Written by A. I. Clunies Ross.

When the Australian fifty-dollar note was issued in 1972, it bore the heads of two scientists. On one side was Howard Florey, co-discoverer of penicillin. On the other side was Ian Clunies Ross. Clunies Ross, though active for some years in productive research, had no major scientific advance to his credit. The strange honour of being imprinted on the currency - in company with Macarthur and Farrer, Greenway, Henry Lawson, Caroline Chisholm and Kingsford Smith - came to him because of the special public position he had come to occupy by the time of his death as spokesman for Australian science, champion of research and promotion for the wool industry, and steady advocate of an open and generous view of Australia's destiny. These three roles are remembered in the naming after him of the National Science Centre in Melbourne, a sheep and wool research laboratory in Prospect, NSW, and the original wing of International House in the University of Melbourne. A long road in Canberra skirting Black Mountain also bears his name. His reputation was due in part to concrete achievements, but also to the fact that, with a distinctive appearance, personality and style, he caught the imagination of many of those who met him or heard him speak.

Ian Clunies Ross was born on the 22nd of February, 1899, in Bathurst, New South Wales, the fourth and youngest son of William John Clunies Ross and his wife Hannah Elizabeth. Ian's father was himself a scientist, with wide scholarly interests both within and without the natural sciences, and at the time of Ian's birth he was head of the Technical College at Bathurst. He had been born and reared in London, where he had as a young man been a lecturer in geology at Birkbeck College, and he had travelled to Australia at the age of thirty-three in a sailing-ship of which his brother Alfred was master. Ian's mother was Australian-born and had been a schoolteacher before her marriage. Her father, Charles Tilley, born of farming stock at Hinton Admiral in Hampshire, and possibly also her mother, who came of distressed Irish Protestant gentry from Co. Tipperary, were apparently professional evangelists. Ian's father's father, Robert Clunies Ross, a sea-captain born in Shetland in 1790, was a brother of that John Clunies Ross who settled with his family and crew on the Cocos-Keeling Islands in 1826-7 and founded a tiny Malay kingdom. Another colourful relative was Ian's mother's brother, William Tilley, who migrated as a young man from Sydney to Berlin and there established a notable school where, with Prussian thoroughness and some eccentric rules, he exposed English-speaking students systematically to the German language.

When Ian was four years old, his father was appointed lecturer-in-charge of the Department of Chemistry and Metallurgy at Sydney Technical College, and the family moved across the Blue Mountains to Sydney, where they settled at Summer Hill in the western suburbs. In a passage on his childhood (published after his death in his Memoirs and Papers), Ian describes the free and varied life which he led, especially after the family had moved to more spacious quarters in nearby Ashfield. For three years, until he was about nine, he and his brother Rob, who was two years older, received all their schooling from their parents, and, as they had lessons only in the mornings, they had plenty of time at their disposal. At Ashfield, they were close to paddocks and to scrubby bushland. Their mother, who always reposed considerable trust in her children, let them roam very much as they liked and tolerated their keeping fantail pigeons and bringing home a variety of insects, frogs and reptiles, though, as he says, she 'drew the line at poisonous snakes in the house'. They counted over seventy species of birds near their home. Ian also had an early love for horses and dogs, and he describes his attempts, at first unsuccessful, to adopt a dog of his own.

As far as a childhood can be made so by external circumstances, Ian's seems to have been a secure and happy one. He had the companionship of Rob and the varied contributions of his two much older brothers: Allen, gentle and studious, with a universal thirst for knowledge like his father's; and Egerton, wild and imaginative, full of romantic stories and adventurous games. For his father, forty-eight years older than himself, Ian had feelings, he says, 'rather of respect than deep attachment', but his mother was at all times a stronghold; his relationship with her was to continue close and untroubled until her death less than twelve years before his own; and she was undoubtedly an important influence upon him. She had in fact some of the qualities of personality that he was to display. While maintaining a certain dignity, she showed a considerable zest for life. She was a good story-teller, with plenty of anecdotes to tell, and a natural teacher, who treated children with respect. Her interests were literary and historical rather than scientific, and she wrote verse in the style of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Though she was conscious of class in the sense of caring about accents and certain details of behaviour, she showed an almost unvarying kindliness and courtesy and conversed easily with everyone she met. Her rule over her family was permissive in many ways and she reposed great trust in her children, but behind this outward relaxation there were very firm views on manners and morals which could not easily be ignored and were sometimes forcefully expressed. Ian seems to have absorbed many of his mother's assumptions and values, and it is likely that her calm assurance of her place in the world, and the devotion, heavily tempered with good sense, that she had for her children, helped to give him a sense of confidence against which his natural ebullience could have full rein.

Ian's outlook was no doubt influenced by the strongly moral attitudes of both his parents, but his own tendency was less to his father's puritanical and self-demanding standards than to his mother's code, in which truthfulness, fairness and courtesy ranked high. Ian's later liberal internationalism was very much of a piece with his mother's; he writes of her admiration for Gladstone against his father's strong championship of Disraeli. His religious position was also to become rather similar to hers; unlike his father, who had an unswerving personal faith, both he and his mother were on the extreme liberal edge of Christianity, shading off into a generalised reverence, but they had a strong attachment to what they believed to be Christian ethics and a critical respect for the church as an institution.

In contrast to Ian's mother, his father cared little for appearances and seems to have had no sense of class distinctions. He was a man of immense intellectual curiosity, for whom Australia, with its plant and animal life and geological structure still not fully catalogued, was fertile ground. He collected rocks, plants and reptiles; published short texts on chemistry; and on his five-month voyage to Australia kept systematic records for the Geographical Society. On one occasion he had himself bitten by the supposedly deadly Australian Black Snake in order to prove that its reputation was exaggerated. Among his many differences of opinion with his wife was over the choice of state or private schools for their sons. By the compromise adopted, Allen and Egerton went to Sydney High School, while Rob and Ian, after a short time at a prep. school in Ashfield, were sent as day-boys to Newington, the Methodist school since favoured by the royal house of Tonga and the leading chiefly family of Fiji.

Ian's time at Newington does not appear to have been particularly memorable for him. He in turn was not by any means an outstanding pupil, and it was a source of surprise to his headmaster when he obtained a second-class honour in English at the Leaving examination. In 1914, while he was at Newington, his father died of cancer, leaving the family in much reduced circumstances, and not long afterwards his three older brothers left for the war: Egerton, a keen part-time soldier, with a commission, to serve in various fields including East Africa; and Allen and later Rob as privates to France. Ian reached the age of eighteen in the second-last year of the war, but it seems that his mother exerted her legal right to prevent his enlisting while he was under the age of twenty-one. Accordingly, and despite his father's dying recommendation against it, Ian entered Sydney University, in the Agriculture Faculty, at the beginning of 1917. At the end of a year in which he passed after a second try in one of his subjects, he transferred to second-year Veterinary Science at the beginning of 1918. In October 1918, news came that Egerton and Rob had died within a few days of one another: Egerton, weakened by an earlier attack of typhoid, from pneumonic influenza; Rob in action. Mrs Clunies Ross travelled to England in 1919 to meet Allen, now commissioned and married, and to join him on his troopship home.

Ian seems to have come to science not mainly out of intellectual curiosity, or even out of fascination with the possibilities of applied research, but because he wanted to work with animals. For much of the veterinary course, he was the sole student in his year, and he probably continued to regard himself as an indifferent scholar. Nonetheless, he completed the course in 1920 and was more than a little surprised to find himself graduating with honours.

'In the morning there was the conferring of degrees,' he wrote to a friend, 'in which I played a small part. The Prof announced that I had got 2nd class Honours at Graduation which I had not known before. I expect he made it up on the spot.'

Indeed he always maintained that his professor had been so keen to have one graduate with honours in order not to be outdone by the other faculties that he had made the award contrary to the rules and had had them amended later.

In 1921, Ian was given a temporary lectureship in veterinary anatomy.

'I have to lecture in Osteology to 1st and Anatomy to 2nd year students,' he wrote to the same friend, 'as well as directing Dissections and doing the Ops in Surgery...The students, though standing in no great awe of me – in fact addressing me when out of hearing of the Prof as Ian – are very decent.'

A number of the students were in fact returned servicemen older than himself, and he later told stories of scuffles in which the lecturer, no less than the students, hurled pieces of carcase around the dissecting room, and of how the teacher 'in his piping treble' (as he related it) and the pupils in their resounding bass would sing 'Good morning to you' antiphonally at the beginning of class.

Next year, he was appointed a Walter and Eliza Hall Veterinary Research Fellow. This allowed him to spend some time overseas, and he arranged to spend much of the year in work on parasites at the Molteno Institute for Parasitology in Cambridge and the School of Tropical Medicine in London. He and his mother set out for England in a cargo ship, their voyage starting inauspiciously with three weeks berthed at Port Kembla. The ship's doctor was Charles Huxtable, who became a life-long friend. Dr Huxtable, who had returned from the war with the Military Cross, had a capacity for quiet amusement and enjoyment which fitted well with Ian's boyish exuberance, and near the end of the year, when Ian had finished his work in Cambridge and London, they went together for a short tour in Hungary and Poland.

After returning from Poland, Ian began his journey home through the United States, where he looked at methods of field control of parasitic diseases, mainly in Texas and Louisiana.

On his return to Sydney he resumed research in parasitology and part-time teaching at the Veterinary School. For a few months in 1925 he hired rooms in College Street in the heart of Sydney, and tried to start a veterinary practice, but his rueful words in a letter of August that year:

four and a half cases this week. Almost it begins to look as if things are looking up.

bear witness that the practice was not successful enough to be worth continuing. Otherwise research on parasites of domestic animals was to occupy the bulk of his working life until 1937. His personal study was concerned with the hydatid parasite (Echinococcus granulosus), the liver fluke (Fasciola hepatica), and the dog-tick (Ixodes holocyclus).

This work, and all the research with which he was associated, had a highly practical bent, and most was directed to urgent problems of the pastoral industry. Hydatids, however, is a disease of men as well as sheep, and his work on the dog-ticks was of concern to dogs and their owners, rather than to graziers. The dog-tick is especially prevalent in the scrub of the Sydney area and is lethal to dogs unless it is removed quickly. Ian developed methods of actively immunizing dogs by short engorgements with ticks and also of using serum from animals already 'over-immunized' against the parasite as a treatment in tick poisoning. Reports of his work in 1933-34 indicated that with the serum 75 % of a sample of badly affected dogs recovered.

In 1926, the Prime Minister, Mr Bruce, arranged for the establishment of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to replace the Commonwealth Institute of Science and Industry, which had been constituted six years earlier but never adequately financed. The Council (to be known by its initials as 'CSIR') acquired six Divisions in its first few years (Economic Botany, Animal Nutrition, Economic Entomology, Forest Products, Soil Research and Animal Health). At the end of 1926, Ian was appointed the Council's parasitologist to continue his work at the Sydney University Veterinary School. By mid-1931, three other research workers, Gabriel Kauzal, Norman Graham and Hugh Gordon, are reported as working with him, and in November 1931 the team moved into CSIR's new McMaster Animal Health Laboratory, established at the rear of the Veterinary School through an endowment by a grazier, Mr (later Sir Frederick) McMaster. Ian was appointed Officer-in-Charge of the McMaster, a position which he held until 1937. The McMaster provided facilities for research by the staff of the Veterinary School as well as by its own officers, and, though sheep and their parasites remained the main interest, investigations extended also to bacterial diseases (and conditions of unknown origin) and to diseases of cattle.

Ian believed in maintaining close contact with the men on the land, and he devoted considerable efforts to increasing the interest of wool-growers in research. The CSIR Annual Report for 1929-30 records his intention to establish field stations on the properties of graziers who had expressed their willingness to co-operate. The same report, in a recital of a number of research achievements of particular value to the sheep industry, mentions work on the control of liver-fluke, 'which previously caused losses amounting to well over £1,000,000 per annum', and important progress on other internal parasites ('stomach worms, lungworms, etc.'), also work in which Ian was involved, quoting on this subject a leading Queensland pastoralist as stating that 'as a result sheep-rearing in his district has been completely revolutionized'.

Ian published about fifty scientific papers, some extending to substantial booklets, in the period up to 1937. Besides studies of specific parasites, they include general surveys of internal and skin parasites of sheep, and of skin parasites of dogs, and general works on medication and pasture treatment against parasites. In 1928, his thesis on the hydatid parasite was accepted by the University of Sydney for the degree of Doctor of Veterinary Science, and in 1936 with Hugh Gordon he published a book, The Internal Parasites and Parasitic Diseases of Sheep (Angus & Robertson) which was intended for the use of both students and wool-growers.

In January 1923, very shortly after his return from abroad, Ian was invited to a weekend at Mount Kembla on the New South Wales south coast, at which Janet Carter, then a final year University student, was to be present. Each had heard of the other, and they had lived not far apart in Ashfield, but they met for the first time on Sydney's Central Station on the eve of an Anniversary Day long weekend, and travelled together on the south coast train. Their surviving letters, starting from August of the next year, show that they were both by then deeply involved with one another. Janet, after graduating with first class honours in English early in 1924, continued to work in the University grounds on the staff of the Fisher Library. Nevertheless, their ideas of decorum for unengaged couples, scarcely believable today, set limits on the frequency of meetings between them. To be seen alone together more than once in three weeks seemed to verge on the improper, even when they had been acquainted for nearly two years. At one point they resolved, not quite successfully, to cease to meet for three months because of Ian's doubts over whether, for his mother's sake, he should refrain from marrying at all. This experiment appears to have settled the doubts. They were officially engaged in 1925, but it was not until Ian's CSIR appointment at the end of 1926 had given him what he considered an adequate living that they were married, on the 6th of October, 1927. Ian's mother left for a fourth trip, to England soon after the wedding, and Ian and Janet occupied her small house at Woollahra.

Their marriage was to last with complete loyalty and devotion until Ian's death nearly thirty-two years later. Apart from simple entertaining Janet took a fairly small part in his public life, being by inclination home-centred, and except for two long trips abroad scarcely ever travelled with him. She was, however, a quick and avid reader, interested in world and national affairs, on which her attitudes fitted closely with his, and on occasion she engaged in public controversy on her own account – most notably in 1945 over the very hot issue of press treatment of the Japanese. In later life she was to become increasingly interested in the personal social welfare services, and after Ian's death she became a University student once again and then taught for six years in the Criminology Department at Melbourne University. Whenever Ian was away and within reach of mails, they wrote to each other, generally every two or three days, his letters full of incident and recounting his meetings with the many friends, both men and women, whom he had acquired in various parts of the world. She, though missing him acutely, never seriously tried to inhibit his many outside engagements until fears for his health emerged near the end of his life.

Not long after their marriage, CSIR arranged for Ian to spend the best part of a year, from June 1929, studying research methods in parasitology at the Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo. Some years earlier, he had begun to learn something of Japanese language and history by attending classes at Sydney University. Soon after arrival in Japan, Ian and Janet took a small Japanese-style house in a Tokyo suburb and engaged a Japanese maid, newly arrived from the country. Few Australians at the time had lived in Japan, and nearly fifty years later few have gone there as Ian did for technical or scientific training. It was thus in some ways a pioneering venture. He was able to continue work on the liver fluke, and his letters to Dr Rivett, the Chief Executive of CSIR, suggest that he found value in the work. But more important to him perhaps was his experience of Japanese people on their home ground. Despite minor inconveniences, he revelled in their language, modes of expression, manners, habits and observances. He kept an extensive diary full of humour and appreciation, much of it dealing with domestic matters such as problems of communication with their maid, Teruko-san. A letter to Rivett describes a Shinto ceremony at the laboratory commemorating the animals sacrificed over the year in the cause of science. He adds a suggestion that a similar practice might be instituted at the McMaster.

His interest in Japan, and in Far Eastern affairs generally, continued after his return to Australia. He edited a book, Australia and the Far East, which was published for the Australian Institute of International Affairs in 1935. The contributors included a number of people notable then or later, among them Sir Robert Garran, John Crawford and H. D. Black. Ian's own paper, 'Factors Influencing the Development of Australia's Trade with Japan', contained a careful attempt to estimate the scope of Japan's possible demand for Australian wool, wheat, dairy products and meat, and to relate this to the growth of Japan's own manufacturing industries. The last third of the paper was devoted to a discussion of how to further mutual knowledge and understanding between Australia and Japan. A passage from the conclusion of the first part of the paper is typical of the liberal and optimistic approach which he continued to have to trade relations. He wrote:

Australia has a very real interest in the progress of Japanese industry and the material welfare of the Japanese people. It is not too much to say that the future prosperity of Australia will to an increasing extent be dependent on that of her great neighbour in the Far East.

Much as Australians had cause to regret the progress of Japanese industry in the early 1940s, the long-range forecast in the last sentence of this passage has turned out to be unusually accurate.

From November 1935 until March 1936, Ian was again in East Asia, this time conducting a brief survey of the sheep and wool industry in North China (including Inner Mongolia), in Japan, and in Korea and Manchuria (both then under Japanese rule). China at the time was in a disturbed and divided state, with banditry prevalent, but all appeared calm and orderly in the newly expanded Japanese empire. In the north-west of Manchuria he was in one of the coldest parts of the world at that time of year. For much of the journey he stayed in Japanese inns, but once at least he spent the night in a Manchurian herdsman's yurt. He was lucky to escape adventures of another kind in Inner Mongolia, for he was told on his return to Peking that the surprisingly prosperous Scandinavian sheep-farmer whom he had visited made his living by betraying travellers to bandits, who kidnapped them for ransom; and indeed this is exactly what happened to an English party who visited the man soon afterwards. Pastoralists' organizations in Australia had supported the survey financially. Broadly the conclusion was that there was no need for Australian woolgrowers to panic over the prospects of expanded wool production in North-east Asia.

After his return in 1936, Ian with his Japanese contacts in Sydney acted as one in a chain of intermediaries between the Japanese and Australian governments in an attempt to fix up a trade deal advantageous to both parties. Australia had recently increased considerably its duties on the import of Japanese textiles. The Japanese had responded by an unofficial boycott of Australian wool sales and by greatly increased import duties on some major Australian exports and licence-restrictions on the rest; and Australia had then prohibited a large part of the goods imported from Japan. Characteristically Ian disliked this sequence of events intensely, and he was convinced that common sense could reach a reasonable compromise. Accordingly, he was quick to take up a proposal made to him by a Japanese businessman, Mr Hirodo, and to feed it by indirect channels to the Australian government. Hirodo and Ian were able to pass unofficial messages between the two governments that enabled them to sound out each other's positions, and, despite misunderstandings, an agreement was eventually reached.

In 1931, Ian and Janet had moved to a house in Gordon on Sydney's North Shore Line. The house was on the edge of craggy bushland and looked across a steep gully with a stream draining into Middle Harbour. Three sons were born to them over the years 1932 to 1936. Their stay in Gordon was interrupted, and as it turned out Ian's career as a research worker was ended for good, by an offer from the Australian Wool Board of a three-year post as Australian representative on the International Wool Secretariat in London. CSIR gave him three years' leave of absence, and in June 1937 the family sailed for England.

The International Wool Secretariat, representing New Zealand, South Africa and Australia, was established at that time to assist in the promotion of wool. It was designed in large part to counter the threat from synthetics. The work was seen as partly one of supporting research into the physical structure of wool and into improvements in the techniques for its manufacture, but in large part also one of public relations, conveying to manufacturers, fashion designers and the public the qualities and versatility of wool. The sums available for this work now seem extremely small, even when allowance is made for the level of prices and costs prevailing at the time. The members of the Secretariat realised that they did not really have enough money to run a world-wide publicity campaign by the methods that had been used for promoting other primary commodities and that they would have to find ways of getting much of their publicity free. They tried particularly to make known some of the newer uses of wool, for example in light-weight dresses. The Queen and Mrs Roosevelt were induced to appear in woollen dresses in an American mid-summer, and the conscience of the Secretariat, it reported, was 'quite unclouded by any suspicion that the comfort of either distinguished wearer was in any way affected other than for good'.

Ian, who was elected first chairman of the Secretariat, clearly enjoyed this completely different field of work. In 1938, he was a member of the Australian delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva, then (at the time of the Munich Agreement) in its last year of operating life. While at the Secretariat he made two visits to the United States, and he came back each time with an enthusiasm for the country and people that differed greatly from his reactions on his 1922 visit. In 1939, Ian and Richard Boyer (a Queensland grazier, later Chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, who shared many of his hopes and enthusiasms) managed to convince American graziers of the need to co-operate with Dominion producers in publicity for wool, and in January 1940 the US National Wool Growers' Congress agreed to a voluntary levy on graziers in order to share in the Secretariat's work. On his return at Christmas 1939, his plane was delayed for ten days at Bermuda, and through this accident he met John Winant, Secretary-General of the International Labour Office and later a wartime US Ambassador to Britain, who was similarly delayed. Winant struck him as one of the most remarkable and admirable men he had met. During the course of 1940, Winant pressed him to apply for the position of Secretary-General of the ILO, which he himself was due to vacate.

In 1938, the Nazi persecution of Jews extended to Austria with its annexation by Germany. Ian sponsored the admission to Britain of a Viennese Jewish couple whose only daughter had come to the family some months earlier as a maid. Apart from the mother, who was interned in 1940 along with many other refugees from nazism, the family stayed in the Clunies Ross house until Ian's departure from Britain.

The outbreak of war in September 1939 meant the end for the time being of some branches of the International Wool Secretariat's work. 'All the great structure we have laboured to build collapsed overnight. Wasted years!' Ian wrote to a friend four days after Britain's declaration of war. But this was unduly pessimistic. The Secretariat had to turn from Europe to concentrate more of its attention on America, and had eventually to put an end to its fashion publicity, but it was to revive after the war and to emerge as a major force in research, with a reputation for ingenious publicity, and with widespread representation through the world. Ian hoped in the early months of the war that the contacts made by the Secretariat in neutral countries might be useful for undercover operations, and, though he was appointed professor of Veterinary Science at Sydney University in November 1939, he remained in London until the end of his term at the Secretariat in July 1940, hoping, as it appears from his letters, for some opportunity of using his experience for the war effort. But he had to content himself with a brief period as sergeant in the predecessor of the Home Guard. In June 1940, he met Duff Cooper, Minister of Information in Churchill's government, in order to put his ideas about better relations with America, a question that appears from his letters to have greatly concerned him at this time. To Janet, despatched with the children early in June and staying at the time in New York, he wrote:

Both we in Australia and the people of America must begin to see each other with new eyes; eyes which are trained to see the virtue not the vices; the strength and not the weaknesses – the similarities and not the differences which in the past in our blindness we have stressed. This war may provide that severe mental shock out of which may arise the vision of a new and better life for both our peoples. If only we are given the opportunity to retrace our steps we must seize it this time. Whatever the outcome here the new world has the future in its hands.

In July he left Britain on an old Cunard steamer and after an unusually devious Atlantic crossing, during which two torpedoes passed beneath the ship, he joined his family in New York. After a month there he returned with the family across the Pacific to an Australia still comparatively little affected by the war.

In Sydney, he took up the position of professor of Veterinary Science, but university affairs did not occupy him exclusively. At a time when there were few professional students of international affairs in Australia, he was used by the ABC as a news commentator; in 1941 he was elected Commonwealth chairman of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, and he became a frequent public speaker, generally on topics with an international concern. He wrote a booklet, commissioned by the Sydney Daily Telegraph, called Should We Plan For Peace? Of one broadcast, delivered in 1941 as part of a series called 'After the war, then what?', the witty and iconoclastic Professor G. V. Portus wrote to him: 'Your amazingly good talk tonight moved me more than I can write about'.

Japan's entry into the war in December 1941 and her rapid push southward brought the fighting close to Australia and inspired a more intense mobilisation. In 1943, Ian was appointed Director of Scientific Personnel in the Commonwealth Directorate of Manpower and also Adviser on the Pastoral Industry to the Department of War Organization of Industry. He held these positions until 1945 while continuing to do some of the work connected with his university appointment. His job at the Directorate of Manpower was to see that trained people were used to maximum advantage for the war effort. This involved interference with people's lives in ways that were not always welcome to them, but it could also involve releasing people from frustrating jobs, in which they felt their talents were wasted, to do the kind of work for which they had special skills. Helen Newton Turner, later to become a distinguished statistician and geneticist, who worked with him then as at various other stages of his career, recalls that:

we had square pegs who came back time and time again because they alleged they had been given round holes, and still they were received courteously and patiently, often by Dr Clunies Ross himself, because he was convinced that the best must be done for every single individual.

Particular difficulties arose over Jewish and other refugees from nazism. Though many of these people were highly skilled, they were, if not interned, often drafted into such jobs as road-building in Central Australia. Ian had an instinctive dislike of both the discrimination and the irrationality that were often behind this kind of labour allocation, and it was on this subject that he made the acquaintance of C. V. Pilcher, a scholarly Englishman recently appointed Co-adjutor Bishop of Sydney, who had come to live in Gordon, close to the Clunies Ross family. Bishop Pilcher was untiring in taking up cases of refugees whom he believed to be unfairly treated, and, finding Ian sympathetic, he became a frequent visitor to the house.

At the end of the war Ian did not return to an exclusive concern with the Veterinary School. In May and June 1945, arrangements were made for him to be released from the University to assist CSIR in making plans for new sheep and wool-textile research. Then in 1946 he was appointed a full-time member of the CSIR Executive Committee, which was situated in Melbourne. In August 1946, he and his family, followed shortly after by his mother, moved to Deepdene in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. The family's period in Melbourne was marked by an attempt to foster two small girls. One of the two, Judith, remained with them and was eventually legally adopted.

CSIR had been led since its establishment in 1926 by an extremely successful team, G. A. Julius (later Sir George) as part-time Chairman, and Dr A. C. D. Rivett (later Sir David) as Chief Executive Officer. They had been joined in 1928 by Dr A. E. V. Richardson as Executive Officer. Julius, the inventor of the automatic totalisator, had political skills and flair, while Rivett contributed his high scientific reputation and ideals, as well as assiduous and conscientious labour. The organization had grown from small beginnings, increasing greatly in size and scope during and shortly before the war. The achievement of Julius, Rivett and Richardson had been to maintain a satisfactory compromise between the university ideals of intellectual quality and free inquiry on the one hand, and the need to provide results acceptable to government and public on the other. They had kept in the organization's hands control of its own internal arrangements and appointments. For these or other reasons CSIR had been able to play a particularly, and for such an organization perhaps uniquely, large role in its country's scientific research. Julius had retired in 1945. His place was filled by Rivett and Rivett's by Richardson. Both Rivett and Richardson were near to retiring age, and it was decided to fill the gap left through Richardson's promotion by appointing two Executive Officers, one interested in secondary, and one in primary, industry. It was these posts that were filled by F. W. G. White, previously chief of the Division of Radiophysics, and Ian Clunies Ross.

In the last fourteen years of Ian Clunies Ross's life, from 1945 to 1959, his own story is bound up with four significant episodes in Australia's history: the establishment and application of the funds for wool research and promotion; the political attack on CSIR and its reconstitution as CSIRO; the application of myxomatosis to the rabbit plague; and the great expansion in Commonwealth surveillance and support of the universities associated with the Murray Report. These four episodes will be recounted in turn.

During the war, the United Kingdom government had bought the whole of the Australian wool clip at a fixed price. It was clear that, when this arrangement ended, large quantities of wool would be held in store, and there were doubts about the terms on which it could be sold. There was considerable gloom about the current financial situation and the future of the industry. At the same time, funds of about £7 million from the sale of wool had been accumulated without having been paid to growers. Clunies Ross's visionary plan, put into law in 1946 with the consent of those who had a claim to the money, was that this fund should not be paid to growers or to government revenue but held in a trust account for the benefit of the industry, with provision for a number of possible uses, including promotion and research. In preparation for this, a law passed in 1945 modified pre-war arrangements by creating a fund for the promotion of wool, to be financed by a levy which would continue as before to be paid on the sale of wool, and another for wool research, to be financed by a government grant matching the levy and initially also by a quarter of the levy itself. The rate of the wool levy had also been raised fourfold from its pre-war level, a change which at first would far more than compensate for inflation. CSIR was to do the scientific work financed by the latter fund, which was to cover methods of improving all aspects of production (wool, lambing percentages, meat) through studies in genetics, physiology and nutrition (including pasture improvement). Much of the fund accumulated from the wartime wool sales was devoted to meeting the capital cost of new laboratories and of extensions to old ones. One completely new establishment was what was originally called the Sheep Biology Laboratory, at Prospect near Sydney. Supported by these funds, CSIR also agreed to enter upon research into the properties of wool fibre and into the processing of wool into textiles. Textile research was a new venture for the organization, and Dr White played a large part in its establishment. In 1948 and 1949, three textile laboratories were opened, each to be given the status of a Division by the late 1950s.

These arrangements involved a substantial investment by the growers and by the country at large in the future of the wool industry. Those who worked with him at the time assert that Ian Clunies Ross conceived the idea and was largely responsible for getting it accepted. After his death, the new laboratory at Prospect was named the Ian Clunies Ross Animal Research Laboratory.

In 1948, the year of the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, CSIR became the object of vigorous attack by certain Liberal and Country Party members of the Federal Parliament and by the Labor rebel, J. T. Lang. In September and October the organization was accused of harbouring officers who were security risks. Early the previous year an attack had been made in Parliament and in the Bulletin on a fairly junior and temporary CSIR officer working in forest products research who was or had been an active Communist Party member. The latest provocation was a newspaper report that the United States government was unwilling to admit Australian scientists to information on atomic research because of fears about security. CSIR in fact applied no political tests in its appointments and, unlike the public service, did not require officers to be secretive about their work unless that work was directed to defence. Sir David Rivett was the special target of attack, having recently in a speech upheld the principle of free communication in science and having proposed that any work which had to be secret should be conducted separately, outside CSIR.

The government answered these criticisms: there had never been any presumption that the United States would share information on nuclear research with Australia or any other country; CSIR was doing no secret work at the time, and it had never been known to leak confidential information. Shortly before this major attack, however, the government had reacted to the rumours over security by appointing Mr W. S. (later Sir William) Dunk and Dr H. C. Coombs to report on the constitution of CSIR. In the succeeding months a decision was accordingly made to reconstitute the organization under the name 'Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization' ('CSIRO'). The old governing Council was converted into an Advisory Council, and the small Executive Committee, now with a full-time Chairman, became the governing body as the Executive. The Aeronautics Division was removed from the organization on security grounds. The Public Service Board, which determines the staffing and standard of provision for Commonwealth government departments, was given control over the numbers of CSIRO's clerical and administrative staff and their conditions of service, and was also given a power of veto over conditions offered to scientific staff. In matters affecting security, CSIRO staff were made subject to the same conditions as public servants.

Rivett, who had bitterly opposed any security restrictions or control by the Public Service Board and fought hard against their imposition, was at first dismayed at these changes, which were to come into effect in May 1949. At sixty-three years old he was close to retiring age and both he and Richardson, who was in very poor health, decided to retire at the time when the new arrangements were to begin. In their place, Clunies Ross and White were appointed Chairman and Chief Executive Offlcer respectively. Rivett, however, accepted the new and honorary position of Chairman of the Advisory Council.

In July 1949, within the first few months of the new Executive's life, it was faced with an embarrassing decision over a CSIRO scientist who had publicly distributed leaflets in London attacking the Australian Labor government for its action against the miners' union during the current coal strike. The officer concerned was on leave but working in England on a CSIRO scholarship in nuclear physics, and he was assumed, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to be a member of the Communist Party. After the Soviet armies' success in supporting the setting up of satellite governments in Eastern Europe, there was a genuine fear that they would attempt to subordinate the rest of the world, and the West's lead in nuclear weapons (then rapidly diminishing) was widely considered to be its main defence. The Communist movement, much more unified than it has since become, was assumed to be a fifth column in non-Communist countries. Thus the idea that CSIRO had let an active Communist into research in nuclear physics was most embarrassing to the government. CSIRO was therefore under pressure to take strong action. After establishing the facts to its satisfaction, the Executive decided that the case justified disciplinary action, as indeed it must have been held to do if the officer were to be regarded as a public servant. The Executive cancelled the few remaining months of his leave and recalled him at once. Presumably to placate public feeling, the Executive also declared that, though not dismissed, he could not continue to work within CSIRO in nuclear physics or radiophysics, the two areas most closely connected in the public mind with defence. Complaints that could have been raised against this decision are that it had not been clear before that a CSIRO officer was subject to the same rules as a public servant, that the decision made it impossible for the officer to work in his own field and therefore went very close to a dismissal, and that he was not given a chance to defend himself before the Executive and argue about the rules applying to his case. He did in fact refuse to comply with the demand that he return and was dismissed. He subsequently had a distinguished career in Britain. On the Executive's side, it could be said that an organization financed by public funds could not operate by rules that were unacceptable to government and public opinion, particularly in matters held to be related to national security, and that some political restraint by CSIRO staff was necessary if the government were to continue preserving scientific freedom within the organization. Sir David Rivett, despite his championship of scientific freedom, approved the Executive's action, and the members of the Executive were doubtless convinced that their judgment followed accepted principles about the allowable behaviour of government employees. However the decision was inevitably controversial, and it aroused a spate of protests from civil-rights and pro-Soviet bodies.

Some of those closest to Clunies Ross at this time believe that this affair placed a great strain on him. He was not thick-skinned, was tense under attack, and readily became angry at what he regarded as unfair or unreasonable behaviour. In November 1949, he began to have attacks of angina which continued with intermissions until his death less than ten years later. Like his Executive colleagues he was naturally averse to penalizing scientists for their political activity. On the other hand, he doubtless felt an obligation, as well as a necessity, to shield the Chifley government, which had resisted pressures to mutilate the organization, and he had probably come to think of Communists as enemy agents against whom special methods might be necessary.

The story of the myxomatosis virus in Australia begins in 1934 when Dr (later Dame Jean) Macnamara of Melbourne wrote to the High Commissioner in London recommending, on the basis of information she had gained in the United States, that it should be tested as a means of controlling rabbits in Australia. Soon afterwards, and in communication with CSIR, Sir Charles Martin in Cambridge conducted experiments with the virus which led him to believe that it could be used in the control of rabbits in limited areas, but he did not show that it could be passed on from one colony of rabbits to another. Later trials under Dr Lionel Bull in the CSIR Division of Animal Health showed that certain Australian insects could carry the disease but did not reveal any method by which it could effectively be spread under natural conditions, and Bull and Mules, in a paper published in 1943, were pessimistic about its usefulness.

