly in the effectiveness of a small Division in which the Chief could keep himself familiar with the essential detail of all research projects. He achieved this aim of a small Division throughout his time as Chief, starting and finishing his term with a total staff of 53 including 23 research scientists. He did not believe in breaking down his research team into formal groups or sections and research staff naturally formed informal groups, as demanded by current research problems, and within these groups every scientist had equal access to the Chief's time. As a Chief, he did not insist on his research staff following detailed research programmes but instilled confidence in his young research scientists by encouraging them to pursue their own ideas within the general framework of the overall research programme of the Division.

Boas shielded his research staff from administrative duties and through his own efforts he was able to keep the administrative staff to a minimum in his small Division. In 1949 the administrative staff in Tribophysics consisted of one clerk, one telephonist/typist, one librarian and one secretary; in 1969 the number in the administrative team was identical although the clerk, Mr A. Daunt (Ack), was then called the DAO [Divisional Administrative Officer] and his work load had grown considerably as general administrative procedures in CSIRO had become more demanding. Boas always tried to keep his 'in-house' administrative procedures as informal and as democratic as possible. A good example of this was his way of settling the annual estimates for equipment. He invited all research staff to a meeting in his office at which they stated their needs. Everybody's bid was written down and, if the total sum involved was too far in excess of the funds available, he encouraged free discussion which soon led to agreements to defer or to share until the sum was reduced to a manageable amount. He then undertook to do his best for everybody in his approach to Head Office and was generally successful. His research colleagues always knew when Boas was going to attend Head Office in Albert Street concerning particularly difficult problems of capital grants or staff promotions, for on those days he would change his normal grey soft felt hat for a black hard hat which gave this gentle man the appearance of a very formidable adversary.

An unenviable task that Boas always took on was the production of the annual report of the Division. All research scientists were asked for their contributions which Boas collected, collated and often rewrote to produce a final report. He took it as a point of honour that a copy of the annual report for the year ending on 30 June would be presented to all members of staff by 1 July. He was very disappointed that this record could not be maintained after reproduction of the report was taken outside the Division in 1961.

Boas always went carefully through every draft manuscript written by members of his staff. Discussions with the authors were often long and detailed with his insistence on precision and clarity of presentation. He would often surprise his colleagues with his detailed knowledge of the niceties of English grammar, which may well have had its origins in his many years of study of Latin as a young man. Of course, word processors were not available in those days and a draft manuscript, when Boas had finished with it, would often resemble a game of snakes and ladders with words and sentences boldly encircled with attached arrows indicating new locations up and down a page. Boas could easily have added his name as an author to many of the scientific papers submitted for publication in the early 1950s, but he rarely did so as he believed that credit should always go to the person responsible for the work. Boas' own publication pattern changed after he became Chief of Division as he concentrated on reviews and general papers concerning the work of the Division. He published some 20 of these.

Boas' interest in maintaining quality in scientific publications is demonstrated by his service as Associate Editor for Australia of Acta Metallurgica from 1953 to 1969 and as a member of the Board of Governors of this prestigious metallurgical journal from 1954 to 1965. He was also Associate Editor for Australia and New Zealand of the journal Wear from 1956 to 1963.

As the leader of a research team in Australia, Boas always emphasised the importance of overseas experience in the formation of a good research scientist and he worked hard to ensure that all the members of his research staff went overseas, to meet and work for a time with internationally renowned scientists in the fields of metal physics and solid state physics and chemistry. For his young colleagues, their first trip overseas was eased by Boas' consideration, as he always wrote to his overseas colleagues announcing the visit and the resultant welcome and hospitality were astounding. This is but one example of Boas' many efforts to further the scientific careers of his staff and it was always clear that he got great pleasure from any success of the young scientists in his team. Many successful scientific careers originated with Boas' leadership in the Division of Tribophysics, and by the late l950s the Division was internationally known and recognised as a centre of excellence for research in the science of materials. As a university lecturer, Boas had inspired his students by his enthusiastic teaching, his encouragement and his friendship. Similarly, as a leader of a research team, he inspired his younger colleagues by his boundless enthusiasm for science and his constant efforts on their behalf, whether it be discussion and advice on their research problems, working hard to obtain funds for a new piece of equipment or, as was often the case, filling the role of friend and adviser for colleagues with problems outside science.

Boas' love of educating students remained with him after joining CSIRO and in 1956 he readily accepted an invitation from Professor Bruce Chalmers to be the Gordon McKay visiting lecturer on Metallurgy at Harvard University during the spring term, even though this involved three months' leave without pay from CSIRO. Further, throughout his term as Chief of Division, he made time to give lectures to students of physics and engineering at the University of Melbourne. He regarded this as an important way of encouraging closer co-operation between CSIRO and the university. He gave courses of lectures on solid state physics to third year Physics students and on physics of metals to Engineering students. For several years he served on the Faculty of Science at Melbourne and he was made an Honorary Senior Associate in solid state physics of the Physics Department at Melbourne in 1963.

Boas always felt that part of the responsibility of a Chief of Division in CSIRO was to foster public relations. To this end he often delivered lectures to learned societies in Australia and always on his trips overseas he lectured on the work of his Division. These efforts by Boas played a big part in the work of the Division becoming known locally and internationally, and this was an important contribution to the Division and its staff during the early years of Tribophysics.

Although in Boas' laboratory most of the work was of a basic nature, he kept in touch with more practical problems through his membership, for many years, of the Engineering Group Committee set up by CSIRO and the Department of Supply. In later years he gained great satisfaction from his membership of the Science and Industry Forum of the Australian Academy of Science. Despite many demands on his time, he attended regularly local meetings of the Australian Institute of Metals and the Australian Institute of Physics and continued to do so all his life, i.e. long after attendances at such meetings had declined dramatically.

Boas had a strong sense of the social responsibility of a scientist and because of this he became interested in the Pugwash movement during the late fifties and helped to establish a Pugwash Group in Melbourne. In May 1961 Professor and Mrs Linus Pauling had organized a Pugwash Conference in Oslo, at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, on the spread of nuclear weapons. All the participants were personally invited by the Paulings and Boas replaced Oliphant, who was unable to attend at that time, as the Australian representative. Frank discussions were held over five days between 60 scientists and other scholars from 15 countries. Boas recalled that he was very impressed by the spirit of goodwill between all the participants including those from the USA and the USSR. Following this experience, Boas was active in organising the first South-East Asian Regional Pugwash Conference on 'Scientific, Technical and Industrial Development in South-East Asia' which was held in Melbourne in January 1967. This was the last major meeting organised by the Melbourne Pugwash Group and Boas has attributed its decline to the great difficulty of keeping to the Pugwash ideal that all meetings and discussions should be strictly non-political.

Throughout his career Boas worked actively for the learned societies in both metallurgy and physics and he received many high awards for his contributions to science. He was a Foundation member of the Australian Institute of Metals (1941), was awarded its Silver Medal in 1960 and was elected as Federal President in 1962. He became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1943, a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics in 1962 and presented the Einstein Memorial Lecture in Adelaide in 1964. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1954 and served on its Council from 1964 to 1966. He was an active and enthusiastic member of the Academy and served on a number of national and sectional committees. He was honoured by election as a Foreign Scientific Fellow of the Max-Planck-Institut für Metallkunde in 1965 and as a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at Vienna in 1972. He was elected to the Solid State Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics in 1963 and held the positions of Secretary to the Commission from 1966 to 1969 and Chairman from 1969 to 1972. These positions of Secretary and Chairman coincided with his six-year term as a vice-president of the Union itself.

Despite his many honours, there was no trace of pomposity in Walter Boas: he was a most friendly and hospitable man and lasting friendships developed between him and his colleagues in the Division of Tribophysics. He and his wife Eva were most generous hosts at their home in Kew which was the centre for a great many happy social occasions for the staff of his Division. There, over the years, he encouraged the development of lasting friendships between his staff's families and there was the venue where young scientists could meet socially with visiting scientists from overseas at delightful dinner parties arranged by Eva. For many years, all members of staff, with their wives or girl friends, who were attending the annual CSIRO ball, would meet first for savouries and drinks at the Boas' home. Eva's savouries were always delicious and Walter's drink, a mix of white wine and pineapple juice in a secret proportion which he never revealed, 'set up' the Tribophysics ball party in such a grand manner that its late arrival at the ball was always cheerful and often noteworthy.

Walter Boas retired from his Division of Tribophysics on his 65th birthday on 10 February 1969. During his time as Chief of the Division he had fulfilled for his staff the conditions that Sir David Rivett had promised him when he first joined CSIRO in 1947. His leadership had provided a free and happy atmosphere in which good research was done and he with Eva's help built up a happy Tribophysics family circle.

Post-retirement years 1969-1982

Boas, an enthusiastic man of science, was not really ready for retirement in 1969 and he became an Honorary Senior Associate in metal physics in his old Department of Metallurgy at the University of Melbourne. Once again he became an active member of the department and initiated there a research programme on the mechanical properties of organic crystals, a programme for which he was given a grant for research assistance by the Australian Research Grants Committee. From his old department he published his third book, entitled Properties and Structure of Solids, in 1971. Walter Boas was working next door to the Tribophysics laboratory and he regularly visited his colleagues there with the greeting that he was 'working harder than ever'.

The University of Melbourne recognised his contributions to science and to the university with the award of the degree of Doctor of Applied Science, honoris causa, in 1974. Part of the citation read at the conferring stated 'Dr Boas' unique and continuing contribution to the deeper scientific understanding of materials was a most important factor in the development of the Department of Metallurgy and the whole School of Engineering'.

Thus in his final years of so-called retirement Walter Boas was back amongst the young students he loved and full of ideas and enthusiasm for revitalising an aging department. During this period he developed an active association with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and was the first chairman of the Applied Physics Course Advisory Committee. From 1969 he was Chairman of the editorial board of Search for ANZAAS .

It is clear from Walter Boas' life as a teacher and a scientific leader that he always had a great personal interest in the encouragement of high scientific achievement by young people, and for this quality, among many others, he will be remembered as an outstanding leader in Australian science.

The high regard in which Walter Boas was held by the Australian scientific community is illustrated by the fact that in 1984 the Australian Institute of Physics established the 'Walter Boas Medal' to promote excellence in research in physics in Australia. This medal is awarded annually for original research work described in papers published in the preceding four years. In addition, in acknowledgement of Boas' interests in the education of science students, the Department of Applied Physics of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology established the 'Walter Boas Memorial Prize' in 1983 which is awarded annually to the best student in the final year of the Bachelor of Applied Science degree course.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.6, no.4, 1987. It was written by L.M. Clarebrough, CSIRO Division of Materials Science and Technology and A.K. Head, CSIRO Division of Materials Science and Technology.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the use of the following material:

1. Correspondence and Personal Record of Dr W. Boas – Australian Academy of Science.
2. 'Walter Boas', by J.F. Nicholas, an introduction to Physics of Materials, a Festscrift for Walter Boas on his 75th birthday, eds. D.W. Borland, L.M. Clarebrough and A.J.W. Moore (CSIRO and Department of Mining and Metallurgy, University of Melbourne, 1979).
3. 'Walter Boas', by L.M. Clarebrough, in booklet for the Walter Boas Memorial Prize of the Department of Applied Physics, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
4. CSIRO Archives, PH/BOA/2.

Written by Ian Darian-Smith.

• Schooling, Undergraduate and Graduate Studies
• Wartime Experience
• Research Contribution
• Professor of Anatomy 1939-1961
• Dean of Faculty of Medicine 1958-1971
• Services to Australian and Victorian Governments
• Other Professional Activities
• International Recognition
• Personal
• Degrees, Qualifications and Honours
• About this memoir
  • Acknowledgments
  • References

This short memoir of Sir Sydney Sunderland is based on autobiographical information assembled by Sir Sydney, on a number of informal discussions the author had with him during the last five years of his life, and on the more accessible public documentation of his many activities associated with the University of Melbourne and the Federal and State Governments. In these notes I am more concerned with providing a picture of the kind of man Sydney Sunderland was, his science, and his contributions to Australian universities and to the community, than with presenting exhaustive detail of his many achievements.

