At the ripe old age of 97, the late Dr Max Day AO FAA was still contributing to science, helping to uncover the mystery behind the scribbles on gum trees, considered by many to be an icon of the Australian bush.

Dr Day, who died on Monday 31 July at the age of 101, spent a lifetime championing the study of insects (entomology), conservation, the environment, and forestry. His research also played a major role in controlling Australia’s rabbit problem.

Dr Day was born in Sydney in 1915. He studied science at the University of Sydney and was awarded the university medal in 1937, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in science.

An ecologist and entomologist who collaborated with Australian greats of both disciplines, Dr Day was a member of the CSIRO Executive for eleven years, during which he was responsible for all the CSIRO Divisions dealing with plant and animal sciences.

Dr Day was the first Chairman of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and coordinated the report that led to the establishment of the Institute near Townsville, North Queensland. He was the founding Head of CSIRO’s Division of Forest Research for five years which led to Australia’s international recognition for its contribution to forest research.

Dr Day also worked extensively with the CSIRO insect collection. His passion for studying insects is perhaps best described in an interview he gave with Academy Fellow Professor Robyn Williams AM FAA in 2015.

“Insects, there are so many of them. It’s a field which goes on forever.”

He applied his work on insect hormones and insect digestion to a critical study of how animal and plant viruses are spread by insects. Dr Day worked with Academy Fellow and virologist Professor Frank Fenner AC FAA FRS to control Australia's wild rabbit population using the virus that causes myxomatosis, a project he described as the most satisfying achievement of his career.

“The government introduced myxo into Australia in 1950 to control rabbits as they had become a serious problem across the country,”  he told his Academy colleagues in 2015.

‘Frank, who I had never previously met, approached me at a meeting here in Canberra and said: ‘We believe myxomatosis might be mosquito-borne. Would you be interested in taking on the mosquito side of it while I do the biology?’, and so for the next five years Frank and I worked on the transmission of the myxo virus.”

Elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 1956, just two years after the Academy was founded, Dr Day was the Academy’s longest serving Fellow and one of Australia’s oldest scientists. He told his Academy colleagues that he still clearly recalls watching the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies lay the foundation stone for what is now known as the Shine Dome in 1958.

Dr Day was one of the founding members of the Australian Conservation Foundation, a strong supporter of national parks, and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1977.

In 2012 aged 97, Dr Day co-authored a paper with Dr Marianne Horak and others about the Ogmograptis scribbly gum moth, describing eleven new species of the moth. Even more remarkable was the recognition that different species made different scribbles.

The author of the Snugglepot and Cuddlepie books, May Gibbs, made scribbles a feature of the gumnut babies’ world, and the great Australian poet Judith Wright cemented their place in literary culture with her 1955 poem Scribbly-Gum. 

Dr Day and his co-authors found that the patterns are made by the moth's various developmental stages, and change according to the stage. 

“The eggs are laid on the bark and the caterpillar burrows in and then just goes around making scribbles,” Dr Day said in his 2015 interview with Professor Williams.

In May this year, Dr Day presented two early-career researchers, Mr Nicholas Leseberg and Dr Marta Yebra, with inaugural Max Day Environmental Science Fellowships, established in his honour.

Through sponsoring this award Dr Day acknowledged the support that he himself received as a young researcher to travel overseas to gain his PhD at Harvard. 

Find out more about Dr Day's life and work.

The Academy’s Anton Hales Medal has so far rewarded the extraordinary achievements of nine early-career researchers who are studying our planet. 

The medal is named in honour of the late Professor Anton Hales FAA. Originally from South Africa, the geophysicist’s impressive career spanned three continents and covered nearly nine decades.

The first recipient in 2009 was Professor Jeffrey Walker, a leading Australian expert on the remote sensing of soil moisture.

Walker has gone on to make further significant contributions in the field, including developing algorithms to derive high resolution soil moisture imagery from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite of NASA. The orbiting observatory measures the amount of water in the top five centimetres of soil everywhere on Earth’s surface.

The ninth and most recent recipient of the Medal is Associate Professor Juan Carlos Afonso. He is at the forefront of revolutionising the way that geoscientists interpret the signals they obtain from deep in the Earth by geophysical methods.

The other recipients were rewarded for their research into fossil records, seismic data, global climate, the evolution and dynamics of the solid Earth, weather, groundwater, and seabed sediments.

Professor Hales moved to the Australian National University from the United States as foundation Director of the Research School of Earth Sciences at the age of 62.

Professor McDougall was one of the first members of staff recruited to Hales’s new school, where they worked together over the following decades. Like Hales, McDougall is also an internationally distinguished Earth scientist.

Following Hales’s death in 2006 at the age of 95, a gift from the McDougalls saw the establishment of an award named in his honour.

Known for his capacity for mentoring, the award not only honours Hales but gives career encouragement to young Earth scientists. 

Find out more about supporting the Academy 

Mr Nicholas Leseberg from the University of Queensland and Dr Marta Yebra from the Australian National University are the first two recipients of the Academy’s Max Day Environmental Science Fellowship Award.

The Max Day Award provides up to $20,000 to support early-career researchers working on the conservation of Australia’s flora and fauna, ecologically sustainable use of resources, protection of the environment and ecosystem services.

Max Day is a champion of entomology, conservation and forestry, and at 101 is the oldest and longest-serving Academy Fellow. The Academy is providing this support to early-career researchers in his honour.

PhD student Mr Leseberg will use his Max Day Award to investigate the ecology of the elusive and endangered Night Parrot, while Dr Yebra will study the moisture content of Australian forests to create models that predict bushfires.

Mr Leseberg and Dr Marta will receive their awards at the Academy’s annual signature science event Science at the Shine Dome on 24 May.

In addition to the awardees, three researchers were ‘highly commended’:

• Dr Hugo Harrison from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University for his project ‘Connecting reefs in the Anthropocene: managing Australia’s coral reefs for recovery and persistence’
• Dr Kerensa McElroy from CSIRO for her project ‘The ‘DNA footprint’ of near extinction: interrogating 100 years of black-throated finch decline by sequencing contemporary and historical specimens’
• Mr Max Worthington from Flinders University for his project ‘Renewable polymers for agriculture and the environment’.

More information on the awardees

Applications for the 2018 Max Day Environmental Science Fellowship Award close on 1 June.

The Academy Medal was awarded to Australia’s former Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb AC, at a special ceremony held at Ian Potter House on Thursday.

The event was attended by influential members of the science community to celebrate Professor Chubb’s outstanding contributions to science.

Earlier this year Academy Fellows elected Professor Chubb to join a distinguished list of past awardees including famous broadcasters, philanthropists and science communicators.

Professor Chubb’s illustrious career championing science—notably as our Chief Scientist, Vice Chancellor of the Australian National University, and president of the International Alliance of Research Universities—has provided opportunities for Australian scientists and researchers to flourish.

Read more about the Academy Medal.

Read the media release.