In the years immediately after the war, however, rabbit numbers became enormous. Dame Jean Macnamara remained unconvinced that the possibilities of myxomatosis had been fully explored and urged publicly and privately that CSIRO should make further attempts to spread it. On the other side Dr Bull stuck to his view that extensive trials had shown no way of disseminating the disease over wide areas. The Executive was faced with what seemed a difficult choice: the urgency of the problem and public pressure to do something about it on the one hand, and, on the other, well-based advice that further trials were not justified. A colleague closely involved in these discussions recalls Clunies Ross as insisting that they must try again. When the Wildlife Survey Section was set up under Francis Ratcliffe in 1949, one of its stated purposes was to explore the possibilities of dealing with the rabbit 'in a scientific fashion', and further trials with myxomatosis were begun almost at once. The two main assailants in the controversy provided what turned out to be vital clues to success, for (as Ratcliffe and Fenner put it) 'stimulated by the insistence of Dame Jean Macnamara...that adequate experiments in well-watered country had still to be done, and following Bull's suggestion that trials should be undertaken where there were abundant [insects], the 1950 trials were conducted in several sites in the Murray Valley.' There was in fact flooding during 1953 along the inland rivers. Nevertheless by the beginning of December of that year the disease had apparently died out in all but one of the sites at which it had been introduced, and the story seemed very similar to that of Bull's experiments. Within that same month, however, the owner of a property near the Murray River rang to say that sick rabbits had been seen in large numbers; 'within a week or less' there was a report of another outbreak ten miles further south; and before the end of the year there were reports of the disease in numbers of rabbits at various points along the Murray, Murrumbidgee, Lachlan and Darling Rivers. Apparently it had tended to spread wherever there were large numbers of 'water-breeding, blood-sucking insects', to rivers, swamps, and areas which had recently been flooded. In the words of the CSIRO Annual Report for 1950-51:

the infection was carried to, and spread along, practically every river system in New South Wales west of the Divide, into northern Victoria, south and south-west Queensland, and into South Australia as far as the Eyre region and Eyre's Peninsula.

Myxomatosis persisted in places over the next winter; in the spring there were campaigns by the States to spread it; and in the summer of 1951-52 there was 'disease activity on a large scale' in the south-eastern States. By July 1953, it was estimated that the rabbit population in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia had fallen to a fifth of the level that it had reached in 1950. Though not the final answer to the rabbit problem, the disease provided enormous help in its control.

By an unfortunate coincidence, encephalitis broke out among humans in the Murray Valley during February 1951 – the first appearance of this disease for many years – only a few weeks after the spectacular spread of myxomatosis. Inevitably there were rumours that the myxomatosis virus was responsible for the human encephalitis. But with opportune timing the CSIRO Minister, Mr Casey, was able to announce in Parliament on the 8th of March that Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Professor Fenner and Dr Clunies Ross had been inoculated with myxomatosis some months earlier without ill effect. This dramatic gesture, conceived by Clunies Ross before the encephalitis outbreak, was a very effective answer to popular fears about myxomatosis.

The myxomatosis story was a signal triumph for CSIRO and served to blot out the memory of the spy stories of the 1940s. Some of the credit inevitably reflected on the Chairman who had been closely involved with the difficult decision to resume field tests. He for his part continued to hope for further spectacular successes, looking particularly for some breakthrough to increase the supply of water to inland Australia. Through the 1950s there are repeated references in Annual Reports to artificial rainmaking and the control of evaporation from reservoirs. But, though there was some progress in those areas, there were to be in his lifetime no practical achievements comparable to that of the attack on the rabbit.

The Universities of Sydney and Melbourne reached their hundredth birthdays in 1952 and 1954 respectively, and Ian Clunies Ross was called upon to give the centenary oration for each. In the Sydney oration he gave an eloquent discussion of university purposes and ideals over and above those of providing training for a job. After mentioning the financial difficulties which the State universities would have in meeting any new challenges, he appealed for 'the setting up by the Commonwealth of a commission of the highest prestige and authority to examine and define the functions, responsibilities and the needs of the universities'. He repeated the appeal in the Melbourne University oration in 1956.

In his position as Chairman of CSIRO, Ian was in a good position to appreciate the inadequacies and the difficulties of the universities and to ask for a consideration of their needs. For some years, however, the proposal was not adopted. It was probably obvious that a commission of this kind would inevitably lead to much greater Commonwealth responsibility for the State universities, which had the great bulk of the students and which depended for the main part of their current expenses, and for almost all their capital expenses, on their own States. Student numbers were lower in the early 1950s than they had been just after the war, and for the time being there was no great sense of urgency. By the middle of the decade, however, it was clear that there would soon be an immense increase in the demand for student places, as the many children born during and just after the war grew up with much greater opportunities than their parents for completing high school and financing higher education. Furthermore, fears about Western backwardness in scientific and technological training were beginning to be fashionable. Accordingly in December 1956 the Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, announced the formation of a five-member Committee on Australian Universities, of which Sir Keith Murray, the Chairman of the United Kingdom University Grants Committee, had agreed to be chairman. Ian was to be one of the members of the Committee, the only one of the five to have been a member of staff of an Australian university.

The Murray Committee (as it is generally known) was charged to look particularly at the role of the university in Australia, the 'extension and co-ordination' of university facilities, technological education at universities, and university finance. After spending the period from 2nd July to 20th August 1957 visiting each of the universities in turn, the Committee proceeded with unusual speed to write its report of about 120 pages, which is dated the 19th September. Ian drafted most of the long chapter on the current state of the universities. The programme was a heavy one, and in the course of it Ian suffered an attack of angina more severe and prolonged than any he had experienced before.

The Committee's report, which is readable and in some places lively, estimated the financial needs of the universities for the following three years and made recommendations on the financing of these needs which would more than double the annual rate of Commonwealth contribution (aside from its contribution through student scholarships) to the State universities. For the future, the report recommended the setting up of what is called a permanent Australian University Grants Committee. This recommendation was fulfilled by the setting up in 1959 of the Australian Universities Commission, which, through its power to recommend Commonwealth financial support, has been able to guide, and to a point co-ordinate, an ever increasing number of universities of increasing size. The Murray Committee recommendations began a new era in the relationships of universities with Commonwealth and States. In retrospect some such radical change seems inevitable, but it was to Ian Clunies Ross's credit that he saw and stated the obvious before it was generally recognised as obvious.

Ian was generally ready to speak to any group that wanted to hear him, and he became easy and popular prey for school speech days, church groups, clubs, conventions and orations. His appointment book for the year 1957, in which nearly two months were absorbed by the Murray Committee visits alone, reveals over seventy engagements apparently involving speeches or broadcasts, including no less than six school speech-days. Scientific research and its applications formed only one of his groups of topics, but his willingness to speak provided good publicity for CSIRO. He was capable of conveying the excitement of discovery and invention, even in areas in which he had no specialist knowledge. He probably enjoyed speaking, and, except with special set pieces, generally talked without notes and apparently with little preparation. Yet his speeches had a certain intensity about them. Generally he caught and held the attention of his audience, and their response inspired him further. He made very good use of a small number of funny stories, most of them depending for their effect on acting skills.

Ian's concern for the public relations side of CSIRO was not confined to his own speeches and writings. He was insistent on the need for scientists to communicate in terms the layman could understand, and another constant theme was that they should ask themselves about the applications of their research. He had a particular concern for CSIRO publications, and in the second year of his chairmanship two new journals directed to laymen were begun. 'Above all', says Helen Newton Turner, 'he was interested in seeing that the results of research were quickly made available'. She rates the great improvement in the public's view of CSIRO as an important achievement of his ten years as chairman. 'The name of CSIRO', she says, writing in 1960, 'stands high throughout Australia, and research results are not only widely known and discussed but are sought by the pastoral community.'

His activities as chairman included the stimulation or encouragement of a number of aspects of research and university teaching, most notably perhaps theoretical genetics (with its applications in animal breeding), wildlife studies and radio-astronomy.

During Ian's period on the Executive, he travelled overseas in 1947, 1950, 1953,1955 and 1958, visiting Britain and the United States (each several times), the Philippines, Egypt (where he went to see arid zone projects), Ceylon, India and Pakistan. He was made a CMG and knighted in 1954, was given several honorary degrees and scientific, veterinary and agricultural distinctions, and served on the governing bodies of three universities and as deputy-chancellor of one. After the severe angina that he suffered during the Murray Committee travels, his associates tried to take particular care of his health during his visit to India and Pakistan in January 1958. However, he suffered a slight stroke in June 1958 and a 'coronary' attack in September. His return to work after this illness was gradual. He used the extra leisure of this period to write some autobiography and to keep a diary, and also tried to increase his reserves by walking, but he had a further coronary attack in June 1959 and died, ten days later, on the 20th of June, at the age of sixty.

Ian Clunies Ross was a good, but not a great, scientist. His reputation must rest principally on what he did as a scientific administrator and as a leader of opinion. The accomplishments of an administrator are difficult to identify. Different people are regarded as good leaders of organisations because of quite different qualities. Yet clearly the job of leading CSIRO was one that he did with great success. Sir Otto Frankel, who served as chief of a large CSIRO Division during Ian's time as Chairman, gives an account of what his qualities as a scientific administrator were. He mentions Ian's memory for facts and ideas; his capacity for swift understanding of a subject, and his immense impact on the morale of CSIRO staff, an impact bound up with his sympathy for people and interest in their work. He says:

As a rule few if any appreciative thoughts go out to the administrator from his colleagues at the laboratory bench or the experiment station; but in this, as in so many other ways, Ian Clunies Ross was an exceptional person. They were grateful for his interest in their work and in their progress; for his tremendous effort in bringing CSIRO before Government, industry and the public; and for securing the moral and material support without which their work could not prosper. In their eyes – and I believe this was true of one and all – he was an excellent leader.

These dealings with government, industry and the public were a vital part of his work. His tireless public speaking and occasional writing helped to bring the fascination of his organization's diverse endeavours before the Australian public and to some extent before scientists overseas. The extent to which he was identified in people's minds with CSIRO's achievements was no doubt due to his energy in projecting them. For graziers particularly, his own close association with a number of practical triumphs gave him a favourable handicap. His relationships with the two Ministers (Dedman and Casey) and two Prime Ministers (Chifley and Menzies) of his period on the Executive were good. He appreciated their diverse qualities and had points of contact with each. There was little if any hint from him of dissatisfaction with any of them over their dealings with him.

It is clear that his success at the helm of CSIRO depended not only on his intellectual capacities but also on certain distinctive qualities of personality. He had an exuberance and vitality that conveyed themselves even in his walk and gestures. Physically he was tall with (in Frankel's words) 'an elegance which was structural rather than superficial; a patrician manner which in a charming way he seemed to cultivate'. He retained to the end his capacity to become interested and enthusiastic. He had a habit of encouraging people to talk about their lives and circumstances and as a result seemed to be continually making discoveries about human experience that surprised and fascinated him. Nor did he ever lose the sense of fun and capacity for play-acting that would lead him, on no greater stimulus than a cup of tea, to imitate Japanese wrestlers or the Mallee Fowl controlling the temperature of its eggs.

He also had a facility with language. In the Australia of his day, which did not cultivate oratory, his qualities as a public speaker were exceptional. Full of humour and of matter as his speeches often were, he was not afraid of style. The best of them have, even on paper, a dramatic flow, and generally his writing was highly readable. Early, and then again late, in life he ventured to write outside the realms of science and public affairs. In his youth he composed several humorous tales reminiscent of Wodehouse, some of which were published in a woman's magazine. Then, much later, he wrote two short stories, one of which, 'A Good Life', is published in his Memoirs and Papers. That collection also includes a chapter on his childhood (intended as the beginning of an autobiography) which has its touch of literary magic. Over one period he composed, but never wrote down, three serial adventure stories for his children, which he told them night by night.

He undoubtedly enjoyed the various honours that fell upon him, but without exactly caring greatly about them. The successes of his life seemed to come rather as a surprise. He used to belittle (probably quite sincerely) his own scientific work. (Once, on meeting scientists in Madison, Wisconsin, he seems to have been genuinely surprised to find that he was known for his work on parasites.) He made no secret of his lack in certain skills such as mathematics. Nonetheless he was confident in his capacity to grasp ideas and in his judgment. Frankel makes it clear that, though a good listener, he could be decisive, and hints that sometimes he was prepared to take major decisions without very wide consultation. Helen Newton Turner believes that his readiness to trust people, which was often of great value to them, was also sometimes misplaced. All in all, caution was not one of his characteristics.

Besides his distinctive personality and his gifts of expression Ian Clunies Ross's contribution and reputation also rest on something that can best be called vision. Ian McDonald, once a student of his, says that his capacity 'to see the unfolding future pattern from a sketchy contemporary outline was probably his greatest gift.' It was this capacity to see what was not yet visible, to look beyond immediate concerns to larger issues, that helped to give him his special character as a publicist. Frankel writes that:

He conveyed a feel of the breadth of the continent, of the challenge and adventure it held, greater now than ever since early exploration, and of the role that science was playing and must increasingly play in this second period of discovery which would lead to developments yet only dimly discernible. But beyond this material development he took the greatest pride in the contributions of Australian science to the world. Though intensely patriotic, his outlook was anything but parochial or materialistic.

Indeed his vision extended to the world at large. Long before it was fashionable to do so, he was concerning himself over Australia's relations with Asia. Dr Peter Russo records of a meeting with him in 1930 that:

Clunies Ross already spoke of the strange lands and coloured peoples with whom he had made contact as if they were congenial neighbours with whom we would all have to live in peace and understanding and on a basis of equality. I had never, until then, met a fellow-Australian, or European, so utterly devoid of the racial condescensions and cultural prejudices which were keeping the world divided.

David Sissons writes that the programmes of Japanese studies for Australia of the kind described by Clunies Ross in 1935 as urgent appeared forty years later to be on the verge of implementation.

Ian had indeed much of the ideology which we associate with nineteenth-century liberals: a commitment to free trade and equality among nations, and a belief in social as well as material progress and the possibility of an international moral order. He believed that the recession and world monetary problems of the inter-war period were the product of national meanness and stupidity; hence he was enthusiastic about the Marshall Plan, the new world monetary institutions, and the full-employment policies, of the post-war period. At the end of the war he was among those who pinned hopes on the United Nations and the continuation of the wartime alliance between the great powers, and he was correspondingly bitterly disillusioned by what he regarded as Stalin's betrayal of these hopes.

International tolerance and understanding were not just principles with him but attitudes that came naturally: he seems to have liked people all the more for being different – Americans for being American, Japanese for being Japanese, Central European Jews, Italians, Indians, all for being what they were. Thus he was always enthusiastic over Australia's massive post-war programme of immigration from continental Europe, and critical only of its niggardliness toward the old and the handicapped. From the early 1940s, if not before, he was an outspoken critic of the White Australia policy. At the end of a speech at one of the annual Citizenship Conventions in the 1950s, he pictured an Australia in which brown and white children played side by side. He was chairman of the committee which, after a number of years' work, managed to establish International House in the University of Melbourne, and from its foundation he was chairman of its Council.

There was a strong element of moral judgment and sometimes indignation in his attitudes to world affairs. He believed that there were rules of international conduct which it was criminal to ignore and which had to be enforced in the interests of all. He also believed in the rightness of western democratic institutions and the wrongness of undermining them. Thus (in what may now seem a strange aberration) he supported in private the constitutional amendment which, if passed in the referendum of 1951, would have made it possible for the Commonwealth Parliament to ban the Communist Party. It is hard to imagine how his convictions would have stood up to Vietnam and the perplexities of the 1960s.

He would become genuinely angry over expressions of prejudice against foreigners or minorities or over any policy that smacked of a lack of generosity. His friend Sir Richard Boyer aptly describes him as 'intolerant only of intolerance'.

It is impossible to know how far he influenced public opinion in his lifetime over the international issues with which he was concerned. Other people, to say nothing of world events themselves, were simultaneously helping, for example, to spread the view that Australians should concern themselves with Asia, or to doom the old White Australia policy. Yet at least he saw such truths early and stated them eloquently. In his lifetime there was a mood increasingly common among Australians which he was able to express.

The author gratefully acknowledges the help in preparation and revision of this biography given by Lady Clunies Ross, Mr. Frank Eyre, Mr. John Graham, Miss Gladys Munro, Mrs Marjory O'Dea, Dr Helen Newton Turner and Sir Frederick White. Thanks for permission to use material written by them or in their possession are also due to Lady Clunies Ross, the Executive of CSIRO, Professor Frank Fenner, Sir Otto Frankel, Mrs Louise Hutchinson, the International Wool Secretariat, Dr Ian MacDonald, Dr Peter Russo, Mr D. C. S. Sissons and Dr Helen Newton Turner. The passage on myxomatosis draws largely from: F. Fenner and F. N. Ratcliffe, Myxomatosis, Cambridge University Press, 1965. That on the Japanese trade dispute draws on an unpublished paper by D. C. S. Sissons, 'Private Diplomacy in the 1936 Trade Dispute with Japan'.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Records of the Australian Academy of Science, vol.3, no.3/4, 1977. It was written by A.I. Clunies Ross (son of Sir Ian Clunies Ross CMG DVSc FAA), Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Strathclyde.

Hugh Bryan Spencer Womersley disliked the word ‘seaweed’, and objected every time it was spoken in his presence. To him algae were not ‘weeds’ but beautiful organisms, well worthy of making the subject of a lifetime of scientific study. 

As was common in the middle of the 20th century, Womersley did not begin his career as a phycologist, but rather found himself specialising in this life form after discovering how richly represented and little known it was along the coast of southern Australia. 

In his 70-year association with the University of Adelaide, Bryan transformed the study of phycology in Australia, attracting a pool of talented students to contribute to his grand project of a marine benthic flora of southern Australia, and to carry the study of algae forward into the next generation. 

Being a pioneer in the field gave him opportunities for groundbreaking research and an overview of the discipline as it developed, positioning him as the leading expert on Australian algae in the international phycological community.

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Supplementary material

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol. 30(2), 2019. It was written by Sara Maroske.

Howard Knox Worner was a renowned figure in Australian applied science and engineering. His successful career can be credited to his strong intellect, leadership and charisma. 

Coming from a humble farming background, he achieved a brilliant academic career in metallurgy and materials at the University of Melbourne. From the position of Dean of Engineering he moved into industry as Director of Research with BHP where his leadership led to significant improvements in conventional steel production and where he conceived his concept of continuous steelmaking. This was not put into practice but after moving to CRA he applied his concept to continuous copper production where it has largely been accepted around the world. 

Later he was a high-level adviser to Government on energy research and development, particularly the economic utilisation of brown coal for liquid and gaseous fuels. In his ‘retirement' he became deeply involved at the University of Wollongong in the application of microwaves to mineral processing and waste treatment. He died on 17 November 2006, aged 93.

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About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.25, no.2, 2014. It was written by W. J. McG. Tegart and B. S. Hickman.

H. Newton Barber was born on 26 May 1914 at Warburton, Cheshire, England. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and then at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge (MA 1941, SeD 1963). From 1936 to 1940 he was Research Cytologist of the John Innes Horticultural Institute, London (PhD 1942). He worked during the war years as a Scientific Officer with the Telecommunications Research Establishment of the Ministry of Aircraft Production and served as a Flight Lieutenant (Hon.) with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (1943–5) in the Mediterranean and South East Asia Commands. In 1946 he was appointed Lecturer in Botany in the University of Sydney. In 1947 he became Professor of Botany in the University of Tasmania, where he remained until 1963 when he was appointed Foundation Professor of Botany in the University of New South Wales. He was planning to move in the year of his death to the University of Newcastle as Foundation Professor of Biological Sciences.

Barber brought with him to Australia his pre-war interests in cytology and genetics. He helped stimulate important research work in these areas after reaching Sydney. Because of the necessarily broad nature of his interests, his published papers include contributions to experimental cytology, experimental taxonomy, physiological genetics, protein genetics and the genetics of natural selection. He made especially important contributions to the studies of plant cytogenetics and extended the knowledge of chromosome behaviour. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1963.

As a teacher he was actively interested in new techniques in instruction for the biological sciences. He was first Dean of the Faculty of Science (1951–55) and Chairman of the Professorial Board (1956–59) in the University of Tasmania. In 1966 he became Head of the School of Biological Sciences in the University of New South Wales.

Barber was a Rockefeller Foundation Special Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 1953–54, and Royal Society Visiting Professor in the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1967. He was President of Section M of ANZAAS in 1956.

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Written by Angas Hurst.

• Introduction
• School, university and the war
• With Max Born in Edinburgh
• Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton
• Institute of Advanced Study, Dublin 1950-51
• Adelaide 1951-99
• Scientific work
• Personal aspects
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Curriculum vitae
• About this memoir
  • Bibliography

Introduction

Bert Green's influence on the development of theoretical science in Australia during the nearly fifty years he lived here cannot be overestimated. From the time he arrived in Adelaide in July 1951 until his death on 16 February 1999 he produced articles and books covering topics as diverse as particle physics, environmental science and neurophysiology. In each of the areas in which he worked, his contributions were always marked by erudition and originality. It is not surprising, therefore, that everyone who came in contact with him, from undergraduate students to international colleagues, wrote in warm and admiring tones about their contact with him.

So, although his official appointment was to the inaugural chair of Mathematical Physics in the University of Adelaide, physics was only one of the fields in which he employed his superb mathematical talent. As an example of some of the outer reaches of his interests, he once used some statistical analyses, prepared by the Dutch composer Henk Badings, of the compositions of some of the great composers to produce by computer (then the very rudimentary IBM1620) lines in the style of Beethoven and Mozart. The then Elder Professor of Music, John Bishop, was highly intrigued.

The Chair of Mathematical Physics in Adelaide was the first chair in theoretical physics in Australia, for, although the Professorial Board at the University of Melbourne in June 1949 had recommended, as a matter of urgency, that a chair of theoretical physics be created, it was not approved until December 1951. That chair was not filled until Associate Professor C.B.O. Mohr was appointed Professor in 1961. In Adelaide, the decision of the then Vice-Chancellor, A.P. Rowe, in consultation with Professor L.G.H. Huxley, Elder Professor of Physics, to create a chair in Mathematical Physics was based on the view that mathematics research in Adelaide had been languishing since the breakdown of Professor J.R. Wilton, and both of these men knew of the chair of mathematical physics in Birmingham held by the distinguished physicist R.E. Peierls. At that time the terms 'theoretical physics' and 'mathematical physics' were used more or less interchangeably. The name 'theoretical physics' was coined by Rudolf Clausius, while J.Willard Gibbs was appointed to a chair of 'mathematical physics' at Yale University in 1871. In recent years the names have begun to acquire slightly different connnotations, with mathematical physics tending to be associated with research having more emphasis on the mathematical structure of the theories, and theoretical physics with attempts to create new theories or to compare theory with experiment. Sadly, these distinctions, minute to an outsider, have begun to show signs of entrenchment, quasi-religious fervour and even vituperative comments. Certainly Bert Green never made distinctions in his choice of research fields, as will be seen from the account of his research work presented in this memoir.

School, university and the war

Bert Green was born on 17 December 1920 at Ipswich, England, the only child of Sydney and Violet Green. Sydney Green had been a mathematics teacher, but increasing deafness meant he had to give up that profession and turn to coach-building. After a period at West Winch, near King's Lynn, Norfolk, the family moved to Felixstowe in 1930. There Bert was a pupil at Langer Road Elementary School until 1932, and even at that early age his outstanding mathematical ability was evident. So it was no surprise when he was awarded a scholarship for Felixstowe County School, where he stayed until 1939. In that year he obtained scholarships to University Colleges at Hull and Nottingham, and passed his Higher School Certificate examination. His results in that examination were so good that he was awarded a Royal Scholarship at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London. His teachers there included W.G. Penney, later well known for his leadership in the British nuclear bomb program, and Sydney Chapman, of Chapman and Cowling fame. He graduated with a BSc in mathematics with first class honours and a Diploma of Associateship of the Royal College of Science (ARCS) in 1941, a achievement which gave him great pleasure.

By then the war had started and in 1940 he took a summer job building coastal defences, and learnt to ride a bicycle. He also did firewatching on the roof of Imperial College, and filled in the many hours of inactivity by studying text books, with some consequent damage to his eyesight.

After graduation his first position was in the government Scientific Service, but he found the work so dull that he changed over to the Meteorological Office in the Air Ministry, and from there to the RAF in 1941 as a Meteorological Officer with the rank of Flying Officer. The rest of the war was spent on the Isle of Man in the Training Flying Control Centre, advising the RAF on flying hazards such as wing icing. This was clearly very responsible work, because many of the night operations over Europe, particularly in the northern latitudes, were very prone to extreme weather conditions, and the lives of many airmen depended on accurate forecasting. Bert's experience there remained with him throughout his career and gave him special insights into environmental questions and, more remotely, into problems in cosmic ray physics that were out of the normal run. For example, he pointed out that the statistics behind the Adelaide claims for the discovery of tachyons suffered from a defect due to truncating data. Such truncation was known to be a source of error in attempting long-range weather forecasting, because it could lead to spurious peaks. Tachyons are hypothetical particles that travel faster than light, and their discovery would greatly change our view of the universe. There was some evidence from cosmic ray showers being studied in Adelaide that some signals being received appeared to be tachyonic in character, and although the experimentalists could find no flaw in their acquisition of the data, the interpretation had to be reassessed. Bert suggested that a peak in the data, presumed to represent the arrival of tachyonic particles, was actually a truncation error. With this interpretation it was concluded that no evidence for tachyons had been found.

As would be expected by anyone who knew Bert, he was quite unlike the usual run of air force officers. He was not interested in social pastimes such as drinking in the Officer's Mess, finding pleasure more in solitary pursuits such as swimming off the not very attractive rock-strewn beaches.

As the war approached its end, he made plans for resuming his studies, and wrote to Sydney Chapman in March 1945 asking his advice on where he could go, and suggesting London, Cambridge or Edinburgh. For various reasons Chapman, in his reply, agreed that Edinburgh would be the best choice.

The exchange of letters which followed throws some interesting light on Bert's very considerable self-confidence, a trait which was very important for his decision to move to Australia. Enclosed in his letter to Chapman was a small calculation which Bert suggested might be suitable for publication. In his reply, Chapman enclosed a comment from George Temple, a very well-known theoretical physicist. Temple was quite negative in his assessment, saying that first of all the work had been done before, and secondly it was wrong! Instead of being crushed by such a reply, Bert wrote a two-page letter defending his work, and respectfully disagreeing with Temple's arguments. In response Temple acknowledged that he was wrong and Bert was right, and that the note should be published. Bert then wrote to Max Born at Edinburgh, asking whether he could work with him and enclosing this paper for possible publication (it never appeared). He left the RAF in September 1945, and started immediately in Edinburgh.

With Max Born in Edinburgh

Bert's time with Max Born was extraordinarily productive. He obtained his PhD in 1947, and DSc in 1949. Together they published six papers and a book summarising their work on a general kinetic theory of liquids. There were usually from six to eight research students working with Born over that period in rather primitive surroundings in the basement of the Old Infirmary in Drummond Street. Born's practice was to visit the research students' room every day, discussing each student's progress and offering constructive suggestions. He left talking to Bert till the last as their discussions were always very long and lively. In fact Born was once heard to say 'I can't stand Green – he is always right'. They would go to conferences together, and during talks Born would often interrupt and then say 'Green', and Bert would go out to the blackboard and expound the points being made. In a letter to Einstein,1 Born wrote: 'My collaborator Green is hard at work on elementary particles; he is a brilliant man, the best I have had since Pryce'.

Bert submitted his work on kinetic theory for his PhD thesis, and it was considered to be so outstanding that Born proposed that it should be awarded a DSc. However this suggestion was regarded as too radical by some of the conservative members of the examining board, and Bert had to be content with a PhD. However his DSc was not long coming because he submitted another thesis soon afterwards and received his DSc two years later.

Bert was no athlete in the usual sense, lacking the required co-ordination, but he was always very fit. On a working holiday in Europe he cycled over the Swiss Alps. Right up till his last illness he was a great walker, and walking companions often complained of the tremendous pace he used to set. He could be rather idiosyncratic, though, and could pose problems for those with him. Two of my correspondents, Professor L.G. Bowden and Professor A.G. McLellan, tell of a memorable walk in the Lake District when Bert insisted on wearing wellingtons instead of the conventional boots, even though they could at times be dangerous. He also attempted to carry back to Edinburgh a ram's skull as big as a bucket, in the belief that it would have anthropological interest, but was persuaded, much against his wishes, to leave it behind. At the memorial service held in Adelaide after his death, Harry Messel told of another excursion up Snowdon in poor weather, when Bert nearly slid to his death because of the unsuitability of his wellingtons for the terrain. After taking a couple of photographs, Harry pulled him to safety.

The Borns were very hospitable and made their students, who came from all over the world, very much at home. At that time they had with them an attractive au-pair girl from Holland, Marlies Friedheim, and she and Bert soon became very good friends. That friendship culminated in marriage in Dublin in 1951.

Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton

Bert spent one year, 1949-50, at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, working on problems generated whilst in Edinburgh. His published papers from that time refer to models of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory initiated with Born. From reports, he did not like Princeton much; the only reference I heard him make to it was that he often used to walk in with Gödel and talk to him about mathematical logic. A possible relic of these encounters could be an interesting unpublished manuscript of Bert's on the foundations of mathematical logic. His decision to go to Adelaide rather than accept one of several offers he had received of appointments in the United States reflected his preference to be free to follow his own paths rather than those dictated by passing waves of fashion.

One lasting friendship he made there was with Roy Leipnik, who found his quiet manner and self-suffiency in strong contrast to the other members of the Institute. Roy Leipnik came to Adelaide in 1954 on a Fulbright scholarship, and there they started a collaboration on plasma physics that led to the writing and publication of their book Sources of Plasma Physics, and regular visits by Bert to the United States to work for the United States Navy on plasma physics problems associated with rocket research.

Institute of Advanced Study, Dublin 1950-51

After Princeton Bert went to the Institute of Advanced Study in Dublin and found the atmosphere there much more congenial. He particularly liked the way in which Schrödinger looked at physics, although he was not so impressed by the extent of religious bigotry that was still evident there. It was in Dublin that he met Harry Messel, beginning a life-long friendship and a frenetic period of research productivity into cosmic ray showers which continued on into Adelaide.

He also renewed his friendship with L.G. ('Dook') Bowden, whom he had met in the RAF on the Isle of Man, and, as already mentioned, he married Marlies in 1951 with Harry and Dook as attendants.

When the University of Adelaide advertised for a professor, a reader and a lecturer in mathematical physics, Bert applied from Dublin for the chair and was appointed. This was a great boost for Adelaide's mathematical research, for at a time when employment in the sciences was starting to rise following the wartime achievements of physicists, it would be expected that it would not be easy to attract an outstanding candidate to Australia. Bert Green was just the sort of person who could make such a 'courageous' decision work. He already had a proven research record over a wide range of mathematical physics and, as already mentioned, he was not attracted to the hot-house American research atmosphere. He also preferred to live away from large cities, while his strongly socialist leanings would find even the conservatism of postwar Australia more congenial than the rabid anti-communism leading into McCarthyism of the United States.

Adelaide 1951-99

It was no problem to find someone to fill one of the other positions in mathematical physics. Harry Messel had already started to collaborate with Bert in cosmic ray showers, and so he stepped immediately into the position of senior lecturer. He and Ren Potts, who was going to a lectureship in mathematics, travelled together to Australia by ship, arriving in September 1951, Bert having arrived in August. Bert and Harry were an oddly assorted couple, Bert being reserved and not very interested in socialising while Harry was extremely extroverted and tended to dominate any social gathering. But they got on famously, with their abilities complementing each other's very well. Their common interest was an intense absorption in their research, and one might say that Adelaide did not know what had hit it when they arrived. Harry Messel only stayed nine months before leaving to take up the long-vacant chair of physics in Sydney, but in that time they produced thirteen papers on cosmic rays, not to mention other papers that Bert wrote on other parts of mathematical physics.

During the North Sea Floods in 1953, the Greens' family home in Felixstowe was in danger of being flooded. Sydney Green moved the furniture upstairs to save it from damage, but sadly the effort was too much and he died soon afterwards from a heart attack brought on by his exertions. Bert and his family went to England by ship to look after the family's affairs and spent six months there. Whilst there, Bert made arrangements for his mother to come to Adelaide, which she eventually did.

During Bert's absence Otto Bergmann was acting chairman of the department, with the main responsibility of looking after Ian McCarthy, who had embarked on a PhD with Bert. This was a bold decision of Ian's because the PhD degree was still very new to Australia, there had been no regular teaching programme established in the department, and Adelaide was alone in doing research in mathematical physics. It was also not easy for Ian, as a beginning student, to be in close contact with such a formidable intellect as Bert's. Ian found that Bert was a kind and understanding supervisor, although the presumption that Ian could follow all of Bert's ideas was at times a bit too much, particularly as even the greatest of scientists have their off moments. Out of it came a very interesting thesis on the then new ideas of parastatistics, with Ian working out some of the detailed consequences of the assumption that particles could behave differently from the standard bosonic and fermionic types.

After Harry Messel left, his position was advertised, and it is interesting to see the quality of people who made enquiries about the position. Amongst them were S.F. Edwards, later Sir Sam Edwards, Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government, and W. Israel and W. Güttinger, both of whom were to become well-known mathematical physicists. J. (John) C. Ward, widely considered as unlucky not to have been awarded a Nobel prize for his later work with Salam, was appointed in October 1953.

Bert's academic life in Adelaide can be divided into four sections, the first being from 1951 until 1959 when he ran what was essentially a research institute with first Harry Messel and then Otto Bergmann and John Ward. It is interesting to read two very contrasting opinions about this period in letters to Bert. They reflect clearly the personalities of the writers.

The first, from Harry Messel, written when he was touring the United States recruiting people for his new institute in Sydney, said: 'Everyone agrees that we have cracked cosmic ray theory and are most pleased with our work. Some of the big experiments now being planned over here (especially by Rossi) depend completely on our work.' The second, from John Ward, written just as he was preparing to leave Adelaide and while Bert was still overseas, paints a very different picture: 'There is no doubt that the state of affairs in theoretical physics is extremely bad (not in Adelaide, I mean everywhere)...One cannot therefore, with a good conscience, recruit students, especially in a place like Adelaide, where the possibilities of jobs are remote, and where the instruction is likely to be poor, and chances of decent research very slight.'

Both of these people only stayed nine months, and the University came to believe that the position was a short-term contract post rather than tenured. This led to a problem for me when I arrived in Adelaide, because the University Council decided that the post did not warrant long-term support such as housing loans and superannuation. The Registrar put the question as to whether it was my intention to stay longer than a year. I actually stayed until my retirement thirty-one years later!

In 1959 a formal Honours course in Mathematical Physics was started (there had been some sporadic teaching before that) with always at least three students each year, and in 1960 third-year courses were introduced. With my arrival in 1957, and Ian McCarthy's in 1961, the department started to be a regular university department with the regular administrative tasks that went with it. Bert was Head of the Department until 1964, and then, following my promotion to a personal chair, the duties of Head alternated until 1973, when departmental government, requiring election of the departmental chairman, was instituted in the University. From 1973 until his retirement in 1985, with departmental government in full swing, Bert shifted much more into the background, although continuing to be very active teaching, doing research and assuming various administrative duties such as Faculty Dean and President of the Australian Mathematical Society.

The final period, from 1985 until his death in 1999, saw no diminution in his research, and continuing activity in teaching and research supervision.

Scientific Work

The main body of Bert's scientific work will be dealt with under the following headings:

1. Kinetic theory and plasma physics,
2. Statistical mechanics,
3. Quantum field theory and particle physics,
4. Cosmic rays,
5. Quantum mechanics,
6. General relativity and gravitation,
7. Mathematical methods,
8. Environmental physics,
9. Biophysics and neurophysiological models.