Schooling, Undergraduate and Graduate Studies

Sydney Sunderland was born in Brisbane on the last day of 1910. His father was a journalist and sporting identity in Brisbane and his family provided a strongly supportive environment for their only surviving child, who quickly established himself as an outstanding schoolboy athlete and student. He spent a couple of years at Scotch College, Melbourne, when his father was circulation manager of the recently established Sun newspaper, and then completed his schooling at Brisbane State High School. Sydney Sunderland was awarded an Open Scholarship in 1930 and started a science course at the University of Queensland. Since at that time there was no medical school in the University of Queensland, students wishing to complete a medical course had to enrol at either Sydney or Melbourne. This became possible financially for Sydney Sunderland when, as top student in first year Science, he won the Raff Memorial Scholarship. In 1931 he entered second year medicine in the University of Melbourne, and so began a highly productive association which lasted more than sixty years. Sunderland graduated as top student in medicine in 1935, having 'topped' every other year along the way and been awarded the Exhibition and Dwight Prize in Anatomy, the Jamieson Prize in Clinical Medicine, the Keith Levi Scholarship, and the Fulton Scholarship in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. He also passed the Primary Fellowship Examination of the Royal College of Surgeons (London) a year before graduating.

Quite early, as a medical student, Sydney Sunderland was attracted to research. In this, he was greatly influenced, firstly by the neurologist Leonard Cox, and then by the singularly charismatic professor of anatomy at Melbourne, Frederic Wood Jones. These two senior colleagues guided Sunderland's interests toward neurology and greased the tracks for his career with a breathtaking directness. Immediately on graduation Sunderland was offered a Senior Lectureship in Anatomy, which he accepted. He was simultaneously appointed Assistant Neurologist in Cox's neurological clinic at the Alfred Hospital, and also Assistant to the eminent surgeon, Hugh Trumble, who specialized in neurosurgery at the same hospital. These four remained close colleagues and friends throughout their lives.

In 1937 the ever-restless and controversial Wood Jones returned to England to the chair of anatomy at Manchester. Before leaving Melbourne, however, he arranged Sunderland's appointment as a Demonstrator in the Department of Human Anatomy in Oxford with Le Gros Clark. Le Gros Clark and the young 'colonial' did not warm to each other, although Sunderland completed four papers on the cerebral cortex while in Oxford, using the Marchi staining technique and retrograde neuronal degeneration for tracing cortical projections in the macaque monkey. Fortunately for both Sunderland and the University of Melbourne, on 21 July 1938 he was offered, and accepted, the chair of anatomy in the University of Melbourne! He was then 27 years old.

Sunderland arranged with the University of Melbourne to take up his professorial duties early in 1940, so that he could complete the research he had begun at Oxford and also make the 'grand tour' of several active laboratories in North America. While in Oxford he spent much time in the neuro-surgical unit of the recently appointed first Nuffield Professor of Surgery, Sir Hugh Cairns. Cairns, an Adelaide graduate and one of the pioneers of neurosurgery in the UK, encouraged Sunderland's participation in neuroanatomical research in his department. There he developed a friendship with the brilliant Pio del Rio-Hortega, a political refugee from Franco's Spain, who had been a student to the Nobel Laureate Ramon y Cajal. Rio-Hortega introduced Sunderland to the various silver staining techniques that the Spanish neurohistologists had developed for visualizing the fine structure of neurons and glial cells, and especially microglial cells, which Rio-Hortega had independently identified.

Sunderland left Oxford in mid-1939 to spend three months at the Montreal Neurological Institute with Wilder Penfield's group, then at its peak. Penfield's very great contribution, for which he received both the Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit, was his systematic investigation of the functional organization of the human cerebral cortex. This study was done on patients undergoing cerebral surgery for the removal of tumors or scar tissue resulting from previous brain injury: at that time, these procedures were done in the conscious patient using local anesthesia at the surgical site. Penfield developed methods of identifying and mapping those regions of the cortex directly concerned with the voluntary movement of the limbs and the perception of the surrounding world. Once identified, these zones could be avoided or minimally resected by the neurosurgeon when removing the tumor or scar tissue: this minimized the sensorimotor disability resulting from the surgical removal of brain tissue. These procedures were soon to become especially important in dealing with the aftermath of penetrating wounds of the head in the war-injured. Sunderland developed the greatest respect for Penfield and his research, and about twenty years later was able to invite him to contribute to the celebration of the centenary of the Melbourne University Medical School (1962). At these celebrations the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred on Penfield.

Other groups visited in this 'grand tour' late in 1939, under the shadow of the impending world conflict, were the important neuroanatomical and clinical neurological groups at Toronto and Harvard, the neurophysiologist John Fulton at Yale, the neurosurgeon Earl Walker at Johns Hopkins, who had just published his classic monograph on the connections and organization of the primate thalamus, and the neurological centres at St Louis, Chicago, Rochester, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Sunderland returned to Melbourne at the end of 1939, after the outbreak of war.

Sydney Sunderland's early association with Wood Jones, and his short period in Oxford before the outbreak of the Second World War, were to determine the direction of his subsequent professional career as a neuroanatomist. Wood Jones was larger than life, an excellent teacher, public speaker and writer (as in his book, The Hand), sharply alert to what would interest an audience and, most importantly, an outstanding intellect. He was one of the thinking, observational biologists of his generation and, although often controversial (he was anti-Darwinian), commanded respect from a wide international scientific audience. Le Gros Clark, Penfield, and Earl Walker trod a different path, with an emphasis on experimentation and the application of innovative techniques. Each of these great experimentalists was prepared to speculate on the meaning of the data, and to develop models of cortical and thalamic organization that could then be further examined by appropriate experimentation. In addition, Le Gros Clark was a great comparative anatomist, especially interested in primate evolution. (In the 1950s, he played an important role in exposing the Piltdown forgery.) Thus, the young Sunderland had the good fortune to work with some of the great neuroanatomists of the period, and their imprint was apparent in the whole of his subsequent career. Sunderland did publish many experimental studies on nerve and nerve injuries, but his strength and evident primary interest was along the observational path of Wood Jones. Rather than pursuing comparative anatomical studies of the brain, however, as did Wood Jones and Le Gros Clark, Sunderland was to turn his research focus to the human peripheral nervous system and its responses to injury. This shift was really dictated by the circumstances of the Second World War, and the many Australian troops chronically disabled by nerve injuries produced by penetrating injuries of the limbs in the period 1940-1945. An attractive feature of such studies was that they led to great advances in the surgical management of nerve injuries, which in turn enhanced the recovery of useful limb function in many patients.

A perhaps unexpected change in Sunderland's subsequent post-war career was that although his early mentors were now in English universities, he became more closely linked to clinical neuroscience in the USA than to that in the UK. This may have resulted from the friendly support and encouragement the very young Sunderland received in North America, contrasting with the more austere and reserved response of some English academics to 'colonials'.

Wartime Experience

Sydney Sunderland was working in Penfield's department at the outbreak of war in 1939, but was able to return to the University of Melbourne by the end of that year. In addition to chairing the Department of Anatomy and doing most of the teaching of undergraduates throughout the period of the war, Sunderland became responsible for a Peripheral Nerve Injuries Unit that had been set up at the 115 AGH, Heidelberg, Victoria. All Australian servicemen sustaining chronic nerve injuries were sent to this unit for treatment. The experience of the next five years was to provide the framework of Sunderland's subsequent research career, in which peripheral nerve organization and its repair following injury were to become central topics. Eighty years earlier, Union troops with rifle-bullet wounds of peripheral nerves sustained in the battle of Gettysberg had triggered the first intensive and systematic study, by Weir Mitchell, of nerve injuries and their consequences, including the excruciating and disabling condition of causalgia. Sunderland was now able to parallel the research of his eminent predecessor, with the advantage of having powerful new neuroanatomical research tools and a backup of improved neurosurgical procedures that surgeons could possibly develop to repair injured nerves. The first papers reporting these clinical neurological studies were published in 1944-45.

Research Contribution

Throughout his career Sydney Sunderland retained wide research interests, evident from papers published on various aspects of topographic anatomy, structure of the cerebral cortex, the connections of the hypothalamus, the vascular supply of various organs and tissues, the pupilloconstrictor pathways, and medical education. Nonetheless, the majority of his papers were focused on the structure of human peripheral nerves, the pathophysiology of nerve injury and regeneration, the disabilities of hand function resulting from nerve injuries of the forelimb, and the natural history of anatomical and functional recovery following these injuries. A number of papers were concerned with the innervation of the small muscles of the hand, the normal action of these muscles, and their abnormal actions following nerve injury. Sunderland considered that his own work 'was at all times directed to the elucidation of those principles on which the clinical management of nerve injuries should be based'. One great strength of Sunderland's peripheral nerve studies was that he personally was able to study the natural history of each of 365 patients with peripheral nerve injuries for a period of ten years or more, and to follow the successive stages of their recovery of sensorimotor function. This very effective co-operation of patient (mainly battle casualties) and investigator flowed from the trust that developed between them. After their discharge from hospital, many of these patients, now ex-servicemen, would repeatedly travel long distances to be examined and reviewed by Sunderland. These men strongly believed in the great value of this long, systematic study of their nerve injuries. A second strength of this longitudinal study was that the surgical repair of nerve injuries was not performed by Sunderland, thus introducing the essential objectivity needed in such studies. In fact, much of the reparative surgery was done by Sunderland's mentor Hugh Trumble. The two editions of Nerves and Nerve Injuries (1968, 1978), and Nerve Injuries and Their Repair (1991) summarize this large body of work and place it in the context of other contemporary work in the field. In his foreword to the first edition of Sunderland's encyclopedic monograph, Sir Francis Walshe pointed out that 'This volume has clearly been a labour of love of many years for its author'. The enduring quality of these studies is evident from the fact that in the period 1991-1995 Sunderland's publications were cited on average in 110 neurological papers each year (ISI Neuroscience Citation Index). In his later life Sunderland was often referred to as the 'father of modern nerve surgery'. In 1979 he was the honoured Founders Lecturer of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand at its meeting in San Francisco, and in 1986 at an international meeting in Tokyo he was cited as a 'Pioneer in the Field of Hand Surgery'.

Revealing features of Sunderland's research were that he was sole author of about 75% of his published papers, and that in the remaining papers the co-authors were usually long-time colleagues and members of the Department of Anatomy (Bradley, Ray, Lavarack, Merrillees, Roche, Adey). Although meticulous and elegantly planned, Sunderland's research did not depend on the use of technically innovative procedures and equipment, reflecting his view that good research is the product of carefully shaped questions, accurate observation and thoughtful analysis of the data obtained. Sunderland dismissed mindless experimentation and thought it to be too common in the current neurobiology. This view, of course, was in accord with those of two of his heroes, the great experimentalist Claude Bernard and the great field naturalist Frederic Wood Jones.

The following paragraphs briefly summarize Sydney Sunderland's research achievements. This work, with a full bibliography, is most accessible in Sunderland's monographs.

Structure of human peripheral nerves

Sunderland recognized the complexity of the biology of peripheral nerves, and that the function of their constituent axons depends in no small measure on their blood supply and the organization of the interfascicular connective tissue of each nerve. These non-neural elements were recognized as having an important role in limiting the effects of injury on the axon populations of a nerve, and on the subsequent processes of functional recovery. Sunderland examined and described the fascicular anatomy of all the major nerve trunks in the human subject, emphasizing their changing patterns along the length of each trunk, and their relations to specific nerve branches of the main trunk that innervate particular muscles or particular areas of skin. He attempted to correlate these anatomical patterns with the susceptibility of each nerve to injury resulting from mechanical deformation, and with its subsequent recovery following mechanical injury.

