Population was of primary concern in the mid-twentieth century, and Australia’s declining birth rate in the 1930s and 1940s brought forth concerns about the reproductive nation. One of the key professions that engaged with ideas of a reproductive Australia was medicine, particularly gynaecologists, obstetricians, and surgeons. Their medical discourse in the mid-twentieth century when exploring infertility exhibited a tension between the burgeoning medical understanding of infertility within marriages—shared between the husband and wife—and the social understanding of reproductive responsibility resting on the woman. Through new approaches to diagnosis and therapeutic technologies, such as artificial insemination, this tension around responsibility was elucidated in the medical discourse. Even when incorporating or exclusively assessing the man’s fertility status there was an underlying presumption of, if not female fault, female responsibility. As the majority of practitioners were gynaecologists, obstetricians, and surgeons, the continued focus on women could be justified through their particular medical specialisation which exclusively examined women. Despite the increased knowledge of male fault, often incurable male fault, in infertile marriages the very nature of examination, diagnosis and treatment was grounded in ideas of female reproductive responsibility.

Warning: This article discusses blood collecting in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It also contains the image of an unnamed Aboriginal man who may be deceased. It is not without justification that the collecting of blood for genetic analysis is frequently associated with race science, but it is not solely or inevitably so. This history of Robert Kirk, a British–Australian population geneticist, confronts blood collecting in the twentieth century. Other histories have analysed the conflation of race with the science of inheritance in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the re-emergence of race in genomics at century’s end. Kirk’s practice of blood analysis and his support for Indigenous rights intercalates those periods, bridging interwar anti-racist theoretical geneticists, and late twentieth century genomic scientists. Through Kirk’s research activities we learn about the twinning of blood science and progressive politics, and the challenges and intersections that posed. Through Kirk’s legacy collection of blood samples now returned to Indigenous control, we see the potential transmutation of a problematic past into a promising future.

Ray Martin (1926–2020) was a talented and successful academic and leader, who won numerous awards and made discoveries that changed fundamental knowledge of the sub-discipline of physical inorganic chemistry. His journey over more than 90 years is one that demonstrates that he was one of nature’s gentlemen, who enjoyed sports, arts and people. He was passionate about science and discovery, and through a series of chance events, had a peripatetic life moving from academic positions, to industry, management, a vice chancellorship at Monash University, and then scientific advisor to the Australian Federal Government. Throughout this journey, he always made strong friendships, was an exceptional teacher and outstanding mentor—he was a quiet achiever.

Australian astronomy has undergone huge changes since the middle of the twentieth century, when astronomers generally only had access to the observing facilities of their own institution. In this paper, we look at the changes in the context of the membership of the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA), since its formation in 1966. Initially, the dominant institutions were the Australian National University, the University of Sydney and the CSIRO, with each of these having more than twice the members of any other Australian institution. Access to world-class national facilities provided by the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT, an optical telescope) from 1975 and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA, a radio telescope) from 1991, led to increases in astronomer numbers at institutions other than the three dominant ones. More recently, to stay internationally competitive, astronomers need access to even larger observing facilities. One of these facilities is the Square Kilometre Array project (SKA). This radio telescope is to be split between Southern Africa and Australia with SKA-Low, observing in low frequency radio waves, to be sited at a remote location in Western Australia. That plan, and two new SKA precursor instruments, has boosted the number of astronomers in the state, making Western Australia one of the major centres of astrophysical research in Australia.