In addition, Bert published a number of far from trivial papers in nuclear physics [43], [61], [68], [69]; in biophysics with Casley-Smith, Vaccaro and Bass [88], [96], [110], [132], [133], [134]; and in electromagnetic propagation with Wolf [34], [38]. These, however, will not be discussed here.

(a) Kinetic theory and plasma physics

The theory of dilute gases, for which the molecules could be regarded as moving more or less independently of each other, was developed from slightly different standpoints by Maxwell in 1866 and Boltzmann in 1872, and remained the only dynamical theory of complex systems until after the Second World War when, independently, five people developed what came to be known as the BBGKY system of equations for the dynamical behaviour of fluids, with the important extension to dense liquids. These people were Bogoliubov (2) in Moscow, Born and Green [1]-[8] in Edinburgh, Kirkwood (3) at Cornell and Yvon (4) in Paris. Of these, Bert Green was exceptional for whereas the other four were distinguished physicists, he was a beginning research student. Moreover he was not just working under guidance from his supervisor, for Born took the unusual step of adding a footnote to paper [4] on the quantum mechanics of fluids in which he said 'I have signed this paper, as it is a part of the programme with which we started this series. My contribution consists of some general suggestions...The work itself is due to Mr Green.' There were six papers under the general title, 'A General Kinetic Theory of Liquids'. In the first paper their version of the BBGKY equations for classical systems was given, and in the second and third papers the equilibrium and dynamical properties of these equations were discussed (Bert was sole author of the second). The fifth paper gave a kinetic basis for thermodynamics and the last, again with Bert the sole author, was on the difficult question of how to explain the anomalous behaviour of liquid helium II. These papers, the publication of which spread over the years 1946-48, clearly tackled questions of fundamental importance, and the following year Cambridge University Press published them all as a single collection, A General Kinetic Theory of Liquids.

It is interesting to see that, apart from Yvon's, all the initial papers of BBGKY were published in 1946. However, neither Yvon's nor Bogoliubov's work was known to the others until later. Bert tells of going to a conference in France, and after giving his talk being approached by a small older Frenchman who told him of similar work he had done. It was Yvon.

Because these first papers of Born and Green set the pattern for the later work of Bert and his collaborators and students, they will be looked at in some detail. The essential difficulty was to find a way to take into account the much stronger mutual influences that molecules in dense fluids can exert on each other.

The starting point for these equations was Liouville's equation:

∂r/∂r/ t + {r, H} = 0.∂

It states simply that probability is conserved during the motion both in classical and quantum theory, and so is an exact but not very useful statement when there is a very large number of particles involved. In classical theory r is the probability of there being N particles present with given co-ordinates and momenta, written f(q₁ ,…,q_N ; p₁ ,…,p_N ; t), whilst in quantum theory it denotes the density matrix.

More useful are the partial probabilities associated with considering only some of the particles at a time, irrespective of what the remainder are doing, and these are written, for the classical case, as f(q₁ ,…,q_n ; p₁ ,…,p_n ; t) with n < N. The extreme case is to consider only one particle at a time, and that is as far as the well-known equation, due to Boltzmann, went. It was the object of BBGKY to construct equations in which more than one particle at a time is considered, and to do that Liouville’s equation can be replaced by an equivalent system of equations describing the behaviour of the partial probabilities. As a simplifying step that accords well with physics, it is always assumed that the particles interact in pairs – by pair potentials. With this assumption, the equation for the n-particle probability involves the (n + 1)-probability, but no more. These are the BBGKY equations and are still exact and still not very useful.

The important step is to find out how to proceed from here. The different authors proceeded in slightly different ways. Bogoliubov expanded r in powers of the density, and treated this parameter as a perturbation. Kirkwood used time averaging as a representation of the time spread involved in making a measurement. Born and Green, and also Yvon in a more rudimentary form, used what they called, following Kirkwood, the 'superposition approximation'. This supposed that the higher particle number densities depended explicitly on the lower ones. The simplest choice is to write f₂(z₁,z₂) = f₁(z₁)f₁(z₂) where z denotes the pair q,p, and this leads back to the Boltzmann equation. Born and Green went further, assuming only f₃(z₁,z₂,z₃) = f₂(z₂,z₃)f₂(z₃,z₁)f₂(z₁,z₂)/f₁(z₁)f₁(z₂)f₁(z₃). All of these approximations have their defects, and have been criticised for their rather ad hoc nature. It is sometimes said that this step signals the appearance of irreversibility, because the complete Liouville equation shows no preference for either direction of time, whereas the Boltzmann equation leads to the very fundamental H-theorem – the statement that entropy increases with time. (Boltzmann's suicide is supposed to have been partially caused by the very strong criticism he received following his proof of the H-theorem and his assertion that it was the source of irreversibility.) In the second paper [2] Bert proved, amongst other things, that the H-theorem followed from the superposition approximation. In a his book Molecular Theory of Fluids, he pointed out that, for irreversibility in gas theory, it was necessary to assume binary collisions together with an assumption about 'final encounters'. This was already well-known and not really fundamental enough, so he returned to it in [45], presenting a slightly different definition of H, for which the H-theorem followed more easily.

In [2] and [3], a very important observation was made concerning the difference between gases and liquids, or, in other words, the phenomenon of condensation. Bert observed that as the density of the fluid increased, a mathematical singularity appeared in the equations, and this was interpreted as heralding the onset of condensation. It is this property which still gives the BBGKY equations their significance, for alternative approaches fail in this regard. In [3], the Chapman-Enskog derivation of the equations of hydrodynamics and the coefficients of viscosity from the kinetic theory was presented from a more fundamental basis.

So well constructed were the first three papers on the classical theory of fluids that the transition to quantum theory went through with little fuss. It was possible to construct a quantum version of the equations of hydrodynamics, as well as expressions for the coefficients of viscosity and thermal conduction. The latter have special significance in the behaviour of liquid helium, which is the distinctive quantum fluid, whose paradoxical behaviour results from the special nature of these coefficients. In [5], [7] and [9], Bert showed that quantum mechanical corrections could substantially account for these strange properties. That work had surprisingly little impact, however, and is barely cited. Here Born's comment to Einstein (1) indicates that it missed out in comparison with Landau:

But the use of (sic) helium, which has a liquid phase that behaves curiously, was not as successful as we had hoped. The theory accepted today originated with the Russian Nobel prizewinner of 1962 L.D. Landau.

However it is quite clear that Bert's telling use of density matrix methods set a pattern that was widely followed in all later work.

Although the BBGKY equations went beyond the Boltzmann equation, there was nevertheless still much of interest to be obtained from the latter, particularly when charged fluids were considered. In 1957 Bert was amused to receive a manuscript by J.R. Cotter, who had devoted a large part of his life to trying to solve the Boltzmann equation when the molecules are rigid spheres, something Bert could see could be done much more simply. However he did not publish his solution, leaving it for ten years until a student, P.I. Brooker, took it over as a PhD project culminating in a number of papers, the first of which was [77]. Several times Bert returned to the question of how the Maxwell-Boltzmann equation could best be obtained from the BBGKY equations, both in the classical [71], [79] and quantum form. In the latter case he went beyond the usual rather crude process of simply inserting the quantum-mechanical cross section in the collision integral, and gave a purely quantum-mechanical derivation [32]. As a consequence he found corrections to the standard treatment by Chapman and Cowling.

In 1957, Roy Leipnik, then at the Michelson Laboratory of the US Navy at China Lake, was working on rocket-ground commmunication involving warm plasmas around rockets, and he quickly saw that Bert would be a valuable collaborator. It was natural that someone with Bert's outstanding expertise in the kinetic theory of neutral fluids should be able to consider the case where the fluid can consist of several charged species – a plasma. Bert first visited China Lake in 1958 and made regular visits until 1968. He very rapidly produced a series of papers that extended the theory from neutral to charged fluids: [54] dealt with small disturbances, such as plasma oscillations, in the neighbourhood of equilibrium, [55] constructed the hydrodynamic equations from the micrscopic theory and [59] the thermodynamics. With a student, T. M.L. Wigley, Bert constructed the Boltzmann equation for a charged fluid, with the Coulomb potential replaced by the much more realistic screened Debye potential. This and other work culminated in the book with Roy Leipnik, Sources of Plasma Physics, which brought order to a previously generally scrappily treated subject.

Apart from papers that might be regarded as written in response to practical questions, Bert retained his interest in deeper questions; this is very evident in [66], in which he derives a thermodynamics of complicated systems from general principles. Particular emphasis is placed on describing irreversible processes away from thermodynamical equilibrium but based on the idea that in sufficiently small regions there is equilibrium. Here he is in illustrious company such as Onsager, de Groot, Caratheodory and Born. Again and again we shall see how Bert, even from the remoteness of Adelaide, was prepared to tackle the deepest and most difficult problems of physics. Perhaps people in the bigger centres regarded this as presumptuous.

His early work on kinetic theory, prior to 1960, was presented in book form in several places. The first was the Cambridge collection already referred to, the second was The Molecular Theory of Fluids, originally published by North-Holland in 1952 and then later by Dover in 1969. This book has been very widely cited and is still regarded as the standard account of the kinetic theory of neutral fluids. In 1960 he contributed a chapter, 'The Structure of Liquids', to the prestigious Handbuch der Physik. There were also extensive articles in the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Physics [63] and Research Frontiers in Fluid Dynamics [72].

(b) Statistical mechanics

Although the time-independent solutions of the BBGKY equations were shown by Bert and others to be, via the H-theorem, the well-known Maxwell-Gibbs expressions of statistical mechanics, the latter are much more general in their application. One very important case is the Ising model, which was solved, for the two-dimensional case by Onsager in 1944 in what was, and is still regarded as a tour-de-force of mathematical physics. This is a simple model of a magnetic material consisting of a rectangular array of elementary magnets that can point only up or down, and that can exert simple magnetic attractions on nearest neighbours. The value of this solution is that it gives an exact description of an interacting many-particle system and exhibits a phase transition at a particular temperature, the critical temperature. At this temperature the system changes from one in which the elementary magnets point predominantly up, or predominantly down, to one in which neither direction is favoured. So it describes a change in the material from a state of being magnetized to one in which it is not. As such, it provides deep insights into such important physical phenomena as melting, evaporation, magnetization and quark-gluon plasmas.

Because of the difficulty of Onsager's solution – which was not helped by the well-known obscurity of his writings – there was a need for a simpler treatment. The first people to provide this were Mark Kac and John Ward (5), using a clever combinatorial method based on the properties of determinants. Whilst trying to understand their paper, I constructed a graphical picture that seemed to describe their construction. However when this was shown to Bert, he first pronounced it a very interesting idea, and then later showed that it would not work in all cases. What followed is an illustration of what working with Bert could be like. Despite several urgings from him that this idea should be written up, I did nothing about it, and eventually Bert produced, without any preliminary discussion, a complete manuscript describing a new solution to the Ising problem. To do this he used the mathematical formalism of Pfaffians, which had been introduced by E.R. Caianiello (6) to describe fermions in quantum field theory and had already been used by me, and then the previous difficulty disappeared. The paper [58] made an immediate impact, leading quickly to the first solution of the complete dimer problem by H.N.V. Temperley and M.E. Fisher and P.W. Kasteleyn (7). (Bert independently also solved this problem, but the publication of his solution was delayed until the appearance in 1964 of the book, Order-Disorder Phenomena.)

This solution, eventually called the free fermion field, simplified the solution of the two-dimensional Ising model so much that it could easily be given in an undergraduate course. Ilya Prigogine asked Bert to prepare a review article, and this he started to do in collaboration with me, at a time when I was on sabbatical leave in Edinburgh. In the course of preparing this article, which soon turned into the book already mentioned, all the Ising models that had been solved up till that time were found to be particular cases of the free fermion model. No further essential progress was made in this field until 1967 when Elliott Lieb (8) solved the six-vertex model, leading on to Rodney Baxter's solution (9) of the eight-vertex model and the enormously significant Yang-Baxter relations.

Despite all these new results and the continued reference made to this book in the literature, there is a sense in which this work did not receive the recognition it perhaps should have. The primary reason for this was that a book is not the best medium for publishing new results. By the time the book appeared, many of the results had appeared elsewhere and priority was lost. Also it appeared that the cursory treatment given to approximate methods – included only as an afterthought in response to a request from Prigogine – did not go down well with those who had invested considerable effort in this important part of the understanding of the properties of cooperative systems. As approximate methods were outside the intended scope of the book, it would have been much more politic to have left them out completely.

(c) Quantum field theory and particle physics

In 1939 Born (10) suggested what he called the principle of reciprocity, which proposed that natural laws are symmetric under the interchange of position and momentum co-ordinates. He based this on the fact that the canonical commutation relations of quantum mechanics and the components of angular momentum display this symmetry. This idea was severely criticised by Peierls, who cited in particular that the principle does not apply to translations, as is very evident from the difference between the two in the actual world. Nevertheless Born remained attracted to this idea, which has still some relevance at the present day in the occurrence of 'duality' in string theory – although it is now quite unlike anything Born and his collaborators contemplated. The main idea as expounded in [8], [10]-[13], [18] and [75] was to use this symmetry to constrain the structure of relativistic wave equations, and consequently the possible values of the masses of the mesons known at the time. It was also hoped that this principle would ameliorate, if not remove, the divergences that still plague elementary particle theory. It is clear from Born's letters to Einstein (1) that he was very optimistic about the value of this program:

Now the divergences in quantum mechanics seem to indicate that an absolute length does exist in the world. I presume that this will have to be included in the general transformation group. We have gone to a great deal of trouble over this. My pupil Green, a highly gifted man (whom I am going to send to you in Princeton next year) may possibly make some progress with it; he has good ideas and great mathematical skill.

It is equally clear from Einstein's replies that he had little interest in what he regarded as the very deficient machinery of quantum mechanics.

Like most physicists who worked on particle physics in the 1950s, Bert had a great interest in trying to formulate the equations so as to be free from unacceptable infinities. At that time the work of Dyson, Feynman and Schwinger had shown that these equations could be expressed as a set of integro-differential equations, the Dyson-Schwinger equations, and if these equations could be made to behave, then one had a fundamental theory. Bert wrote several papers, [33], [39], [106] and [125], in which the divergent quantities could be removed, leaving behind some very complicated but putatively finite equations. In the process of doing this, he derived a generalization of the Ward identities, which are some of the most important constraints on the fundamental equations. However his priority in this has been only occasionally recognised, and they are usually called the Ward-Takahashi or simply the Ward identities. This failure to recognise him was a source of the very rare occasions when Bert showed what could almost be described as anger.

In 1953, Bert wrote a short paper [31] which, more than any other of his writings, has made his name widely known. In this paper he described what is known as parastatistics, which is a symmetry extending the well-known Bose and Fermi statistics. Bose statistics apply in particular to photons and are central to the operation of the laser, while Fermi statistics provide the mathematical foundation for Pauli's exclusion principle and hence the structure of the periodic table of elements. Parastatistics can be regarded as interpolating between these two, and for some time it looked as if they were the appropriate language for describing quarks. Even though they missed out on that score, they are still the subject of immense research at the present time, being re-expressed in terms of more and more exotic mathematical schemes. This theory has gradually assumed importance, more as an elegant framework on which to build other algebraic structures. Even since 1989, there have been well over several hundred citations of this single paper. The 'Green Ansatz' which appeared there for the first time is a standard tool in describing what are also called 'Generalised Statistics'. The 'para-Bose' algebra, in particular, can be seen today as an example of a 'Lie superalgebra', although superalgebras were not introduced formally into physics by others until much later (12). For the people, including Bert, who were working in Adelaide in the late '60s, trying to put internal and space-time symmetries together in a non-trivial way, the failure to spot the potential of superalgebras in this connection, rather than Lie algebras, surely represents what Dyson would have called a 'missed opportunity'. As is so often one of the ironies of life, this paper was written whilst Bert was in the midst of what he regarded as much more important work with Harry Messel on cosmic rays, and it was regarded by him as an amusing sideline. The work on cosmic rays is now part of history.

Bert, in association with A.J. Bracken and later P.D. Jarvis, continued to investigate paraparticles and their generalisations as models for the known collection of particles. In the paper [89], they constructed a generalised parastatistics in which the quarks did not have definite isospin or hypercharge. The advantage of this model was that the quark could be regarded as a simple parafermion, so that an additional colour label is not required. However it was a parastatistic model of order 3, and no consistent way of quantising this could be found that would respect the correspondence principle. This led Bert to a further generalisation called modular statistics, [94], [100] and [119], for which a consistent quantisation could be defined. This appeared to be a more economical model of quarks, without the multiplicity of colours. However as quarks are not observed there needs to be some explanation for this, and Bert made the bizarre suggestion that they are tachyons – particles that can travel faster than light, and that are certainly not observed. More conventionally, in association with Peter Jarvis, he constructed a model whereby all the standard particles, including quarks, were composites of modular particles, with quarks being more complex composites than electrons.

The problem of how to describe bound states in quantum field theory was advanced by the appearance of the Bethe-Salpeter equation and the related Wick equation (11), which however did not conform to the standard form of bound-state equations coming from the Schrödinger equation. Bert and S.N. Biswas obtained solutions [44], [46], [76] and [87] without making the usual instantaneous interaction approximation, and Bert showed in [48] that the Wick equation separated nicely in bipolar coordinates, with the consequent appearance of a separation constant called a relativistic quantum number, which might be interpreted as labelling the so-called 'strange' particles L and q. Later on, Biswas and collaborators showed (13) that this separability was due to the symmetry of the Wick equation under the group O(5).

Bert always had a fondness for using the non-compact de Sitter group SO(4,1) in cosmology and in particle physics. In the latter case it appears as the group generated by the G-matrices of the Bhabha equation, and it is this equation (with a modified mass term) that Bert employed to construct equations describing particles of higher spin [102], and in particular charged particles. This is not straightforward because the usual versions of such particles suffer from defects of non-causality and an indefinite metric. However, Bert was able to construct an electrodynamics of charged particles with higher spin [106] that was free from causality defects.

(d) Cosmic rays

The Green-Messel papers were written and published in the early 1950s when not much was known about the interactions of pions with nuclei, although by then the distinction between pions and muons had been demonstrated by C.F. Powell and co-workers. Strange Particles and Associated Production were under discussion, but the particle physics side of cosmic ray studies was still to settle down to the eight-fold way and the eventual quark model.

The theoretical issues of the day were concerned with the development of the cosmic ray cascade in matter in general and the atmosphere in particular. The electromagnetic cascade itself (via bremsstrahlung and pair production) was understood, but the nuclear cascade was still only vaguely understood, as was the way it affected the development of cascades in the atmosphere.

For example, the discovery of the p⁰ and its decay immediately gave a means to feed energy from the nuclear interactions into the electromagnetic cascade. It was not, however, clear how the primary nuclei distributed energy into the secondary nuclear cascade. A common question was whether the pions were produced by 'multiple' or 'plural' production. Angular distributions gave some clues.

Bert and Harry addressed these issues with an essentially analytical approach in [35] and [36]. Later on, cascade calculations used Monte Carlo methods with heavy computer back-up, such as Harry developed with the new Silliac computer. As a result, these papers, although a tour-de-force of mathematical analysis, have been superseded by less elegant methods and much more powerful computing resources. Unfortunately it therefore seems that this work was a decade or so too early, and most of this intense effort was wasted.

(e) Quantum mechanics

Running through most of Bert's work, and particularly in quantum mechanics, was a preference for using algebraic as opposed to analytic methods. Probably his undergraduate background did not develop a feeling for mathematical rigour, and algebraic methods usually gave a better understanding of what the mathematics meant. His book, Matrix Mechanics, which arose out of his third-year lectures but also reflected many of his research techniques, was translated into German, Russian and Japanese as well as appearing in two English printings. This book continues to provide a useful and remarkably compact introduction to quantum mechanics for the beginning student. In it, Bert solved a wide variety of problems in quantum mechanics by purely algebraic methods. Even the fine structure of the energy levels of the hydrogen atom was obtained by such methods, perhaps for the first time. However it is typical of Bert's approach to problem-solving generally that the solutions presented in the book are often not completely rigorous. On a close examination, many subtle difficulties reveal themselves, usually relating to the precise definitions of the algebraic objects being manipulated. But it is also typical that by examining these subtleties and attempting to find out how and why Bert's methods work, one can obtain new insights into the underlying physics as well as the mathematics of the problem at hand.

In 1958 Bert published one of his best papers [53]. It was entitled 'Observation in Quantum Mechanics' and addressed one of the outstanding problems of modern physics, namely the process by which indeterminate superpositions in quantum mechanics become converted to the determinate, although possibly unknown, alternatives of ordinary macroscopic physics. For many years the prescription of von Neumann, usually called the 'collapse of the wave packet', was the accepted view of how this happened. As it assumed that some processes outside quantum mechanics had to be invoked, even going so far as involving the brain of the human observer, people were not comfortable with it, although it seemed the only possible answer. The best known representation of this difficulty appears in the well-known Schrödinger's cat paradox. Bert, together with a number of others such as Wakita and Ludwig, found a much more satisfying explanation, which is basically still the received description, although nowadays in various forms. The idea was to suppose that a measuring apparatus could be of almost any form so long as it was very complicated, that is, contained a very large number (often for mathematical convenience taken to be infinite) of components such as molecules or electrons. The system being measured could be microscopic. When the two systems interact, any 'interference terms' in the state of the microscopic system become vanishingly small purely as a consequence of the size of the measuring instrument. There are, of course, many processes in nature in which a human observer is not involved – especially before homo sapiens evolved – and the von Neumann description is quite unable to say how these could happen. However with Bert's theory all one has to do is to replace the measuring apparatus by the environment to bring about the necessary disappearance of interferences. The only place where this very satisfactory explanation might run into some difficulty is in the early evolution of the universe, where there is no environment!

From his work with Born, Bert became convinced that quantum mechanics could only properly be discussed when states are described by density matrices rather than wave functions. (Perhaps even that can be a bit restrictive, as for example when dealing with supplementary conditions.) The paper just described emphasised the fact that the state of the measuring apparatus could not be known exactly, and a density matrix must be used. On a more general level, he presented an abstract formulation of quantum mechanics in terms of semi-groups [113] – he also considered semigroups in [108] – with states being given by density matrices. In the spirit of the comments made above, there is no attempt here to discuss the topological requirements of this theory, so it is not clear what sort of algebra of quantum variables is actually being defined.

(f) General relativity and gravitation

Although Bert wrote only three papers that could be clearly classified under this heading, they are so interesting that they deserve a separate classification. Bert had strong views about gravitation and cosmology, insisting right up to his last book that physicists were in error in not confining themselves to the de Sitter universe and de Sitter group.

In the first paper [51], he tackled the problem that occupied Einstein in the latter years of his life, namely to construct a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. His approach was the opposite of that usually followed. Instead of setting up a gravitation theory and then incorporating the Dirac equation, he started with the Dirac matrices, spinors and Lagrangian, and from them constructed the metric tensor and the total Lagrangian including gravitation. The latter step is commonplace now under the heading of local gauge invariance, but it was quite unfamiliar at the time. But not only did this gauge-invariant Lagrangian include gravitation, it also contained the electromagnetic field! In a follow-up paper [52], Bert showed that this theory admits teleparallelism, meaning that vectors can be parallel transferred around the space, even though it is not flat. It also describes mesonic fields in addition to gravitation and electromagnetism. Bert never seemed to have followed up this paper, although several thesis projects came out of it.

(g) Mathematical methods

All the people who worked with Bert speak of his very strong mathematical ability, and there are at least fifteen of his papers that can be classified as mathematics rather than physics. But Bert was in no sense a mathematician, and would not have wished to be regarded as such. As Freeman Dyson in his talk to the Australian Academy of Science at its jubilee meeting in 1979 would describe it, Bert was engaged in what G.H. Hardy called 'schoolboy mathematics'. This is not as pejorative as it sounds, because he was in the company of almost all theoretical physicists. As already remarked in subsection (e), he was not concerned with nice points of mathematical rigour but rather with obtaining results. So long as the problems were essentially finite-dimensional or involved analytic functions, there was little to worry about, and his most elegant work was in this field. Also his collaborators Tony Bracken, Peter Jarvis and Denis O'Brien, having been educated under a more modern syllabus, were able to sound warning bells if necessary.

The schoolboy mathematics that Dyson referred to was mainly centred around the problem of how to classify the very large number of 'elementary' particles that appeared in the 1950s and later. The appropriate mathematical tools for this were finite-dimensional Lie algebras and their representations, and their study required expert and often ingenious algebraic manipulations – right in Bert's field. In collaboration with Tony Bracken, he developed what they called characteristic identities that are analogous to the more elementary Cayley-Hamilton theorems of matrix algebra [83], [84] and [95]. These identities are a very powerful tool for constructing representations of Lie algebras, and have applications to parastatistics [85]. They can be generalised to Lie superalgebras, [109] and [120], which had been found essential for the non-trivial combination of internal and space-time symmetries and particle physics.

(h) Environmental physics

On one of his regular visits to the United States, Bert became involved in studies in environmental physics, and his paper [90] discussed the spreading of pollutants. His extensive experience in kinetic theory and fluid dynamics was important in constructing the correct equations describing this process. The classical diffusion equation needed to be supplemented by the stochastic theory of Brownian motion. This work led to a dramatic confrontation with the South Australian government in 1984, following a decision by that government to construct a large petrochemical complex at Redcliff at the northern end of Spencer Gulf. The principal product of this enterprise would be dichlorethane, a rather nasty substance, and there was a risk that in loading this on to ships there could be spills into the gulf.

At the time Bert was a member of the Board of Environmental Studies at the University, which oversaw the work of the Department of Environmental Studies, under the direction of Dr J.R. Hails. This was a postgraduate department, and students were expected to undertake research in some environmental project. Bert suggested that a study could be made of the Redcliff project because he had been told about its possible hazards by Professor Rainer Radok, Head of the Horace Lamb Institute at Flinders University. Because of his previous work in this area, Bert eventually took over the study and wrote a submission to the Redcliff Environmental Inquiry in which he pointed out that the dangers were so real that the project should be discontinued. This caused such a stir that he appeared on the ABC television program, 'The 7.30 Report'. This report concluded with Bert sitting in a small and unsteady dinghy in the middle of Spencer Gulf with the ABC reporter Pru Goward, and saying in response to her asking what would happen if a spill occurred that 'Whyalla and Port Augusta would have to be evacuated'. He left for the United States shortly after appearing on this program, and the South Australian government felt obliged to reply. The relevant Minister, Roger Goldsworthy, cast doubt on Bert's report and interviewed comments, saying that they were nonsense. I regarded this as professional libel and contacted the ABC. I spoke to a very nervous Pru Goward, who was well aware of the ABC's vulnerability. I then wrote a letter to the Minister, taking strong exception to the tone of his remarks, and eventually received a three-page reply defending the Government's position and which was almost entirely beside the point. The letter was clearly written by a scientist but not an environmental physicist, and it later emerged that it had been written by a pair of chemists from Michigan, USA, who had been contracted by the South Australian Government. The final irony was that the chemists contacted Bert in the United States, asking his advice on the problem! The conclusion of the whole matter was that the petrochemical project at Redcliff was abandoned, and nothing further has been heard of it. This incident is a very good example of how independent academics can provide advice that is free from contractual pressures. It is to be regretted that now such independence is rapidly disappearing. This will be a cost to the community.

(i) Biological and neurophysiological models

Professor Terry Triffet met Bert at a Quantum Chemistry and Biology Workshop at Sanibel Island, Florida, in 1963 and began a friendship and collaboration that lasted until Bert's death. Among many common interests, the most fruitful was their belief in the influence quantum effects had on mental processes. Initially they concentrated on developing the mathematical, physical and chemical tools that they knew would be required [81], [97]-[99]. Here they looked at a model of a 'small interconnected group of neurons' from the point of view of the electrochemical dynamics, using Hamiltonian and matrix-operator notation. As this was unfamiliar to the neuroscience community, it was initially regarded with considerable suspicion. With the development of computing capacity, they were able to provide a sound basis for neural modelling by applying the laws and methods of theoretical and mathematical physics. The 'small interconnected group of neurons' was modified to represent 'unit circuits' known to constitute primary functional units throughout the brain, and these were interconnected to form an extensive network capable of simple image recognition and certain other simple basic brain processes.

As their methodology allowed them to extend the model into the quantum realm, they could bring digitalised information to bear on their linearised macroscopic model, leading to the concept of 'computing the uncomputable'. This led to the treatment of computational brain processes as a 'quantal Turing machine' and finally to a general theory of how the mind operates by gaining and creating information. This was all summarised in their book Sources of Consciousness, published in 1997. While far from a complete model of the mind's operation, the theory remains unique in its mathematically structured incorporation of physical laws and biochemical facts to describe interactions within the brain, extending from the quantally dependent interactions of metastable ions in the membrane channels of neurons, to the interactions of currents flowing in networks of these neurons with the electromagnetic fields they generate.

For some time Bert and Terry were convinced that the processes by which nerve signals were propagated could be explained by a Hamiltonian model of nonlinear oscillators, rather than by the opening and closing of membrane ion channels as proposed by Hodgkin and Huxley. However this part of their theory had to be recast when it became clear from experimental evidence that ion channels did exist and could open and close by way of conformational changes in proteins embedded in the membrane

There is an unpublished paper, 'Formation and Impairment of Sequential Memory: A Contribution from a Case of Transient Global Amnesia', that was written in response to a transient ischemic attack which Bert suffered in 1990 whilst attending a lecture at the University of Arizona. For a period of nine hours he suffered what is commonly called a 'black-out', and when he awoke the next morning, he had no memory from the middle of the lecture until 9 pm. His experience was incorporated into their model of brain processes.

The whole course of their investigations is described in twenty five papers [111], [112], [114], [115], [121]-[123], [126]-[131], [135], [136], [138], [140]-[144] and [149]-[151].

Personal Aspects

It is clear from what has been written here – which covers only a part of Bert's published scientific work – that he was a scientist of extraordinary breadth and depth. There was nothing routine or pot-boiling about any of his publications, so that even in areas such as general relativity, in which he published little, he produced material that could prove fertile for many years. In the preparation of this memoir, I received reports from a wide variety of people who found themselves both baffled and enormously impressed by Bert. The word 'genius' keeps appearing in comments by people who would not be expected to speak extravagantly. There are some reasons which can account for these strong reactions. First of all, Bert had a privileged upbringing in so far as he was a very talented only child, and although he always had a very friendly nature, he was perfectly satisfied with his own company. This self-isolating tendency was exacerbated when he started to go deaf in his twenties, which meant that his social exchanges became much less easy. For students this would mean a remoteness that they would find very hard to bridge, and for colleagues a difficulty in free exchange of ideas. So scientific discussions with him were rarely of the kicking-the-ball-around type, but rather a formulation of the problem, after which Bert would disappear, to return next morning, say, with it all worked out. Sometimes his solution would not be correct, and it could be quite tiring convincing Bert to change because, like most people, he did not take kindly to being corrected, and he could be very stubborn. Tony Bracken puts it admirably:

Sometimes his ideas were wrong, but he had the magical gift that, when he was wrong, it was almost always wrong in an interesting way. Those who worked with Bert sometimes had the feeling that our main task was to keep the locomotive on the rails. It was no good saying to Bert, 'I think this is wrong'. He would just say 'Oh?' and shrug. The only thing that worked was to produce a counterexample; then he would alter track slightly, and by repetitions of this process you could gradually come to a satisfactory conclusion.

Most of the time, though, the solution would be both ingenious and complete, bringing in ideas from unexpected directions. Bert had a very wide range of knowledge and could call up the relevant parts without difficulty, and with great clarity and cogency. He did not appear to search around for the correct path to a solution, so that there was rarely much sign of the usual false starts and well-filled waste paper basket. His use of University of Adelaide examination booklets, 16-page blue paper covered foolscap, in which to write his notes almost without blemish and apparently straight out, was legendary. Beginning research students repeatedly told of having a problem suggested to them, and of being given an examination booklet setting out in impeccable style, and in characteristic semi-neat writing, all the relevant points.

This leads to the most puzzling question of all when considering Bert's career. Despite his great scientific productivity and originality, he did not receive the sort of recognition that would be expected. There were no honorary doctorates, no elections to foreign scientific societies and academies (including the Royal Society of London), no invitations to give plenary addresses or to act as rapporteur at conferences, and no memberships of international committees. His deafness must not be discounted in considering his disinclination to feature at international meetings. It is not generally appreciated how disabling deafness can be in so much of ordinary intercourse. For example, on one occasion Bert gave an important seminar at Princeton that went well until question time, when, because he could not hear the questions, he simply smiled and nodded, giving the impression to the audience that he was not really on top of his subject. He was very reluctant to say that he was deaf, so people who did not know him would think he was very slow.

He was often invited to accept positions in the United States, both before coming to Adelaide and after, but he refused them all, saying that he much preferred the lifestyle of Adelaide, both at the University and elsewhere, and that his scientific work could function perfectly satisfactorily there. There is no doubt from his record that that is true, but there is also no doubt that his occasional visits to the United States and Europe were not sufficient to make a big impact on the international scene. Added to this was his very wide interests, which prevented him from making a strong impact in any one area, especially in such a highly competitive area as particle physics and field theory. His strongest reputation is undoubtedly in kinetic theory, in which he published not only fundamental papers, but also very highly regarded books and monographs. He was not particularly upset or bitter about his lack of recognition, feeling that he was very fortunate to do the things he wanted to do, surrounded by very bright young students, with periodic overseas visits to keep in touch. He certainly had no wish to push himself forward in any administrative role, no matter how prestigious. He took on the Presidency of the Australian Mathematical Society out of a sense of duty, and worked very hard then to assist Soviet refusniks. In the same way he took on the job of Dean of the Mathematical Sciences Faculty at Adelaide, and membership of Academy Sectional Committees, but had no interest in being on the University or Academy Councils.

At a personal level, Bert is remembered, despite his apparent remoteness, with great respect and often affection by those who worked with him, as students or as colleagues and often as both. Like a lot of people with introverted personalities, he found it easier to get on with extroverts as they would make most of the running. Two traits of his character that commanded great respect were his absolute integrity and his moral courage. He had very clear ideas about acknowledgement of other people's work, often to the extent of citing papers that were only marginally related to what he had done, and firm views about serving out a proper time after a job had been taken on. So not only did his students receive fine training in research but they were also given guidance on how to behave in later life. These instructions were given by example rather than precept.

As already mentioned, although Bert was not an athlete, he was a tremendous walker and he knew the Adelaide Hills and Flinders Ranges very well. He also walked extensively around Tucson, climbing the 2885m Mt Wrightson at the age of 67. Despite his deafness he was a very keen and discriminating concert goer, this being recognised by the choice of music at his funeral and memorial services. His favourite hobby was the game of Go, regarded by Japanese as their especial province so that defeat by a non-Japanese was a very serious matter. So it was not surprising that from time to time Bert would have to be regarded as an honorary Japanese in order for his opponent not to lose face. He organised a Go club in Adelaide, which used to meet regularly at his home.

Once when he was quite ill with a viral disease, and not able to concentrate on his beloved mathematics, Bert decided to write a detective novel. Instead of composing it as he wrote, he worked out the complete story, complete with racy dialogue, in his mind and then typed it out. He submitted the story to Penguin publishers but they did not accept it, and he did not bother any further. The manuscript is still in existence and it would be interesting to see whether a posthumous spy novel would have a sale now.