Pathophysiology of nerve injury and regeneration

Sunderland also studied the axon populations of peripheral nerves, their responses to injury, and their subsequent degeneration or regeneration. Again, these studies were mainly on human tissues. In one study the atrophy of the endoneural tube distal to the site of axonal injury was found to have little effect on the subsequent regrowth of the axon into the denervated tissue. Similarly, it was found that the atrophy of muscle fibres resulting from prior denervation did not limit their subsequent reinnervation, even when the period of denervation had extended over many months. These studies did show clearly that the full restoration of muscle function following interruption of its nerve supply depends on much more than the simple re-establishment of neuromuscular continuity. The motoneuronal axons which make synaptic contact with the denervated muscle fibres must originate from the appropriate motoneuronal pools in the spinal cord, they must be sufficient in number, and they must reinnervate a substantial fraction of the initially denervated extrafusal muscle fibres. In addition, the innervation and function of muscle spindles in these muscles must be re-established. Comparable studies of cutaneous nerves emphasized the complexity of sensory innervation and the myriad factors which determine the recovery of cutaneous sensibility following nerve injury.

Sunderland also systematically examined the manner and rate of regeneration of previously interrupted peripheral nerve axons, how this varied in different nerves and was modified by the type of nerve injury, and how different types of surgical repair could influence the final recovery of sensory or motor function in the patient.

In addition to studying gunshot wounds of nerves, Sunderland also examined traction and compression injuries of those nerves mediating sensorimotor functions of the hand. As with penetrating injuries, he found that the integrity of the nerve's blood supply was critical, and that factors impairing it were those which also impaired nerve conduction. Furthermore, those peripheral nerves most readily injured by traction were characterized by having relatively few large fascicles of nerve fibres supported by a minimum of non-neural interfascicular tissue.

Painful sequelae of nerve injuries

Yet another problem examined by Sunderland was a relatively common and severely debilitating complication that can develop following a proximal lesion of one of the nerves innervating the hand or foot. This extremely painful condition, first systematically studied by Weir Mitchell eighty years earlier and termed causalgia by him, most commonly occurs following an incomplete nerve lesion resulting from a missile penetrating the upper arm or thigh, and may develop immediately following the injury, or weeks or months later. Sunderland's contribution to the understanding of the basis of causalgia was to bring together the evidence for a central spinal location for its neuropathology, supporting the views of Livingstone. This model did not preclude contributing factors operating at the site of nerve injury, but it did emphasize that the etiology of the condition is complex, and it provided an explanation for the well-known clinical finding that repair of the peripheral nerve injury or removal of local neuromas may not cure the condition. Although the focus of recent studies, the neuronal genesis of causalgia is still not clear. However, Sunderland's idea that there is disruption of the processing of sensory information in the regional spinal cord circuitry receiving input from the injured nerve, is still current.

The classification of peripheral nerve injuries

Extensive experience with peripheral nerve injuries, their surgical management and 'repair', and the subsequent recovery of sensorimotor function, prompted Sunderland to develop a classification that is based on the histopathology of the nerve injury rather than its cause. He recognized five stages of nerve damage, increasing in severity from loss of nerve conduction in structurally intact axons, loss of axonal continuity and associated Wallerian degeneration, the disruption of the internal structure of nerve fascicles, the disorganization of the nerve trunk's fascicular anatomy, and finally the loss of continuity of the nerve trunk. Each category of nerve injury could be recognized clinically, and provided some guide to the prognosis of the injury and the best form of clinical management.

In seeking to explain the impact of Sunderland's research on peripheral nerve injury, several factors stand out. First, he approached each problem through questions that would be clinically relevant, and examined them systematically in terms of the known neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. Secondly, he was always practical and down-to-earth in his approach and, especially in his 'bible' on nerve injuries, explained carefully how sensorimotor dysfunction might be assessed by the neurologist in the months following nerve injury or attempts at repair. Sunderland's studies of nerve injuries happened to coincide with the introduction of penicillin, so that surgeons could now concentrate their efforts on microsurgical techniques. This meant that the microanatomy of peripheral nerves, at the level of resolution that could be visualized at the operating table, assumed a special clinical importance that was largely met by Sunderland's investigations.

Professor of Anatomy 1939-1961

Sydney Sunderland was an excellent lecturer and soon had the reputation in the University of Melbourne Medical School of being a first-rate teacher of neuroanatomy. As was the current fashion, he used to great advantage the blackboard presentation of the three-dimensional relations of the different brain structures. In the background of the portrait of him, painted by Wes Walters, that hangs in the Sunderland Lecture Theatre in the Medical Centre at Parkville, this particular skill is alluded to. In teaching undergraduates, Sunderland relied on the highly competent presentation, both in the dissecting room and in the lecture theatre, of anatomical fact that he considered should constitute part of the education of every practising doctor. This matter-of-fact approach to teaching was particularly well expressed in the facilities of the new building that housed the Anatomy Department from 1967 and that was largely designed, in all its grandeur, by Sunderland and his staff. The fully air-conditioned dissecting room, the excellent anatomy museum and the 'Padua' theatres for small-group tutorials and demonstrations that they designed, continue to be greatly appreciated by the hordes of undergraduate students who currently use them. Sunderland fully exploited these wonderful facilities by appointing competent and knowledgeable tenured senior academic staff, and using trainee surgeons to tutor undergraduate students in anatomy. The senior staff of the Department of Anatomy included early Melbourne associates (Russell, Ray, and Bradley, each of whom became a professor in the Department) and other very experienced anatomists (Drs Lavarack, Merrillees and Adey).

In 1953-54, at the beginning of his period as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Sydney Sunderland was Visiting Professor of Anatomy in Bodian's department in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine at Baltimore, and during that year was freed from administrative duties and able to concentrate on his research and teaching.

Dean of Faculty of Medicine 1953-1971

Sydney Sunderland was elected Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in 1953. As Professor of Anatomy he held this part-time position until 1961. He was then appointed Professor of Experimental Neurology and held this position and that of Dean until 1971. He retired in 1975 but continued working in the Department of Anatomy as Emeritus Professor until 1993.

During his eighteen years as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Australian universities, and particularly the medical schools, changed profoundly. In no small measure this upheaval was the result of the recommendations of the Australian Universities Commission, of which Sunderland was a leading member. In the 1950s a number of clinical chairs were set up in the teaching hospitals, in medicine, surgery, psychiatry, obstetrics and gynaecology, ophthalmology, and child health. The establishment of a second medical school in Melbourne, at Monash University in 1960, with the transfer of the use of Alfred Hospital and Prince Henry's Hospital as teaching hospitals to Monash, produced serious overloading of the teaching facilities at the Royal Melbourne and St Vincent's Hospitals that remained with the University of Melbourne. The shortage of teaching facilities was compounded by the University's commitment to the State Government to expand the intake of medical students in order to meet the perceived need for medical services in Victoria. These problems were slowly resolved by pursuing a vigorous policy of expansion of the preclinical and clinical University departments that was implemented during Sunderland's deanship. During his period as Dean the number of professors was increased from six to twenty-four, mainly in the clinical departments, and a Clinical Sciences Block was built in each teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Melbourne. New buildings to house the preclinical departments and the Brownless Medical Library were completed in 1967, and the Austin Hospital became an important addition to the teaching hospitals of the Medical School of the University of Melbourne.

Services to Australian and Victorian Governments

Sydney Sunderland was an active member of many Federal Government committees. He represented universities with medical schools on the National Health and Medical Research Council, and was a member of the Council's Medical Research Advisory Committee from 1953 to 1969. He was chairman of the latter committee from 1964 to 1969. In 1970-1971 he was a member of the Advisory Medical Board of Australia.

One of Sunderland's most important and fruitful commitments to the Federal Government was his long association with the Australian Universities Commission. He was the longest-serving member of the AUC, working from 1962 until 1976 with all four chairmen of the Commission - Sir Leslie Martin, Sir Lennox Hewitt, Sir Henry Basten and Professor Peter Karmel. Even before joining the AUC, Sunderland worked on a subcommittee with Sir Leslie Martin to assess the costs of the clinical training of medical students in teaching hospitals, a task that involved visiting all the medical schools and most teaching hospitals throughout Australia. The report of this committee provided the baseline data for the subsequent operations of the AUC.

The AUC was feverishly active in the 1960s and '70s, during which period twelve new universities and six new medical schools were created. At the same time the older universities received substantial injections of funds. Sunderland was involved in all these developments, particularly those relating to medical schools and teaching hospitals. He was a persistent advocate of payment for clinical teaching undertaken by visiting honorary medical staff, and of the building of Clinical Science facilities in teaching hospitals to accommodate university clinical science departments, both practices eventually being adopted.

Sunderland was particularly involved with the establishment of the medical school in Perth, not initially through the AUC but through a subcommittee of the Senate of the University of Western Australia, appointed in 1955. Financial support from the AUC eventually gave reality to the University's proposal.

Sunderland had a long association with the Australian Department of External Affairs. His most important commitment, although eventually it came to nothing, was in Indonesia. At the request of the Indonesian Government, the Australian Government agreed to support the creation of a medical school at Bukittingi, in central Sumatra (1956-1960). The project was to operate under the auspices of the Medical School of the University of Melbourne. Planning was well advanced, buildings erected, and an Australian coordinator in residence, when the scheme had to be abandoned because of the outbreak of civil war in the area. During the 1960s, Sunderland acted in an advisory capacity concerning the establishment of medical schools in various other countries, including Burma and New Guinea.

Other Committees of the Federal Government that were chaired by Sunderland included the Protective Chemical Research Advisory Committee (1964-73), the Safety Review Committee of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission (1961-74), and the National Radiation Advisory Committee (1951-1964).

Sydney Sunderland was created a Knight Bachelor by the Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia on 12 June 1971 'for distinguished services to medicine and government'.

Sunderland also served for remarkably long periods on State Governmental bodies, including the Zoological Board of Victoria (1944-1965), the National Museum of Victoria, of which he was a Trustee and Council Member from 1954 to 1982, and the Medical Advisory Committee to the Mental Hygiene Authority of Victoria (1952-1963).

Australian Academy of Science

Sunderland was one of the twenty-three Foundation Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science and played an important part in its early development. He, along with O.W. Tiegs and T.M. Cherry, was assigned the task of drafting the bye-laws of the Academy.

Dr John Nicholson became the first Secretary (Biological Sciences) in 1954 but resigned early in the following year. Sunderland was elected to succeed him (1955-1958) and joined the Council, which included Mark Oliphant as President, David Martyn as Secretary (Physical Sciences) and Hedley Marston as Treasurer. In this early stage of the Academy's history, much of the Council's business was complex and contentious and its meetings were quite turbulent. Martyn and Marston were bitter adversaries who could never agree. Sunderland was friendly with the other members of the Council but found that he could rarely if ever make peace between the contestants. This frustrating and tedious period was one that Sunderland was later to recall without any enthusiasm.

Sunderland was also an active member of the Council's Building Committee that selected Roy Grounds to design the Academy's building in Canberra. Since he knew Grounds and lived in Melbourne, Sunderland was assigned the task of interacting with the architect, and as a consequence played an important role in the Building Committee's deliberations.

Other Professional Activities

Governing bodies and boards of management of research institutes sought Sunderland's advice and judgment throughout his career. He was a long-time member of the Council of the University of Melbourne, of the Committee of Management of the Royal Melbourne Hospital and of the Board of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and a Trustee of the Van Cleef Foundation. In recognition of Sir Sydney's thirty years' service as a Governor of the Ian Potter Foundation from 1964 until 1993, in 1994 this Foundation established the annual Sunderland Award of $10,000 to enable a selected young neurobiologist, working in a field that would have interested Sir Sydney, to gain research experience in an overseas laboratory of the recipient's choice.

International Recognition

By the 1950s, Sydney Sunderland's work was becoming widely recognized and respected by those clinical groups concerned with nerve injuries in human subjects, a reputation that was greatly enhanced by the publication of the first edition of Nerves and Nerve Injuries in 1968. As a result, he was invited to lecture at more than fifty international symposia and conferences in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, Austria, the United States, Canada, South Africa, India, China, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Lady Sunderland accompanied him to each of these meetings, often four to six per year. Sunderland enjoyed these meetings, and continued to participate in them in his eighties.