With his student W

Robert Gerard (Gerry) Wake was born at Wangi Wangi, a town on the shore of Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, on 8 August 1933. He died from the complications of Parkinson Disease in Sydney on 26 January 2020. Wake had a long and distinguished academic career in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Sydney, spanning 1950—with a two-year postdoctoral period and various study leaves—to 1999. His association began as an undergraduate, progressing to MSc (1956) and PhD (1958) and an appointment as lecturer in 1961, and a professorship in 1977. He is internationally renowned for work on the physical biochemistry of the transformation of the milk protein κ-casein by the enzyme rennin; and what was to become his major career focus, the molecular biology of bacterial DNA replication; having been the first to show that the chromosome in Bacillus subtilis (the hay bacterium) is circular. This was only the second bacterium for this general characteristic of bacterial genomes to be discovered. Furthermore, and against conventional wisdom, he demonstrated that replication of the B. subtilis circular chromosome is bidirectional involving two replication forks moving away from a common origin. Wake was a dedicated educator at the undergraduate level and led by example with excellent postgraduate guidance. He also made major contributions to academic governance at the University of Sydney, and more broadly to science in Australia, through influential roles in the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Australian Research Council, and the Australian Academy of Science.

The American, Roger Tory Peterson, has been the single most influential figure in the evolution of birding field guides around the world. He was also a major contributor to the awakening of an environmental consciousness among the wider public in the second half of the twentieth century. In Australia, he provided a powerful impetus to the renovation of the field guide genre from the 1960s onward; and his Australian followers, like Peterson himself, were driven by a conviction that field guides are potent contributors to the conservationist cause. This article explores the myriad ways in which Peterson helped shape Australian birding field guides, including an exposition of his personal friendship with one of Australia’s major field guide authors, Graham Pizzey.

In this paper we examine the changes in the diversity of astronomers working in Australia, particularly the ratio of women compared to men, from 1966, when the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) was formed, to 2023. This was a pivotal time, as there was a significant change to workplace law that enabled women who worked for Commonwealth departments to retain their permanent position once they married. We consider the impact on gender diversity and other marginalised groups in astronomy due to this and other changes in the law, through the membership records of the ASA. We focus on the experiences of female astronomers who have been at the leading edge of change, and women and men who have instigated strategies to increase the percentage of women employed in astronomy. The successes of two Australian Research Council (ARC) centres of excellence in achieving gender balance are considered as providing best practice models.

The earliest record of pineapple plants being grown around Sydney in the British colony of New South Wales was that of Governor King in 1803. However, the climate of a new northern settlement at Moreton Bay (later Brisbane) soon proved to be far more conducive to growing the fruit. Pineapples prospered for over 50 years around Brisbane until a mysterious disease appeared in the late 1890s. In April 1891, Professor Edward Shelton, an American who had been appointed as the Queensland government’s first Instructor in Agriculture, was the first scientist to inspect the affected crops and concluded that the disease was caused by a fungus. In the following year, Shelton, Henry Tryon (then assistant curator at the Queensland Museum) and others again inspected the diseased pineapple crops. Tryon described the symptoms in detail as well as spores which were composed of two rounded elements, each having a double contour (chlamydospores). There is no doubt that the disease was caused by the oomycete Phytophthora cinnamomi that was described decades later. In 1897, Shelton was passionate about agricultural education and was appointed as the first principal of the Gatton Agricultural College, but his disciplining of some students of the college led to his forced resignation just 18 months later.

Grain production in the early years of the British colonisation of Australia was characterised by a lack of expertise of farmers, a paucity of farm animals and equipment and the poor work ethics of convicts. In 1803, just when wheat production was increasing and becoming less risky, stem rust of wheat caused by the fungus Puccinia graminis f.sp. tritici was discovered by an exiled Irish rebel Joseph Holt, on Captain William Cox’s Brush Farm. Stem rust became an intermittent and often serious disease culminating in a series of epidemics in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Growing varieties less prone to rust was a key recommendation from a series of rust-in-wheat conferences held from 1891 to 1896. It was William Farrer who was the first in Australia to develop new wheat varieties that resisted the ravages of rust principally by maturing earlier. The rust outbreaks were also catalysts for the New South Wales and Victorian governments to employ Australia’s first plant pathologists, Nathan Cobb and Daniel McAlpine, respectively. A year later, Henry Tryon was employed by the Queensland government as its first vegetable pathologist, although he had conducted plant disease investigations as early as 1889.