With the very strong support of his wife, Marlies, he made a point of regularly entertaining members of the department at their home. This produced a marvellous spirit within the department which had a great influence on the students. Even though the department no longer exists, this influence is still very noticeable in Australia, where so many of its graduates have risen to responsible positions. Bert always considered the existence of the Department of Mathematical Physics to be as great a contribution to the development of Australian science as his own research publications. Because of its special origin and the unique way in which Bert and his colleagues set it in motion, it was always regarded by the rest of the University with a mixture of pride, incomprehension and envy. Henry Basten, former Vice-Chancellor of Adelaide, once referred to it as the jewel in Adelaide's crown. Consequently it was a continuing source of sadness to Bert in his final years that what he had worked so hard to create should have been virtually destroyed, despite being given a resounding commendation by the Review Committee set up in 1984 to make recommendations for its future.

Bert was always a committed socialist of the Fabian variety and so believed in rule by an enlightened minority, sometimes being scornful of the 'tyranny of the majority'. His son, Roy, felt compelled at times to argue strongly that socialism not based on true democracy would be a stunted and dangerous form of political organization. Bert's answer to this was that no decisions of any significance should be left in human hands, and that artificial intelligence, rather than the market place, would be our saviour.

When Bert was in Dublin, he got to know de Valera well, because the latter, though president of the republic, maintained an interest in theoretical physics throughout his life – so much so that he intervened constantly in the seminar program that Bert co-ordinated, and if he had some political objection or score to settle he would strike the offending invitees off Bert's list! Despite their difference in age and religious belief, the two had many political views in common. Although Bert's religious views were agnostic, he believed in toleration and supported his daughter Johanne's marriage taking place in her husband's church, recognising its importance to him. Bert meditated regularly for the last half of his life. This was more for health and relaxation purposes than as any particular religious practice. He did, however, have some respect for certain aspects of Buddhism and at times referred to himself as a Humanist.

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the contributions made to this memoir by the twenty-five people who responded to my invitation to write about their association with Bert. They provided me with a wonderful range of impressions of Bert as an outstanding scientist, as a kindly mentor and as a warm and constant friend. I particularly want to thank his wife Marlies and children Roy and Johanne for details of their family life, and their experience of living in Adelaide. Professors Leon Bowden and Alister McLellan and Mr Arthur Birt were very helpful about Bert's life before coming to Adelaide, providing some very enjoyable lighter touches which were very revealing of sides of Bert's character. Professor Terry Triffet gave me a definitive account of their work together on neurophysiology and Professors David Hoffman, Tony Bracken and John Prescott helped to set Bert's work in the context of present knowledge. The detailed accounts of Bert's work from Associate Professors Peter Jarvis and Robin Storer were also much appreciated. Without their help I would have found it almost impossible to assimilate and judge the extraordinarily wide corpus of Bert's scientific writings.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.13, no.3, 2001. It was written by Angas Hurst, Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics, University of Adelaide.

Numbers in brackets refer to the references, and numbers in square brackets refer to the bibliography.

References

1. The Born-Einstein Letters (Macmillan, 1971).
2. N.N. Bogoliubov, J.Phys. (U.S.S.R.) 10, 256 (1946). An English translation is given in Studies in Statistical Mechanics, Vol.I (North-Holland, 1962).
3. J.G. Kirkwood, J.Chemical Physics 14, 180 (1946).
4. J. Yvon, La Théorie Statistique des Fluides et l'Equation d'État. Actualités Scientifique et Industrielles # 203 (1935).
5. M. Kac and J.C. Ward, Phys.Rev. 88, 1332 (1952).
6. E.R. Caianiello, Nuovo Cimento 11, 492 (1954).
7. H.N.V. Temperley and M.E. Fisher, Phil.Mag. 6, 1061 (1961); P.W. Kasteleyn, Physica 27, 1209 (1961).
8. E.H. Lieb, Phys.Rev. 162, 162 (1967).
9. R.J. Baxter, Ann.Phys. 70, 192 (1972).
10. M.Born, Proc.Roy.Soc.Edin. A59, 219 (1939).
11. E.E. Salpeter and H.A. Bethe, Phys.Rev. 84, 1232 (1951); G.C. Wick, Phys.Rev. 96, 1124 (1954).
12. J. Wess and B. Zumino, Nucl.Physics B70, 39 (1974).
13. D. Basu and S.N. Biswas, J.Math.Phys. 11 (1970).

Curriculum vitae

• Visiting Professorships, Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Florida, Michigan State University and University of Arizona.
• Fellow, Australian Academy of Science 1954–99.
• Fellow, Australian Institute of Physics.
• Life Member, Australian Mathematical Society (Vice-President 1973–74 and 1976–77; President 1974–76).
• Life Member, Royal Zoological Society of South Australia.
• Editorial Boards: (sometime member and chairman) Australian Journal of Physics; (sometime member) International Journal of Engineering Science; (member) Mathematical and Computer Modelling.

Bibliography

Books

• M. Born and H.S. Green, A General Kinetic Theory of Liquids (Cambridge University Press, 1949).
• H.S. Green, Molecular Theory of Fluids, 264pp. (North-Holland Publishing Co., 1952).
• H.S. Green, 'The Structure of Liquids', Handbuch der Physik, 10, 1–133, (1960).
• H.S. Green and C. A. Hurst, Order-Disorder Phenomena, 363pp. (Interscience Publishers, London, 1964).
• H.S. Green, Matrix Mechanics, 118 pp. (P.Noordhoff Ltd., Groningen, 1965).
• H.S. Green, Research Frontiers in Fluid Dynamics, Ch. 4: Molecular Theory of Fluids, 105–143 (Editors, Seeger and Temple) (Interscience, New York, 1965).
• H.S. Green, Quantenmechanik in Algebraischer Darstellung, 106pp. (Springer, Berlin, 1966).
• H.S. Green, Matrichnaya Kvantovaya Mechanika, 163pp. (Ed. A.A. Sokolov) (Izdat. 'Mir', Moscow, 1968).
• H.S. Green, Matrix Methods in Quantum Mechanics (Barnes and Noble, New York, 1968).
• H.S. Green and R. B. Leipnik, Sources of Plasma Physics, 630pp. (Wolters-Noordhoff, Groningen, 1970).
• H.S. Green, Matrix Methods in Quantum Mechanics (Japanese edition, with additional material) (Kodansha, Tokyo, 1980).
• H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Sources of Consciousness (World Scientific, Singapore, 1997).
• H.S. Green, Information Theory and Quantum Physics: Physical Foundations for Understanding the Conscious Process (Springer, Berlin, 1999).

Journal Articles

(Letters in parentheses refer to corresponding sections in the above discussion of Green's scientific work.)

• [1] M. Born and H.S. Green, A General Kinetic Theory of Liquids I: The Molecular Distribution Functions. Proc. Roy. Soc. A188, 10–18 (1946).(a)
• [2] H.S. Green, A General Kinetic Theory of Liquids II: Equilibrium Properties. Proc. Roy. Soc. A189, 103–117 (1947).(a)
• [3] M. Born and H.S. Green, A General Kinetic Theory of Liquids III: Dynamical Properties. Proc. Roy. Soc. A190, 455–473 (1947).(a)
• [4] M. Born and H.S. Green, A General Kinetic Theory of Liquids IV:Quantum Mechanics of Fluids. Proc. Roy. Soc. A191 168–181 (1947).(a)
• [5] M. Born and H.S. Green, Quantum Theory of Liquids. Nature 159, 738–739 (1947).(a)
• [6] M. Born and H.S. Green, A General Kinetic Theory of Liquids V: The Kinetic Basis of Thermodynamics. Proc. Roy. Soc. A192, 166–180 (1948).(a)
• [7] H.S. Green, A General Kinetic Theory of Liquids VI: Liquid Helium II. Proc. Roy. Soc. A194, 244–258 (1948).(a)
• [8] H.S. Green, The Relativistic Quantum Mechanics of the Elementary Particles. Proc. Cambridge Phil. Soc. 45, 263–274 (1948).(c)
• [9] H.S. Green, Liquid Helium II, Nature 161, 391 (1948).(a)
• [10] M. Born and H.S. Green, Quantum Theory of Rest-Masses. Proc. Roy.Soc. Edin. A62, 470–488 (1949).(c)
• [11] H.S. Green, Recent Developments in the Theory of Elementary Particles, British Science News 3, 91–92 (1949).(c)
• [12] H.S. Green, Quantized Field Theories and the Principle of Reciprocity, Nature 163, 208 (1949).(c)
• [13] H.S. Green, On the Self-energies of Orthodox Quantum Mechanics, Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. A1197, 73–89 (1949).(c)
• [14] H.S. Green, The Equations of State in Quantized Kinetic Theory and Quantum Statistical Mechanics. Physica 15, 882–890 (1949).(a)
• [15] H.S. Green, The Kinetic Theory of Elasticity and Viscosity in Liquids. Proceedings of the International Congress on Rheology, Holland 1948, I, 12–28 (North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1949).(a)
• [16] H.S. Green, Remarks on a Paper by Riddell and Uhlenbeck, J. Chem.Phys. 18, 1123 (1950).(a)
• [17] H.S. Green, The Quantum Mechanics of Assemblies of Interacting Particles. J. Chem. Phys. 19, 955–962 (1951).(a)
• [18] H.S. Green and K. C. Cheng, The Reciprocity Theory of Electrodynamics. Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin. A63, 105–138 (1951).(c)
• [19] H.S. Green and H. Messel, Differential Cross-Section for High Energy Nucleon-Nucleon Collisions. Phys. Rev. 83, 842–3 (1951).(d)
• [20] H. Messel and H.S. Green, Mean Square Angle of Emission of Nucleons in High Energy Nucleon-Nucleus Collisions. Phys. Rev. 83, 1279 (1951).(d)
• [21] H.S. Green, The Quantum Mechanical Partition Function. J.Chem.Phys. 20, 1274 (1952).(b)
• [22] H.S. Green, The Second Virial Coefficient near Absolute Zero. Proc. Phys. Soc. A65, 1022 (1952).(a)
• [23] H.S. Green and H. Messel, The Lateral Spread of Cosmic Ray Showers in Air and Lead. Phys. Rev. 85, 679 (1952).(d)
• [24] H.S. Green and H. Messel, On the Spread of the Soft Component of the Cosmic Radiation. Phys. Rev. 88, 331 (1952).(d)
• [25] H.S. Green and H. Messel, On the Theory of the Angular and Lateral Spread of the Nucleon Component of the Cosmic Radiation. Proc. Phys. Soc. A65, 689 (1952).(d)
• [26] H.S. Green, H. Messel and B. A. Chartres, The Angular Distribution Functions for High Energy Cosmic Ray Particles. Phys. Rev. 88, 1277 (1952).(d)
• [27] H. Messel and H.S. Green, The Angular Distribution of Scattered Nucleons in High Energy Nuclear Collisions. Proc. Phys. Soc. A65, 245 (1952).(d)
• [28] H. Messel and H.S. Green, High Energy Nuclear Collisions and the Fermi Model. Phys. Rev. 87, 378 (1952).(d)
• [29] H. Messel and H.S. Green, The Angular and Lateral Distribution Functions for the Nucleon Component of the Cosmic Radiation. Phys. Rev. 87, 738 (1952).(d)
• [30] H.S. Green, First-Order Meson Wave Equations. Phys. Rev. 89, 965 (1953).(c)
• [31] H.S. Green, A Generalized Method of Field Quantization. Phys. Rev. 90, 270–273 (1953).(c)
• [32] H.S. Green, Boltzmann's Equation in Quantum Mechanics. Proc. Phys. Soc. 66, 325 (1953).(a)
• [33] H.S. Green, A Pre-Renormalized Quantum Electrodynamics. Proc. Phys. Soc. A66, 873 (1953).(a)
• [34] H.S. Green and E. Wolf, A Scalar Representation of Electromagnetic Fields. Proc. Phys. Soc. A66, 1129 (1953).(g)
• [35] H.S. Green and H. Messel, On the Expansion of Functions in Terms of their Moments. Quarterly of Applied Mathematics 11, 403–409 (1953).(g)
• [36] H. Messel and H.S. Green, The General Three-Dimensional Theory of Cascade Processes. Proc. Phys. Soc. A66, 1009 (1953).(d)
• [37] H. Messel and H.S. Green, A Suggested Scheme for Meson Production, Phys. Rev. 89, 315 (1953).(d)
• [38] E. Wolf and H.S. Green, A Scalar Method for the Investigation of Electromagnetic Fields. Canadian Journal of Phys. 31 (1953).(g)
• [39] H.S. Green, Integral Equations of Quantized Field Theory, Phys.Rev. 95, 548 (1954).(c)
• [40] H.S. Green and O. Bergmann, Core Structure in Soft Component Showers. Phys.Rev. 95, 516 (1954).(d)
• [41] I. E. McCarthy and H.S. Green, A Method for the Solution of Nuclear Bound-State Problems. Proc. Phys. Soc. 67, 719 (1954). (c)
• [42] H.S. Green, Goldstein's Eigenvalue Problem. Phys. Rev. 97, 540 (1955).(c)
• [43] H.S. Green, Covariant Treatment of the Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction. Proc. Phys. Soc. A68, 577 (1955).(c)
• [44] S. N. Biswas and H.S. Green, Radially Symmetric Solutions of Bethe-Salpeter Equation. Nuclear Phys. 2, 177–187 (1956).(c)
• [45] H.S. Green, Molecular Theory of Irreversible Processes in Fluids, Proc. Phys. Soc. B69, 269–280 (1956).(a)
• [46] H.S. Green, Cell and Cell-Cluster Models for Liquids, J. Chem.Phys. 24,732–737 (1956).(a)
• [47] H.S. Green, Renormalization with Pseudo-Vector Coupling, Nucl.Phys. 1,360–362 (1956).(c)
• [48] H.S. Green, Separability of a Covariant Wave Equation, Nuov. Cim. 5, 866–871 (1957).(c)
• [49] H.S. Green and S. N. Biswas, Covariant Solutions of the Bethe-Salpeter Equation, Prog. Theor. Phys. 18, 121–138 (1957).(c)
• [50] H.S. Green and C. A. Hurst, Parity Mixtures and Decay Processes. Nucl. Phys. 4, 589–598 (1957).(c)
• [51] H.S. Green, Spinor Fields in General Relativity. Proc. Roy. Soc. A245, 521–535 (1958).(f)
• [52] H.S. Green, Dirac Matrices, Teleparallelism and Parity Conservation. Nucl. Phys. 7, 373–383 (1958).(f)
• [53] H.S. Green, Observation in Quantum Mechanics. Nuov. Cim. 9, 880–889 (1958). (e)
• [54] H.S. Green, Propagation of Disturbances at High Frequencies in Gases, Liquids and Plasmas. Physics of Fluids 2, 31–39 (1959).(a)
• [55] H.S. Green, Ionic Theory of Plasmas and Magnetohydrodynamics. Physics of Fluids 2, 341–349 (1959).(a)
• [56] H.S. Green, Normalization and Interpretation of Feynman Amplitudes. Nuov. Cim. 15, 416 (1960).(c)
• [57] H.S. Green and R. B. Leipnik, Exact Solution of the Association Problem by a Matrix-Spinor Method, with Applications to Statistical Mechanics. Rev.Mod.Phys. 32, 12 (1960).(b)
• [58] C. A. Hurst and H.S. Green, New Solution of the Ising Problem for a Rectangular Lattice. J. Chem. Phys. 33, 1059 (1960).(b)
• [59] H.S. Green, Statistical Thermodynamics of Plasmas. Nucl. Fusion 1, 69 (1961).(a)
• [60] H.S. Green, Theories of Transport in Fluids, J. Math. Phys. 2, 344 (1961).(a)
• [61] H.S. Green, Proton-proton Scattering at Relativistic Energies. Nucl. Phys. 27, 405–414 (1961).(c)
• [62] H.S. Green, The Long-Range Correlations of Various Ising Lattices. Zeits. f. Physik 171, 129–148 (1962).(b)
• [63] H.S. Green, seven articles contributed to Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Physics, Pergamon, Oxford (1961–2).(a)
• [64] H.S. Green and R. G. Storer, Kinetic Theory of Second Order Effects in Fluids. Proc. International Symposium on Second Order Effects in Elasticity, Plasticity and Fluid Dynamics, Haifa 1962, 31–42 (Pergamon, Oxford, 1962).(a)
• [65] H.S. Green and R. G. Storer, Theory of Higher Order Effects in Fluids. Phys. of Fluid 5, 1212–1218 (1962).(a)
• [66] H.S. Green, Thermodynamics of Complicated Systems. Int. J. of Engineering Science 1, 5–22 (1963).(a)
• [67] H.S. Green, Plasma Dynamics and Thermonuclear Reactions. Atomic Energy 6, 2–6 (1964).(a)
• [68] H.S. Green, Structure and Energy Levels of Light Nuclei. Nuclear Physics 54, 505–515 (1964).(c)
• [69] H.S. Green, Lambda-Nucleon Forces and Structure of Hypernuclei. Nuclear Phys. 57, 483–492 (1964).(c)
• [70] H.S.Green, Theory of Reciprocity, Broken SU(3) Symmetry and Strong Interactions. Proc.International Conference on Elementary Particles, Kyoto, 159–169 (1965).(c)
• [71] D. K. Hoffman and H.S. Green, On a Reduction of Liouville's Equation to Boltzmann's Equation. J. Chem. Phys. 43, 4007–4016 (1965).(a)
• [72] H.S. Green, Research Frontiers in Fluid Dynamics, Ch.4: Molecular Theory of Fluids, 105–143 (Editors, Seeger and Temple) (Interscience, New York, 1965).(a)
• [73] H.S. Green, Integral Equations for Distribution Functions in Fluids. Physics of Fluids 8, 1–7 (1965).(a)
• [74] H.S. Green and R. B. Leipnik, Diffusion and Conductivity of Plasma in Strong External Fields. Intern. Jnl. of Engineering Sci. 3, 491–514 (1965).(a)
• [75] H.S. Green, Theory of Reciprocity, Broken SU(3) Symmetry, and Strong Interactions, Proc. Int. Conf. on Elementary Particles, 159–169, Kyoto, 1965; Prog.Theor. Phys., Kyoto (1966).(c)
• [76] H.S. Green and S. N. Biswas, Singularities of a Bethe-Salpeter Amplitude, Phys. Rev. 171, 1511 (1968).(c)
• [77] H.S. Green and P. Brooker, An Exact Solution of Boltzmann's Equation for a Rigid Sphere Gas, Aust. J. Phys. 21, 543–61 (1968).(a)
• [78] H.S. Green and D. Hoffman, Self-Consistent Approximations in Kinetic Theory, J. Chem. Phys. 49, 2600–2609 (1968).(a)
• [79] H.S. Green and T.M.L. Wigley, New Kinetic Equations for Plasmas. Physics of Fluids 11, 2771–2773 (1968).(a)
• [80] H.S. Green, Symposium on Kinetic Equations, Ch.1, The Kinetic Basis of Thermodynamics, 166–180 (Editors, Liboff and Rostoker) (Gordon and Breach, 1969).(a)
• [81] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Codiagonal Perturbations, J. Math. Phys. 10, 1069–1089 (1969).(g)
• [82] H.S.Green, Self-consistent kinetic equations, 3–19 (a)
• [83] A. J. Bracken and H.S. Green, Vector Operators and a Polynomial Identity for SO(n). J. Math. Phys. 12, 2099–2111 (1971).(g)
• [84] H.S. Green, Characteristic Identities for Generators of GL(n), O(n) and Sp(n). J. Math. Phys. 12, 2107 (1971).(g)
• [85] A. J. Bracken and H.S. Green, Algebraic Identities for Parafermi Statistics of Given Order. Nuov. Cim. 9A, 349 (1972).(g)
• [86] H.S. Green, Parastatistics, Leptons and the Neutrino Theory of Light. Prog. Theor. Phys. 47, 1400–1409 (1972).(c)
• [87] H.S. Green and S. N. Biswas, Recent Developments in the Bethe-Salpeter Equation. Fields and Quanta 3, 241–261 (1972).(c)
• [88] H.S. Green and J. R. Casley-Smith, Calculations on the Passage of Small Vesicles across Endothelial Cells by Brownian Motion. J. Theor. Biol. 35, 103–111 (1972).(i)
• [89] A. J. Bracken and H.S. Green, Parastatistics and the Quark Model. J. Math. Phys. 14, 12 (1973).(c)
• [90] H.S. Green, Pollution by Diffusive Processes. In Pollution: Engineering and Scientific Solutions (Ed. E.S. Barrekette) (Plenum, New York, 1973).(h)
• [91] H.S. Green, G. R. Anstis and D. K. Hoffman, Kinetic Theory of a One-Dimensional Model. J. Math. Phys. 14, 1437 (1973). 101 of U(3), Int. J. Theor. Phys. 11, 157–73 (1974).(a)
• [92] J. A. Campbell, H.S. Green and R. B. Leipnik, Bootstrap Equations with Restricted SU(3) Symmetry and the Cabibbo Angle. Phys.Rev. D9, 2451–2455 (1974).(c)
• [93] H.S. Green and A. J. Bracken, Angular Momentum in Tensor Representations of U(3), International Journal of Theoretical Physics 11, 157–173 (1974).(g)
• [94] H.S. Green, Quantization of Fields in Accordance with Modular Statistics. Aust. J. Phys. 28, 115–125 (1975).(c)
• [95] H.S. Green, Spectral Resolution of the Identity for Matrices of Elements of a Lie Algebra. J. Aust. Math. Soc. 19B, 129–139 (1975).(g)
• [96] H.S. Green and J. Casley-Smith et al., The Quantitative Morphology of Skeletal Muscle Capillaries in Relation to Permeability. Microvascular Research 10,43–64 (1975).(i)
• [97] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, An Electrochemical Model of the Brain: General Theory and the Simple Neuron. J. Biol. Phys. 3, 53–76 (1975).(i)
• [98] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, An Electrochemical Model of the Brain: Collective Behaviour, Irreversibility and Information. J. Biol. Phys. 3, 77–93 (1975).(i)
• [99] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Quantum Mechanics and the Brain. Int.J. Quantum Chem: Quantum Biology Symp. 2, 289–296 (1975).(i)
• [100] H.S. Green, Generalized Statistics and the Quark Model. Aust. J.Phys. 29, 483–488 (1976).(c)
• [101] H.S. Green, C. A. Hurst and Y. Ilamed, The State Labelling Problems for SO(N) in U(N) and U(M) in Sp(2M). J. Math. Phys. 17, 1376–1382 (1976).(g)
• [102] H.S. Green, Field Theory of Particles with Arbitrary Spin. Aust.J. Phys. 30, 1–14 (1977).(c)
• [103] H.S. Green, Energy and Australia–Japan Relations. Pp.81–88 in Australia–Japan Relations Symposium (Eric White Associates, Canberra, 1977).(h)
• [104] H.S. Green, Quantum Mechanics of Space and Time. Foundations of Physics 8, 753–591 (1978).(e)
• [105] H.S. Green, Quantum Electrodynamics of Particles of Arbitrary Spin. Aust. J. Phys. 31, 219–231 (1978).(c)
• [106] H.S. Green, J. F. Cartier and A. A. Broyles, Electron Propagator without Renormalization. Phys. Rev. D18, 1102–1109 (1978).(c)
• [107] H.S. Green, Distribution of Arrival Times in Cosmic Ray Showers. Adv. Appl. Prob. 10, 730–735 (1978).(d)
• [108] H.S. Green, Semigroups in Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. Structures of Time and Space 3, 183–194 (1979).(c)
• [109] P. D. Jarvis and H.S. Green, Casimir Invariants and Characteristic Identities. J. Math. Phys. 20, 2115–2122 (1979).(g)
• [110] S. Vaccaro and H.S. Green, Ionic Processes in Excitable Membranes. J. Theor. Biol. 81, 777–802 (1979).(i)
• [111] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Mathematical Modelling of Nervous Systems. Math. Modelling 1, 41–61 (1980).(i)
• [112] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, Information and Energy Flow in a Simple Nervous System. J. Theor. Biol. 86, 3–44 (1980).(i)
• [113] H.S. Green, Semigroups and the Density Matrix Formulation of Quantum Mechanics. Int. J. Quantum Chem. 17, 121–132 (1981).(e)
• [114] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Non-linear Ion Dynamics. Dynamical Systems 2, 80–91 (1981).(i)
• [115] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Ionic Currents in the Debye Layer, Mathematical Modelling 3, 161–178 (1982).(i)
• [116] H.S. Green, Colour Algebras and Generalized Statistics. Pp.346–350 in Lecture Notes in Physics 180: Group Theoretical Methods in Physics (Springer, Berlin, 1983).(g)
• [117] H.S. Green, Entropy and Human Activity
  in Environment and Population: Problems of Adaptation. (Ed. J. B. Calhoun), 85–89 (Praager Publishers, New York, 1983).(h)
• [118] H.S. Green, Go and Artificial Intelligence. Ch. 9, pp. 141–151, in Computer Game-Playing: Theory and Practice (Ed. M. A. Bramer), (Ellis Horwood, Chichester, 1983).(g)
• [119] H.S. Green and P. D. Jarvis, Generalised Statistics and the Rishon Hypothesis. Aust. J. Phys. 36, 123–126 (1983).(c)
• [120] H.S. Green and P. D. Jarvis, Casimir Invariants, Characteristic Identities and Young Diagrams for Colour Algebras and Superalgebras. J. Math. Phys. 24, 1681 (1983).(c)
• [121] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Calcium Dynamics at a Plastic Synapse in Aplysia. J. Theor. Biol. 100, 649–674 (1983).(i)
• [122] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, in Membrane Permeability: Experiments and Models. (Ed. A. H. Bretag), 31–35 (Techsearch, Adelaide, 1983).(i)
• [123] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, Ionic Currents and Field Effects in Neural Extracellular Spaces. In Nonlinear Electrodynamics In Biological Systems (Eds. W.R. Adey and A.F. Lawrence), (Plenum Pulishing Co., 1984).(i)
• [124] H.S. Green, Fluid Transport Processes in Upper Spencer Gulf. Marine Geology 61, 181–195 (1984).(h)
• [125] J. F. Cartier, A. A. Broyles, R. M. Placido and H.S. Green, Finite, Unrenormalized, Non-Perturbative Solution to the Schwinger-Dyson Equations of Quantum Electrodynamics. Phys. Rev. D30, 1742–1749 (1984).(c)
• [126] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, Mathematical Modelling of the Cortex. Mathematical Modelling 5, 383–399 (1984).(i)
• [127] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Extracellular Fields within the Cortex. J. Theor. Biol. 115, 43–64 (1985).(i)
• [128] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Electromagnetic Waves in Cortex Layers. Winner of Best Paper Award and Maxwell Prize in Proceedings, 5th International Conference on Mathematical Modelling, Berkeley, August 1985 (Pergamon, 1985).(i)
• [129] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, Information Transfer by Electromagnetic Waves in Cortex Layers. J. Theor. Biol. 131, 199–221 (1988).(i)
• [130] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Information Processing by the Cortex. Comput. Math. Appl. 15, 743–756 (1988).(i)
• [131] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, Information Transfer in the Cortex. Mathl. Comput. Modelling 11, 832–836 (1988).(i)
• [132] A.J. Bracken, H.S. Green and L. Bass, Groups Defined on Images in Fluid Diffusion. J. Austral. Math. Soc. B30, 101–119 (1988).(i)
• [133] L. Bass, A.J. Bracken and H.S. Green, Boundary Layers and Images in Dispersed Flow Reactors: A Green's Function Approach. Chemical Engineering Science 43, 1583–1590 (1988).(i)
• [134] L. Bass, H.S.Green and H. Boxenbaum, Gompertzian Mortality Derived from Competition Between Cell Types: Congenital, Toxicologic and Biometric Determinants of Longevity. J. Theor. Biol. 140, 263–278 (1988).(i)
• [135] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, A Zonal Model of Cortical Functions. J. Theor. Biol. 136, 87–116 (1989).(i)
• [136] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, Unit Circuit Neural Networks of the Cortex. Mathl. Comput. Modelling 12, 673–694 (1989).(i)
• [137] H.S. Green, A. J. Bracken and L. Bass, Harmonic Functions Satisfying a Radiation Boundary Condition. Computers Math. Applic. 22, 23–38 (1991).(g)
• [138] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Quantum Mechanics, Real and Artificial Intelligence. Aust. J. Phys. 44, 323–334 (1991).(i)
• [139] H.S. Green, A. J. Bracken and L. Bass, Harmonic Functions Satisfying a Radiation Boundary Condition. Computers Math.Applic. 122, 23–38 (1991).(g)
• [140] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, A Model of an Artificial Electrochemical Synapse. Intelligent Engineering Systems Through Artificial Neural Networks (C.H. Dagli, L.I. Burke and Y.C. Shin, Eds.) 12, 51–60 (ASME Press, New York, 1992).(i)
• [141] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Modelling Intelligent Behavior. Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures 4, 35–42 (1993).(i)
• [142] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, Structured Neurobiological Networks. Mathl.Comput. Modelling 17, 75–88 (1993).(i)
• [143] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, Development of an Electrochemical Transistor for Use as an Artificial Synapse. Proc. of Third International Conference on Microelectronics for Neural Networks, 195–205 (Univ. of Edinburgh Technologies Ltd., Edinburgh, 1993).(i)
• [144] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, Artificial Neural Processing. Mathl. Comput. Modelling 18, 1–18 (1993).(i)
• [145] H.S. Green, A Cyclic Symmetry Principle in Physics, Aust. J. Phys. 47, 25–43 (1994). (e)
• [146] H.S. Green, Statistical Symmetries in Physics, Aust. J. Phys. 47, 109–122 (1994). (e)
• [147] H.S. Green, Contiguity and the Quantum Theory of Measurement, Aust. J. Phys. 48, 613–633 (1995).(e)
• [148] S. N. Biswas and H.S, Green, Symmetry Breaking by Deformations, J. Phys. A28, L339–342 (1995).(c)
• [149] T. Triffet and H.S. Green, Consciousness: Computing the Uncomputable. Mathl. Comput. Modelling 24, 37–56 (1996) (i)
• [150] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, The Cortex as a Quantal Turing Machine. The Mathematical Scientist 21, 73–84 (1996).(i)
• [151] H.S. Green and T. Triffet, The Animal Brain as a Quantal Computer. J.Theor.Biol. 184, 385–403 (1997).(i)
• [152] H.S. Green, Quantum Theory of Gravitation. Aust. J. Phys. 51, 459–475 (1998).(f)

Unpublished Manuscripts

(In Green Papers, Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics, University of Adelaide.)

1. H.S. Green, On the Foundations of Mathematical Logic.
2. H.S. Green, Generation of Small Random Numbers.

Written by L.C. Birch and T.O. Browning.

Abstract

Herbert George Andrewartha was born in Perth on 21 December 1907, the second of three children of George and Elsie Andrewartha. His father was a primary-school teacher, later a headmaster. The family moved often to country towns in Western Australia where his father was posted, but they maintained a base in a small farm at Gosnells, about 40 km from Perth. At the end of his primary schooling, Andrewartha was awarded a scholarship to Perth Modern School. He took up residence at the Gosnells home and lived alone. He travelled 5 km on horseback and 40 km by train each day to school. After several years, when his father retired to work the farm, his parents and two sisters returned. Andrewartha remained closely attached to his family throughout his life. His younger sister, Bon, died soon after marrying but his elder sister, Ethel, survived him. He was always very proud of her self-taught musical ability, taking an interest in the choral groups she led and for which she composed. He himself was tone deaf!

On completing his secondary schooling in 1924, Andrewartha was awarded a cadetship with the Western Australian Department of Agriculture and enrolled at the University of Western Australia, where in due course he took his Bachelor's degree in Agriculture. During his secondary schooling, and at University, he took little part in the social or sporting life because of the long journeys each day, but he played cricket and football for the local Gosnells teams, and tennis on a court made of clay from termite mounds - perhaps this led to his interest in insects. In any event, he continued to play tennis on his own grass court until he was laid low by a stroke a few years after his retirement in 1972.

After graduation, Andrewartha began work as Assistant Entomologist in the Department of Agriculture under the supervision of L.J. Newman, who had recently come to Western Australia from the Burnley School of Horticulture in Melbourne. He commenced a study of a weevil, Otiorrhynchus cribricollis, that infested fruit trees and this established his interest in the detailed analysis of life-cycles and behaviour of insects and in the phenomenon of 'diapause', in which an individual ceases morphological and reproductive development for a period and usually becomes highly resistant to inclement weather.

In 1933, Andrewartha took up a post in Melbourne with the CSIR as Assistant Research Officer and became part of a group of biologists studying the biology of the apple thrips, Thrips imaginis, which at that time was devastating apple crops in southern Australia. He worked in the School of Agriculture and Forestry at the University of Melbourne under the direction of Professor (later Sir) Samuel Wadham and was able to complete a thesis for which he was awarded the degree of Master of Agricultural Science. Through this work he met, worked with and married Hattie Vevers Steele, another young biologist.

In 1935, Andrewartha and his new wife moved to Adelaide, to the Waite Agricultural Research Institute, to join Professor James Davidson who was himself engaged in studies on T. imaginis. Andrewartha took some part in these studies, as did his wife for a time, but his main duties were the study of the plague grasshopper, Austroicetes cruciata, which was destroying field crops in South Australia and Western Australia in those days.

The plague grasshopper lived in the marginal farming areas of South Australia, lands where the mean annual rainfall was only just or not quite sufficient for growing wheat and the variability was great. Thus drought was frequent, and during the Great Depression much of the land had become badly eroded due to excessive cropping. Studies on the grasshopper entailed long journeys, often over very rough country, in a specially equipped utility truck – Andrewartha always carried two lengths of roof guttering-iron to help him negotiate landhills! His farm background and his innate ability to improvise enabled him to negotiate these trips without serious mishap, with his wife as diary-keeper and cook. However, on one occasion, when they did not arrive back in Adelaide as expected, Davidson asked the Australian Broadcasting Commission to send out a request for their whereabouts, which they did during a broadcast of a test-match, much to Andrewartha's chagrin! The broadcast stated that Andrewartha and his wife were last seen at Mount Hopeless!

In 1946 Professor Davidson died suddenly leaving unanalysed fifteen years of records of the numbers of thrips. Davidson and Andrewartha had discussed these data in detail over the years and had consulted E.A. Cornish of CSIR's Mathematical Statistics Section on the appropriate statistical analysis. So it was that Andrewartha was in a position to direct the very laborious statistical procedures, to appraise the results and to write the two papers that appeared under their joint names. These papers were to cause much controversy and were to be the forerunners of Andrewartha's general theory of population ecology.

At this time, Andrewartha made his first journey overseas, visiting England and the United States, where he met many of the influential scientists working with insects and in ecology. On his return, he wrote a review of the importance of diapause in enabling insects both to synchronise their life-cycles with the changing seasons and to persist in adverse conditions, and thus of its ecological significance. He also put forward a theory of the physiological nature of diapause but, unlike most of his work, this was based on inadequate data and did not stand up to critical analysis - a cautionary tale of entering into fields where one is insufficiently informed. We see similar instances when people, distinguished in other fields, pronounce on matters ecological.