The Sunderland Society

A remarkable and unique tribute to Sydney Sunderland's contribution to the clinical study of nerve injury was the formation of the Sunderland Society in the early 1980s. The following resume of the origins of this society is based on information provided by Drs George E. Omer, Jr and J. Leonard Goldner (see acknowledgments). In 1978 a group of surgeons interested in peripheral nerve pathology met at Duke University with J. Leonard Goldner as host, in order to explore the possibility of establishing a Peripheral Nerve Study Group. Following on from this, it was agreed that clinicians and research scientists with an interest in peripheral nerves should meet periodically to exchange their clinical experience, to assess recent advances in research on peripheral nerves, to establish what important issues were not understood, and to attempt to direct research into these latter problems. Action was prompt and in August 1979 a group including Drs Spinner, Curtis, Kutz, Omer, Wilgis, Jabalay, Urbaniak and Tupper set about organizing a formal meeting of the Study Group. The membership of this Group was quickly expanded to about 22, and included some from the United States, Austria, Canada, Sweden and Switzerland. Sunderland was invited to join the Group in 1980.

Just prior to this time, the second edition of Sir Sydney's Nerve and Nerve Injuries was published and he was invited by the President of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand, George Omer, to be the Founders Lecturer at the 1979 meeting of this Society in San Francisco. These events duly prompted the Study Group to adopt the new name of the Sunderland Society, a change that was unanimously accepted by all its members. This change was in recognition of Sir Sydney's considerable contribution to our current understanding of the biology and pathology of peripheral nerves at a level of immediate relevance to neurologists and neurosurgeons involved in the management and surgery of peripheral nerve lesions.

Sir Sydney was delighted by this honour and, along with Lady Sunderland, attended the meeting of the Sunderland Society at Santa Fe in May 1983. Furthermore, he was an active participant in all the following twelve meetings, some in Europe, up till 1993. The most recent meeting of the Sunderland Society was in Zürich in 1995, hosted by Professor V.E. Meyer.

Personal

Sir Sydney Sunderland walked the corridors of power for the greater part of his long professional career. In spite of this he remained a genuinely attractive man, shrewd but both generous and optimistic in his judgment of others. He was an enthusiast and could quickly become excited by new experimental findings of his colleagues. In the last ten years of his life when I came to know him a little through regular contact in the Department of Anatomy, I could always be sure of arousing his critical interest by telling him of our recent experiments on the macaque's cortex. He had traced out cortical connections in the macaque fifty years earlier in Le Gros Clark's laboratory, and retained a clear image of the questions that still need to be answered. One was sure of a useful but critical discussion of cortical structure, and of the experiments just completed. Furthermore, everyone in our laboratory, from student to professor, could be sure of being taken seriously by Sir Sydney in any such discussion. For this alone he gained their lasting respect and affection. At a more down-to-earth level, Sunderland was generous in his support for any investigator seeking funds whom he judged to be working on a good, well-defined biological problem, and who had the skills to do the necessary experiments.

Sunderland dedicated all his monographs to his wife, Nina Gwendoline Sunderland, and insisted that without her help and support throughout his career these would not have been published. Lady Sunderland graduated as a lawyer at the University of Melbourne in 1938, before her marriage to Sydney in 1939, and completed her articles on returning to Australia. After that she committed much of her time to helping him prepare and publish his many research papers and his three major books, and she accompanied him to many of the professional meetings at which he spoke. Their son, Ian Sydney Sunderland, graduated in medicine at the University of Melbourne, and is Investigating Officer for the Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria.

Sir Sydney Sunderland died on 27 August 1993, in his 83^rd year.

Degrees, Qualifications and Honours

• 1935: M.B., B.S. Melbourne
• 1941: F.R.A.C.P.
• 1945: D.Sc. Melbourne
• 1946: M.D. Melbourne
• 1952: F.R.A.C.S. (Honorary)
• 1954: F.A.A. (Foundation Fellow)
• 1961: C.M.G.
• 1970: M.D. (Honorary) Tasmania
• 1975: M.D. (Honorary) Queensland
• 1975: LL.D. (Honorary) Melbourne
• 1977: LL.D. (Honorary) Monash
• 1971 (12 June): Knight Bachelor

Academic Appointments

• 1936-1937: Senior Lecturer in Anatomy, University of Melbourne
• 1936-1937: Honorary Assistant Neurologist and Neurosurgeon, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne
• 1939-1961: Professor of Anatomy, University of Melbourne
• 1953-1954: Visiting Professor of Anatomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md, USA
• 1953-1971: Dean of Medicine, University of Melbourne
• 1951-1975: Professor of Experimental Neurology, University of Melbourne
• 1972-1973: Fogarty Scholar in Residence, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md, USA
• 1976-1993: Professor Emeritus, University of Melbourne
• 1977: Sterling Bunnell Lecturer and Visiting Professor of Orthopedic Surgery, University of California, USA
• 1979: Founders Lecturer, American Society for Surgery of the Hand

Professional Activities

• 1951-1967: Member of Council, University of Melbourne
• 1957-1969: Australian Representative on Pacific Science Council
• 1960-1968: Member of Victorian State Council, Australian Medical Association
• 1963-1971: Member, Committee of Management, Royal Melbourne Hospital
• 1964-1993: Governor, Ian Potter Foundation
• 1968-1975: Member of Board, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne
• 1971-1993: Trustee, Van Cleef Foundation, Melbourne
• 1972-1993: Member, Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology and Medicine, Melbourne
• 1975-1978: Vice-President, International Association for the Study of Pain

Honorary Membership

• 1964: Australian Association of Neurologists
• 1971: Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland
• 1973: Anatomical Society of Australia and New Zealand
• 1975: Neurosurgical Society of Australasia
• 1975: Australian Medical Association
• 1975: American Neurological Association

Commonwealth Government Appointments

• 1958-1969: Member, National Health and Medical Research Council, and Medical Research Advisory Committee
• 1964-1969: Chairman, Medical Research Advisory Committee, NH&MRC
• 1957-1975: Member, Defence Research and Development Policy Committee, Dept. Defence
• 1957-1978: Member, Defence Medical Services Committee, Dept. Defence
• 1957-1964: Member, National Radiation Advisory Committee (Chairman, 1959-1964)
• 1961-1974: Chairman, Safety Review Committee, Australian Atomic Energy Commission
• 1962-1976: Member, Australian Universities Commission
• 1964-1973: Chairman, Protective Chemistry Research Advisory Committee, Dept. Supply
• 1970-1971: Advisory Medical Council of Australia

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, Vol.11, No.1, 1996. It was written by Ian Darian-Smith, Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, and Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology and Medicine, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3052.

Acknowledgments

Lady Sunderland provided the author with many details of the career of Sir Sydney, and with various documents that he wrote. I am most grateful to her. George E. Omer, Jr, Professor and Chairman Emeritus, Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and J. Leonard Goldner, James B. Duke Professor, Chief Emeritus, Division of Orthopaedic Surgery, Division of Surgery, Duke University Medical Center, Durham sent the author a detailed account of the formation of the Sunderland Society and its subsequent history. I thank them for their great assistance. Professor Graeme Ryan helped in many ways in preparing this memoir. Iris Welcome uncovered many University documents relevant to it, and typed the bibliography.

References

• Jones, F. Wood, The Principles of Anatomy as Seen in the Hand, 2nd edition (London: Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1941).
• Haymaker, W., and F. Schiller, The Founders of Neurology, 2nd edition (Springfield, Ill.: C.C. Thomas, 1970).
• Le Gros Clark, W., Chant of Pleasant Exploration (Edinburgh: Livingstone, 1968).
• Penfield, W., and H. Jasper, Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).

Australian scientist Shirley Jeffrey was a pioneer in oceanographic research, identifying the then-theoretical chlorophyll c, and was a worldwide leader in the application of pigment methods in quantifying phytoplankton as the foundation of the oceanic food supply. Her research paved the way for the successful application of microalgae in aquaculture around the world. 

Jeffrey earned bachelor's and master's degrees at University of Sydney, majoring in microbiology and biochemistry, followed by a PhD from the King's College London Hospital Medical School. Returning to Sydney, she was hired by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to research chlorophyll c. Following this successful effort, she became a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 1962 to 1964. She then became affiliated with the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research. After a 1973 sabbatical at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, she returned to CSIRO, where she spent the rest of her career.

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About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol. 27(1), 2016. It was written by Simon W. Wright, Gustaaf M. Hallegraeff and R. Fauzi C. Mantoura.

Sally Smith (she was never known as Sarah) was a world leader in the study of arbuscular mycorrhizal symbioses between plants and soil fungi that allow a wide range of plants to grow in soils low in nutrients, especially phosphate. Her work has been relevant to both plant ecology and agricultural productivity. 

Sally obtained a tenurable position at the University of Adelaide after many years’ employment on short-term contracts. She rapidly developed a large and active group that researched at scales ranging from advanced microscopy through molecular biology and physiology to plant ecology. 

Sally established long-standing international collaborations and was awarded many honours. She was a keen cook and gardener, and became an avid birdwatcher, travelling the world with her husband Andrew in pursuit of their hobby.

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About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol. 32(2), 2021. It was written by F. Andrew Smith, Tim Cavagnaro and Sandy Dickson.

Written by Patrick G. Quilty and Maxwell R. Banks.

Introduction

Professor S. Warren Carey (as he preferred to be known) personified a philosophy of synthesis/integration that lies at the heart of large-scale disciplines such as geology and astronomy. This philosophy is complementary to but sometimes seen to be in conflict with the reductionist approach that characterises so much modern science. He was also a strong proponent of the mantra of 'We are blinded by what we think we know; disbelieve if you can'.

Samuel Warren Carey entered this world under slightly unusual circumstances in 1911, near Campbelltown, then a small country centre some 45 km southwest of Sydney. He attended primary school near his birthplace but entered high school at Canterbury, only 8 km from the city. After a record of distinction at high school, he won a scholarship to the University of Sydney.

As a result of perceptive advice, he enrolled at university in geology, in which he achieved outstanding results in his undergraduate studies. He did not, however, restrict himself to scholarly pursuits but participated in and initiated other worthwhile activities. For Honours and MSc, he carried out research on Carboniferous and Permian rocks in northern New South Wales in which he demonstrated initiative, close observation, and logical and creative thought. His research influenced thinking on these rocks for several decades. While at university, he became familiar with the concept of continental drift, a concept that he pursued and expanded through much of the rest of his life.

The research he had carried out fitted him well for the position of geologist in the petroleum industry in Papua New Guinea, in which capacity he produced geological maps and reports that were highly sought after for many years. His work in New Guinea also inspired him to produce an outstanding thesis for his Doctor of Science degree demonstrating his ability to think clearly and widely, and to introduce novel concepts – although he always claimed that he had to omit certain matters because some examiners would have opposed them.

Field work in New Guinea also provided an excellent background for the next stage in his career, a spell in a special commando unit within the Australian Army. He achieved some celebrity status as a result of his work with this unit.

From the Army, he went to Government service as Government Geologist of Tasmania, in which capacity he revitalised the Geological Survey and produced order in the understanding of Tasmanian economic and general geology where little had been seen before.

When the University of Tasmania decided to found a Department of Geology in 1946, Carey became the Foundation Professor and regular courses in geology began in 1947. Professor Carey rapidly developed a reputation as an inspiring teacher, a successful administrator, an outstanding researcher and director of research, an important member of the academic community, and a respected promoter of his subject in the Tasmanian community. He now had the opportunity, possibly a duty, to develop his interest in continental drift and the broad field of the structure of the Earth's surface. He rapidly achieved worldwide recognition for his work in this field, although his ideas were not immediately regarded as orthodox and some still are not. As a result of his work he became convinced that the Earth had expanded and continues to expand. From the expanding Earth he went on to think about the Universe and the Cosmos. Although his views on these latter topics have not been universally accepted, they have challenged orthodoxy and stimulated research.

Even as early as his last year in high school, S.W. Carey stood out among his fellows and he did so through the rest of his life. He was a member, and commonly an active and executive member of many organisations, mainly but not exclusively scientific. Many of these organisations, in Tasmania, in Australia and internationally, recognised his contribution with honours such as Honorary Membership, invitations to Fellowships, and medals. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in recognition of his services to science. He died on 20 March 2002, aged 90.