Davidson and Andrewartha had been deeply engaged in an attempt to account for the often violent fluctuations in the numbers of individuals in populations. After Davidson's death, Andrewartha joined forces with his former graduate student, L.C. Birch, in a determined effort to construct a theory that would illuminate and unify the multifarious studies that had been published. The result was The Distribution and Abundance of Animals, which appeared in 1954. It was this book that established their reputations in the vanguard of population ecologists.

Soon after the publication of this book, Andrewartha moved from the Waite Institute to the Zoology Department of the University of Adelaide to become Reader-in-Charge of a small Unit of Animal Ecology, set up by Professor W.P. Rogers with financial support from CSIRO. Although Andrewartha while at the Waite Institute had taken a close interest in the work of the younger members of staff, and of the few postgraduate students in the Entomology Department, and had done some stints of lecturing, especially in statistics, he had not been in a position actively to supervise students nor to develop a course in ecology. So, on his move to Zoology, he began to set up a final-year unit in Animal Ecology and to gather round him a group of honours and postgraduate students. The undergraduate work was a considerable challenge because it is fair to say that no course in experimental ecology existed at that time, and Andrewartha was determined to introduce his students to the study of the distribution and abundance of animals through laboratory and field experiments that could be achieved within the restrictions of undergraduate time-tables. He also set out to design each exercise to be amenable to an appropriate statistical analysis, something with which zoology departments, at that time, were not at all familiar. His lectures were, of course, based on The Distribution and Abundance of Animals, but this was much too formidable a book for undergraduates, and contained a good deal of material that he did not consider relevant to his course. The result was the publication in 1961 of his Introduction to the Study of Animal Populations, a book containing a section on the theoretical treatment of populations and another consisting of a series of experiments, complete with representative data (much of which had been collected in his classes) and the detailed appropriate statistical analyses set out and explained. This course continued to attract large numbers of students until his retirement.

In 1962, Professor Rogers resigned from the Chair of Zoology and Andrewartha was appointed in his place. This was near the beginning of the great increase in funds available for postgraduate study, and so it was that during his tenure of the Chair, a large and flourishing school of research students and postdoctoral workers was built up. His agricultural background and his strong belief that good fundamental studies could always be done using animals of economic importance, either beneficial or detrimental, led most of his students into studies on abundant animals of importance in agriculture, medicine or households. A steady stream of PhD's emerged from the Department to go out into academia, industry or government research with thorough backgrounds in the theory and practice of experimental ecology, on which ideas like sustainable agriculture and forestry and conservation of natural resources depend.

The Distribution and Abundance of Animals had emphasised the importance, in trying to elucidate the causes of fluctuations in numbers, of a knowledge of certain aspects of the physiology of the animal being studied, and also of its behaviour. The Department of Zoology was fortunate in having strong groups in the early days in parasite physiology and biochemistry and in reproductive physiology, which helped broaden Andrewartha's understanding of these topics, to the benefit of his ability as a supervisor, and of his own thinking.

Andrewartha was a strong personality with strong convictions. He had very definite views about the supremacy of science as a way of thinking. This coloured much of his conversation with students and colleagues. The big difference of opinion he had with the so-called density-dependent school of regulation of animal numbers was due, he felt, to a misunderstanding on their part of the role of induction and deduction in science. He never accepted the premises that the density-dependent school regarded as fact. This misunderstanding was so important that he included a substantial statement on induction, deduction, hypothesis formation and theory in the book, The Ecological Web, that he later wrote with Birch.

Because of his strongly stated views, some people regarded him as somewhat abrasive or even pig-headed. Others found his position a wonderful anvil on which to hammer out their own views. The climax of the dispute between the density-dependent school and supporters of Andrewartha's views came at the 22nd Cold Spring Harbor Symposium in 1957 on 'Population Studies: Animal Ecology and Demography'. The symposium was largely organized by Theodosius Dobzhansky for the purpose of reconciling the opposing factions. The public dispute between Andrewartha and A.J. Nicholson became highly charged and personal, much to the dismay of the Americans in particular. Dobzhansky went away more confused than ever about these argumentative Australians.

Andrewartha's greatest influence was with his students, particularly his graduate students. They quickly warmed to his sincerity, humour and kind attention. Those whom he set on their life's path remained steadfast colleagues of his for the rest of their careers. They felt they had a mission to fulfil in making better understood the ecological thinking that had been so important for themselves. There was also a substantial group of ecologists, particularly in the Netherlands and the USA, who found in Andrewartha's theories concepts that guided their own research. Professor Daniel Simberloff, in writing the citation for the eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America for 1988 to Andrewartha and Birch, said:

Both men have worked specially with insect populations, but their insights have informed our field to the extent that the "Andrewartha-Birch school" connotes a widely recognized viewpoint and suggests a distinctive research protocol. The Distribution and Abundance of Animals was the landmark synthesis of field population ecology that inspired a generation widely credited with constructing modern ecology...Their field and laboratory efforts were the starting points for a more general theory of population ecology that culminated in The Ecological Web...Andrewartha and Birch have been consistent skeptics, continually confronting fashionable models with hard-won field data on specific organisms...Their skepticism implies neither hostility to theory nor failure of their own viewpoint to evolve...Largely because of their books, Australian systems and Australian ecological research are part of the common vocabulary of ecologists throughout the world.

Andrewartha was ably supported by his wife Vevers until she died some years before his death. She was an entomologist and for some years worked on the embryology of the grasshopper Austroicetes cruciata when Andrewartha had this species as his main ecological project. She was always the gracious hostess at the many evening discussions of Honours and graduate students at their home in Netherby, near the Waite Institute. Together they worked long hours in their very large garden and looking after their grass tennis court, which was usually the venue of tennis games for friends throughout the tennis season.

Long before automatic garden watering systems had been invented, Andrewartha invented his own for their large garden. It was very much a 'Heath-Robinson' sort of contraption but it worked. Andrewartha was skilled at inventing all sorts of contraptions for the laboratory and field work as well. Scarcely any bit of laboratory equipment would come into the laboratory that 'Andy' did not alter and improve in some way. He designed the fine set of temperature controlled cabinets in his laboratory. On one occasion, when he was visiting Thomas Park at the University of Chicago, the Parks' toilet flushing system stopped working. Much to Tom's surprise, Andy got to work. It was going again in no time. 'Do all Australians do these sorts of things?' asked the somewhat abashed American host.

Especially in his younger days in Adelaide Andrewartha took a close interest in left-wing political matters. He was also active in the professional organizations associated with science and agriculture. He was a committee member of the Federation of Scientific and Technical Workers, a group interested in the working conditions of scientists and technicians, and he was active in and at one time president of the local branch of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science. His presidential address to the branch was a polemic about the laissez-faire system of farming, which he thought had been largely responsible for the devastating soil erosion that had occurred during the droughts of the 1930s. Later he resigned from the Society because he disagreed with a new policy of advocating studies in Agriculture as a profession, when the Society took no responsibility for the future employment of those who were influenced by its advocacy.

He was active in the conservation movement in its early days, being elected president of the Nature Conservation Society of South Australia, and was, for six years, chairman of the National Parks and Wildlife Advisory Council of South Australia.

Andrewartha shared (with L.C. Birch) the David Syme Prize of the University of Melbourne, the Clarke Medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales and the Verco Medal of the Royal Society of South Australia. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1961. In 1987 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Ecological Society and in the following year was named (together with L.C. Birch) 'Eminent Ecologist of the Year' by the Ecological Society of America.

Andrewartha suffered a serious stroke in 1975 which left his left arm paralysed. However, with great fortitude and patience and helped by his inventive genius, he largely overcame the disabilities of this stroke and wrote his last book with Birch while still recovering. He died on 27 January 1992 at the age of 84, after a long illness that followed a broken knee sustained in a fall at his home. He is survived by his son Graeme and daughter Susan Dutch.

Scientific research

Andrewartha's first work was a study of aestivation of adults of the beetle Otiorrhynchus cribricollis in Western Australia. This became part of a later interest in the dormant phases of stages in the life-histories of insects. With CSIR in Melbourne he began work on the ecology of Thrips imaginis, a pest of some fruits. This work was to continue with Professor James Davidson as one of a number of projects when he moved to the Waite Institute in Adelaide. However, his first major research programme at the Waite Institute was on the population ecology of the plague grasshopper, Austroicetes cruciata, on which he published some dozen papers. In the 1960s he developed a programme in conjunction with J. Munro and N.L. Richardson on the use of sterile males to control populations of the Queensland fruitfly Dacus tryoni, which was a possible threat to fruit growing in the southern States if it became established there.

Two general principles motivated his ecological research. In the first place he was dedicated to doing something useful as well as adding to basic scientific information about the ecology of animals. Curiosity alone was not a sufficient reason for him to embark on a research programme. All the animals he worked with were of agricultural importance. He was convinced that success in helping the 'useful arts', as he called them, depended upon the quality of basic scientific research. The useful arts that depend on the science of ecology include the control of pests, the conservation of wildlife and the management of game. All these activities have a common goal, to control or to manipulate the reproduction and the life-expectancy of the animals in a natural population so that the density of the population remains between certain pre-determined limits.

Secondly, all his research was to contribute to a general theory of population ecology. Population ecology was a term coined by Thomas Park in Chicago. Andrewartha preferred to say that he was working on the principles that governed the distribution and abundance of animals. This phase comes directly from Charles Elton's classic Animal Ecology published in 1927. It became the title of his first book (with L.C. Birch) in 1954. Whether he used the phrase population ecology or the distribution and abundance of animals, Andrewartha made a clear distinction between the study of the ecology of a single species and community ecology. He was never persuaded that community ecology would contribute substantially to the science of ecology.

As he pursued his interests on the principles governing the distribution and abundance of animals, he was to find that in general the best work was done on animals that were either pests or were animals managed as game. This is borne out in the preponderance of examples from these areas in the book The Distribution and Abundance of Animals. It was simply true that the best work was in these areas. Much of it was done in Australia.

Andrewartha's long-term study on the ecology of Thrips imaginis was done in collaboration with Professor James Davidson. Davidson died in 1945, but their major findings on Thrips were published in two classical papers in the Journal of Animal Ecology in 1948. These were to be the focus of much debate amongst ecologists for years to come. The work on both Austroicetes and Thrips led Andrewartha and Davidson to develop a theory of population ecology that was at variance with the conventional wisdom of the day. Following Davidson's death, Andrewartha collaborated with a former student of his, L.C. Birch (who was no longer in Adelaide but at the University of Sydney), in further developing a theory of population ecology. This theory, together with supporting data and arguments, was published in two books jointly authored by Andrewartha and Birch, The Distribution and Abundance of Animals in 1954 and The Ecological Web in 1984.

The ecology of Thrips imaginis

The basic data for the ecology of Thrips was a daily estimate of their numbers in the rose garden of the Director's residence at the Waite Institute for fourteen years, together with daily meteorological data recorded in the meteorological station at the Waite Institute, just by the rose garden. Fourteen years is an unusually long time for the study of any population of animals, but such a long time turned out to be critically important in the analysis of the data. The method of partial regression was used to analyse the data in attempting to explain what were the main components of the environment that could account for the day-to-day and season-to-season changes. This was the first time partial regression had been used in population ecology. The regressions included the following independent variates: rainfall and temperature for each of the three days preceding the sampling of the population, the maximum temperature and rainfall for the day immediately before the day the population was sampled. These independent variates were chosen on the basis of what was known about the biology of Thrips. Food was not included in the analysis as it was never in short supply.

Some 78 per cent of the variance was accounted for by four quantities that were calculated entirely from meteorological records. This left virtually no chance of finding any other systematic cause for variation, since 22 per cent is quite a small residuum to be left as due to random sampling errors. All the variation was attributed to causes unrelated to the density of Thrips. Not only did Andrewartha find no 'density-dependent factor', but he claimed there was no room for one. This was the aspect of the analysis that created much discussion and controversy, since the dominant school of population ecology claimed that the numbers in natural populations can be regulated only by density-dependent factors. In their absence, the numbers were supposed to go on increasing without limit or to decrease to extinction. Neither of these things happen in the case of Thrips, since the seasons subject Thrips to a period that is favourable for increase in numbers to be followed by a season that is very unfavourable. One important reason why Thrips does not become extinct in the area studied is the heterogeneity of the places where it may live. It may become extinct in one locality only for this to be colonized again from a locality where it has not become extinct.

Andrewartha's conclusions about Thrips went against the conventional wisdom that dominated population ecology at the time. The two conclusions that the numbers of Thrips can be explained by the succession of good and bad seasons and by the heterogeneity of places where they lived, became central to the general theory of population ecology that Andrewartha was developing.

The ecology of Austroicetes cruciata

The ecology of this plague grasshopper was studied by Andrewartha, from 1935 to 1942 together with James Davidson, and with L.C. Birch. The life-cycle is characterized by an intense obligate diapause or state of dormancy in the egg stage. Consequently there is only one generation each year. Since diapause in the egg was critical to understanding the ecology of the grasshopper, Andrewartha studied the influences that determined the stage of onset of diapause and the influences that ended diapause. Soon after being laid, the embryos inside the egg developed up to an early stage, after which obligate diapause ensued. The embryo remained in that state during the winter. A particular sequence of cold temperature was responsible for the resumption of development at the end of the winter.

In this study, the numbers of grasshoppers were not determined precisely as was the case with Thrips. Qualitative or subjective estimates were made. It became clear quite early in the study that dryness during the spring was critical in determining the number of grasshoppers that survived in any year. In some seasons the drought was so severe that grasshopper populations crashed and only a succession of good years to follow enabled numbers to become abundant again. During drought years the stocks of food ran out, not because they were eaten by grasshoppers but because drought made the grass useless as food for grasshoppers. The supply of food was unrelated to the number of grasshoppers.

The rate of increase of grasshoppers was not determined by density-dependent factors, yet their numbers did not go on increasing to the limit of their resources of food. Calamity in the form of drought overtook the grasshoppers before this could happen. This sort of calamity occurred with a certain frequency that was calculated from the meteorological records. Grasshoppers became extinct in many localities during a dry season. However, some always survived in more favourable places. It was from these places that new colonies could be set up in subsequent years. Grasshoppers never became extinct over the whole range of their distribution. The explanation of numbers of Austroicetes was strikingly similar to the case with Thrips, and once again it challenged conventional wisdom about what determined the numbers of an animal.

Austroicetes was distributed in a belt of country that had been cleared of its native vegetation of plants such as saltbushes, which are not food for grasshoppers. However, the grasses that took the place of the original vegetation were suitable food for grasshoppers. Much of this country was marginal wheat country, and much of it had been abandoned for growing wheat. There was then a simple ecological solution to getting rid of grasshoppers, and that was to return the country to its original saltbushes. However, that turned out to be unacceptable politically and perhaps economically.

Diapause

Andrewartha's study of diapause in the eggs of Austroicetes led him to an intensive study of diapause in general amongst insects, as is indicated by the long chapter on the subject in The Distribution and Abundance of Animals. His study was the most complete that had ever been made up to that time. An important contribution of this study was his discovery that diapause in the egg stage characterized the life-history of plague grasshoppers around the world. These are grasshoppers that do not migrate. They cope with the hostile season by going into diapause. Locusts on the other hand were thought not to have a diapause at any stage and to cope with the hostile season by migrating huge distances. Andrewartha was able to study this on the spot in South Australia where the locust Chortoiocetes terminifera had its 'outbreak' areas in the northern desert of the state, from which the population at long intervals spilled over in huge migratory swarms to the southern areas of Australia. Most of the locusts did not survive long in these places, but some did. Andrewartha reasoned that eventually some of their descendents managed to get back to the dry outbreak areas where populations were permanent. This helped them to be permanent inhabitants of these places. Andrewartha assembled a great deal of data indicating that with plague grasshoppers, diapause in the egg enabled them to survive in the inhospitable season, and that with locusts, migration from inhospitable areas enabled them to remain extant. More recent work has shown this concept not to be as clear-cut as Andrewartha thought, though the two mechanisms of survival are well recognized.

The Queensland fruitfly Dacus tryoni

In most parts of Australia, with the exception of the central and western deserts and southern Tasmania, the climate is hospitable for the Queensland fruitfly. Its distribution, however, is much more restricted. This is probably due to the absence of a succession of fruits. Before fruit trees were cultivated in Australia, Dacus was restricted to tropical and sub-tropical forests. With the cultivation of fruit trees, it spread south as far as eastern Victoria. Occasionally, infested fruit has been found on trees further west and around Adelaide. In temperate areas, the chance of a female finding a mate becomes quite small during two periods. The over-wintering population of adults is quite small and is widely dispersed in a few sheltered localities. In early spring, the first generation that arises from the over-wintering adults is also small and dispersed. Moreover, most of the newly emerged adults leave the locality in which they originated.

Because of these facts, Andrewartha surmised that early spring would be a strategic time to liberate sterile flies with the objective of flooding the population with sterile males and so reducing the chance of females finding fertile males, a technique for the control of populations that had recently been proposed, and tested, by E.F. Knipling of the United States Department of Agriculture. This appealed to Andrewartha as a possible method of control, particularly in areas that might become newly colonized by the insect such as Victoria and South Australia.

Andrewartha, J. Munro and N.L. Richardson worked out a strategy for the control of fruitflies by releasing huge numbers of sterile males. Many millions of flies were bred in Sydney and pilot experiments were done in towns in western New South Wales. The work had to be terminated before it could be demonstrated that the method was economically feasible, though initial results were encouraging. The work is important as it was the first attempt to use this technique in Australia and showed its feasibility, if sufficient funds could be found to breed and release the huge numbers of insects needed.

General theory of the distribution and abundance of animals

The general theory of the distribution and abundance of animals was based on the original field studies of Andrewartha, Davidson and Birch, together with the analysis of many case-histories of the ecology of animals, many of them from Australia. In the course of these investigations, Andrewartha spent much time working through the data of other investigators who had accumulated a great deal of information but had never put it together in the form of a general theory. This applied, for example, to the work in the CSIRO on the European rabbit in Australia, on waterfowl and on the Australian magpie. In working on these case-stories and many others, Andrewartha not only made the work in question more accessible to ecologists but put it together in the context of a general theory. The results of this work were published in the two books with L.C. Birch, The Distribution and Abundance of Animals and The Ecological Web.

The central proposition of the theory is that the numbers of an animal (and therefore its distribution and abundance) depend upon its chance to survive and reproduce, which in turn depends on the animal's environment. It follows that the ecologist needs to have precise ways of defining and measuring the chance to survive and the chance to reproduce, and secondly to have a precise definition of environment and its components. The precise meaning of and measurement of the chance to survive and reproduce were established in The Distribution and Abundance of Animals. The meaning of environment was developed in the same book but became much more refined thirty years later in The Ecological Web. Indeed, this latter work presented the results of many years of discussion between Andrewartha, Birch, T.O. Browning and B.S. Niven. It was a unique contribution and basically different from what most ecologists had been working with.

The problem was how to define environment and how to split it up into components that did not overlap. The environment is not just anything that happens to be around the animal. It is anything that influences an individual's chance to survive and/or to reproduce. The word 'individual' is critical. In this theory there is no such thing as the environment of a population, for every individual may exert an influence on every other individual. The concept of the environment of the individual contrasts with the then current concept of the environment of the population. The importance of defining environment in terms of the individual took a long time to catch on and is still rejected by many ecologists. In these deliberations Andrewartha aimed to discover a precise and completely unambiguous way of defining each component of environment. This had never been done before. Terms such as 'biotic' and 'physical' were hopelessly imprecise. It was for this reason that he welcomed the contribution of Susan Niven, who used the symbolism of formal logic for this purpose. Her somewhat complex formal procedure was included as an Appendix in The Ecological Web.

The definition of the components of environment is summarised in Table 1.01 in The Ecological Web. This is a 2´2 table with four compartments depending on (a) the reaction, either negative or positive, of the component to the animal and (b) the response of the animal, either negative or positive, to the component. This gives four 'directly acting' components: resources, mates, malentities and predators. Anything that influences the activity of the directly-acting components is not in this centrum of directly acting components but is part of a web of influences extending outwards from the centrum. 'Malentity' is a rather new idea, and 'resource' has a more restricted meaning than is general in ecology.

The Ecological Web introduced the idea of the 'envirogram'. This is a diagram for the animal that shows the directly-acting components as the proximate causes of the condition of the animal, and the distal components as a web extending outwards from the directly-acting components. It shows any interactions there may be between components, and is basically simple to look at. This contrasts with the complicated flow diagrams that ecologists had up to then constructed.

The definition of environment, the analysis of the components and the envirogram were the subject of enthusiastic acceptance by some ecologists, but the object of much criticism by others. One problem was that you had to know quite a lot about your animal before you could correctly decide which were the four directly-acting components and which were the indirectly acting ones. Also, to get there required a lot of careful thought. While this turned out to be stimulating for some students, it proved too strenuous for others. Some critics so misunderstood the meaning of the envirogram that they incorrectly said it failed to show interactions. It is too early to say to what extent this analysis will be accepted by population ecologists, though there are some fine examples of its application by others, particularly in the ecology of birds, and Susan Niven has used it in her studies of a wide range of invertebrates and vertebrates.

A second main plank of the general theory is that populations are multipartite, that is to say the population is subdivided into local populations where environments differ widely. Moreover, each local population may be genetically different. The extent of dispersal from one local population to another is very important in understanding the dynamics of the whole process and its outcome. In The Ecological Web the term used for this was 'spreading the risk', which was proposed by P.J. den Boer of the Netherlands to indicate the way in which heterogeneity between local populations could confer stability and persistence in the natural population. The concept of the multipartite population and spreading of risk was illustrated by diagrams in both The Distribution and Abundance of Animals and The Ecological Web, each diagram representing a different way in which spreading of risk operates.

Andrewartha considered that the general theory of population ecology set out in these two books replaced the conventional wisdom that populations have to be regulated by density-dependent factors such as competition. He was happy to use the word competition when one genotype was shown to be superior to another, but in other contexts he felt the word confused or obscured what was happening. This again was quite a radical idea that was in opposition to conventional ecological thinking.

The general theory of population ecology that Andrewartha developed with his colleagues held that any component of environment could play a part in determining numbers, preventing numbers from increasing indefinitely and preventing extinction of the natural population as a whole. Each component of environment could be assigned a probability, none was completely deterministic. This was a probabilistic as contrasted with a deterministic approach. It was clearly in conflict with the widely held theory that populations could only be controlled by density-dependent factors and represented by deterministic models.

Unfortunately, the theory was widely misconstrued by some of its critics who supposed that it claimed that so-called density-dependent factors played no part in the regulation of animal numbers. On the contrary, according to the theory these took their place with all other components, as should have been clear from the examples given in which predators were critical in determining numbers. The arguments that ensued resulted in Andrewartha writing quite a lot about the role of induction, deduction and theoretical models in scientific method (e.g. pages 187-191 in The Ecological Web).

Andrewartha was convinced that the study of community ecology had not contributed to understanding the causes of the distribution and abundance of animals. He hoped that population ecology (the study of single species) would eventually displace studies in community ecology.

Andrewartha held that the first requirement of an ecologist was to be a good naturalist. You have to know something about your organisms before you can start to make theories about them. He was not opposed to theory but he was opposed to theories that made gross abstractions from the real world and seemed to depend little if at all on data from the field, going only to the field or the literature to find results that seemed to conform to the conclusions of the theoretical model. In his opinion the theoretical models of his day left out of account the idea of the multipartite population and the heterogeneity of the environment. This made them useless except for theoretical exercises in mathematics.

Andrewartha's contribution to population ecology was largely spread through the two books written with Birch. The Distribution and Abundance of Animals was widely used in ecology courses, particularly in the USA, and influenced a whole generation of ecologists. The influence of The Ecological Web has yet to be assessed. Andrewartha paid great tribute to Charles Elton, who put animal ecology on the map in the United Kingdom, particularly for his workmanlike approach to what ecology was about. The two differed greatly on the value of community ecology. Andrewartha had great respect for the work directed by Harry Smith at the Citrus Experiment Station at Riverside in California and used many of these studies in his writings. He was influenced in later years by the work of den Boer and his students in the Netherlands.

There is a sense in which Andrewartha's contribution to population ecology was ahead of its time. The conventional wisdom was against it. The sudden efflorescence of highly abstract theoretical models based on the ability of a computer to follow complex interactions tended to engulf the literature in the '70s and '80s, and biosphere studies emphasised community ecology until its practitioners realized that this did not answer the questions that were being asked. Through all this, there is beginning to emerge a new valuation of the long-term field study and the necessity of studying the multipartite population. One day this approach may become more dominant than it is at present. When that happens, we can thank Andrewartha for setting the direction with such skill and persistence.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.9, no.3, 1993. It was written by L.C. Birch, Emeritus Professor, University of Sydney and T.O. Browning, Emeritus Professor, University of Adelaide.

Written by F. Fenner and S.F. Harris.

Introduction

With the death of Herbert Cole ('Nugget') Coombs on 29 October 1997, Australia lost its greatest public servant, a man who spent his life as an employee of the Commonwealth initiating major civilizing activities in economic and cultural fields, and after his retirement became a great champion of the rights of Aboriginal Australians. More than any other individual, he was responsible for the formation of the Australian National University, he was a most influential Governor of the Reserve Bank, he was the foundation chairman of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust and of the Australian Council for the Arts and its successor, the Australia Council. From the time of his appointment as Chairman of the Office of Aboriginal Affairs in 1968 he became deeply interested in the welfare of Aborigines, and this became his major activity during the last thirty years of his life.

The account which follows is not a biography, but a biographical memoir of the Australian Academy of Science. In consequence, the discussion of his activities as a public servant and as an economist are only briefly mentioned, attention being concentrated on Coombs' contributions to science and environmental conservation, and to a lesser extent his influence in the promotion of the arts and the welfare of Australian Aborigines.

Early life

Coombs was born in Kalamunda, Western Australia, on 24 February 1906, the son of a country stationmaster and a well-read mother. After five years at Perth Modern School, he worked as a pupil-teacher for a year before spending two years at the Teachers' College. He then spent two years teaching at country schools, during which he studied for an Arts degree in the University of Western Australia, at the time the only university in Australia that did not charge fees. Transferring to a metropolitan school for the final two years, he graduated BA with first-class honours in economics and won a Hackett Studentship for overseas study. This was deferred for a year, at the end of which, in 1931, he graduated MA and married a fellow teacher, Mary Alice ('Lallie') Ross. He then proceeded to the London School of Economics, the staff of which then included Laski, Robbins and von Hayek. In 1933 he was awarded a PhD for a thesis on central banking. He was caught up in the ferment of the Keynesian revolution and as he later wrote: 'The publication in 1936 of John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was for me and many of my generation the most seminal intellectual event of our time.' In 1934 he returned to a teaching position in Perth and combined this with part-time lecturing in economics at the University.

Career in the Commonwealth Public Service, 1935-1949

While in London, Coombs had met Leslie Melville, Economist for the Commonwealth Bank, with whom he discussed opportunities for obtaining work as an economist. In 1935 he resigned from the Education Department of Western Australia and moved to Sydney as assistant economist to Melville. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 he was transferred to Canberra as an economist in Treasury. In 1942 he was appointed to the Commonwealth Bank Board and later that year Prime Minister Curtin appointed him Director of Rationing. In 1943 he was appointed Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction. In this position he was responsible for the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (CRTS), and he took a particular interest in establishingfacilities for the rehabilitation of disabled service men and women. He played a major role in planning the 1945 legislation that established the Commonwealth Bank as a competitor with the trading banks and strengthened the authority of the central bank (the Reserve Bank). He was also an important figure in the international discussions that began in 1943 and culminated with Australia's signature of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in November 1947. Throughout the negotiations he emphasised the importance of acceptance by the participating countries of a domestic policy aimed at full employment and rising living standards (Rowse, 1997).

While Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction, Coombs was deeply involved in the establishment of what became the Australian National University. The creation of this research university, with two of its initial four Research Schools being in the natural sciences and the subsequent expansion of Research Schools in science and mathematics to eight, was his principal contribution to science and an important component of the decision of the Australian Academy of Science to elect him as a Fellow by special election in 1969. Until 1944 education at all levels had been a jealously guarded State responsibility, but with the establishment of the Commonwealth Office of Education in that year, a move in which Coombs was deeply involved, the subsequent creation of the Universities Commission, and Commonwealth acceptance of financial responsibilities for CRTS trainees, the pattern of support for tertiary education in Australia was changed forever. During this period Coombs also initiated the long-term programme of biological and agricultural research that was needed for the development of northern Australia.

In 1948 the government became concerned about research on matters of military security being investigated by scientists employed by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). A move to convert CSIR into a government department had substantial support in Cabinet, not least from John Dedman. At Prime Minister Chifley's request, Coombs and W.E. Dunk (Chairman of the Public Service Board) reviewed the situation, and recommended that a separate Defence Science Organization should be established, and that CSIR should be expanded as the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), free of any commitment to 'secret' research. Many years later, when in 1975 Coombs was Chairman of the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration, he found that 'On the whole in retrospect the 1948 report, despite its compromises, stood up fairly well. Certainly the performance of CSIRO over the intervening years suggests that the rearguard action that we had fought to preserve appropriate conditions for scientific work had been reasonably effective.' (Coombs, 1981).

As Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction, Coombs maintained close contacts with Ian Clunies Ross, soon to become the first Chairman of CSIRO, advising him on means of stimulating the application of relevant research at the farm level. He had a continuing interest in fostering innovation in secondary industry and later was active in the Science and Industry Forum of the Australian Academy of Science. He was also concerned with environmental problems, and was President of the Australian Conservation Foundation from 1977 to 1979. In 1990 he published a book, The Return of Scarcity: Strategies for an Economic Future, dealing with some of the conflicts between ecology and the economy.

Governor of the Reserve Bank, 1949-1968

In 1949 Coombs was appointed Governor of the Commonwealth Bank and in 1951 Chairman of its Board. When central banking legislation was changed in 1960 he was appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia and Chairman of the Board, posts that he held until 1968. As he describes in Other People's Money, he used this position in a most innovative way, setting up a Banking Administrative Staff College and establishing regular meetings with the managers of commercial banks. Later he organized meetings of central bankers of various countries, especially those of South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and was involved in the planning of the banking system of Papua New Guinea in anticipation of its independence. On the scientific side, he showed a great interest in the part played by the Rural Credits Development Fund in stimulating and assisting research projects and post-graduate education in the universities. The Rural Credits Development Fund also sponsored several academic positions in Australian universities, primarily to help apply agricultural and biological research to operations at the farm level.

Coombs had always been interested in the arts, and while he was Governor of the Commonwealth Bank he was instrumental in setting up the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, of which he was Chairman from 1954 to 1967. He was a member of the Council of the Australian Ballet School from 1958 and a director of the Australian Ballet Foundation from 1962 to 1967.

Chairman of the Council for the Arts and the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, 1967-1976

Late in 1967, at the suggestion of Prime Minister Holt, Coombs retired from his position as Governor of the Reserve Bank and assumed two other onerous and important tasks, chairmanship of two new bodies, the Council for the Arts and the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. He held these posts until 1976. After his appointment as a Visiting Fellow in CRES in 1976 he devoted most of his energies to promoting the recognition of Aboriginal Australians. As he got older, Coombs escaped from the cold Canberra winter to the North Australia Research Unit, which on his initiative had been set up in Darwin as an outpost of the Australian National University in 1973.

Foundation of the Australian National University

Perhaps Coombs' major contribution to science and culture was his role in the establishment and development of the Australian National University, a topic recently discussed in detail by Foster and Varghese (1996), from whose book the following account, which is focused on the two science Schools, in medical research and physical sciences, is largely derived. Because of his background, he played an even more important role in setting up the Research Schools of Pacific Studies and Social Sciences.

The idea of a national university for Australia goes back to the 1870s, and in 1913 Walter Burley Griffin designated a site for a university for 'teaching and research' in Canberra near the foot of Black Mountain, on much the same site that it now occupies. His design for the university, as for so much of Griffin's Canberra, was a somewhat complex arrangement of concentric circles, symbolizing the extension of knowledge from a theoretical core outwards to the more applied aspects of each field.

In 1927 T.H. Laby, professor of natural philosophy at the University of Melbourne and a distinguished physicist, told a government commission that Canberra should have a national university devoted to teaching and research, something that would be for Australia what Oxford and Cambridge were for Britain. Between the two World Wars the idea of a university for Canberra was kept alive by the University Association of Canberra, of which Sir Robert Garran, a prime mover in the constitutional debates that preceded federation and the first Solicitor-General, was a prominent member. In 1929 the Association persuaded the government to establish Canberra University College, affiliated with the University of Melbourne, as a place to provide tertiary education for Commonwealth public servants and their children. The Association also tried to interest politicians in the establishment of an independent university in Canberra, but this idea did not blossom until John Curtin became Prime Minister in October 1941. In contrast to his predecessor, Robert Menzies, Curtin's vision extended beyond the immediate wartime needs; he wished to plan for a new social order that would ensure that every Australian would enjoy peace, security and employment. It was fortunate that at that period the Commonwealth government was supported by an outstanding group of public servants who shared this vision, prominent among them Coombs, then Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction.

John Dedman's Interdepartmental Committee

The first moves towards advances in education through Commonwealth initiatives came not from the Department of Post-War Reconstruction, but from the Department of War Organization of Industry, the deputy head of which, Ronald Walker (another economist), persuaded his Minister, John Dedman, to set up an interdepartmental committee to examine possible Commonwealth initiatives in education. The committee included Coombs, Sir David Rivett, the Chairman of CSIR, and R.C. Mills, professor of economics in the University of Sydney. The committee met several times in late 1943 and throughout 1944, and was assisted in its deliberations by C.S. Daley, representing the Department of the Interior which was at that time responsible for the government of the Australian Capital Territory. It was Daley who put the notion of a national university on the agenda. The committee's final report, handed to Minister Dedman in October 1944, accepted Coombs' suggestion for a Commonwealth Office of Education, which was set up under R.C. Mills early in 1945. It also stated in strong terms that there was a need for a national centre for higher learning, spelling out government, Pacific affairs, international relations and Australian history and literature as areas to be included. Dedman brought the report to Cabinet early in 1945 and it was referred to a subcommittee of ministers, which in turn referred it to another interdepartmental committee, with Mills as chairman, Coombs, Daley, George Knowles from the Attorney-General's Department, H.J. Goodes from Treasury and Garran present by invitation.

Sir Howard Florey's visit to Australia

In 1943 Sir Howard Florey, an Australian expatriate who was professor of pathology at the University of Oxford, had converted penicillin from a laboratory curiosity into a wonder drug, especially for the types of infections common in battle casualties, and by 1944 it was in use in the Allied armed services operating in Europe. Sir Thomas Blamey, Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Armed Forces, was anxious to see it made available for the Australian forces. Stimulated by Alfred Conlon and R. Douglas Wright of the Army Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, he persuaded Prime Minister Curtin to invite Florey to visit Australia to advise on the production of penicillin and its use in the army and among civilians. Florey arrived in August 1944 and spent some months visiting all the mainland capitals, several country regions and all the major centres of medical research. From his survey he soon concluded that medical research in Australia was in a parlous state, and said so in public lectures that were widely reported. In response to an invitation from Curtin, Florey developed the idea of a national medical research institute, like the National Institute of Medical Research in London, suggesting that it should be located in Sydney since Melbourne already had a first-class medical research institute (the only one in Australia, in Florey's view), the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.

The Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs of the Australian Army

Another factor, critical to the ultimate structure of the Australian National University, entered the scene. The Army Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs was a small think-tank headed by Colonel Alfred Conlon, who had direct access to the Commander-in-Chief. Conlon was a charming and charismatic man, without formal medical or military qualifications, who worked closely with R.D. ('Pansy') Wright, professor of physiology in the University of Melbourne and an honorary colonel in the Directorate. As Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction, Coombs made contact with the Army Directorate and found their company and approach congenial. As well as Conlon and Wright, the Directorate included Julius Stone, professor of international law and jurisprudence in the University of Sydney, the poet James McAuley, the anthropologist Bill Stanner and the lawyer John Kerr. Wright, who had worked with Florey in Oxford in 1937-38, held strongly the opinion that Australia had to improve its facilities for medical research so as to prevent so many of its promising research workers making their careers abroad. Conlon, who graduated in medicine after the war, supported him in this view; they were pursuing the idea of setting up a national institute of medical research, located in Sydney, and welcomed Florey's support for this concept.

Because of the illness from which Curtin was eventually to die, Florey was unable to meet him, and the idea of a national institute of medical research was conveyed to Curtin by Blamey, who was himself deeply interested in the promotion of scientific research in Australia (Hetherington, 1954). The idea was referred to the Minister for Health, who set up an expert committee consisting of Sir David Rivett, head of CSIR, J.H.L. Cumpston, the Director-General of Health, and H.J. Goodes of Treasury. The two technically qualified members of the expert committee, Rivett and Cumpston, were unsympathetic to the idea of setting up a new institute, and Cumpston was strongly opposed to any alteration to the existing system for the control of funding for medical research, namely through the National Health and Medical Research Council. However, their opinions were to be over-ruled by the intrigues of the Army Directorate of Research.

The National Medical Research Institute becomes part of the Australian National University

Conlon and Wright had been talking over Florey's ideas between themselves and with Coombs, when it occurred to Coombs that the medical research institute might form a part of the national university then being considered by the interdepartmental committee chaired by Mills, of which he was a member. He took the new idea to the first meeting of the Mills Committee in April 1945, which initially toyed with the idea of an institute of 'social medicine', which would appeal to economists and politicians but had little in common with the sort of medical research of which Florey was thinking. After several more meetings the Mills Committee came back to the ministerial subcommittee with a formal proposal that the government should establish a national university concerned mainly with postgraduate studies and research, with institutes of social sciences and social medicine. The committee had suggested that the new university should be called the University of Canberra, but Cabinet, while accepting the committee's other recommendations, proposed the name 'Australian National University'. Initially this proposal provoked much hostility, but despite representations from the committee of vice-chancellors and all the committees set up to advise on the development of the university, Cabinet insisted on their name, realising that if the university was to survive it had to proclaim its national purpose and demonstrate that it was not duplicating the work of the state universities.

Coombs now took a lead in defining the essential features of the new university. Realising that Cabinet would soon be facing a host of other pressing post-war objectives, he was anxious to get it on the statute books. Using draft legislation that had been prepared for the Canberra University College some months earlier, a detailed proposal was ready for Cabinet by the end of 1945. The core of this proposal was the setting up of the Research Schools. Coombs listed five of these, which after further discussion became social sciences, Pacific affairs, medical research, town and regional planning, and atomic (later nuclear) physics. In Cabinet, 'town and regional planning' was subsumed within social sciences, and there was some doubt about physics, but the other three Schools won acceptance. Panels of five or six experts were then set up by the Mills Committee to comment on such matters as the fields of research within each School, relations between Schools, ways of organizing research, staff numbers and salaries, financial and accommodation needs, and relations with other Australian universities.

Much remained to be done before the final proposals could be put to Cabinet and Parliament. In April 1946 Coombs visited London, Washington and Tokyo with the Prime Minister, Ben Chifley. Conlon and Wright talked with Coombs before he left, urging him to spare no effort to persuade Florey to take on leadership of the John Curtin School of Medical Research. Coombs had also to see whether it would be possible to persuade distinguished Australian expatriates to come back to Australia to head up the other Research Schools, and met and talked with the historian W.K. Hancock, the political scientist K.C. Wheare, the physicists H.S.W. Massey and M.L.E. Oliphant, and the economist R.L. Hall. Chifley met Oliphant, with whom he was greatly impressed. Although somewhat startled by the capital cost of Oliphant's concept of a Research School focused on nuclear physics (over four times the figure originally suggested to Cabinet), he told Coombs, 'If you can persuade Oliphant to head the school we will do whatever is necessary'. Coombs came back highly optimistic, telling the Mills Committee that there were good prospects of enticing Florey and several others of the expatriates whom he had met back to Australia.

Meanwhile, in Australia, the Australian National University Act was introduced in Parliament and gained assent in August 1946, the research schools being entitled Pacific Studies, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences and The John Curtin School of Medical Research. The functions of the University were defined in the Act as:

1. To encourage, and find facilities for, postgraduate research and study, both generally and in relation to subjects of national importance to Australia;
2. To provide facilities for university education for persons who elect to avail themselves of those facilities and are eligible to do so;
3. Subject to the Statutes, to award and confer degrees and diplomas.

Until the Council could be constituted, the University was to be governed by an Interim Council, consisting of members appointed by the Governor-General.

The Interim Council and the Academic Advisory Committee

The Interim Council, which included all the members of the Mills Committee and, through Coombs' influence, R.D. Wright, met for the first time in September 1946, and elected Mills as chairman. It decided to invite Florey, Oliphant and Hancock to advise them on the development of the research schools of medical science, physics and social sciences respectively. Early in 1947 they approached R.L. Firth, a New Zealander who was professor of anthropology at the University of London, to advise them on the Pacific Studies school. All were expatriates who had grown up in Australia (or New Zealand), who had established international reputations in their respective fields and who had expressed an interest in the new research university.

Early in 1947 Wright, who by this time had become Honorary Secretary of the Interim Council, travelled to England to sound out the prospective directors, whom he found had many concerns. After a two-day meeting in London at the end of March, attended by Coombs, Wright and all four prospective directors, only Oliphant was unequivocal in his commitment to come. Wright then produced a strategy to keep the prospective directors interested and informed, but not to press them too hard until progress had been made on the University's buildings and academic structure. He suggested that they should be formally constituted in England as an academic advisory committee, to be serviced by an administrative officer, to advise the Interim Council regarding statutes, budgets, building design, acquisition of books and equipment and the like. Council would act on the recommendation of the Advisory Committee in making appointments, who could work in accommodation in various parts of the world until buildings were available in Canberra.

The Academic Advisory Committee met monthly after its first meeting in Oxford in August 1947, and thereafter every two or three months, usually in Hancock's rooms at All Souls College or in Florey's office at the Dunn School. For a time there was some concern in Australia as to whether the new Australian National University would be run from Oxford or Canberra. There was a great deal of discussion in both places about the kind of person who should be sought as Vice-Chancellor. Coombs was pressed to take the job, but he was too committed to the cause of post-war planning. Eventually, two names surfaced: Sir Douglas Copland, a 53-year-old former professor of economics who was then Australia's Minister to China, and Leslie Melville, who had since 1931 been economic adviser to the Commonwealth Bank. The Advisory Committee favoured Melville but the Council chose Copland, who served as Vice-Chancellor from 1 May 1948 to 30 April 1953; in November 1953 he was succeeded by Melville.

Oliphant's proposals for the Research School of Physical Sciences

Following their meeting in 1946, Coombs advised Chifley that Oliphant would come to Canberra only if he could do work of the same quality and standing as he was then doing in Birmingham. This would mean a capital cost of some £500,000 over five years, much more than Chifley had anticipated, but Coombs thought that if Oliphant's needs could be met there was a good chance of attracting Florey and Hancock (Adviser to the Research School of Social Sciences) as well.

The Academic Advisers met in Canberra in Easter 1948. Oliphant, who alone of the group had made up his mind to come to Canberra, outlined his plans for the Research School of Physical Sciences. In contrast to Florey, who proposed that the medical research school should cover a wide range of topics, Oliphant saw himself as the director of a school that would focus on his interests, namely research in fundamental nuclear physics and the chemistry of radioactive substances. At the meeting in Canberra he added a chair in theoretical physics, and before Oliphant took up duties as Director in 1950 the School grew by the addition of Richard Woolley, the Commonwealth Astronomer, and the Mount Stromlo Observatory as a Department of Astronomy.

Florey's proposals for the John Curtin School of Medical Research.

Florey liked the idea that his 'national institute of medical research' would become part of a research university, but realised that this raised problems about the role of the director, whom he now saw as a chairman of professors, who would try to achieve some uniformity of aim and some common standards of performance. He would provide the oil to lubricate the machine, he would watch carefully to ensure that no department would build itself into 'a little independent kingdom', he would encourage the departments to work together. Clearly, the director's position would be 'one of delicacy'.

After the Easter conference Florey met for two days with sixteen senior medical scientists from all over Australia, to try to dispel what he saw as the 'fairly widespread and somewhat justified' distrust of the idea of a research-only Australian National University. In this he had some success, his 1945 proposal for additional funding for research outside the new institute being appreciated. Florey's plan for a diversified research school, covering a wide range of disciplines, was well received.

Recruitment of staff commenced in 1948, and by 1950 the University had eleven professors, five readers and ten junior academic staff on its books.

Coombs on the University Council, 1946-1976

Coombs was a member of the Interim Council, and from the establishment of the Council in 1951 he was successively Deputy Chairman from 1951 to 1959, then Pro-Chancellor, a position created especially for him, and, after the death of the third Chancellor, Florey, in 1968, Chancellor. The first three Chancellors, Lord Bruce, Sir John Cockcroft and Lord Florey, were based in England. Although they were able to represent the University at ceremonial functions in Britain, help with senior appointments and occasionally visit Canberra, they were only rarely able to perform the most important of the non-ceremonial duties, namely presiding over meetings of the Council. This task fell to Coombs, and kept him continually involved with University affairs. His appointment as Chancellor in 1968 coincided with his impending retirement from the Reserve Bank, and he was able to give more time to the task, which he relinquished when he retired from the public service in 1976. After fifteen years of silence on University matters, however, Coombs spoke with vehemence and conviction at a rally in December 1991 to 'save the JCSMR', which, following a report by the Stephen Committee of Review, was threatened by a take-over by the National Health and Medical Research Council, a move that was seen as a threat to the continued existence of the University itself.

Among the initiatives in the ANU that can be directly ascribed to Coombs are the New Guinea Research Unit, established in 1957 and handed over to the autonomous Papua New Guinea Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research when the Territory won independence in 1975, the Creative Arts Fellowship Scheme, set up in 1964, and the North Australia Research Unit (NARU), set up as an outreach of the Research School of Pacific Studies in 1973.

Views on science and technology

Coombs' views on science and technology are outlined in his keynote address to a conference convened by the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences in April 1979, entitled 'Science and Technology for What Purpose? An Australian Perspective'. This makes interesting reading even now, twenty years after it was written. He starts with a comment on the title, which he suggests implies that science and technology are directed to a single and common end. While acknowledging that this is the way politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen and even many scientists tend to justify the activities of scientists, Coombs notes that this is a recent development. As he puts it, 'there is science for understanding and science for manipulation'. He considers that science as a search for understanding does not need to be justified by the greater power it confers on mankind; rather, it is akin to the creative work of artists and, as a source of enlightenment and liberation, 'a noble expression of the human spirit'. 'A society which fails to give it opportunity and scope will thereby be the poorer'.

He goes on to deal at length with science as a substrate for technology, and emphasises that science for manipulation must be justified by its results, and should be required to demonstrate that the benefits it confers on mankind outweigh the costs: material, social and spiritual. Already, in 1979, he recognizes but deplores the growth of 'mammoth industrial corporations' that are dominated by market forces and focus on optimizing production, with little concern for the social or environmental aspects of their activities. Twenty years later we see these tendencies being vastly increased by the drive towards globalization. In answer to a question, he reiterated his support for creative science, but thought that manipulative science needed 'to reconsider its objective, to reorient to some degree its directions, and, particularly, to examine its impact upon the human and social aspects of society'.To use a phrase now in common parlance among environmentalists, development needs to have concern for three 'bottom lines', economic, social and environmental.

Research in social sciences

Coombs also stimulated research in the social sciences, for example by arranging for the Commonwealth Bank to set aside a portion of its profits as a fund for university-based research in economics. Much of the work that was carried out by consultants for the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration incorporated original research. His Boyer Lectures in 1970 are a mature expression of his thoughts on the problems of institutionalizing intellectual creativity of all kinds, in the arts, the social sciences and the natural sciences. Some years later, in 1984, he persuaded the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies to co-sponsor, with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, the University of Western Australia and the Stegley Foundation, the East Kimberley Impact Assessment Project. This was a multidisciplinary and policy-relevant programme carried out to assist Aboriginal people to deal with economic and social changes arising from resource development. It resulted in the production of 25 working papers and a book (Coombs et al., 1989), which provide information that remains relevant to the solution of some of the problems faced by Aboriginal Australians.

Interest in environmental problems

At a time when most economists ignored the environmental costs of the modern consumer society, Coombs realised that economic growth had generated substantial environmental problems. He first spoke about these concerns in a lecture to a symposium at the Twelfth Pacific Science Congress in Canberra in 1971 (Coombs, 1972). On his retirement in 1976 he became a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University, and for the next twenty years mixed daily with academics concerned with environmental problems. His concern for problems of conservation were underlined by his acceptance of the position of President of the Australian Conservation Foundation between 1977 and 1979. As a result, he became 'increasingly conscious of long-term structural changes in our own and the world economy – especially those arising from the interaction of ecological and economic concerns'. In 1990 he published his 1971 address and seven other papers on this topic that had been produced between 1978 and 1985, together with a chapter outlining his views in 1989, as a book, The Return of Scarcity: Strategies for an Economic Future (Coombs, 1990).

Visiting Fellow, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies,1976-1996

The Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES) was established in 1973, with Frank Fenner as Director. Initially housed in the old Nurses' Home near the John Curtin School, early in 1976 it moved to occupy the upper two floor levels of the newly constructed Life Sciences Library Building. In May that year, after negotiations with the Vice-Chancellor (Sir John Crawford) and the Director, Coombs was appointed a Visiting Fellow in CRES, an appointment that was subject to annual reappointment based on his current intellectual, cultural and social contributions. On moving in, his appearance was transformed from that of the clean-shaven public servant, wearing coat and tie, to a bearded academic in open-neck shirt and pullover, as illustrated in the two full-page photographs of him on the front and the back pages of the book by Foster and Varghese (1996).

Coombs applied himself with vigour to promoting the cause of Aboriginal Australians. From 1989 he spent several months each winter at the North Australia Research Unit (NARU), which he had long before been instrumental in setting up in Darwin as an outpost of the ANU. In 1991 this arrangement was formalized so that his visiting fellowship was held jointly at CRES and NARU. He published extensively, in books (3, 5, 7, 8 and 10), reports, learned journals and newspaper articles, as illustrated in the select bibliography at the end of Aboriginal Autonomy (Coombs, 1994) and the publication list provided at the end of this memoir. In late 1995, while at NARU, he had a disabling stroke from which he never recovered.

Personal characteristics

From his earliest days in government office, Coombs was known as a 'controlled, low-key sagacious servant of the people'. His vision had been greatly influenced by the Great Depression of the 1930s, which imprinted on his mind the suffering of the under-privileged, to which he reacted with compassion and concern. When, after his appointment to the Council for Aboriginal Affairs in 1968, and especially after his retirement from the public service, he learnt more of the abysmal condition of many Aboriginal Australians, he became a passionate advocate for these disadvantaged people.

Besides having great influence in public affairs by virtue of the many influential positions he held, Coombs was an éminence grise, who worked behind the scenes to achieve results that would serve all Australians. He was a confidant of leading Australians in the arts, in science, in public affairs and in politics. As described in his book Trial Balance (Coombs, 1981), he was personal adviser to seven Prime Ministers, from Curtin to Whitlam, and for such a very busy man he was a prolific writer, producing no fewer than nine books and many published lectures and feature articles in the press.

On the lighter side, he had made a reputation as a rover in Australian Rules football in his youth (his nickname 'Nugget' derived from that), he remained a committed cricket fan all his life, and he regularly played squash into his early 80s. He was an excellent cook and he loved good wine, especially a good red.

Honours and awards

Coombs consistently refused to accept an imperial honour; he told his old teacher Sir Walter Murdoch that such an honour would not be 'in character'. When the Order of Australia system was instituted in 1975, he was among the first to be awarded its highest honour, Companion of the Order of Australia. However, in 1976, incensed by the introduction of a knighthood (AK), he resigned from the Order.

He was appointed a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1969, and was a Foundation Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. He also received a number of honorary degrees: Hon. LLD (ANU, Macquarie, Melbourne, Sydney), Hon. DLitt (WA), and in 1961 he was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics. In 1963 the Royal Society of Arts (London) awarded him the R.B. Bennett Commonwealth Prize for services to 'banking, economics and the arts', in 1972 the newspaper The Australian named him as their first 'Australian of the Year' and in 1977 he was awarded the ANZAAS Medal at the 48th Congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 1962 the Coombs Building, housing the Research School of Social Sciences and the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies of the Australian National University, was named after him. In 1992 funds were collected for a Nugget Coombs Forum at the North Australia Research Unit and in 1998 the University established the Nugget Coombs Aboriginal Studies Scholarship Scheme, to provide support at the North Australia Research Unit for undergraduate and postgraduate scholars who combined traditional academic disciplines with traditional indigenous knowledge.

He was given a state funeral and a service of thanksgiving was held in St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney on 14 November 1997. He wanted it known that the choice of a Catholic church should not be taken as a sign of a death-bed conversion, but because his wife Lallie would have delighted in it. Somewhat later he was accorded full Aboriginal funeral rites, with scattering of half of his ashes at Yirrkala in the Northern Territory, the only white person to have been so honoured. On 11 March 1999 the other half of his ashes were scattered on the garden at University House, where had lived for so many years. He was survived by three sons and one daughter.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, Vol.13, No.1, 2000. It was written by:

• F. Fenner, John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University,Canberra, ACT 0200, and
• S.F. Harris, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian NationalUniversity, Canberra, ACT 0200.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Professor H.A. Nix and Dr Tim Rowse for reading over the manuscript and making useful suggestions and to Ms Sigrid McCausland, Ms Ettie Oakman and Dr R. May for providing information. The photograph was taken by Bob Cooper, Coombs Photography, ANU. 

References

• Coombs, H.C. (1971). Other People's Money: Economic Essays. Australian National University Press, Canberra.
• Coombs, H.C. (1981). Trial Balance. Macmillan, Melbourne.
• Coombs, H.C. (1994). Aboriginal Autonomy. Cambridge University Press, Melbourne.
• Coombs, H.C., McCann, H., Ross, H. and Williams, N.L. (eds.) (1989). Land of Promises: Aborigines and Development in the East Kimberley. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, and Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.
• Foster, S.G. and Varghese, M.M. (1996). The Making of the Australian National University. Allen and Unwin, Sydney.
• Hetherington, T. (1954). Blamey: The Biography of Field-Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey. Cheshire, Melbourne.
• Rowse, T. (1997). The Paraguay Round? The rationales and fortunes of H.C. Coombs' approach to Australian trade diplomacy, 1942-8. In: 50 Years of Australia's Multilateral Trade Diplomacy and the Road Map for the Future. Australian National University, Canberra

Bibliography

The organization of a publication list for Coombs presents problems not encountered in the preparation of biographical memoirs of scientists. During his life as a public servant and, after his retirement, as a champion of the rights of Aboriginal Australians, Coombs produced many reports for government bodies and the like, gave many speeches and produced many newspaper articles. Below we have listed the books he wrote or edited, with commentaries on some of them, and then, by year, articles published as chapters in books and journals or as pamphlets listed in the catalogue of the Australian National Library. We have not included any of his many newspaper articles, nor sought to discover memoranda and reports that he produced as a public servant. 

Books and articles

Books

1. Coombs, H.C. (1970). The Fragile Pattern – Institutions and Man. The Boyer Lectures, 1970. Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney, 59pp.
2. Coombs, H.C. (1971). Other People's Money: Economic Essays. Australian National University Press, Canberra, 190pp. Based on fifteen addresses and papers presented or published between 1949 and 1968, during his term as Governor of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and subsequently of the Reserve Bank of Australia.
3. Coombs, H.C. (1978). Kulinma: Listening to Aboriginal Australians. Australian National University Press, Canberra, 250pp. Sixteen articles of varying length, produced between 1968 and 1977, twelve of them during Coombs' chairmanship of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs.
4. Coombs, H.C. (1981). Trial Balance. Macmillan, Melbourne, 341pp. An autobiography covering Coombs' working life as a Commonwealth public servant between 1942 and 1976.
5. Coombs, H.C., Brandl, M.M. and Snowden, W.E. (1983). A Certain Heritage: Programs for and by Aboriginal Families in Australia. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, 461 pp.
6. Coombs, H.C. (1990). The Return of Scarcity: Strategies for an Economic Future. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, in association with the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University. CRES Monograph No. 9, 171pp. A collection of essays, most based on addresses given to various audiences in Australia.
7. Coombs, H.C., McCann, H., Ross, H. and Williams, N.L. (eds.) (1989). Land of Promises: Aborigines and Development in the East Kimberley. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, and Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 165pp.
8. Coombs, H.C. (edited by D. Smith) (1994). Aboriginal Autonomy, Issues and Strategies. Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 251pp. Essays written by Coombs for various occasions since 1978, when Kulinma was published. Contains a select bibliography of writings by Coombs on issues regarding Aboriginal Australians, including many newspaper articles not entered in the publication list below.
9. Coombs, H.C. (1994). From Curtin to Keating: the 1945 and 1994 White Papers on Employment: a Better Environment for Human and Economic Diversity? North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, Darwin, 65pp.
10. Coombs, H.C. (1996). Shame on Us!: Essays on a Future Australia. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 93pp.

Articles/book chapters

1944

• Coombs, H.C. The economic aftermath of war. In: Campbell, D.A.S. (ed.) Post-War Reconstruction in Australia. Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney, pp. 67-120.

1948

• Dunk, W.E. and Coombs, H.C. Report on Council for Scientific and Industrial Research: Organization, Administration and Related Problems. Australian Government Printing Service, Canberra.

1955

• Coombs, H.C. The Development of Monetary Policy in Australia. University of Queensland Press, Brisbane.
• Coombs, H.C. Central banking in Australia. Bankers' Magazine of Australasia, 69, 61-68.
• Coombs, H.C. Economic development and financial stability. Economic Record, 31, 183-191.

1957

• Coombs, H.C. Staff training in the Commonwealth Bank. Personnel Practice Bulletin, 13, 46-50.

1958

• Coombs, H.C. Conditions of Monetary Policy in Australia. R.C. Mills Memorial Lecture, University of Sydney Department of Economics, Sydney.
• Coombs, H.C. Banking in a developing economy. Bankers' Magazine of Australasia, 71, 142-147.

1959

• Coombs, H.C. Rural Credit Developments in Australia. Australian Agricultural Economics Society, Sydney.

1961

• Coombs, H.C. Balance of payments problems – old and new style. Bankers' Magazine of Australasia, 75, 36-41.

1962

• Coombs, H.C. Other People's Money. Sir John Morris Memorial Lecture, Adult Education Board of Tasmania, Hobart.

1963

• Coombs, H.C. Some Ingredients for Growth. Edward Shann Memorial Lecture, University of Western Australia, Perth.

1965

• Coombs, H.C. Pennies and policies: a Reserve Bank in New Guinea. New Guinea, 1, 62-69.

1966

• Coombs, H.C. Training for development. Economic Activity in Western Australia, 9, 8-12.
• Coombs, H.C. Training central bankers. Far Eastern Economic Review, 53, 494-496.

1967

• Coombs, H.C. Capital, Growth and International Payments. Australian Industries Development Association.

1969

• Coombs, H.C. Science and the future of man: the role of the social scientists. Australasian Annals of Medicine, 4, 329-334.
• Coombs, H.C. Does banking legislation need to be overhauled? Austfact, 1, 14-18.
• Coombs, H.C. Central banking – a look back and forward. Economic Record, 45, 485-495.

1970

• Coombs, H.C. The economics of the performing arts. Economic Papers, The Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand, 35, 32-46.

1971

• Coombs, H.C. Changing economic and social perspectives in resource management. In: Costin, A.B. and Frith, H.J. (eds.) Conservation. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, pp. 284-299.

1972

• Coombs, H.C. Matching ecological and economic realities. Journal of the Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand, 48, 1-17. Also published as Australian Conservation Foundation Occasional Publication No. 9.
• Coombs, H.C. The Future of the Australian Aboriginal. The George Judah Cohen Memorial Lecture, Sydney.

1973

• Coombs, H.C. Ecologist and entrepreneur – Is reconciliation possible? In: Industry and the Environment. Science and Industry Forum Report No. 6, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, pp. 7-11.

1974

• Coombs, H.C. Decentralization trends among Aboriginal communities. Search, 5, 135-43.

1976

• Coombs, H.C. Aboriginal Australians 1967-76: A Decade of Progress? Walter Murdoch Lecture, Murdoch University, Perth.

1977

• Coombs, H.C. The Pitjantjatjara Aborigines: A Strategy for Survival. CRES Working Paper No. 1. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 53pp.
• Coombs, H.C. The Quality of Life and its Assessment. Paper given at the Sixth Conference of Economists, University of Tasmania. Occasional Paper 11, University of Tasmania, Hobart.
• Coombs, H.C. The Application of CDEP in Aboriginal Communities in the Eastern Zone of Western Australia. CRES Working Paper No. 3. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 15 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. Report of the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration. Government Printer, Canberra, 483pp.
• Coombs, H.C. The Commission Report. In: Hazlehurst, C. and Nethercote, J.R. (eds.) Reforming Australian Government: The Coombs Report and Beyond. Royal Institute of Public Administration, Canberra, pp. 49-52.
• Coombs, H.C. The future bureaucracy. In: Hazlehurst, C. and Nethercote, J.R. (eds.) Reforming Australian Government: The Coombs Report and Beyond. Royal Institute of Public Administration, Canberra, pp. 53-57.

1978

• Coombs, H.C. Implications of land rights. In: Jones, R. (ed.) Northern Australia: Options and Implications. Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, pp. 121-129.
• Costin, A.B. and Coombs, H.C. Australian conservation. Nature, 274, 528.
• Coombs, H.C. Australia's Policy towards Aboriginals 1967-1977. Minority Rights Group Report No. 35, London.
• Coombs, H.C. Some Aspects of Development in Aboriginal Communities in Central Australia. CRES Working Paper No. 5. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 59 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. Scarcity, Wealth and Income. Presented when President of the Australian Conservation at Hobart, Tasmania, October 1978. CRES Working Paper No. 7. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 16 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. Submission to the Commission on the Walpiri Land Claim. CRES Working Paper No. 8. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 34 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. Implications of Land Rights. CRES Working Paper No. 9. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 15 pp. Reproduced in Coombs, H.C. (1994) Aboriginal Autonomy.
• Coombs, H.C. Aggression and the Aboriginal environment. In: Aggression: Second Australian -Asian Pacific Congress of the Australian Academy of Forensic Sciences, Sydney. Also published as CRES Working Paper No. 6. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 9 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. Aboriginal nutrition and the ecosystems of Central Australia: Summing-up. Aboriginal Nutrition , 2, 2-3.
• Coombs, H.C. 'President's Report'. In Australian Conservation Foundation Annual Report 1977-78. Australian Conservation Foundation, Melbourne.

1979

• Coombs, H.C. Science and technology for what purpose? In: Healy, A.T.A. (ed.) Science and Technology for What Purpose? Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, pp. 21-47. Also published as CRES Working Paper No. 12. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra.
• Coombs, H.C. Is Democracy Alive and Well? CRES Working Paper No. 10. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 19 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. Aboriginal Land Rights Teach-in. CRES Working Paper No. 11. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 9 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. Guest of Honour Talk: Australian Broadcasting Commission. CRES Working Paper No. 13. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 5 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. The Proposal for a Treaty Between the Commonwealth and Aboriginal Australians. CRES Working Paper No. 14. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 9 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. 'President's Report'. In Australian Conservation Foundation Annual Report 1978-9. Australian Conservation Foundation, Melbourne.

1980

• Coombs, H.C. The future of the outstation movement. In: Coombs, H.C., Dexter, B.G. and Hiatt, L.R. (eds.) The Outstation Movement in Aboriginal Australia. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Newsletter 14, 16-23. Also published as CRES Working Paper No. 15. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 9 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. The impact of uranium mining on the social environment of Aborigines in the Alligator Rivers region In: Harris, S.F. (ed.) Social and Environmental Choice: The Impact of Uranium Mining in the Northern Territory. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, pp. 122-135. Also published as CRES Working Paper No. 18.
• Coombs, H.C. Signing an Australian peace treaty. Social Alternatives, 1, 63-64.
• Coombs, H.C. Economic change and political strategy. Chamberlain Lecture, University of Western Australia. CRES Working Paper No. 19. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 26 pp.

1981

• Coombs, H.C. Yirrkala Law Council. Social Alternatives, 2, 36, 60.
• Costin, A.B. and Coombs, H.C. Farm planning for resource conservation. Trees and Victoria's Resources, 24, 21-22.
• Coombs, H.C. Comment: Farm planning for resource conservation. Search, 12, 429-430

1982

• Coombs, H.C. On the question of government. In: Berndt, R.M. (ed.) Aboriginal Sites, Rights and Resource Development. Proceedings of the Fifth Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Symposium, Canberra 1981. University of Western Australia Press, Perth.
• Coombs, H.C. The case for a treaty. In: Olbrei, E.K. (ed.) Black Australians: The Prospects for Change. James Cook University Students Union, Townsville, pp. 57-60.
• Coombs, H.C. The three waves of Aboriginal identity. Aboriginal Treaty News, 4, 9.
• Coombs, H.C. Technology, income distribution and the quality of life. Search, 13, 142-147.

1983

• Coombs, H.C. The Yirrkala Proposals for Law and Order. CRES Working Paper No. 1983/11. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 14 pp. Reproduced in Coombs, H.C. (1994) Aboriginal Autonomy.
• Coombs, H.C. Economic, Social and Spiritual Factors in Aboriginal Health. CRES Working Paper No. 1983/16. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 14 pp. Reproduced in Coombs, H.C. (1994) Aboriginal Autonomy.
• Coombs, H.C. The economic and social impact of nuclear war for Australia and its region. In: Denborough, M. (ed.) Australia and Nuclear War. Croom Helm Australia, Canberra, pp. 119-135.

1984

• Coombs, H.C. The Role of the National Aboriginal Conference. Report to the Hon. Clyde Holding, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 147pp.
• Coombs, H.C. John Curtin: a consensus Prime Minister? John Curtin Memorial Lecture, Australian National University. Arena, 69, 46-59.

1985

• Coombs, H.C. The Yirrkala proposals for Law and order. In: Hazlehurst, K.M. (ed.) Justice Programs for Aboriginal and other Indigenous Communities; Australia: New Zealand, Canada, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. Proceedings of the Aboriginal Criminal Justice Workshop No. 1, 29 April-2 May, pp. 201-205. Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra.
• Coombs, H.C., Bin-Sallik, M.A., Hall, F.L. and Mottison J. Report of Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Employment and Training Programs. Australian Government Printing Service, Canberra.
• Coombs, H.C. Where do we go from here. In: Wright, J. (ed.) We Call for a Treaty. Collins and Fontana, Sydney, pp. 284-307.
• Coombs, H.C. Resource management and environmental law. Paper presented to Environmental Law Association Symposium, Hobart, 1985. Published in Coombs, H.C. (1990). The Return of Scarcity: Strategies for an Economic Future. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 97-117.

1986

• Coombs, H.C. Towards Aboriginal independence. In: Foran, B.P. and Walker, B.W. (eds.) Science and Technology for Aboriginal Development. Centre for Appropriate Technology, Alice Springs, pp. 38-43.
• Coombs, H.C. Sustainable society will need a new ethic of responsibility. Habitat, 14(1), 29-31.
• Coombs, H.C. The predecessors. In: The Whitlam Phenomenon. McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Fitzroy, pp. 41-59.

1988

• Coombs, H.C. Aborigines and the Treaty of Waitangi. Boyer Lecture No. 6, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Reproduced in Coombs, H.C. (1994) Aboriginal Autonomy.

1989

• Coombs, H.C. Aboriginals and the Treaty of Waitangi. Land Rights News, 2(12) 18-20.
• Coombs, H.C. Science and technology: for what – or for whom? Current Affairs, 56(4), 4-15.

1990

• Coombs, H.C., Dargavel, J., Kesteven, J., Ross, H., Smith, D.I. and Young, E. The Promise of the Land: Sustainable Use by Aboriginal Communities. CRES Working Paper No. 1990/1. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 19 pp.
• Coombs, H.C. Aboriginal Employment: The Underlying Issues. Report to the Commissioner, Mr P. Dodson, Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Reproduced in Coombs, H.C. (1994) Aboriginal Autonomy.
• Coombs, H.C. Aboriginal Education, Socialisation and the Underlying Issues. Report to the Commissioner, Mr P. Dodson, Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

1991

• Coombs, H.C. Aborigines Made Visible: from 'Humbug' to Politics. Kenneth Myer Lecture. Friends of the National Library of Australia, Canberra. Reproduced in Coombs, H.C. (1994) Aboriginal Autonomy.
• Coombs, H.C. Aborigines and Development in the Northern Territory. State Library of the Northern Territory, Occasional Paper No. 24.

1992

• Coombs, H.C. Banana republic? No, banana colony. Australian Business Monthly, March, 26-29.
• Coombs, H.C. A sundered country. Australian Business Monthly, April, 50-52.
• Coombs, H.C. Miners still in dreamtime. Australian Business Monthly, April, 50-52.
• Coombs, H.C. Black deaths – who has custody. Australian Business Monthly, June, 126-128.
• Coombs, H.C. Towards a new federation. Australian Business Monthly, July, 146-148.
• Coombs, H.C. Multifunction parks. Australian Business Monthly, September, 138-140.
• Coombs, H.C. How the West was won. Australian Business Monthly, November, 74-77.
• Coombs, H.C. Signing an Australian peace treaty. Social Alternatives, 6/7, 63-64.

1993

• Coombs, H.C. Aborigines and development in northern Australia. Occasional Paper No. 24, North Australia Research Unit, Darwin.
• Coombs, H.C. Science and technology – for what purpose? Questioning the future. Occasional Paper No. 3, Commission for the Future, Canberra.
• Coombs, H.C. Issues in Dispute: Aborigines Working for Autonomy. Published jointly by the North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, and The Age and The Canberra Times, 52pp.
• Coombs, H.C. Willowra. Published jointly by the North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, and the Nugget Coombs Forum for Indigenous Studies.
• Coombs, H.C. Independence or bust. Australian Business Monthly, January, 60-63.
• Coombs, H.C. Who owns the intelligentsia? Australian Business Monthly, February, 116-119.
• Coombs, H.C. Grasping the Mabo options. Australian Business Monthly, August, 38-41.