Early days

Samuel Warren Carey was born on 1 November 1911 at Campbelltown in New South Wales, to Tasman George and Hannah Elspeth Carey. He was born at home with his father and a neighbour in attendance, several days after his mother was thrown from a sulky when the horse bolted. The family had built a small stone cottage on a 4 ha farm on the Georges River. His name was chosen by his father to honour his own father. He was the third of six surviving children in a family of nine. As primary school students at Campbelltown, he and his siblings had to walk the five kilometres to school whatever the weather or their state of health. When he was six or seven years of age, the family moved to Campbelltown where his father had a job as typesetter for a local newspaper. Carey attended the prestigious Canterbury High School, where like so many students throughout history, he was strongly influenced by his teachers, especially James (Jerry) Jervis (chemistry) and Frank Gillogley (physics). His enrolment paper of 28 January 1924 lists his mother as shopkeeper on the corner of Queen and George Streets, Hurlstone Park, where the family moved in about 1922. He was a prefect in his final year at school. In the 1928 School Leaving examinations, Carey earned one of the few University Public Exhibitions to the University of Sydney, so he entered the University of Sydney in 1929. He also obtained a Teachers' Training College Scholarship.

It is worth noting that economic depression was beginning to take effect about this time and that, as a small shopkeeper with a family of five, his mother was not likely to be able to afford many luxuries. Carey was attracted to medicine but this was an expensive course. By enrolling in science, he could avoid the more costly option and the teaching scholarship helped with his and the family's finances. Students enrolling in science had to study chemistry, physics and mathematics in the first year of their course, leaving them a choice of one other subject. On the advice of his teacher, Jerry Jervis, he chose geology. And thus are careers determined!

University of Sydney – the undergraduate

Carey was a very good student. He obtained a high distinction in first-year geology (sharing second place in the course with Alan Voisey, both behind Dorothy York), in a class of 83 students, in a department that included Professor L.A. Cotton, Drs W.R. Browne and G.D. Osborne and Mr L.L. Waterhouse among its staff. In the background was Professor T.W. Edgeworth David who had retired in 1924. David had a large and continuing influence on Carey. Throughout Carey's academic career, a large photograph of David held pride of place above Carey's desk and still hangs in the tea room of the School of Earth Sciences in Hobart. Carey proceeded to obtain high distinctions in second- and third-year geology, an honour shared with Voisey, who was also to be a long-serving Professor of Geology in Australia. They graduated together, both with First Class Honours, in 1933. Carey won the Deas Thomson Scholarship for Mineralogy and the Science Research Scholarship. They shared the John Coutts Scholarship for proficiency in science but Carey had to withdraw because of limitations on the number of scholarships that could be held by one student. The friendly competition continued throughout their lives, even extending to comparison of the state of their respective knees as they turned 80 within a few months of each other.

While an undergraduate, Carey became aware of Wegener's concept of continental drift. An English translation of Wegener's book The Origin of Continents and Oceans had been published in 1924, thus making available to a much wider audience his ideas on continental drift. Cotton published a paper in The American Journal of Science in 1924 in which he referred to polar wandering, an aspect of geology with connections to continental drift, and he taught a course, Principles and Problems of Geology, in Geology III in which there was particular emphasis on continental drift which he saw as being 'a logical answer to many Southern Hemisphere problems' (Branagan 1973, p. 30). During Carey's Honours year, Cotton ran a seminar course on the same topic. Further, in 1928, Edgeworth David published, in The Australian Geographer, a short paper on drifting continents. Carey could thus not have been unaware of the concept, which influenced his interpretation of what he saw in New Guinea, was reflected in his doctoral thesis, and underlay much of his academic career. Carey's first paper – on water divining – was published in the Sydney University Science Journal in 1933.

During his Honours year, Carey developed an abscess in his ear and had an operation that he was not expected to survive, but did. This had the consequence that, now partially deaf, he surrendered, with considerable relief, his Sydney Teachers' Training College Scholarship. The operation left him with an ability that he used later to impress indigenous New Guineans. He could exhale cigarette smoke through his deaf ear.

Carey's family was not wealthy and he entered the University as the Great Depression deepened. This not only affected his career choice but, in addition, he had to augment his scholarship income with extracurricular activities to supplement the family income. This was achieved by a variety of tasks including stints as a milkman, iceman, conjurer in Saturday afternoon children's entertainment and night clubs, and coach to high school students in science subjects and even Latin. During his Second Year geology excursion, he participated in an evening concert: as Voisey notes, 'Another outstanding turn was a conjuring and memory session by the Great Mystic S. Warren Carey which left everyone dazed, incredulous and academically scared'. Because of the costs of travel for his Honours work, Carey even took on the task of 'cattle drover' on trains to his Honours area, Currabubula in northern NSW. He amazed local residents with his energy in pursuing his mapping project. He acted as a guide through Jenolan Caves. His extracurricular activities as an undergraduate and Honours student give evidence of self-reliance, creativity and a very well-trained memory. Because he couldn't afford the bus fare, he walked from Blackheath to Jenolan Caves for one excursion.

He was influenced in the choice of his honours project by W.R. Browne, and his honours mapping was followed up by geological mapping, supported by scholarships, in the Werris Creek area for the Master's degree. The particular contributions to geological knowledge he made during his Honours and Master's work were in Carboniferous and Permian stratigraphy and structural geology of the region, and earned him an MSc (1934). He published four papers on this work. The work was also the basis for a paper with W.R. Browne in which the Carboniferous stratigraphy, tectonics and palaeogeography of New South Wales and Queensland were discussed, and a paper with G.D. Osborne on stress analysis. All these papers had long-term influence on later studies and reveal his developing interests and the influence of Cotton, Browne and Osborne particularly.

His interests were not only academic. Since his school days, he had been active in outdoor pursuits such as scouting. Thus he was a member of the Sydney University Regiment and joined the University Rover Crew, and his memory training may be attributed in part to a Scout activity called 'Kim's Game'. The disciplined outdoor activities in the Rovers and the University Regiment were expressions of interests and attitudes that would influence later decisions and approaches, and the lifestyle choices that followed. Later, as Professor and Head of Department, his memory was a major advantage, a source of amazement and sometimes frustration to staff and students. He founded the Students' Geological Society at the University of Sydney and was its initial president. It was in this capacity that he first met Professor David – in Michaelmas term, 1931 – to invite him to deliver the first address to the Society. David had been a dominating figure in Australian geology for several decades and became a major influence on Carey.

Carey retained a strong interest in his alma mater throughout his life, giving the keynote address at the first of the annual Edgeworth David Days in 1988. From a more immediate point of view, his Honours and Master's studies were excellent experiences on which to base the next stage in his career, that of petroleum geologist in New Guinea.

And so to work – Papua New Guinea

Following the successful completion of his Master's studies, Carey planned to proceed to Cambridge to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy degree, possibly with an academic career in mind. He had applied for an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship, but in the year he applied, it was given to a competitor who would not be eligible in later years. Carey was told he had an excellent chance for the following year and so, sustained with a New South Wales Government Research Scholarship, late in 1933 he was actively collecting further material in the Werris Creek region, south of Tamworth, to take to Cambridge.

At this point, opportunism intervened and changed the direction of Carey's career, changing his future path from one that could have been mundane (unlikely with his personality) to the dynamic one that eventuated.

Oil Search Ltd needed more geologists in Papua New Guinea and, in the person of G.A.V. Stanley, came to Sydney recruiting, especially for someone with experience in stratigraphy and structural geology. Stanley himself was a highly regarded University of Sydney graduate, having obtained the Undergraduate Scholarship for Proficiency in 1923, and the Science Research Scholarship in 1925/26. Voisey and Carey were both interviewed but Voisey did not want to work in New Guinea and Carey was persuaded to accept a position after convincing Stanley that he was worth an extra £300 over and above the £250 he was offered, because of his

Master's experience in structural geology. This employment continued while the company evolved through Oil Search Ltd (1934-36), Papua Oil Search (1936-38) and Australasian Petroleum Company (1938-42).

Carey had made a choice between field and laboratory based studies and field work won. Two weeks later, he sailed on S.S. Montoro to his destination in Boram, 5 km east of Wewak in northern New Guinea. At the age of 23, he was thrown into the field, in many cases in areas where white men had never been and where the knowledge of the geology was, at best, rudimentary. He spent two years in the Sepik district working on foot, followed by two years in the Gulf region of central southern Papua where field work could be done by boat. During this time, he became fluent in both Pidgin and Police Motu.

Work in these conditions, where self-sufficiency for long periods in the field was absolutely necessary, brought out in Carey the attention to detail that was to mark the rest of his career. He was the sole white man supervising a field party of about 30 'boys', often including members of tribes who regularly were at war. Adaptability and flexibility were tested regularly, as was his ability to use his initiative to deal with natives who had not seen white men before, who had a deeply entrenched tribal approach with deep suspicion of neighbouring tribes, and among whom war and lack of western-style respect for human life were the norm. Much of the food supply had to be obtained locally and this involved learning the New Guinea values and trade system, and avoiding being 'taken for a ride'. He also needed to be field leader, surveyor, doctor, diplomat, trader, recorder of detail, and maintenance man for the equipment. Some examples to illustrate!

In many instances there were no base maps so theodolite, staff and plane tabling were the main survey systems. In the high humidity, the glass in the eyepiece of a theodolite telescope is subject to fungal growth, especially where etched with vertical and horizontal cross-hairs. The diaphragm with cross-hairs was thus replaced with glass bearing spider-web cross-hairs that lasted longer than the etched variety. He collected spider-web thread on a card with a slot in it, after a lengthy process of getting 'his boys' to collect the right type of spiders and choosing the individual spider that produced the best single thread (hence the personal word 'spidering'). Applying the spider web to the eyepiece often had to be done several times to get the spacing absolutely correct. He also preferred to make his own bamboo staffs because they floated if dropped in water and were light, cheap and easily replaced. Plotting the day's results was done after dinner by the light of a Tilley lamp. The advent of aerial reconnaissance flights late in 1937 allowed sketching of topography and other features from the air. Aerial photography then speeded up the mapping considerably.

Carey had many medical experiences including regular stitching of surface and deeper wounds. He also treated yaws and sexually transmitted diseases, malaria, pneumonia, diverse parasites, some measles, typhoid, deaths. All to be cared for by a non-medically-qualified geologist in his early 20s! His principal guidance came from a ship's captain's medical book and from the company doctor. His background in Scouts, Rovers and the Sydney University Regiment had given him some relevant experience. While taking so much care for others, he contracted tropical typhus and survived on beef tea until strong enough to walk out of the base camp.

He carried a few bags of rice, blue peas (soak overnight and carry damp in hessian bags during the next day so they sprout and produce vitamin C, to prevent scurvy) and some canned bully beef in case all else

failed. He made bread regularly but had to keep the yeast alive. Meat was what could be shot. Self-discipline was highly developed to prevent him developing any tropical diseases and camp routine was strict, including a daily bath, sick parade, and administration of 'bush justice'. He learned to identify key fossils in the field and developed his own means of polishing rock slabs to examine with hand lens the fossil foraminifera therein, using the field guide prepared for the purpose by Professor Martin F. Glaessner, also an employee of the Australasian Petroleum Company, who eventually also became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (McGowran 1994). This skill stayed with him through later years. In the first two years, there was no radio and mail commonly was two months old by the time he received it.

Carey made great contributions to the understanding of the geography and geology of Papua New Guinea and the country, in turn, left a very strong mark on him because, in contrast to the age and stability of the areas in which he had worked in his earlier research, it is geologically young and one of the most active places on Earth. It is a land of growing mountains, active volcanoes (and many others that have been active very recently), earthquakes, and vigorous erosion and sedimentation regimes. He experienced first-hand the natural violence of the local environment. He was very close to the epicentre of the Torricelli Earthquake of 20 September 1935. This was the then most violent earthquake recorded in Papua New Guinea and caused the seismograph recorder at Riverview Observatory in Sydney (3,500 km away) to go off-page and to react violently for many hours. His records of the earthquake illustrate again his attention to detail in that he recorded the frequency of various types of vibration, the effects on local material (suggesting acceleration greater than g), and the different types of vibration. There were major landslides and it took months for the shocks to die down and the effects to become fully evident.