Henry Oliver Lancaster (1913–2001) was a pioneering Australian statistician and medical scientist. 

His most celebrated medical contributions include the first quantitative demonstration that melanoma rates increased closer to the equator due to UV radiation, and a groundbreaking study establishing the causal link between rubella infection during pregnancy and congenital deafness. 

As Foundation Professor of Mathematical Statistics from 1959 to 1978, he made major theoretical advances in the decomposition of the chi-square statistic and the theory of bivariate distributions, work that was incorporated into leading international statistical textbooks. 

He was also a prolific historian and bibliographer of statistics and medicine, producing the vast scholarly work Expectations of life (1990) among many other publications. 

He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1961, awarded the Lyle Medal, and appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1992.

Download the memoir

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol. 15(2), 2004. It was written by:

• E. Seneta, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sydney. Eugene Seneta, FAA, succeeded H.O. Lancaster as Professor and Head of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Sydney in 1979. Denoted by 'ES' in the sequel.
• G.K. Eagleson, Australian Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales. Geoff Eagleson was one of Lancaster's first PhD students in Mathematical Statistics (PhD, University of Sydney, 1967).

Written by M. F. Newman and G. E. Wall.

Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science and Fellowship of the Australian College of Education are formal recognition of Hanna Neumann's impact on a country she had first set foot in only in August 1963. But then Hanna Neumann was a remarkable person. Throughout her life she had won the love and respect of many people. The extent of this can not really be measured, however some indications can be given. A memorial meeting held in Canberra overflowed a large lecture theatre even though it was virtually vacation time. A collection of papers dedicated to her memory and a fund to provide some form of memorial to her have both drawn quite overwhelming support from many parts of the world. One finds a tremendous list of words describing her memorable qualities: warm, enthusiastic, inspiring, energetic, firm, tactful, sympathetic, efficient, patient, shrewd, humble, peace-loving, courageous, gracious,...No words can hope to evoke more than a pale shadow of such a person; this story must be read in such a light.

A description of Hanna's life (she was not a formal sort of person and much preferred this simple style of address) divides rather naturally into three parts: Germany 1914-38, Britain 1938-63; Australia 1963-71.

Hanna was born in Berlin on 12 February 1914 the youngest of three children of Hermann and Katharina von Caemmerer. Her father was the only male descendant of a family of Prussian officer tradition. He broke the tradition to become an historian. He had a doctorate and his venia legendi (right to lecture) and was well on the way to establishing himself as an archivist and academic historian when he was killed in the first days of the 1914-18 war. Her mother was descended from a Huguenot family which had settled in Prussia in the second half of the eighteenth century. The older children were a brother Ernst (1908) and a sister Dora (1910). Her brother was Professor of Law at Freiburg i.Br.-he was for a time Rektor (Vice-chancellor). Her sister (who also has a doctorate) worked in Berlin in the re-training of social workers.

As a result of her father's death the family lived impecuniously on a war pension which had to be supplemented by other earnings. Already at the age of thirteen Hanna contributed to the family income by coaching younger school children. By the time she reached the final years at school she was coaching up to fifteen periods a week. This presumably helped teach her to organize her time efficiently.

After two years in a private school she entered the Augusta-Victoria-Schule, a girls' grammar school (Realgymnasium), in 1922. She graduated from there early in 1932. Her school report for university entrance lists fifteen subjects taken. She attained a grade of 'good' or higher in all but one of these in the Abiturium (final examination); the exception was music which she none the less liked and maintained an interest in throughout her life. The report comments that she showed independence of judgement, acute thinking (well beyond the requirements of the school) in mathematics and natural science and a note-worthy willingness to help. Only one teacher stood out in Hanna's memory of her school days – Fraulein Otto, her form mistress and French teacher for the final two years. This woman, who was to become a trusted friend in the turbulent Nazi years ahead, by the example of her fortitude, sense of humour, tolerance and wisdom, strongly influenced Hanna's view of people and events; her lack of hatred and bitterness, more than anything else, convinced Hanna that they have no place, ever, in human relations.

Her early hobby was botany. She collected plant specimens and built up voluminous herbaria for about four years until at about the age of fourteen this interest was superseded by her interest in mathematics.

Hanna entered the University of Berlin at the Easter of 1932. Her first year, the summer semester of 1932 and the winter semester of 1932-33, was all that she had dreamt it would be. The lecture courses in mathematics she took that year were: Introduction to Higher Mathematics given by Feigl; Analytical Geometry and Projective Geometry both given by Bieberbach; Differential and Integral Calculus, E. Schmidt; and The Theory of Numbers, Schur. The first of these courses eventually appeared in print in 1953 under the names of Feigl and Rohrbach; in the introduction one finds an acknowledgement to use made of notes taken by Hanna in that summer semester of 1932. She was introduced to physics by the Nobel Laureate Nernst in a course of lectures on Experimental Physics. She also attended a course, Introduction to the Theory of Physics, by Orthmann. As well as these formal courses she took full advantage of the German tradition of attending lectures on a wide variety of topics. She listened to Kohler, one of the originators of Gestalt theory, on Psychology; to the well-known Roman Catholic theologian Guardini on Dante, and to Wolff, the leading academic lawyer in Germany, on Common Law (his popularity was such that he always had overflow audiences in the biggest lecture theatre in Berlin University).

Bieberbach, Schmidt and Schur, all full professors of mathematics, were to have strong mathematical and personal effects on her life. Bieberbach was the first strong mathematical influence. He was, to her, an inspiring mathematician in spite of disorganized lecturing. He nearly turned her into a geometer. In fact she seems to have had quite a strong geometrical bent. Schmidt and Schur were, respectively, responsible for her introduction to Analysis and Algebra.

In this first year at university besides the excitement of study and the inevitable coaching there were, because lectures started early (8 a.m. and sometimes in summer 7 a.m.) and finished late, coffee breaks. Hanna soon found herself in a group of people, all senior to her – some already with doctorates – many of whom were later to make their mark in mathematical circles. It included Werner Fenchel and his future wife Käte (both professors at Copenhagen), Kurt Hirsch (recently retired as Professor of Pure Mathematics at Queen Mary College, London), Rudolf Kochendörffer (Professor at Dortmund, for a time Professor of Pure Mathematics in the University of Tasmania), Erika Pannwitz (formerly Chief Editor of the Zentralblatt für Mathematik), Richard Rado (Emeritus Professor at Reading), Helmut Wielandt (Professor at Tübingen and longtime editor of Mathematische Zeitschrift) and, in particular, her future husband Bernhard H. Neumann (Professor of Mathematics at the Australian National University).

The friendship between Hanna and Bernhard started in January 1933 and quickly blossomed into something special. In August 1933 Bernhard left for Cambridge in England; it had become clear that Germany would be no place for Jews for some time to come. At the Easter of 1934 Hanna visited Bernhard in London and they became secretly engaged; already the climate in Germany, and soon the law, was against such 'mixed' marriages. Then Hanna returned to her studies.

As a result of her work in her first year, Hanna won three-quarters remission of fees and got a job as a part-time assistant in the library of the Mathematical Institute. This meant not only a lighter load of coaching but also, very importantly, an earlier than usual introduction to a wider range of mathematical books and to mathematical journals.

In Germany at that time the first university degree was a doctorate (of philosophy). However university study could also lead to the Staatsexamen which was a necessary prerequisite for entry into the public service including the teaching service. The formal requirements for both were similar. There were certain attendance requirements: at lecture courses, at exercise classes, at practical classes, at seminars and at a physical education course (swimming in Hanna's case). There was also for each a final examination. The examination for the Staatsexamen laid more stress on breadth, it consisted of two essays and an oral examination in two major fields of study and one subsidiary (the example of Hanna's examination will be given a little later). The examination for the doctorate laid more stress on depth; it consisted of a thesis usually embodying some original results and an oral examination in two major fields (for example, Algebra and Analysis), a minor field (say, Experimental Physics) and a subsidiary (say, Philosophy). As a consequence, in the first couple of years the final goal was relatively unimportant.

In her second year Hanna attended lectures on Higher Geometry, Differential and Integral Calculus, Differential Equations, The Theory of Functions, Ideal Theory, Mechanics, and General Experimental Chemistry. She took part in the exercise classes associated with some of these courses, in the beginners' practical classes in Astronomy and Physics, and in a junior (pro-)seminar.

There is a story about the practical Physics class which illustrates a significant feature of Hanna's make-up. During the course the students, working in pairs, were required to use a theodolite to measure the height of a distant chimney stack. Hanna and her partner made the measurements, did the appropriate calculations and took the work for marking. They were told their result was significantly wrong and to repeat the work. This they did with essentially the same result. They were then told how far short their result was and to try again. They did with again much the same result. They then managed to persuade the demonstrator to check the measurements. Much to his surprise his agreed with theirs. Investigations revealed that a few years earlier the stack had been lowered by several courses of bricks!

During Hanna's first year at university the Nazis came to power and Hanna was outspokenly critical of them. The Nazis tried to stop the lectures of Jewish staff by organizing protests and violence in them. In her second year Hanna was active in a group of students who tried to protect the Jewish lecturers by ensuring that only genuine students attended their lectures. In spite of this student support the objective was achieved. Moreover people with Jewish ancestry were prevented from studying in universities. Hanna lost her job in the Mathematical Institute, presumably as a result of these activities. However she had by then won, and continued to earn for the rest of her course, full remission of fees.

In her third year Hanna attended lectures on Set Theory, Elliptic Functions, Groups of Linear Transformations, The Theory of Functions, The Theory of Invariants, the Theory of Electricity and Magnetism, Logic and Fundamental Questions of Metaphysics. She did practical Physics and attended the Analysis, Geometry and Algebra seminars and also the Philosophy of Religion seminar of Guardini (this latter she regarded as a particular honour as attendance was by invitation only and it was not one of her major studies).

Early in the third year Hanna was invited to become a reviewer for the Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik. A couple of years later she had a vacation job in the editorial office; employed, as she was much later to describe it, 'rather like a superior office boy'.

In her fourth year she attended courses in the Theory of Functions, Additive Number Theory, Galois Theory, The Philosophy of History, The Principal Problems of Systematic Philosophy and The History of the Development of German Education. She attended exercise classes in the Introduction to Philosophy and on Plato's Republic, a Philosophy colloquium, further practical Physics classes and again the Analysis and Algebra seminars and the pro-seminar of A. Brauer.

The Nazi terror had the effect of polarizing people; it was almost impossible to remain neutral. Hanna was fascinated and frightened by this process – fascinated by the way she and others developed a sixth sense for detecting the direction in which people had become polarized, frightened by the way some people reacted (one eminent mathematician started writing in all seriousness about the differences between Aryan and Jewish mathematics).

There was also a direct effect on her studies. Hanna had by now set her sights directly on a doctorate. However in her fourth year she was warned that in the oral examination the above-mentioned mathematician would personally examine her on 'political knowledge' which was by now compulsory. She was advised to switch quickly to the Staatsexamen for which, though it had a similar requirement, the oral might be arranged with a different examiner. She could then go on and do a doctorate at another university.

As remarked earlier the Staatsexamen had requirements which placed more emphasis on breadth than those for the doctorate. Hanna chose to be examined in Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy. This involved an oral examination in all three subjects and extended essays in Mathematics and Philosophy. The switch also involved some last minute changes in her course for the eighth semester to meet the requirements in Philosophy. Fortunately she was able to find a Philosophy lecturer who was sympathetic to her difficulties. He suggested the essay topic: The epistemological basis of number in Plato's later dialogues. Though this work was intended as a make-weight, Hanna tackled it with commendable thoroughness. In order to be able to compare the translations of critical passages she acquired a rudimentary knowledge of Greek in a couple of months of private study. The mathematical essay was: The construction of relative cyclic fields. The summer semester of 1936 was spent on leave from courses preparing for the orals in August. Preparation was seriously disrupted by an attack of scarlet fever. Nevertheless she obtained distinctions in both Mathematics and Physics and good in Philosophy for an over-all award with distinction.

During all this time Hanna and Bernhard kept in contact by correspondence. It was, in the circumstances, not an easy correspondence; it was conducted anonymously through various friendly channels. They met only once during this period – in Denmark for a couple of weeks in 1936 when Bernhard was travelling from the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo.

With the Staatsexamen completed and through the good offices of Hans Rohrbach, a lecturer at Göttingen and former Assistant at Berlin (later Emeritus Professor at Mainz), Hanna was accepted as a research student by Hasse, one of the professors in Göttingen. He also found her a minor tutoring and assistant's job with which she could finance her stay. Before taking up studies there in the summer of 1937, Hanna spent six months working in the statistics department of an institute of military economics. Göttingen was very active though it was no longer the outstanding centre that it had been before the advent of the Nazis. As well as Hasse and his team, there was Siegel and his co-workers. Hasse believed in team work: he assigned each of his school some task towards a common goal. At that time it was the Riemann conjecture in algebraic function fields of characteristic p. Seminars were used to ensure that everyone retained an overall picture of the project. The most powerful members of the team were Witt, H. L. Schmid, and Deuring; fellow students were Günther Pickert and Paul Lorenzen.

In Göttingen Hanna found time for some chess and some gliding. She also found time to attend a course on Czech – this because a friend wanted to learn the language and the minimum class size was two. The course was no hardship as Hanna had a flair for learning languages, one that she put to good use later in her professional career in reading papers in a wide variety of languages.

Early 1938 saw the annexation of Austria and summer the Czechoslovak crisis. Hanna decided it would be impossible to complete her course without risking a prolonged delay in her marriage plans. So, after three semesters, she gave up her course and in July 1938 went to Britain. Hanna never harboured any bitterness or resentment against Germany and was later to enjoy a number of visits there.

The first years in Britain were far from easy, yet they saw the beginning of her family, and the beginning of productive research. Hanna and Bernhard felt they could not openly marry until his parents were safe from possible reprisals. Bernhard was a Temporary Assistant Lecturer in Cardiff. Hanna went to live in Bristol. There she started working on a problem, suggested to her by Bernhard, that was to be the seed for her first paper, 'On the elimination rule'. The opening two paragraphs of the paper tell the story:

Chess matches are often decided according to the following elimination rule. The team with the higher score wins, of course. If both teams score the same number of points, the one that lost at the last board at which the game was not drawn wins the match. The problem is to find an arithmetical equivalent of this rule, i.e., to attribute to the single boards positive integral weights (which then have to be chosen as small as possible) such that the result is in accordance with this rule. We solve this problem as a special case of the following more general problem.

It was also then that she started working on finite plane geometries, an interest that was to remain with her throughout her life. The interest was inspired by a report Bernhard gave her of a lecture describing the connection between Graeco-Latin squares and finite planes that he heard at the British Association meeting in August 1938. Her work on finite planes, though rarely a major interest, provided material for several lecture courses and occasional lectures, and in 1954 a paper 'On some finite non-desarguesian planes'. In a memorial lecture in Toronto the leading geometer Coxeter described this as an important contribution. She showed the existence of finite planes with two types of quadrangles: some whose diagonal points are collinear, and some whose diagonal points are not (the Fano configuration). She made the bold (according to Coxeter) conjecture that a finite plane in which all quadrangles are of the same type is desarguesian. This conjecture is still unresolved.

Late in 1938 Hanna and Bernhard were secretly married in Cardiff. They finally set up house together in Cardiff early in 1939 when Bernhard's parents joined them. Later that year their first child, Irene, was born. During this time in Cardiff Hanna's earlier interest in botany was turned to practical use. The family were able to vary and supplement their diet with the use of such plants as sorrel which could be found growing wild.

Both Hanna and Bernhard were classified as 'least restricted' aliens. This meant that at first they were not affected by restrictions on aliens. However, after Dunkirk a larger part of the coast was barred to all aliens and they were required to leave Cardiff. They moved to Oxford – because it was a university town. Within a week Bernhard was interned and a few months later released into the British army. Meanwhile Hanna, expecting a second child, made arrangements to complete a doctorate (D.Phil.). This was made possible by the Society of Oxford Home Students (later St Anne's College) through which she enrolled, and a generous waiver of fees that Oxford University granted to all refugee students whose courses had been interrupted. Just after Christmas the second child, Peter, was born (he became a mathematics don at Oxford after himself gaining a D.Phil. from there).

On leaving Germany Hanna had abandoned her research on algebraic function fields feeling that it was not fruitful to continue this line outside the team. (She was not aware till after the war that Weil had solved the problem in 1940). For her D.Phil. thesis she chose the problem of determining the sub-group structure of free products of groups with an amalgamated subgroup. This had been suggested in the paper of Kuroš in which he solved the corresponding problem when there is no amalgamation. Her research supervisor was Olga Taussky-Todd (then a lecturer at Westfield College, London, which had been evacuated to Oxford; she became professor at the California Institute of Technology). The supervision was largely a formality as Hanna made good progress and her supervisor was not especially interested in the topic of research. Hanna also had once or twice a term to visit her College Tutor. On these occasions fellow students would mind the children in the common room. The children used to travel in a side-car attached to Hanna's bicycle. The combination became well-known throughout Oxford.

The major problem during this time was accommodation. The original flat became unavailable towards the end of 1941. It was not easy to find accommodation with two young children and was made no easier by having to compete with refugees from the bombing of London. All Hanna could find was a sub-letting of part of a house – with shared facilities. A year later another move became necessary. This time Hanna found a brilliant solution. She rented a caravan and got permission from a market gardener to park it on his farm. She also, as was necessary had it declared 'approved rooms' by the Oxford Delegacy of Lodgings.

It was then that the thesis was largely written; in a caravan by candlelight. The typing was done on a card-table by a haystack when the weather permitted. The thesis was submitted in mid-1943. Soon after, restrictions on aliens were eased and Hanna was able to return to Cardiff. In November of that year the third child, Barbara, was born (she graduated in Mathematics from Sussex University and went on to teach mathematics). The thesis was examined by two Fellows of the Royal Society – Philip Hall (later Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at Cambridge) and Henry Whitehead (later Wayneflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Oxford). The oral examination took place in Oxford in April 1944. Hanna returned to Cardiff with her D.Phil.

A year later the war in Europe was over. Bernhard was demobilized from the army and resumed his university career at the beginning of 1946 with a Temporary Lectureship at the University College in Hull. At the same time the fourth child, Walter, was born (after studying at universities in New York, Adelaide and Bonn, he gained a doctorate and is now active in mathematical research). For the next academic year Bernhard was made a Lecturer. Hanna was offered a Temporary Assistant Lectureship which she took and thus began her formal teaching career.

Hanna was to stay in Hull for twelve years rising through the ranks to be by the end of her time there a Senior Lecturer. She also saw the transformation from a college of about 500 students being prepared for London external degrees to an autonomous university of about 1400 students. Bernhard, on the other hand, received an invitation to a Lectureship at Manchester and from October 1948 spent his terms in Manchester.

The curriculum of British universities was not one which Hanna's training had specifically equipped her to teach. In reviewing the book of Feigl-Rohrbach, Einführung in die höhere Mathematik, she regretted that a course of that kind was not suitable for use in British universities 'where so much more time is spent on enabling a student to solve problems – or perhaps: so much more care is taken to turn out students not worried by an integral or a differential equation'. With characteristic energy, and she would no doubt say because of her more mathematical training, she learnt the requisite techniques and was able to give lectures which students found clear and illuminating though demanding. The head of the department in Hull was an applied mathematician. So Hanna, with her (by British standards) very pure background, became the focus for moves to change the curriculum to introduce some of the more recent developments in pure mathematics. Here her ability to argue a case clearly, firmly and with tact was invaluable in getting changes made.

She took an active interest in her students. She was a strong supporter of the student mathematical society. She gave lectures to it on a number of occasions on such topics as: Dissection of rectangles into incongruent squares; Difficulties in defining the area of surfaces; and Prime numbers. Her aim was to exhibit some of the facets of mathematics for which there was not enough time in the regular courses and, as always, to convey her joy in mathematics. It was one of Hanna's striking qualities that she found joy in so much. The model-building group also had her active support; in particular she participated in the making of paper models of regular and other solids. The outstanding feature, though, was her coffee evening. She often invited staff and students to meet at her house over coffee. This turned into a regular weekly open house at which her students were always welcome and, as one of her colleagues of those times says, 'many benefited greatly from being able to drop in for company, discussion and often help with personal affairs'. She was very interested in people and in seeing that they made the most of their abilities. One finds over and over that her interest in someone's work and her encouragement of it played a significant role.

A number of people now teaching in British universities received significant help from Hanna. One of the undergraduates, John Britton, stayed on to take a Master's degree under Hanna's direction. This involved preparing him for two examination papers; he chose Group Theory and Analysis. The latter involved Hanna in learning a lot of hard analysis by working through Whittaker and Watson's A course of modern analysis. He then went to Manchester to work for a doctorate under Bernhard's supervision and became a professor at Queen Elizabeth College, London. One of her young colleagues, John Shepperd, who had a Master's degree for work of an applied nature, became interested in Group Theory, and, under Hanna's guidance, gained a doctorate for work in it. John Bowers, later a lecturer at Leeds, took a Master's degree under Hanna and went on to London to do a doctorate.

Meanwhile the family thrived and grew with the addition of a fifth child, Daniel, born in 1951 (he has completed a university course in Mathematics and Greek). This was, of course, a very busy time for Hanna. Even with a home-help (in whom she invariably inspired intense loyalty), she had to be well-organized and call on all her resources of stamina, will-power and self-discipline. Visitors were always struck by the organization of the children: all had tasks to do and carried them out with responsibility and efficiency.

Research continued too. Two papers were prepared from material of the thesis and published in the American Journal of Mathematics. In Manchester Bernhard shared an office with Graham Higman, (Whitehead's successor at Oxford) and this led to a joint paper, Embedding theorems for groups, in 1949 which is much quoted and has led to certain groups being called HNN-groups. Her own research and joint research with Bernhard also progressed well and resulted in a number of papers. In 1955 her published work was submitted to Oxford and judged worthy of a D.Sc. A lecture given by H. Hopf, a very distinguished topologist, to the fourth British Mathematical Colloquium in 1952 helped revive interest in a group-theoretic problem of his which is related to the structure of certain manifolds. Hanna was invited to lecture at the sixth British Mathematical Colloquium in 1954 and chose to report on Hopf's problem. The problem involved a property of groups which is now called the Hopf property. Hanna reported on the state of knowledge about Hopf groups and went on to ask a number of questions about them. One of these, whether the free product of finitely many Hopf groups is again a Hopf group, was to concern her for quite a number of years. In 1954 she attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam and reported on some work on near-rings. This led on to work on varieties of groups which was to be a very significant part of her mathematical career and in which she was to be a leading figure.

As if she didn't already have a full load, Hanna also took on for a time the job of Secretary of a local United Nations Association branch.

At various times from 1948 on Hanna looked for a suitable position in Manchester so that the family could lead a life under one roof. This search finally succeeded in 1958, when the Faculty of Technology of the University of Manchester (now The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) decided to set up an honours programme in mathematics and were looking for a relatively senior pure mathematician to be responsible for that aspect of the courses. (There was and is no formal contact between the Department of Mathematics in the Faculty of Technology and that in the other part of the university in which Bernhard was by then a Reader; they are also physically quite separated.) Hanna applied for and was appointed to a Lectureship in the Faculty of Technology – with the understanding that the drop from Senior Lecturer would be short-lived; and indeed it was. It was considered by some that this was not only a drop in rank but also a drop to a lower kind of institution. Hanna did not feel this and in a lecture to her former colleagues at Hull a year later was able to report from experience that she saw no justification for that view.

Before taking up the appointment in Manchester in October, Hanna and Bernhard fitted in a stay at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh and a cycling holiday with the family. Longish cycling trips with the children had become very much part of their life and cycling remained an important recreation with Hanna.

During Hanna's first year in Manchester Bernhard took his first study leave. In the nine months of it he visited India and Australia. Hanna took over the supervision of one of his research students (MFN).

Hanna set about organizing courses which would show the students something of mathematics as she saw it. She was able to introduce into the first year course, which had till then been entirely problem-oriented, a small strand of one lecture a week of an introduction to mathematics in the style of Feigl-Rohrbach. The later-year algebra courses much more thoroughly reflected her own interests and views. She continued to develop a style of teaching which aimed at making the acquisition of very abstract ideas accessible through judicious use of more concrete examples and well-graded exercises. Through the use of books like those of Kemeny and others, she was able to emphasize to undergraduates that parts of mathematics other than calculus were being applied to branches of human endeavour other than physics, Hanna also set about building up an active teaching and research team around her. After a year John Shepperd came from Hull and soon became involved with and solved a problem raised by a braid manufacturer which was first taken to the textile engineers and was brought by them to the mathematicians. The solution of this used some quite deep group theory. Hanna was delighted with this application and built it into a lecture for non-specialist audiences. In the following year (1960-61) Jim Wiegold, a former research student of Bernhard's with whom Hanna had started joint work on certain products of groups which they called linked products, joined the staff. That year Hanna started supervising her first research students: Ian Dey, later a Senior Lecturer at the Open University, and Chris Houghton, later a Lecturer at Cardiff. Ian Dey worked on the problem of whether the free product of finitely many finitely-generated Hopf groups is again Hopf and settled a number of special cases.

Life thus continued very busy. Hanna would sometimes work all night reading manuscripts or preparing lectures, take a good long shower and appear in the office seemingly as fresh as if she had had a night's sleep. She did not allow this pressure of work to interfere with her contact with fellow staff and students nor with taking an interest in their work. There were regular coffee sessions at which they would discuss problems of interest. She was not beyond getting new experiences such as that of wall-papering.

In the summer of 1959 she went on a fortnight's tour of universities in Hungary lecturing on various aspects of her research. Hanna also received an invitation to address the twelfth British Mathematical Colloquium in 1960. On this occasion she talked about Wreath Products – a group construction which had implicitly seen the light of day in the work of Frobenius in the 1890s but which had really burst into prominence in the 1950s. It had played a key part in some work with Bernhard and was to play a key part in some other work a year later.

Group theory is studied by mathematicians largely for the fascination of its problems and the appeal of its ideas. However certain aspects of it have proved useful in the application of mathematics to various fields but especially physics. While Hanna was always at pains to stress that she saw the intrinsic motivations of beauty and joy as quite crucial, she was also interested in exploring such applications. Therefore she agreed to take part in a postgraduate course run by mathematicians and physicists on representations of groups. The mathematicians were to begin by giving a detailed account of those parts of the theory of interest to the physicists and then the physicists were to take over and explain how the theory was used. Hanna gave the mathematical lectures during 1960-61; the physical part never eventuated.

During 1960-61 preparations were made for a joint study leave by Hanna and Bernhard at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York in 1961-62; Hanna was a Visiting Research Scientist. It was also then that an offer came to Bernhard to set up a research department of mathematics at the Australian National University. Hanna was offered a post as Reader (now called Professorial Fellow) in that department. They accepted, with Bernhard to take up his appointment after the year in New York and Hanna a year later after discharging her obligations to her research students in Manchester.

The year in New York was very successful. They were accompanied on the trip by their three sons. The eldest (by then an undergraduate at Oxford) started an active interest in research under the guidance of one of the professors there, Gilbert Baumslag (another former student of Bernhard's), and was soon involved in his parents' research. During the year Bernhard, Hanna and Peter solved the problem of the structure of the semigroup of varieties of groups, showing that it is free. Together with Baumslag the three of them also made a significant study of varieties of groups that are generated by a finitely-generated group. Hanna gave a number of invited lectures in the course of the year.

While Hanna was away, the group at Manchester grew with the addition of another staff member, Laci Kovacs (yet another former student of Bernhard's who was later at the Australian National University), and three more research students (supervised by some of the other staff). One of these, Carl Christensen, was a recent graduate of the department who had been inspired to do further work in mathematics by Hanna. The year of winding up was also a hectic year. Hanna was invited to give a number of lectures around the country on the New York work. She also gave a graduate course on varieties of groups: notes were taken by her two students. The course was to be very influential in stimulating the growth of interest in this part of group theory. It was during this year that the so-called finite basis problem for varieties generated by a finite group (first posed by Bernhard in 1935) was solved in stages in Oxford. Hanna reported on progress as it happened. Very typically she kept tabs on what was happening and by her interest encouraged the people making the progress. It also involved a lot of effort on Hanna's part working into an area of group theory with which she was not very familiar. Soon after she reached Australia she was able to report the successful completion of the solution.

While in Manchester Hanna took an active role in the Mathematical Society, a group of people interested in mathematics in a wider and to some extent non-professional sense.

In August 1963 Hanna left Britain to face new challenges in Australia. Hanna came to a research post in which she hoped to pursue her research interests and guide some research students to doctorates. In fact two students were waiting for her when she arrived. They were Martin Ward and Bob Burns; both successfully completed doctorates and later held university teaching posts at the Australian National University and York University (Canada) respectively. Her first goal was to polish the lectures on varieties of groups into a monograph.

Instead Hanna found herself heading into major teaching responsibility. She was invited to take the newly created chair of Pure Mathematics in the National University's School of General Studies (that is the part of the university which is responsible for the teaching of undergraduate students and in which the academic staff are expected to devote a significant part of their time to teaching duties). With the chair went the headship of the Department of Pure Mathematics which, together with the Department of Applied Mathematics, had grown out of the fission of the former Department of Mathematics. She accepted the invitation and took up the appointment in April 1964.

She also quickly became involved with helping teachers in secondary schools with some of the problems being created by the introduction of the Wyndham scheme into secondary schooling in New South Wales. This scheme involved a radical restructuring which forced the creation of new syllabuses. In mathematics these new syllabuses reflected some of the changes that were taking place in the teaching of mathematics in other parts of the world. Many teachers found that their training had not prepared them to teach some aspects of these syllabuses. In the first term of 1964 Hanna and Ken Mattei, one of the mathematics masters in Canberra, ran (under the auspices of the Canberra Mathematical Association) a once-a-week course for teachers entitled 'The language of sets in school mathematics'. This was Hanna's first excursion into this kind of activity, however her experience and sensitivity enabled her to hit the right note and she was thanked '...for the lessons and guidance given so cheerfully and efficiently'. This direct involvement with secondary teachers was, as will be seen, to continue for the rest of her life.

Meanwhile Hanna set about building up a department of pure mathematics under difficult circumstances. Most of the more experienced staff of the former Department of Mathematics had, because of their research interests, joined the Department of Applied Mathematics. At that time experienced staff was almost impossible to come by. Fortunately Hanna was, in time, able to attract some of her former students to join her (Martin Ward, Carl Christensen and Ian Dey) and by her guidance and enthusiasm to build up an active and keen young department round her. In this she was helped by being able to draw on some of the people in Bernhard's department for occasional advanced courses, by being able to attract some more senior people as visitors (including M. Stone, professor at Chicago, and Coxeter, professor at Toronto, for a term each and Jim Wiegold for two years), and to use some of the research students to help with part-time tutoring.

Hanna was concerned to see that all students got courses suited to their needs. On the one hand she wanted the better students to get a real appreciation of mathematics so that they could sensibly decide whether they wanted to make a career within mathematics and be well prepared to do so. In this respect, besides making available an intensive course of study through lectures, she instituted forms of examining, especially take-home assignments, which encouraged more sustained use of the ideas and techniques involved than the conventional short closed-book examination. She also made a supervised project an important component of the final honours year. While this was not intended, these projects occasionally produced original research some of which has been published. On the other hand she was deeply concerned that students with a limited background who were intending only one year's study of mathematics should get as clear an understanding as possible of the nature of the subject because many of these people would be required to make some use of mathematics later in their lives. She was keen to get over the idea that doing and thinking about mathematics can be joyous human activities, though it needed effort to get the rewards. She conveyed this by her own obvious joy in the subject and her willingness to work hard. It is not really possible to assess how successful these shorter courses were in achieving their aims; certainly the classes seem quite happy with them. The success of the intensive course is more easily measurable, at least a dozen students have gone on to complete doctorates in such widely scattered places as Cambridge, Edinburgh and Oxford in Great Britain, Chicago and Seattle in USA and Kingston in Canada as well as in Australia; mostly in mathematics but also in computing, physics and the history of science. These doctorates have been attained by graduates from the honours classes of 1965 to 1968 and represent about half the graduates from those classes. At the time of writing, quite a few of the later graduates were working towards doctorates.

Not only did she have these ideas about teaching which she put into operation, she also created an atmosphere in which her staff were encouraged to have ideas about teaching and to discuss, plan and execute them. Some of these won their way into wide acceptance. For instance a suggestion by a part-time tutor was the seed from which a course on distributions (in the sense of Schwartz) to third year pass students grew. Hanna gave this course a number of times and the lecture notes have been published. These notes were used by Erdélyi, professor at Edinburgh, in connection with a course he gave at the tenth Summer Research Institute of the Australian Mathematical Society and have been used for a course at the University of New South Wales. A short course on computing designed by Bill Steiger and Martin Ward has been made available to the first year students.

As well as creating the course on distribution, Hanna designed some of the details of the more problematic elementary courses and used courses to the final year honours students to work up a knowledge of important areas related to her research interests such as: cohomology of groups and Lie methods in group theory. She supervised the project work of a number of fourth year students on these topics but also on normal numbers and Hilbert's tenth problem.

Hanna believed in making herself available: as far as formal commitments allowed, she was always in her office with the door open. She encouraged students to seek help with their difficulties and she was often to be seen explaining a point at her blackboard. She also found herself helping students with non-mathematical problems. Her impact here is best summed up by the following extract from a letter by two students published in the local paper just after her death:

We will remember her not only as a mathematician; she was a friend who always had a sympathetic ear for any student, and was never too busy.

We will always miss her tremendous dedication and sincerity, and the friendliness of her presence.

Of course the price was paid in much midnight oil.

The new responsibilities drastically reduced the time Hanna had for research and research related activities. Production of the monograph slowed down. In 1965 she helped organize in Canberra a very successful international conference on the theory of groups. At the conference she gave one of the major survey talks – on varieties of groups – in which she was able to report on some of the work that had been inspired by her original course. In 1966 she attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow and reported on recent work in Canberra on varieties. The monograph was finished towards the end of 1966 and appeared early in 1967. It showed quite clearly the influence of the earlier course in developing interest in the subject. The monograph listed some of the unsolved problems, many of Hanna's own devising, about varieties. Many have been by now solved, quite a number of these by people in Canberra who have been inspired by Hanna to take up an interest in the subject. Almost immediately a Russian translation was started by Šmel'kin in Moscow – this was ready with a couple of appendices a year later but did not appear till 1969. She was invited to give talks on this work at various Australian universities and had been invited to give one of the major lectures at the Australian Mathematical Society meeting in 1972. In 1966 her first two research students in Australia completed their courses and Hanna took on two new students, Chau and Itqan Farouqi, who also went on to take doctorates and take university appointments in Sudbury (Canada) and Karachi (Pakistan) respectively. These two were followed in 1969 by two more, Bill Haebich and George lvanov, who completed their doctorates after her death.