His experience and observations of landslides and mudslides were to stand him in good stead in teaching about past environments when he eventually assumed a professorship. His few papers on the area are regarded as landmark works, but most of his work was recorded in company reports. He made predictions that took many years to be proven correct, and the knowledge base he left in company reports and papers has been an important element in the successful search for hydrocarbons in the area. His interests in tectonics were enhanced extremely and he never lost his interest in this part of the world.

A thesis finalised

At the end of four years, Carey took six months' leave in 1938, returned to Sydney, and completed and submitted a thesis for the Doctor of Science degree, based on his work in Papua New Guinea. It was entitled 'Tectonic Evolution of New Guinea and Melanesia'. The examination of the thesis was quite a saga. It was submitted at about the time of the declaration of the Second World War. The examiners included the very prominent overseas geologists Arthur Holmes (who had worked in oil exploration in Burma) and H.A. Brouwer, and in Australia, the Commonwealth Geological Adviser, W.G. Woolnough, another of David's students. Getting the thesis to them in the first instance, by sea mail, was difficult enough, but to complicate the process, Brouwer kept moving around the world, with the thesis following him and catching up with him only when he returned to his home university in the Netherlands. As a result of the long delay, Carey thought he had failed. Eventually the examiners' reports were all in and the degree was awarded in 1939.

He returned to and continued working in Papua New Guinea until 1942, when World War II intervened in his career. This led to another phase that was to produce its own fame, depending on those same personality traits of adventurous spirit, lateral thinking and attention to detail that had characterized his earlier experiences.

Marriage and family

Carey and Austral Robson, a nurse and portraitist, were married in her home town of Kempsey, New South Wales, on 15 June 1940. They had met through the Voisey connection. Austral and their four children (Tegwen Alice, Robyn, Harley and David), seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren survive him.

War in the Southwest Pacific

In 1942, events in south-east Asia indicated clearly that life in Papua New Guinea was about to change. Carey, with his knowledge of conditions there, and with his network of contacts throughout the area, was seen as a valuable resource. He enlisted on 30 June 1942 and was given the rank of Acting Captain on 6 July 1942 (this was confirmed on 6 January 1944). His attention to detail came into its own during Carey's time in the army but his breadth of practical expertise had its drawbacks in gaining credibility with his military superiors in an institution that had it own way of doing things. There must have been a clash of philosophies between Carey and the military, because of Carey's history and belief in self-reliance and the military's call for obedience to a command structure.

The Inter-Allied Services Department (ISD) had been established in March 1942 as an organization for subversion/sabotage behind enemy lines. Perhaps its most famous exploits were Operations Jaywick and Rimau in the Singapore region. The first unit formed in ISD was the Z Special Unit ('secret and unorthodox tasks'), which Carey joined on 1 July 1942. Training for this unit was held at Z Experimental Station a few kilometres inland from Cairns. His secret role was to act as liaison officer between the Commanders-in-Chief New Guinea Force (Lieutenant-General Edmund Herring) and Australian Military Forces (General Sir Thomas Blamey). His more public appointment was as General Staff Intelligence (Topographical), compiling topographical intelligence in Port Moresby, a task for which he was admirably suited (see his paper entitled 'The Morphology of New Guinea' published in 1938; paper No. 7 in his bibliography). This involved collating his own knowledge, transmitting coded messages, dealing with Coastwatchers, and recruiting appropriate candidates for the war effort. In this role he worked in Papua New Guinea through the latter half of 1942.

Carey's best-known role was with Operation Scorpion, his own brainchild. This operation was planned in fine detail to conduct a raid on Rabaul Harbour using folding boats (folboats) launched from a US submarine. The idea was to attack where the Japanese felt most secure. The force would enter the harbour, place limpet mines on enemy shipping, hide in local caves on Vulcan Island until the fuss died down, and escape later. His knowledge of the area was ideal and it was to be conducted only with others who knew the area or had been trained to know it in detail. The concept was treated initially with some scepticism but Carey eventually persuaded Blamey that it was worth an attempt, and Blamey gave Carey a very simple letter stating that what Carey did was with Blamey's approval ('Captain Carey is proceeding to Australia with instructions which I have given him personally. You will assist him in any way you can.'). Training for the ten men of Operation Scorpion began at headquarters in March 1943. Carey's initial task was in 'toughening up' the men to develop a high degree of stamina through an intensive regimen of swimming and running. They also had to develop a full capability in the use of folboats, and of attaching limpet mines quietly.

There were those who believed that Operation Scorpion could not succeed and would not be approved unless the concept could be proven viable. To show that it was, Carey decided that there had to be a test run – on shipping in Townsville Harbour, a harbour protected by a minefield – an appropriate training exercise for people and gear. Thus, at 11 pm on 19 June 1943, the Scorpion team left a train at a river crossing just north of Townsville. The group carried 45 sand-filled limpet mines and dehydrated food for three days. They carried no fuses, and the limpet mines could not be detonated. The river was not tidal as he had been led to believe, and it took some 30 hours to reach Magnetic Island, about 10 km from their destination. At 11 pm on 22 June, the commandos set off. They navigated through the mined Townsville harbour entrance with little trouble. With only a single potential problem, they retired quietly to Townsville at 7 am on 23 June, leaving fifteen ships, including two destroyers, with three limpet mines on each.

Unloading the vessels allowed the mines to become visible. The rumour mill was activated and the word passed to Townsville itself that the Japanese had limpet-mined the ships. Work in the harbour stopped. The military communication system came into play and the message eventually reached the offices of General Douglas MacArthur who was, by this stage, responsible for the ISD, now renamed Allied Intelligence Bureau. One of his officers was immediately suspicious of Carey and asked that he be found. He was, at 3 pm, asleep in the Officers' Club. He was arrested but released on production of Blamey's letter. He went through interviews with successively higher ranks in the Navy and ultimately to drinks on HMAS Arunta, the pride of the fleet. During drinks, it became clear that Arunta's captain was unaware that his ship had been limpet-mined, a situation that was then demonstrated.

The Townsville venture had been more successful than Carey had dreamed; it had shown that his training and forethought had worked. But Operation Scorpion, originally proposed as a raid on Rabaul, was not to be. US forces lost a submarine and Australian troops captured the Huon Peninsula, thus rendering the raid both logistically difficult and unnecessary. The Navy did not pursue any military legal action on condition that he be transferred; thus he did not have the chance to participate in other Z activities. The success of the exercise showed that such daring raids could work and ultimately led to acceptance of the idea that Operation Jaywick, employing Krait might work; it was very successful. Following Jaywick, another Z raid (Rimau) included Carey's brother Walter who was captured and beheaded by the Japanese, in Singapore, on 7 July 1945, one month before the atom bombs were dropped on Japan.

Following the disbandment of Operation Scorpion, Carey moved to Melbourne before returning to Papua New Guinea. He was appointed Director of Research in the Joint Planning, Training, Air and Technical Directorate, established in July 1943 under Major (later Sir) John Holland. He was Mentioned in Dispatches.

Carey qualified as a parachutist on 30 September 1943. He was actively involved in experimental work in parachuting, using the Liberator 'Beautiful Betsy', and retained his interest in parachuting throughout his life. As the war was coming to an end and policy was to take employment if it came available, he took the opportunity and was discharged on 6 November 1944. He remained in the Army Reserve.

His experiences during World War II illustrate well the developing Carey – creative thinking, attention to detail, personal faith in and commitment to what many saw as outrageous proposals, ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and desire to win – pure effrontery.

Tasmanian public servant

After demobilization from the military in 1944, Carey, at this time in Melbourne, accepted appointment as Government Geologist of Tasmania, following the move of the previous incumbent in that office, Dr D.E. Thomas, to Victoria. Carey was one of a group of highly trained, very able people who emerged from the war effort. He was perhaps exceptional in that he had had a period of being a high achiever before the war began and so had a head start over many of the others. Carey began to reorganize the Geological Survey, to investigate and write reports on mineral prospects, mines, groundwater resources and engineering projects, and to make a critical review of the literature and evidence involved in an understanding of the geology of Tasmania. He paid particular attention to the Cenozoic structure and sediments, both areas to which his earlier geological experience of structure and tectonics was relevant. The Palaeozoic was the Era in Tasmania during which most of the mineral resources were formed. As a result of his review, he brought for the first time a semblance of order to the conflicting views of the stratigraphy, structure and mineral potential of the early Palaeozoic rocks (particularly of the Cambrian volcanic rocks which later became known as the Mount Read Volcanics). He also produced for the first time a model relating Tertiary non-marine deposition to Cenozoic rift valley faulting. During his term of office, he arranged for up-to-date geological and mineral maps of the State to be prepared and published. He was not particularly happy at the Survey because the Director of Mines at the time had a policy of not publishing the results of the Survey's work. Carey eventually found a way around this restriction with his publication of the Report of the Government Geologist for 1945, a major advance in knowledge.

Professor of geology

Following the decision by the University of Tasmania to found a Department of Geology, Carey was appointed Foundation Professor and took up duties on 27 October 1946. Over the next six months, he designed courses, started a teaching collection of minerals, rocks and fossils, began to increase the library holdings of text and reference books, to organize office and laboratory space, and to arrange for appointment of a departmental secretary and a demonstrator. The structure of the first-year course was based on his experience at the University of Sydney – lectures, laboratory classes and a number of field excursions. He chose as first-year text Arthur Holmes' book Principles of Physical Geology (which included a chapter on continental drift). Students enrolled in the newly available subject, and teaching of science, engineering and agricultural students began in March 1947. In some of his subsequent lectures and excursions, 'The Prof.' referred graphically to the processes that he had seen in operation in New Guinea and the resulting rocks, when this was relevant to Tasmania. 'The Prof.' was always rather formally dressed, even on excursions, and addressed both staff and students very formally as 'Mr' or 'Miss' (or other appropriate term). Woe betide staff or students who were less formal in their address. This formality was a carry-over from his own school and university days. Close colleagues addressed him as 'Sam' but he always signed himself as 'S. Warren Carey', his chosen style.

Carey was housed for a brief period at the old University of Tasmania building on Hobart's Domain but moved almost immediately to the Second World War vertical-board 'huts' at the current campus, which had been a military rifle range. Teaching began in the old buildings on the new site and this continued until a new building was provided for Geology and Geography and occupied late in 1962. The building was planned in fine detail by Carey working with architects and incorporated his forward-looking perceptions of his subject. Teaching emphasis grew in the emerging disciplines of Geophysics and Geochemistry.

Carey's view was that geology is dynamic and best taught in the lecture room, laboratory classes and the field. The building was designed with high-impact aids. These included a Foucault pendulum in the foyer stairwell, a large terrestrial globe, a seismic recording drum, a mosaic on the foyer floor, specimens of Tasmanian minerals, rocks and fossils, and a growing gallery of photographs of graduates and former staff.

The globe (1.8 m diameter relief model) of the Earth had the geology of the seafloor painted on it incrementally as this became known through the 1960s. This sphere rotated once every three minutes and was designed to be lowered into and float in a water-filled mobile trolley, disconnected and wheeled across the corridor into the first-year lecture theatre for use during lectures. Unfortunately the idea was not totally successful because the sphere leaked when placed in the water. The sphere occupied its own glass-fronted room where it was visible to all, and Carey could work on it employing a specially built curved ladder that allowed him to access any part of the surface. The sphere is still there! Under his initiative, a seismic network was established in Tasmania in 1957, centred on the Geology Department. In the foyer of the new building, the rotating seismic drum continually records and displays Tasmanian seismicity from signals generated at four seismic stations. The Tasmanian Seismic Net was integrated into the World Standard Seismic Network. The floor of the foyer features an Escher 'Knights on Horseback' to demonstrate some elements of crystal symmetry. The specimen displays acted as a reference collection and a teaching aid for courses in Tasmanian geological history. The photographic record (the 'Rogues' Gallery') is of interest to current ('so that's what he/she used to look like') and past students (reminding them of past days, experiences and companions).

From his experience at the Geological Survey of Tasmania, Carey knew that there was a serious need for modern regional geological maps for use by the Survey, by the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission, and by an expanding exploration industry. In a hint of things to come, he invited experienced geologists from all over Australia to come to Tasmania, to apply their particular geological skills, and to help extend knowledge of the geology of the island. Thus Professor R.T. Prider and Dr R.W. Fairbridge came to Tasmania from Western Australia, and Professor A.H. Voisey from Armidale, to map areas of interest to the Hydro-Electric Commission in its dam-building programme (Carey was consultant to the HEC for some years). The maps produced by these geologists were a significant part of the papers published on the areas concerned.

In the late 1940s, North Broken Hill Co. Ltd and some associated companies, interested in the matter by Dr C. Loftus Hills, became involved in an exploration programme in western Tasmania under the guidance of Dr M.D. Garretty. One result of this programme was the preparation of a photogeological map of the Zeehan area by Carey, using the skills he had acquired in New Guinea. As part of this exploration, Mr E. Gill was invited to Tasmania to examine the stratigraphy and palaeontology of the Siluro-Devonian rocks. Soon after the Geology Department started, Carey taught a course in air-photo interpretation to a group of professional geologists from Tasmania and other states. To assist further with production of regional geological maps, Carey developed a co-ordinated programme in which Honours and Master's students and staff produced geological maps of one or two 10,000 yard (9.144 km) squares at a published scale of one inch to the mile (1:63360). This programme lasted almost fifteen years during which 52 maps representing a total area of more than 4,500 km ² (about 6.6% of the State) were published in colour. Many of the maps were produced by students using air photos and the slotted template method of map compilation. Many of the students were associated to varying degrees with the Geological Survey, the Hydro-Electric Commission or mining companies. The synergy between the Department and other bodies was very fruitful.

Teaching

In his role as teacher, Carey was very effective – he was inspirational. He gave a course on the broader aspects of geology (for example, tectonics) to first-year students throughout his career and courses in the same general area to second- and third-year students. In the early years, he ran all the excursions, but later restricted himself to first-year excursions. The excursions and many of the lectures were run on the 'disbelieve if you can' principle; he actively encouraged students to make close observations, to construct hypotheses consistent with their observations and previous knowledge, and to use multiple working hypotheses to explain what they saw. It was not 'I speak, therefore it is!', rather 'you look; you think; you defend your explanations against your fellow students and me'. At a time when most geology departments could count on a recruitment of 20-30% of first-year students to second year, his department was inspiring up to 60% to advance to higher levels of geological study. A number of graduates from his department, including several who studied geology as a fourth subject in first year (as Carey had done), reached eminence in the profession, in academia, in government service, and in industry. His graduates include several Professors of Geology, several Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He was a highly successful teacher.

In the academic community

His department grew and he steered it very well, but his connection with the academic community did not stop there. He was very assiduous in senior roles in the University – Dean of the Faculty of Science twice, Chairman of the Professorial Board, and President of the Staff Association. He played a significant role in the foundation of a Department of Geography in 1954 (shades of Professor David and Geography in the University of Sydney), and actively supported the introduction of an agricultural science degree in 1962. He was heavily involved in discussions on the planning of the University on the Sandy Bay campus, in the Royal Commission into the University in 1954, and in the Orr case. Although he was not a sympathiser with Orr, he initiated the 'Friends of the Orr family' to help Orr's widow after her husband's death. He was an energetic and respected member of the University community.

Spreading geology in the Tasmanian community

Carey had many roles in his capacity as spreader of knowledge of and about geology in the wider Tasmanian community. He founded the Tasmanian Caverneering Club, based on his experience in Jenolan Caves and in training for Z Force; this was the first such organization in Australia and the first use of the term. He maintained close links with the Australian Paratroopers' Association including active parachuting, and was strongly committed to Hobart Legacy.

He strongly encouraged the teaching of geology in schools, particularly secondary schools, a valuable source of recruitment for University geology. Following his early student membership of the Royal Society of New South Wales, he took an active role in the Royal Society of Tasmania, becoming its Senior Vice-President (the State Governor traditionally accepted the post of President). Subsequently, he was elected as Trustee, and later (1951/52), Chairman of Trustees of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

Research on Tasmania

Despite his ascent into the Ivory Tower, Carey remained interested in Tasmanian geology. He published at least eleven papers on this subject arising from work after he became Professor. These ranged from the very local to the regional, and from emphasis on Precambrian rocks to Pleistocene glacial effects, from mineralogy to variation of physical parameters in the subcrust. Some were factual reports, others wide-ranging syntheses. His contribution to the dolerite problem, and to analysis of structures in the Bass Basin, were typical.

Relations with industry

Carey was no armchair academic in an Ivory Tower. He believed that one of geology's important roles was in resource exploration for the nation's economic well-being. As both Government Geologist of Tasmania and Professor at the University of Tasmania, he saw the value of geology in exploration and in application to solving engineering problems in Tasmania. Economic geology was an important subject in his department, and examination of the Department's 'Rogues' Gallery' shows many who went on to successful and often very senior positions in mining and petroleum exploration companies, academia, geological surveys and similar organizations.

A continuing association was with Geopeko at its Tennant Creek mine in the Northern Territory. There is continuing controversy concerning the origin of some of the structures in the rocks there and Carey advised on this issue, eventually hiring staff at the University of Tasmania and having PhD research done on the problem. It was typical of his concept of integrating university and industrial needs for research.

Carey had worked for Oil Search and the Australasian Petroleum Company in Papua New Guinea for petroleum exploration for eight years.  Much of his field work and subsequent structural analysis laid the foundation for the modern success story there. His understanding of geological structures allowed predictions that are only now being proven correct. This interest was further expressed in the large Papua New Guinea project at the University of Tasmania during the 1960s.

Carey's publication record has many papers that are resource-related. What is less well-known is his role in the very successful exploration for hydrocarbons in the Gippsland Basin that has had a major impact on Australia's economy and reduced its dependence on imported oil. Lewis G. Weeks, consultant to BHP, sat in on one of Carey's 1959 lectures while Carey was Visiting Professor at Yale University.  Later, at Weeks' home, Carey sketched the extension of onshore Gippsland Basin anticlines to the offshore. This led, through Weeks, to BHP applying for permits to explore the offshore Gippsland Basin that led, in turn, to discovery of the major hydrocarbon province that is still producing and being explored further.

His main intellectual thrust

From the beginning, Carey taught continental drift. His attraction to the topic was initially because of his acquaintance with

Wegener's early work through lectures by L.A. Cotton at the University of Sydney, and later through the 1930s publications of the British geologist Arthur Holmes. His personal experience consisted of his undergraduate attraction to the topic and subsequent Papua New Guinea experience. What he taught in the early days at the University of Tasmania would now be regarded as plate tectonics. This was a time when fixity of the continents was orthodoxy. In addition to his teaching of the mobility of the continents, his research was related to some of the questions of properties of rocks involved in structural geology and continental movement.

His pioneering studies of the large-scale features of the Earth in the early 1950s led to many new concepts (sphenochasm, rheidity, orocline and many others) that required new expressions. These were defined very carefully, taking into account the best principles of etymology. For example, his concept of subsequently-rotated orogenic belts he originally named geoflex but he later rejected this term when he realised that it was a mixture of Greek and Latin roots; he replaced the word with orocline, purely Latin-based. His view of geoscience was the same. He had strong opinions on the pronunciation of words. One such word was 'kilometre' and he could be heard in presentations by others, correcting them loudly from the audience.

Carey developed an innovative approach to the study of continental drift and past supercontinental reconstruction. He arranged for construction of a hemisphere of Tasmanian endemic Huon Pine, 750 mm in diameter, and developed a system for making plastic overlays for this hemisphere. On these, he laboured long hours making detailed tracings of continents and moving these to past positions using palaeomagnetic data, geology and geography. This led to his detailed rebuttal in Geological Magazine of Sir Harold Jeffreys' 1929 assertion that South America and Africa did not constitute a proper fit of past continents. As he reconstructed past supercontinents, he found that there were gaps in what were probably originally continuous structures using an Earth of current diameter, and he became convinced that the Earth had expanded markedly with time. His demonstrations of the case for continental drift, evolution of rift valley to rift ocean and new seafloor, and the tracing of continental movement by volcanic chains (nemataths which he attributed to 'hotspots') are all legacies of his creative and pioneering research which have now become fully integrated into the plate tectonics model for the convecting, dynamic Earth. This was the integrative science that Carey taught through the 1940s and 1950s and which, when combined with seafloor spreading data, showed continents to be mobile, not fixed, in conflict with earlier dogma. It finally led to the 'plate tectonics' revolution in the mid-1960s. His later advocacy of an expanding Earth has not convinced the majority of his profession but the ability to lead with iconoclastic creativity is the characteristic for which Carey is best remembered.

In the mid-1950s, Carey began to convene a series of symposia on topics on which there was wide divergence of opinion. The first of these was on glacial marine sedimentation held in November 1955. Regrettably, papers presented at that meeting have not been published although, as a result of the meeting, a seminal paper on the topic was published by Carey and N. Ahmad in 1961. This paper, stimulated by the Permo-Carboniferous Gondwana glaciation in Tasmania, is still regarded as a classic.

The most famous, and most influential, of the symposia was the Continental Drift Symposium held in March 1956, attended by prominent overseas experts and published by the University of Tasmania in 1958. It was the time when a vast new body of oceanic data (sea floor bathymetry, earthquake distribution in three dimensions) was becoming available but continental drift was still not generally accepted. Carey assembled a group of leaders in various related fields, believers and non-believers alike, and produced a landmark volume. In the resulting publication, he introduced his belief in Earth expansion. Some see the results of this symposium as the most significant work on continental movement published in the twentieth century. It led to many converts and much follow-up study. Shortly afterwards, seafloor magnetic lineations were recognised, and major international initiatives such as the Deep Sea Drilling Project began with the object of testing some of the concepts. Also at about this time, Plate Tectonics, which explained the observations that Carey had taught in the late 1940s, became orthodox, as it still is.

Late in 1956, a symposium was held in Queenstown, western Tasmania, on the topic 'The Genesis of the Lyell Schists', the host rocks of the Mt Lyell copper ore body. This was not published. A little over six months later, in July 1957, the topic of dolerite was addressed. Dolerite is a very common rock type in Tasmania and, in the Australian context, a characteristically Tasmanian rock. It has been economically important, affecting the search for Tasmanian coal, and is an important determinant of the spectacular Tasmanian scenery. Despite its common occurrence, its mode of intrusion and structure were by no means clear at the time. Further, similar dolerites are prominent in Antarctica and South Africa. At the Dolerite Symposium, many aspects received attention and Carey introduced a novel concept – the isostrat – to help determine and explain its structure, a concept that triggered considerable geological and geophysical study that, in due course, led to the rejection of the isostrat concept. The Symposium stimulated research into the rock which continues today.

The success of the 1956 Continental Drift Symposium led to much international recognition for Carey. His Visiting Professorship at Yale attracted several PhD students who came to Tasmania for his New Guinea project (see below). His reputation as a proponent of his views grew and he received a large number of invitations to attend overseas meetings, to speak and to have his views published. He began to receive many international awards, culminating with the award of its 2000 Career Contribution Award by the Structural Geology and Tectonics Division of the Geological Society of America.

Some of the concepts Carey espoused made him realise again the importance of Papua New Guinea as a source of ideas on earth movement and he obtained funding for a serious study by a group of PhD students. Thus several students worked together in the 1960s studying field geology in critical regions, and also key aspects of the geophysics of the area.

The symposium on Syntaphral Tectonics and Diagenesis, in 1963, addressed the origin of unusual minerals and their textures developed in unconsolidated sand and finer sediments as they move under the influence of gravity and water pressure. An important topic was the key role of colloids and gel/sol in transitions in producing large crystals in sedimentary rocks, and the relationship to ore bodies. The symposium was held both in Hobart and in the field at Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. It generated heated debate following presentation of unorthodox views on the origin of the porphyroblasts in the Tennant Creek rocks, but was consistent with Carey's philosophy of stimulating the debate.