Of course family life continued. Only one child was still living at home. However the family was supplemented by a year-long visit by a niece and a longish visit by Hanna's mother. There was also quite a lot of entertaining of a wide range of colleagues and students, of visitors to Canberra and of friends from their other activities. Hanna served her term on the executive of her local Parents' and Citizens' Association. Hanna's recreations were listed in Who's Who as cycling and photography. The former continued unabated: it was a common sight to see Hanna and Bernhard cycle to and from their offices or to their lunch-time coffee in the city. They also developed a fondness for four-wheel travel and saw much of Australia, especially the back-blocks which so many city-dwellers never see. The photography, which had been a brief interest during student holidays, was revived by coming across some old photos that she had taken. The royalties of the monograph bought a new camera. This interest was combined with the old interest in botany to build up an impressive collection of photographs of flowers and trees of all sorts but especially of many varieties of acacia. The chase for these involved much use of four wheels. It also resulted in bodily damage, and at least one broken rib is directly attributable to a chase after an elusive acacia. Such ailments had no noticeable effect on her work, and even a leg in plaster could do no more than keep her away from classes for a week – she still prepared the lectures for a colleague to give.

The interest in secondary education that had been kindled continued to grow. Later in 1964 Hanna gave an in-service course to teachers in Goulburn (a city about sixty miles from Canberra) on the new emphases in mathematics in the junior secondary school. That year also saw her taking an active part in the discussions on the new syllabuses for the senior forms. It was undoubtedly her work in evaluation of the draft proposals and her energetic work on suggestions for improvements which earned for the Canberra Mathematical Association a reputation for trenchant and constructive criticism. The following year when the syllabuses had been published she gave in-service courses on aspects of them in both Canberra and Goulburn. She visited Armidale and Newcastle in New South Wales and lectured to the Mathematical Associations there. In Armidale she also gave an intensive course to honours students on group representations. In Canberra she continued her support for the new spirit in the junior forms by giving a lecture (for the Canberra Mathematical Association) to parents 'Learning Mathematics and learning Chinese', a title she borrowed from the introduction to a book by W. W. Sawyer. She set out to explain to (an overflow audience of over two hundred) parents the ideas behind the new syllabuses and to enlist their co-operation in making them a success. She believed that the community had to be educated to create a more favourable climate (one in which mathematics is not feared) for the learning of mathematics – especially among girls. At the beginning of 1966 she lectured to the University of New South Wales' Summer School for Mathematics Teachers on Évariste Galois and the theory of equations.

January of 1966 also saw the meeting which finally, after four years of discussion, set up the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers. Hanna was immediately elected to be one of the foundation Vice-Presidents. In that role she had, in September of that year, to deliver the first presidential address in the absence overseas of the President (Bernhard). In her address 'Education in Semut' she described a semi-utopia in which mathematical education had reached the stage of incorporating all the best features of mathematical education that she had personally observed in various parts of the world. She admitted that no one system had all these features but felt that their existence somewhere made the achievement of the system she described realizable. She also had to chair the lengthy meetings of the first council and succeeded in moulding into a group this collection of individuals from all over Australia many of whom were meeting each other for the first time.

A little later in 1966 Hanna was elected Vice-President of the Canberra Mathematical Association as a prelude to becoming its President for 1967-68. It was during this time that the Canberra Mathematical Association pamphlets for teachers were largely prepared. This is a series of notes intended to provide teachers with background to the new topics in the senior forms which was inspired by some of the misunderstandings which showed up in many of the first text-books written for these syllabuses. Hanna wrote a pamphlet on Probability which is the best-seller in the series. It has been described by one recent text-book author as the best account available anywhere of an introduction to this topic. The pamphlet is used as a text for first year students at La Trobe University. This series of pamphlets spawned the series of Notes in Pure Mathematics published by Bernhard's and Hanna's departments in which her notes on distributions are published.

In 1967 she gave the Canberra Mathematical Association lecture to school pupils on her much favoured topic of 'Braids'. These lectures which had been started early in the life of the Canberra Mathematical Association were at that time being replaced by the Friday evenings of which Hanna was a very active supporter. She often attended and took an active part in the discussions over refreshments. When the ANU-AAMT National Summer School for talented high school students was started in 1969 she was an enthusiastic supporter of it and on two occasions gave lectures on geometry which proved very popular.

In November of 1968 she was invited to give the inaugural address to the Riverina Mathematical Association. Under the title 'Who wants Pure Mathematics?' she illustrated her view that the range of mathematics which is being applied had broadened a lot as have the fields of human endeavour to which it is being applied.

Hanna went on study leave in August 1969. Her first stop was at the First International Congress on Mathematical Education at Lyons. This provoked her into writing a letter (one of a very few) to the editors of several Australian newspapers which it seems appropriate to quote here:

'The proceedings of this congress have confirmed my impression that the development of mathematical education in Australia is lagging behind that of the rest of the world to a frightening extent.'

Typically, while we in Australia are asking whether to teach computer programming in schools, the discussion here takes it for granted that this is done and goes on to consider the question of how the (new!) mathematics programmes have to be changed and re-organised to take account of the impact of computers on the content of mathematics.

It is clear that the great advances in other countries stem from experimentation made possible by the enlightened flexibility of examining bodies and their clientele (for example, employers, universities) and the availability of funds.

Certainly, mathematical education in Australia is changing, but the rate of change has to increase vastly if we want to catch up with the progress made elsewhere.

Because of Hanna's known interest in educational matters she was proposed for membership of the Australian College of Education early in 1968, was elected to Fellowship (FACE) in 1970 and was a member of the ACT Chapter committee in 1971.

Hanna's post as Professor of Pure Mathematics involved her in committee work within the university. On these committees her qualities of commonsense, balance, fairness and impartiality won her respect and her views were listened to. She was asked to take on some of the more demanding administrative tasks but usually felt she could not accept them without putting an unfair load on her young staff. She did, however, accept the position of Dean of Students from January 1968 till August 1969. In this she played an important role in maintaining good relations between the student body and the university authorities. The students appreciated the time and effort that she put into acting on their behalf and, though she could not always agree with their position, she was respected for her integrity and the soundness of her judgement.

The Australian Mathematical Society also made use of Hanna's organizational abilities. She was invited to be the director of the ninth Summer Research Institute held in January 1969. She invited Mac Lane, professor at Chicago, and Gaschütz, professor at Kiel, as main lecturers. This attracted the greatest attendance ever at a Summer Research Institute. Bonuses were visits by Erdös and Hirsch.

In March 1969 her academic excellence was given further recognition by her election to a Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science.

The next stop after Lyons in the year long study leave (taken with Bernhard) was a meeting on Decision Problems in Group Theory held in California. Then they went on to a five-month stay at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where Hanna was on a National Science Foundation Senior Foreign Scientist Fellowship. Another visitor to Vanderbilt at that time was their eldest son Peter. Hanna gave a course to graduate students on Varieties of Groups. Into this she was able to incorporate a solution to one of the fundamental questions in the theory: the finite basis problem. News of a negative solution of the problem by a young Russian Ol'šanskii (a student of Šmel'kin) reached them early in their stay. A better solution was found by Vaughan-Lee who was then also at Vanderbilt, having just completed a doctorate at Oxford under Peter's supervision. The course was concluded by Vaughan-Lee presenting his solution. However, the highlight of the stay was the solution of the problem on the free product of finitely many finitely-generated Hopf groups. Hanna and Ian Dey had been continuing work on the problem making some progress. Now with Hanna having more time to devote to the problem the final difficulty was overcome. It turned out that such free products are indeed Hopf groups. The solution required almost all the techniques of this area of group theory often in specially sharpened form. This work was indeed a fitting climax to Hanna's research career. However with typical modesty Hanna's report to the university on the leave apologizes for her having only achieved this. During her time in Nashville Hanna was invited to give many lectures in other parts of North America. In spite of declining some invitations she still gave at least fifteen lectures in places as far apart as Atlanta, Houston and Toronto; usually on varieties or the Hopf problem. They then moved on to Cambridge in England where they stayed for the next four months, Hanna as Honorary Bye-Fellow at Girton College and as a Visiting Professor to the University. In the latter capacity she gave a course of lectures on varieties of groups. Here again she gave invited lectures up and down the country including one to the London Mathematical Society. She also managed to visit her (at that time) nine grand-children. This stay was followed by six weeks at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut of the University of Freiburg delightfully situated in the Black Forest in Germany. Hence, refreshed, they did a three-week lecture tour of the Indian sub-continent spending the main time in Lahore, Madras and Madurai before returning to Australia in August 1970.

No sooner was Hanna back than she was invited to make a lecture tour of Canada under the Commonwealth Universities Interchange Scheme. This was arranged for the (Canadian) winter of 1971-72. In her department she found that the tightening financial position was making it more difficult to continue to offer the same services to students. This together with some changes in the structure of the university and problems which were becoming more clearly visible with some of the courses convinced her that a major new planning of courses would be needed and she set about initiating it.

During 1971 she was invited to give two talks. First in Adelaide to a joint meeting of the Mathematical Association of South Australia and the Australian Mathematical Society in which she talked on 'Teaching first year undergraduates: fads and fancies', and second at Wodonga Technical High School to a regional meeting of teachers on 'Modern Mathematics – Symbolism and its importance at the secondary and tertiary levels'.

At the end of October Hanna set off on her Canadian lecture tour. She visited in quick succession the University of British Columbia, the University of Calgary, the University of Alberta, the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Manitoba. She arrived at Carleton University, Ottawa, on the 8th November for a somewhat longer stay. On the evening of the 12th she felt ill, admitted herself to hospital and quickly went into a coma. She died on the 14th without regaining consciousness.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Records of the Australian Academy of Science, vol.3, no.2, 1975. The text of this obituary is reprinted with permission from the Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society 17 (1974), 1-28. The memoir was written by:

• Michael Frederick Newman, PhD, a first cousin once removed of the late Professor Hanna Neumann's husband, Senior Fellow in Mathematics, Australian National University.
• Gordon Elliott Wall, PhD, Professor of Pure Mathematics, University of Sydney; he was elected to the Academy in 1971.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Hanna's family, friends and colleagues for providing much useful information. They are too many to mention individually, however, we must record our special gratitude to her husband who has been a patient and tireless source of information and has given us access to many private papers.

Written by Ross Street.

• Introduction
• Scientific Contribution
• About this memoir
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Bibliography
  • Publications dedicated

Introduction

Gregory Maxwell (‘Max’) Kelly (1930–2007) was educated at the University of Sydney (BSc 1951 with First Class Honours, University Medal for Mathematics, Barker Prize, and James King of Irrawang Travelling Scholarship) and the University of Cambridge (BA 1953 with First Class Honours and two Wright’s Prizes; Rayleigh Prize, 1955; PhD 1957). He returned to Australia as Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at the University of Sydney in 1957, became Senior Lecturer in 1961 and Reader in 1965. He was appointed Professor of Pure Mathematics first at the University of New South Wales in 1967 then at the University of Sydney in 1973, becoming Professor Emeritus in 1994. He introduced the mathematical discipline of category theory to Australia and continued active and influential research in the subject until the day of his death.

Professor Gregory Maxwell (‘Max’) Kelly was born in the inner Sydney suburb of Annandale on 5 June 1930. His father Owen Kelly was a radio operator on merchant ships plying the Pacific region before he married Rita McCauley who came from a farming family in Nelligen, New South Wales. After their marriage they together bought a business that collapsed during the Depression. Owen became a telegraphist with the Post Office and in his later years had a variety of jobs, the last of which was taxi-driving. Michael, born some seven years later, is Max’s only sibling.

Max received all his schooling at Bondi Beach where he was a student of the Marist Brothers throughout his primary and secondary education. He topped the New South Wales School Leaving Certificate Examination overall. He went on to win in 1951 the University Medal for Mathematics at the University of Sydney and to gain the James King of Irrawang Travelling Scholarship to study at Cambridge. There he obtained a BA with First Class Honours and two Wright’s Prizes in 1953, a Rayleigh Prize in 1955 and his PhD in 1957; the doctorate was in algebraic topology under the principal supervision of Shaun Wylie. Max also spent a term or more at Oxford where M.G. Barrett suggested a problem; Max’s solution became a chapter in his PhD thesis [1]. The thesis consisted of three separate parts published as [2], [3] and [4].

Max returned to the University of Sydney in early 1957 as a Lecturer in Pure Mathematics; he was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1961 and to Reader in 1965 (Fig. 1). For many years he served the New South Wales Department of Education as Assessor for the Leaving Certificate Examinations in Mathematics.

In November 1960 Max married Imogen Datson whom he met through friends of his brother. Imogen had come to Sydney from Broken Hill where she had taught for some years. She had planned to further her studies at the University of Sydney as an evening student while teaching at Newtown Demonstration School. After a year or so of juggling teaching, study and courtship, she decided to abandon her studies and devote herself to family life. Max and Imogen had four children—none of whom showed any great interest in mathematics—and the family now includes ten grandchildren. It was a source of great pride and delight to Max when, upon retirement from teaching, Imogen resumed her studies, gaining a PhD with a thesis on medieval and early modern English drama (Fig. 2). As Chancellor Santow remarked at the awarding of the degree, ‘You must have very interesting conversations in your household’.

Conversations were indeed lively in the Kelly household. With a seemingly natural flair for languages, Max spoke fluent French and Italian and frequently lectured in one or other of those languages when he travelled overseas. He had an abiding interest in etymology and a great love of literature. Language fascinated him. In his younger days, before debilitating back problems made extreme physical activity difficult, Max was a keen squash and table tennis player. He also enjoyed lunchtime games of Bridge in the Mathematics Department of the University of Sydney.

Max was solely responsible for introducing category theory into Australia at a time when the subject was in its infancy. The 1966 monograph ‘Closed Categories’ by Eilenberg and Kelly [14] set the stage for two more generations of Australian category theorists. This research stream reached maturity with Max’s 1982 book, Basic Concepts of Enriched Category Theory [41], and now finds application in many areas of mathematics, theoretical physics, computer architecture, software design and information management.

Eilenberg and Mac Lane completed the basic definitions of category theory in 1945. Although Max heard these definitions at Cambridge, the power of the subject was impressed upon him in 1962 when he heard some of Mac Lane’s deeper categorical ideas during Michael Atiyah’s lectures at Harvard. Soon Max had himself developed lasting ideas in the area. While visiting Tulane University in 1963–64, he met Eilenberg who insisted that Max remain in the USA for another year. Indeed Eilenberg, in one phone call, arranged a job at the University of Illinois for 1964–65. During the year at Tulane, Max also met Mac Lane, who recognized Max’s ability and arranged a visit to Chicago.

Max was a spontaneous lecturer, often referring to having found inspiration for the content that morning while in the shower or crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Once Max had made a topic his own, he could provide a thorough account of it without notes at the drop of a hat. While teaching fourth-year honours in 1965, he asked the class whether they knew what was meant by the product of a family of sets. A lack of response prompted him to abandon the lecture he had planned. Upon the green board he wrote six forms of the Axiom of Choice (one form involving the non-emptiness of a product), and proceeded to prove the six equivalent. In that one lecture he completed five of the six steps, finishing the job next time. In that last step he used a technical lemma that he must have concocted on the day because I have not seen it anywhere else. I memorized this proof of the equivalence for the final examination; however, the examination question caused me some extra thinking by asking us to prove a different lemma for that last step.

In 1967, Max moved to become Professor at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). After visits to Columbia University from January to May 1968 with Eilenberg, and to the University of Chicago in 1970–71 with Saunders Mac Lane, Max returned to UNSW and arranged a sabbatical there for Peter Freyd from the University of Pennsylvania. During Freyd’s stay Max organized, with the strong support of Bernhard Neumann from the Australian National University, the first conference in Australia on category theory.

Max was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1972 and moved back to the University of Sydney as Professor in 1973. He was a true academic: erudite in the classics, prolific researcher and publisher, editor for several journals, successful department head, traveller, linguist, raconteur and bon-vivant. He supervised five PhD students to completion: I was the first (1969), then Brian Day (1970) , Geoffery Lewis (1974), Robert Blackwell (1976) and Greg Bird (1984). Other supervisions included the MSc of Roger Eyland in 1962 and of Amnon Neeman in 1979.

Max was one of the first mathematicians to attract research funding from the Australian Government through the Australian Research Grants Committee and its successor the Australian Research Council, contributing to recognition of the legitimacy of funding for research fellows, visiting researchers and travel. Another way in which Max broke down the tyranny of distance for Australian category theory was to establish and maintain a Category Mailing List in those email-free days. Preprints and that List were typed using an IBM electric ‘golf-balls’typewriter. The List was photocopied on to address labels.

These initiatives led to an ongoing stream of researchers visiting category theorists in the Sydney area. Indeed, Max was invited to many overseas universities for research visits. His linguistic ability was helpful and much appreciated by his hosts. These visits and collaborations strongly influenced Max’s career and the direction his research followed. Periods spent at other universities were listed in his CV as follows: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (October–November 1962); Tulane University, New Orleans (1963–64); University of Illinois at Urbana (1964–65); Columbia University, New York (January–May 1968); University of Chicago (1970–71) ; McGill University, Montréal (September–December 1976; February–March 1986; June 1991); Université du Québec à Montréal (January–May 1977); Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium (June 1977; May 1981; June 1983; August 1987; January–February 1993; July 1994; July 1995; May–June 1996; November 1996; May–June 1998); Università degli studi di Trieste, Italy (May 1980; June 1981; July 1983; April–May 1986; July 1990); Fernuniversität Hagen, Germany (June–July 1980; May 1981; February 1997); Athens, Thessalonika, Xanthi, Sofia, Brno, and Prague (May 1983); Aarhus, Denmark (June 1983); Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea (August–September 1984); Université de Paris Nord (June 1986); Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw (June 1986); Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada (May–June 1987; July–August 1988; July 1989; August 1990; May–June 1993; July 2006); Università di Milano (July 1987; January–February 1989; July 1991; September–October 1992); University of Sussex (July 1988); University of Fribourg, Switzerland (June 1992); Georgian Academy of Science, Tbilisi (August 1992); Cambridge University, England (November–December 1992); University of Tours, France (July 1994); University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain (September 1995; January 1997); University of Vigo, Spain (September 1995); Universities of Coimbra and of Lisbon, Portugal (January 1998).

All of Max’s ninety or so scientific publications exhibit his obsession for completeness, beauty and accuracy. Michael Makkai (McGill) claims Max as a logician in his passionate insistence on precision and clarity in mathematics and his belief in, and search for, the grand order at the heart of the world. Much of Max’s work could be called higher-order universal algebra.

Max was very aware of how fortunate his life had been, and felt an obligation to give something back to the community. He gave freely of his time to aspiring young mathematicians and to those keen to learn. For example, frustrated by bureaucracies, he enlisted the power of the media and was able to borrow for a blind girl in the Catholic school system a mathematics textbook in Braille that had been gathering dust in a Department of Education office. This commitment to social justice was further evidenced by his involvement with Action for World Development and his efforts to help the Aboriginal community in Red-fern in Sydney. He befriended Father Ted Kennedy, Mum Shirl and others active in these movements. He also questioned the morality of the Vietnam War, making himself quite unpopular with some of the clergy of the day.

Many were moved by the words of encouragement Max offered young category theorists in his speech at the 2006 Category Theory Conference dinner in White Point, Nova Scotia. Max had an active and analytical mind to the very end. He attended the Category Seminar at Macquarie University two weeks before he died, excusing himself the next week because of an appointment. He started learning ancient Greek recently and in his last months was engaged in complex research on coherence theory, which he was typing despite failing eyesight. This research was completed and published by colleagues in Canada and Italy as [92]. The paper includes the remark: ‘G.M. (Max) Kelly died during the preparation of this paper. He was actively working on it on the day of his passing. The other authors express their gratitude for his work here and for so much more that he had shared with us as a friend and a colleague over many years. We regret too that he was unable to provide a proof reading of our final draft’.

A very successful conference was organized by George Janelidze at the University of Cape Town in January 2008 to commemorate the first anniversary of Max’s death. The proceedings will appear as [III]. The volumes of research papers [I] and [II] were also dedicated to Max.

Scientific Contribution

Max Kelly was the first researcher on category theory to be elected to the Australian Academy of Science. It therefore seems appropriate to provide some history of the subject itself.

With papers [a] and [b], top American mathematicians Eilenberg and Mac Lane founded category theory during the period 1942–45. Both became members of the US National Academy of Sciences; in 1973 Mac Lane became Vice-President of that body and President of the American Mathematical Society. More recently, Fields Medalist Vladimir Voevodsky declared [c] that categories were one of the most important ideas of twentieth-century mathematics.

As Max states on the first page of [35], in relation to Mac Lane’s work, ‘Major advances, once made, seem so inevitable that a younger generation, brought up familiar with these ideas, may not realize how great their impact was’. My intention here is to explain Max Kelly’s impact on his chosen field in the context of the times. I shall discuss how he was led to category theory and what his contribution was. In particular, his courage and ingenuity were shown by his leading role in the origins and development of enriched category theory.

Even by 1960 it was still the rare university mathematics course that mentioned the main categorical concepts: category, functor and natural transformation. Certainly, they were not mentioned during 1950–53 at the University of Sydney in the three courses Max studied on homology theory, Pontryagin duality and group representations. It is inconceivable nowadays that a course on any of these topics would not rely on categories.

Algebraic topology was popular at Cambridge so it was not surprising that Max, while commencing his postgraduate studies in 1953, came across the new book [d] by Eilenberg and Steenrod. Max had felt dissatisfied with earlier books but this one took the subject to a new and deeper level, as I shall try to explain.

Algebraic topology is concerned with the construction of invariants for topological spaces; topologically equivalent (homeomorphic) spaces should have the same invariant. The invariants started out as numbers such as Euler characteristic and Betti numbers. It was recognized, and particularly insisted upon by Emmy Noether, that algebraic structures (mainly groups or vector spaces), from which these numbers could be obtained, were the proper invariants to be studied. One such invariant of a space X is its homology: this is a sequence HX of abelian groups H₀X, H₁X, H₂X, ..., also called a graded abelian group. Now I have said ‘one such invariant’, however, the truth is that there were many different constructions of what could justifiably be called homology, and the different constructions applied to different classes of space. Eilenberg and Steenrod wrote a list of properties that a homology construction should satisfy and proved that any two constructions satisfying the properties were essentially the same (isomorphic). So now there were axioms for homology.

The work of Eilenberg and Steenrod could barely have been expressed without some use of the language of category theory. Each class of space appropriate, for each homology construction, formed a category in which all the morphisms between the spaces (continuous functions in this case, not just homeomorphisms) also lived. Each construction was a functor H from a category of spaces to a category of graded abelian groups. The axioms involved natural transformations between functors. So it was from this book that Max learnt the very basic categorical notions.

Yet Max was not totally satisfied with the masterpiece [d]. It actually dealt not with spaces but with pairs of spaces, and axiomatized homology defined on these pairs. Max saw another step to be taken and wrote his first publication [2], which was also one of the three chapters of his PhD thesis [1]. Max established axioms that determined, uniquely up to isomorphism, the homology functor defined on single spaces. Clever topological constructions were involved in doing this and Max’s dexterity with universal techniques appeared at this early stage. The other two chapters of the thesis were published as [3] and [4].

Max had learnt some homological algebra from a short course at Cambridge taught by Davis Rees and from the book [f] by Car-tan and Eilenberg. This book uses only the basic elements of category theory yet it is clearly written in the spirit of the subject.

The review of [f] by Hochschild, which deserves quoting at length, articulates this spirit. It begins:

The title “Homological Algebra” is intended to designate a part of pure algebra which is the result of making algebraic homology theory independent of its original habitat in topology and building it up to a general theory of modules over associative rings. The particular formal aspect of this theory stemming from algebraic topology is that of a preoccupation with endomorphisms of square 0 in graded modules [that is, with chain complexes]. The conceptual flavor of homological algebra derives less specifically from topology than from the general ‘naturalistic’ trend of mathematics as a whole to supplement the study of the anatomy of any mathematical entity with an analysis of its behavior under the maps belonging to the larger mathematical system with which it is associated. In particular, homological algebra is concerned not so much with the intrinsic structure of modules but primarily with the pattern of compositions of homomorphisms between modules and their interplay with the various constructions by which new modules may be obtained from given ones.

The review concludes:

The appendix by D.A. Buchsbaum proposes an abstract framework of “exact categories” that is capable of accommodating the functor theory of this book as well as additional structural elements that one may wish to introduce. The proposed theory includes an abstract notion of duality which makes it unnecessary, at least in principle, to give separate treatments for covariance and contravariance and for projectivity and injectivity.

The appearance of this book must mean that the experimental phase of homological algebra is now surpassed. The diverse original homological constructions in various algebraic systems which were frequently of an ad hoc and artificial nature have been absorbed in a general theory whose significance goes far beyond its sources. The basic principles of homological algebra, and in particular the full functorial control over the manipulation of tensor products and modules of operator homomorphisms, will undoubtedly become standard algebraic technique already on the elementary level.

It is probably with such expectations that the authors have put so much missionary zeal into the systematization of their approach and the cataloguing of the basic results.

Note the central role ascribed to chain complexes since, as we shall see, these proved very important to Max. The idea of duality featured in the appendix and the importance of considering all ‘maps’ or morphisms amongst structures of the same kind are at the heart of category theory.

Max reminisced in [91] that it was late 1962, during lectures by Michael Atiyah at Harvard, that he first heard Mac Lane’s universal notion of product in a category. This idea was the beginning of a deeper theory, beyond merely a natural language.

Still interested in homology, contributing [5] and [10] to the subject, Max gave lectures at the University of Sydney in the early 1960s using, inter alia, the book [e] of Hilton and Wylie. He came to know the book well, and found a mistake in that first edition concerning the cohomology of a product of two spaces with coefficients in a general commutative ring. He adapted a result in another part of the book to provide a counter-example for the ring of integers. However this mistake in [e] was responsible for the rise of category theory in Australia (see the first paragraph of [91]).

The questions Max began to ask, arising from trying to understand the cohomology of a product, could not even be posed without categorical concepts. The chain complexes mentioned in the quote above from Hochschild were paramount. In particular, Max asked what it really meant for the homology functor to be a complete invariant for chain complexes. This led to publications [6], [7] and [8], which developed a considerable amount of category theory in its own right before turning to the new results in homological algebra. Ordinary mathematical structures are deemed ‘the same’ when they are isomorphic; categories are mathematical structures and isomorphism makes sense for them. However, there is a weaker notion, equivalence of categories, which is fundamental and which Max analysed thoroughly, introducing the idea much later to be called anafunctor by Makkai in [h]. He captured what it was for a functor to provide a complete system of invariants for objects of the domain category; he called these functors complete ([7], [8]). He implicitly recognized in [6] that additive categories were ‘rings with several objects’ by generalizing such notions as ideal and Jacobson radical to additive categories.

The germ of Max’s research on enriched category theory can be found in [8] with his concept of complex category. Most of category theory to that date had concentrated on additive categories. In a category, the morphisms from one object to another form a set, called a hom set. In an additive category, morphisms in each hom set can be added, forming an abelian group. A complex category does not merely ask for extra operations on the hom sets, rather, that each hom set should be replaced by a chain complex; that is, a complex category has its homs enriched in the category of chain complexes.

While on sabbatical at Tulane University, at the end of 1963, Max met Eilenberg who was lecturing at Las Cruces, New Mexico, on differential graded categories which he had invented with John C. Moore. Since these turned out to be the same as ‘complex categories’, Eilenberg immediately arranged a job for Max in Illinois for the next academic year. Soon after, Max met Mac Lane in Miami at an American Mathematical Society meeting where Max spoke on his paper [5]. Within a few weeks personal connections had been established that would direct Max’s research towards enriched category theory and ‘coherence’.

One reason that chain complexes form a suitable category on which to base hom enrichment is that there is an operation of tensor product of chain complexes which produces a new chain complex from two given ones. Mac Lane had studied general categories with tensor product. To match reality, such tensor products should not be associative nor commutative up to equality but only up to specific natural isomorphisms. It turns out it is desirable for these isomorphisms to satisfy infinitely many conditions. However, in [i], Mac Lane proved that this infinite class of conditions follows from finitely many conditions. Such results are called coherence theorems. On learning about this, Max was able in [9] to reduce Mac Lane’s finite list to two conditions for the associativity isomorphism and two more for the commutativity isomorphism.

Bénabou [j] also had been working on categories with tensor products and both Linton [k] and Bénabou [l] had ideas about enriching homs in suitable base categories. Max’s contribution [11] spurred Eilenberg into suggesting that they work together on the subject. Their first joint paper [13] was ground-breaking in many ways. They fundamentally extended category theory’s motivating concept of natural transformation and produced a calculus of substitution and composition for it. I have regretted that the paper did not include the diagrams that Max used to draw when speaking on the subject: these diagrams involved string-like linkages that are now understood as part of a bigger theory.

The first major conference on category theory was held at La Jolla, California, in June 1965. Eilenberg and Kelly reported on [14] and completed the 142-page document soon afterwards—involving many long letters between Sydney and New York. The paper developed the theory of two kinds of base categories for hom enrichment: closed categories and monoidal categories. The latter were categories with tensor product as previously mentioned. The former were categories with homs enriched in themselves; for this Linton [k] used the word ‘autonomous’. Most good examples were both closed and monoidal with the tensor and hom related by ‘adjunction’.

After [14], the structures for enriched category theory were established: enriched categories, enriched functors and enriched natural transformations.

Another more subtle contribution made by [14] was the use of Ehresmann’s 2-categories [m] to express their results: an example of what is now called ‘higher category theory’at work.Justas Max had found it necessary to use the language of category theory to express his ideas on homology, he now found the language of higher categories necessary to encapsulate his work on categorical structures. Ironically, the authors pointed out that these 2-categories were categories with homs enriched in the category of categories.

Now enriched category theory had its defining concepts. It needed Max’s courage and conviction to extend ordinary category theory to the enriched context. He did this beyond all expectations in papers such as [16], [17] and [32], culminating in his by-now classic book [41] (electronically available as [90]).

Some of the enrichment process was routine but a large part required insight that involved a re-thinking of ordinary category theory. In particular, the notion of conical limit, which sufficed for ordinary categories, needed supplementation in the enriched setting. Technically, Max realized that powers, also called cotensors, should be distinguished as limits and he introduced the concept of end. His book [41] culminates in a definitive theory for universally adjoining allocated limits to an enriched category.

Soon after writing his book he was able in [42] and [43] to enrich the whole subject of finite-limit theories which was developed by Ehresmann [n] and Gabriel and Ulmer [o] for ordinary categories. In my opinion, this was a great achievement. It is a case where a less courageous soul would be misled by the ordinary case. A cornerstone of the topic is the fact that a left Kan extension of a left exact functor should be left exact. It was known to be true when the target category was a topos. For enrichment one might expect to require a topos as the base monoidal category. However, surprisingly, Max proved it for a general locally finitely presentable base.

Haunting Max was the dream to eliminate the large diagrams required in full proofs of theorems about monoidal and enriched categories. Such diagrams occurred in the La Jolla article [14] (see Fig. 3). The hope was to prove coherence theorems rendering the diagrams redundant. While Mac Lane was in Australia, he and Max were inspired by Lambek’s ideas in [p] to prove coherence theorems using Gentzen’s work in logic. This resulted in a major coherence theorem for symmetric closed monoidal categories published as [20]. Max, often jointly, proved other delicate specific coherence theorems: for example, [23], [27], [31] and [38].

Yet Max had more far-reaching ideas. He wanted more than individual coherence theorems: he wanted a whole theory of coherence. What are coherence theorems? In Chicago in 1970–71, he began a universal approach to the question, inventing the notion of club. At the same time and place, Max actively attended lectures by Peter May on what he came to call operads, published as [q]. Max saw a close connection between what he was trying to do with categories and what May was trying to do with topological spaces up to homotopy. Max produced a preprint. At the time, Mac Lane asked Max to expand more on the connection between clubs and operads; unusually for Max, he let that job slide and the work was not published. Under pressure of renewed interest in operads in category theory, the preprint was recently published as [86]. The paper was a barely noticed root for several major branches along which category theorists were to climb, such as Joyal’s theory of combinatorial species [r], classifying toposes [s] and Batanin’s higher operads [t].

The work on clubs appeared in [24], [25], [26], [29] and [30]. Max realized that a coherence theorem for a categorical structure was an assertion about free structures of that type. His clubs had the simplifying property that the free structure generated by a single object, appropriately augmented, determined all the free structures. This idea has proved paramount in work on higher category theory; see [u]. Such ideas surfaced later to do with the easier ordinary algebraic structures on sets. Max was invited to speak and write on the topic and produced [65] since it is of considerable relevance to computer science.

The importance of the cross-fertilization between homotopy theory and category theory is now well recognized. Yet it was a theme through Max’s work from the earliest times. Because of the analogy, he always insisted on using the homotopy symbol for categorical equivalence. Several techniques that he introduced into 2-dimensional universal algebra have their analogues in homotopy theory. No doubt the successful collaboration between Stephen Lack and Max [66], [67], [74], [77], [82], [85] gave Lack the grounding for his part in making these analogies mathematically precise [v].

Max collaborated extensively—with his students, with postdoctoral fellows, and with international colleagues. It is through these collaborations that some of Max’s basic and lasting contributions to category theory, ordinary and enriched, are permanently recorded. His papers [15], [22], [49] and [71] on factorization systems are a good example: he took a notion that had appeared in a rather exploratory way in work of Mac Lane and Isbell, completely pinned it down, and then used the concept creatively to solve problems. Those who collaborated with Max emerged with a deepened passion for precision, beauty and completeness in their research.

In short, category theory was the subject that matched Max’s approach to mathematics. Happily, it was there at the time he needed it. He collaborated with the founders and other key mathematicians, leaving an influential and stylish volume of work to motivate future mathematicians. The differential graded categories that he independently discovered are still a hot topic: for a sample of the developments since Max’s work the reader can look at Bon-dal and Kapranov [w], Drinfeld [x], Keller [y], [z] and [aa], Tabuada [ab] and [ac], Toen [ad], [ae] and [af] and Toen and Vaquie [ag]. There is also a survey in Keller’s invited address at the 2006 World Congress of Mathematicians; see [ah]. I am convinced that Max’s leading contributions to ordinary category theory, enriched category theory and higher universal algebra will stay at the heart of fundamental mathematics.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.21, no.2, 2010. It was written by Ross Street, Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia. Email: ross.street@mq.edu.au

Letters in square brackets refer to the references, numbers in square brackets refer to the bibliography.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Imogen Kelly for her invaluable help with this and earlier biographical accounts. Steve Lack, George Janelidze, Margery Street and Richard Wood have provided thoughtful suggestions for improvements to earlier drafts, as have the two referees to the submitted version. I have only slightly adapted the words suggested.

References

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Publications dedicated

1. Aurelio Carboni, George Janelidze and Ross Street (Editors), Special Volume celebrating the 70th birthday of Professor Max Kelly, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 175 (1–3) (8 November 2002).
2. John C. Baez and J. Peter May (Editors), Towards Higher Categories, Dedicated to Max Kelly (The IMA Volumes in Mathematics and its Applications; Springer, 2010).
3. Martin Hyland, George Janelidze, Michael Johnson, Peter Johnstone, Stephen Lack, Ross Street, Walter Tholen and Richard Wood (Editors), Special Volume in Memory of Max Kelly, Applied Categorical Structures (to appear).