Carey's publications became more concerned with tectonics as time passed, but occasionally he delved into other topics. Near 'retirement' and after, the scale of his thinking expanded and turned more towards the role of Earth and humanity in the universe. A 1988 review of his Theories of the Earth and Universe: a History of Dogma in the Earth Sciences noted that in this book 'Carey was back in comfortable territory: outside of the establishment'.

Scientific societies

Beyond the limits of Tasmania, Carey also was active and held executive roles in many scientific societies. He also promoted membership of such societies to students. He was prominent in the Geological Society of Australia, being a Foundation Member, later President and ultimately was elected to Honorary Membership. The Society struck a medal in his honour, first presented in 1992. He took a close interest in the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS), was Secretary for the 1949 meeting in Hobart, and President of the 1970 Port Moresby Conference (where he gave his presidential address accompanied by a gradually expanding balloon – the Earth – that he punctured at the end of the presentation). He was eventually awarded the ANZAAS Medal and Honorary Life Membership. He was an Honorary Life Member of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and Honorary Foreign Life Member of the Geological Society of America.

On retirement and soon after the establishment of the award, he was appointed an Officer in the Order of Australia (AO), reflecting the depth and diversity of his contributions to the Australian community.

In 1979, in company with two US scientists, Carey founded the Expanding Earth Exchange (EEE), a cyberspace network to promote the concept of the expanding Earth and to show that adoption of subduction was an 'unfortunate and regrettable mistake'. This evolved into the Central Expanding Earth Exchange which continued until just before Carey's death.

Relationship with the Australian Academy of Science

Carey's relationship with the Australian Academy of Science was stormy to say the least. The record will show that he accepted Fellowship of the Academy following a telephone call from Sir Rutherford Robertson on 27 April 1989. The Academy of Science, at its April 1989 Annual General Meeting, elected him under the by-law that allowed special election of a limited number of Fellows on the basis that such election honoured someone who 'has rendered conspicuous service to the cause of science, or whose election would be of signal benefit to the Academy and to the advancement of science'. This election brought to conclusion a controversial relationship. Carey responded by letter on 1 May 1989, accepting the honour but also pointing out that he was completely unaware that he was being considered, as he had been equally unaware of the honours bestowed on him by 'the Indian National Science Academy, Geological Society of London, ANZAAS, Geological Society of America, Geological Society of Australia, Royal Society of New South Wales', etc.

The long-running dispute between Carey and the Academy had begun several decades earlier.

Until the institution of the Australian Academy of Science in 1954, representation of Australia in international scientific bodies had been through the Australian National Research Council, of which Carey had been a Fellow since 1938. When the Academy of Science came into being, with twelve of the 24 Foundation Fellows being Fellows of the Royal Society of London working in Australia, Carey was not offered Fellowship. This, he believed, was because of objections by some Fellows who considered that his advocacy of continental drift was so outrageous that any adherent in its ranks would bring discredit to the Academy.

Carey submitted his orocline paper to the Journal of the Geological Society of Australia that year and it was reviewed perchance by three Fellows of the Academy, and rejected. In consequence, he wrote that he would never allow put his name to be put forward for election to the Academy, nor again submit a paper for publication by the Geological Society of Australia. The lines were drawn!

Following the success of the Continental Drift Symposium, Sir Harold Raggatt asked Carey's permission in 1958 to put his name forward for Fellowship. Carey declined, citing the issue of the rejection of his paper.

In February 1969, Professor Dorothy Hill, as President of the Academy, wrote to Carey saying that she had the numbers to have him elected. Again he declined nomination, comparing his earlier treatment with that of William Smith when publication of his Geological Map of the England and Wales was rejected by the Geological Society of London early in the nineteenth century (this map was subsequently published, coincidentally, by John Carey, who was found to be unrelated). He further stated that 'I do not think that the Academy will amount to anything geologically in my lifetime'.

Australia hosted, in August 1976, the 25th International Geological Congress, which was co-sponsored by the Academy and the Geological Society of Australia. The Congress was very successful and made a profit of some $70,000. The Organizing Committee of the IGC recommended to the Academy that this fund be used for a variety of geological purposes. These included contributing to organizations that had supported the Congress, paying for publication of the Congress reports, contributing to the cost of publishing a Tectonic Map of Australia, and establishing a fund for the purpose of assisting promising geologists from Australia and New Zealand to attend other IGCs, or for those from IGC-hosting countries to visit Australasia. In accordance with precedent, however, the Academy, as financial sponsor and guarantor of the Congress (which included responsibility for any losses incurred) decided that the profit should be available to support its continuing role of sponsoring international conferences in a variety of disciplines.

This decision was not acceptable to the Congress organizers, and particularly to Carey as president of the Geological Society of Australia. Much debate and strongly worded correspondence ensued, and Carey's energetic diplomacy led to his discussing the matter with the officers of the Academy in Canberra late on 20 April 1977. Later that year, the earlier Council decision was rescinded, the Congress organizers' recommendations were accepted, and a trust fund was established.

Carey followed this incident with a severe criticism of the Academy in The Australian Geologist. Until the establishment of the Academy, the Geological Society of Australia had been the Australian link to the International Union of Geological Sciences, but the Academy had now assumed that role. Carey was vehement in his criticism of the Academy, referring to it as a producer of reports that were eventually consigned to the waste-paper basket.

Outstanding achievements

Carey was foundation Professor of Geology at the University of Tasmania and held the position for thirty years, from appointment in 1946 until retirement on 31 December 1976. He was recognised internationally as a controversial extrovert who expounded vigorously his belief in Earth expansion as an explanation for what he observed in his studies of continental drift. He should perhaps be even more noted for his teaching and recruitment of students into geology. This approach caused the Geology Department at the small University of Tasmania to become Australia's leading department of earth science for many years.

As a scientist, Carey was an independent thinker, perhaps something of an intellectual 'loner'. He had several opportunities to leave Tasmania for posts at better known universities, both in Australia and overseas; however, he believed that operating in an environment with no history of commitment to geological orthodoxy provided a freer intellectual milieu. Tasmania was ideal.

While professionally deeply involved in studying first-order aspects of the way Earth functions, Carey's interest was never superficial, and he was fully conversant with the detail. This was a major philosophical conviction and applied to any interest he developed.

He was a showman and enjoyed making an impact. At a meeting in Hobart in the 1960s, at which virtually all Australian professors of geology were present, he hosted a small social gathering in the Geology Department. He entered a few minutes after the due time. All other professors referred to him as 'professor' and he addressed them (all male) as 'my boy'. All appeared to look up to him as the 'father figure'.

For all the high-level recognition he received, Carey was also highly interested in the ordinary needs of people and was an active member of Legacy for many years, organized support for the family of Sydney Sparkes Orr after Orr's death, and was available at all times to help any student who genuinely needed help.

Acknowledgements

We recognize that this review is one of many that will pay tribute to Carey and thank others in the throes of preparing such testimonials for their input. This summary should be seen as complementary to those tributes.

We thank the Australian Academy of Science and especially Professor Ross Day for this opportunity to contribute to commemorating someone who has had such a major role in our careers and way of thinking. A project such as this depends on contributions from many. Professor Carey's family, especially Mrs Austral Carey and Robyn Loughead, have been great supporters. Dr D. Branagan and Messrs J. Elliston and J.K. Davidson were sources of information and sounding boards for ideas and text. Drs K. McCracken and H.J. Harrington provided images and recollections that have improved the story. Nola Skillman of Canterbury Boys' High School helped with information on his enrolment and progress there. We thank reviewers Professors David Curtis, David Green and Ross Taylor and editor Rod Home for their very constructive comments.

June Pongratz, School of Earth Sciences, University of Tasmania, who worked closely with Carey for some forty years, helped with the production of images for this paper.

Awards

• Honorary Life Member, Royal Society of NSW
• Honorary Life Member, Geological Society of Australia
• Honorary Life Member, ANZAAS
• Honorary Foreign Life Member, Geological Society of London
• Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (FNI)
• Honorary Fellow, Geological Society of America
• Visiting Professor, Yale University (1959/60)
• U.N. Technical Adviser, Israel (1963)
• Chrestien Mica Gondwanaland Gold Medal (Geological Mining and Metallurgical Institute of India, 1963)
• Visiting Professor, University of Western Ontario (1967/68)
• Clarke Medal (Royal Society of NSW, 1969)
• Honorary DSc, University of Papua New Guinea (1970)
• R.M. Johnston Medal (Royal Society of Tasmania, 1977)
• Honorary Doctor of Geological Science, University of Urbino (1977)
• Officer of the Order of Australia (1977)
• Browne Medal (Geological Society of Australia, 1982)
• Lewis Weekes Medal (1996)
• ANZAAS Medal (1998)
• Medal of the Italian Geological Society
• Gold Medal of the Australian Society of Exploration Geophysicists (1998)
• Geological Society of America, Structural Geology and Tectonics Division, 2000 Career Contribution Award

Affiliations

• Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science
• Past President, Geological Society of Australia
• Royal Society of NSW
• Past Senior Vice-President, Royal Society of Tasmania
• Royal Society of Western Australia
• Linnaean Society of NSW
• Past President, ANZAAS
• American Association of Petroleum Geologists
• Association of Photogrammetric Engineers
• Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy
• Geological Society of France
• Legacy
• Australian Paratroopers' Association

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.14, no.3, 2003. It was written by:

• Patrick G. Quilty, School of Earth Sciences, University of Tasmania
• Maxwell R. Banks, School of Earth Sciences, University of Tasmania

References

In addition to family, diaries, and the World Wide Web, the following publications have provided a considerable amount of the material used here:

• Banks, M.R., 1976. Professor S. Warren Carey – some biographic data. Journal of the Geology Students Club, University of Tasmania, 10: pp. 57-68.
• Branagan, D.F. (editor), 1973. Rocks – Fossils – Profs. Geological Sciences in the University of Sydney 1866-1973. Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Sydney, Sydney, 84 pp.
• Branagan, D.F., Elliston, J., and Banks, M., 1990. Samuel Warren Carey. In Branagan, D.F. (ed.) 'Knight Errant of Science'. Sir Edgeworth David Memorial Oration. Australasian Mineral Heritage Trust and others. Parkville; The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, pp. xi-xiv.
• Branagan, D.F., and Holland, G., 1985. Ever Reaping Something New – a Science Centenary. Faculty of Science, University of Sydney. University of Sydney, Sydney, 256 pp.
• Cooper, B.J., and Branagan, D.F. (editors), 1984. Rock me Hard…Rock me Soft…A History of the Geological Society of Australia. Geological Society of Australia, Sydney, 194 pp.
• Davis, R., 1990. Open to Talent – The Centenary History of the University of Tasmania, 1890-1990. University of Tasmania, Hobart, 256 pp.
• Elliston, J., 2002. Professor S.W, Carey's Struggle with Conservatism. The Australian Geologist, Newsletter No. 125: pp. 17-23.
• Harrington, H.J., Yeates, A.J., Branagan, D.F., and McNally, G.H., 1991. Sixty Years on the Rocks: the Memoirs of Professor Alan H. Voisey. Earth Sciences History Group, Geological Society of Australia, Sydney, 124 pp.
• Horton, D.C., 1983. Ring of Fire. Macmillan, Melbourne, 164 pp.
• Jennings, I.B., 1976. History of the Geological Survey and the Geological Survey Branch, Department of Mines, Tasmania. In Johns, R. K. (editor) History and Role of Government Geological Surveys in Australia. Government Printer, South Australia, Adelaide, pp. 57-63.
• Macintyre, S., 1992. S.W. Carey Symposium: after dinner address. The Australian Geologist, Newsletter No. 82: pp. 11-13.
• McGowran, B., 1994. Martin Fritz Glaessner 1906-1989. Historical Records of Australian Science, 10: pp. 61-81.
• McKie, R., 1960. The Heroes. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 235 pp.

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