Athel Beckwith was an organic chemist whose research was concerned with free radicals, the reactive intermediates that play important roles in many organic chemical reactions. After studies and junior appointments at Australian universities, at Oxford University he worked with W. A. Waters and completed his doctorate at a time when scepticism about the very existence of free radicals was being rolled back by a small group of experimentalists. Returning to Australia, where he occupied chairs at the University of Adelaide and the Australian National University, Beckwith used studies of organic structure and mechanisms, revealed by kinetic methods and electron spin resonance spectroscopy, to become a world leader in this field of chemistry. He was honoured by election to Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science (1973) and the Royal Society of London (1989), by several awards from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, and by membership of the Order of Australia (2004). His extensive travels, often accompanied by his wife Kaye and their children, to work in overseas chemical research laboratories and to give presentations at international meetings, helped him to secure his place in networks at the highest levels of his profession. Several those who studied with him now hold important positions in Australian chemistry.

Hans Buchdahl, who died in Adelaide on 7 January 2010 at the age of 90, contributed extensively to three fields of theoretical physics: geometric optics, general relativity and thermodynamics. His early work on optical aberration coefficients was motivated by a wartime need; through this work he rejuvenated a field that had been moribund for close to a century. The methods he developed underlie some of the modern analytic and numerical approaches to the design of optical instruments. He contributed to the general theory of relativity during what was known as its ?Golden Age', and he made pedagogic contributions to the discipline of thermodynamics.

Paul Ramdohr (1890-1985), celebrated mineralogist, ore-deposit researcher and pioneer of ore microscopy spent three periods in Australia that differed considerably from each other in nature and structure. He was a Principal Research Scientist specializing in microscopy and ore deposits for nine months with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Melbourne in 1948-9. For three months in 1962 he was Visiting Professor of Geology at the University of New South Wales. On holiday in Adelaide and Sydney in December 1970 and January 1971, he negotiated an agreement as a result of which the Mundrabilla II meteorite was shipped to Heidelberg in Germany for slicing and distribution for research purposes. This study summarizes his activities and direct contributions to Australian mineralogy during and as a result of those visits.

Over fifty years ago, the new Department of Geophysics of the Australian National University in Canberra pursued research in paleomagnetism which was to be fundamental to the major developments in Earth Sciences now known as the plate tectonics revolution. In the setting of some then unexplained phenomena such as reversely magnetized rocks, and slightly in advance of fundamental developments in the dating of rocks using radioactive decay schemes of naturally-occurring isotopes, a team led by Edward Irving obtained data for the Australian continent which, accepted and combined with data from Europe and North America, demanded that major continents of the globe had moved relative to each other over geological time. Generally these facts are recognised in histories of science, however such histories usually do not record the local Australian National University setting, which it is intended to describe in this paper. Essential for the paleomagnetic work was the skilled support of a wide range of Australian geologists, who guided collection strategy and supplied oriented samples that had been collected continent-wide. It may also be little appreciated that the first paleomagnetic measurements at the Australian National University were carried out by J. C. Jaeger on samples of Tasmanian dolerite, following work on the same rock by P. M. S. Blackett's group in England. Because these cores were vertical and the magnetization in them approximately vertical, that they were not oriented with regard to horizontal direction was unimportant. Their vertical magnetization gave a forerunner of the continental-drift result.

Kenneth James Le Couteur was born in St Helier, Jersey, on 16 September 1920 and died in Canberra on 18 April 2011. He had a distinguished career as a theoretical physicist in the United Kingdom and in Australia as the Foundation Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Research School of Physical Sciences of the Australian National University. He was internationally recognized for his significant contributions to the statistical model of excited nuclei and the extraction of beams from proton synchrocyclotron accelerators.

In the 1870s, an intense quest revealed to scientists that pituri, an important Aboriginal commodity, was sourced from the plant Duboisia hopwoodii —a shrub named after a well-known colonist. But it was Aboriginal people and white explorer-pastoralists from the Mulligan River region in far western Queensland who provided the samples and alerted scientists to the important chemical properties of pituri. Subsequently, there was a proposal to change the name of the plant to Duboisia pituri . Whom should the plant have been named after, the colonist or the Aborigine?

Historical Records of Australian Science publishes peer-reviewed articles and book reviews on the history of science and scientists in Australia and the southwest Pacific, biographical memoirs of deceased Fellows of the Academy, and an annual bibliography of the history of Australian science

Wesley Kingston Whitten (1918?2010) was recognized as one of Australia's most innovative biological scientists. His studies were the precursor of the science of preimplantation embryology and the technology of assisted reproduction. He pioneered the study of mammalian pheromones and their receptor, the vomeronasal organ. He elucidated the genetic basis of hermaphroditism and mosaicism, and the timing and mechanism of X chromosome inactivation. Several of his recombinant mouse strains continue to provide models for a number of diseases.

Spencer Smith-White's research group at the University of Sydney was for many years the foremost laboratory studying the cytology, cytogenetics and cytoevolution of the Australian flora. He pioneered this field with his chromosomal studies on major Australian families, such as the Rutaceae, Myrtaceae, Proteaceae and Epacridaceae. His cytogenetic analyses underpinned his discussions of the origins and distribution of the major elements of the Australian flora.

W. N. (?Chris') Christiansen was an innovative and influential radio astronomy pioneer. The hallmarks of his long and distinguished career in science and engineering, spanning almost five decades, were his inventiveness and his commitment to, and success with, large-scale projects. These projects were the outcome of his innovative skill as physicist and engineer. Paralleling this was his equal commitment to forging strong international links and friendships, leading to his election as Vice-President of the International Astronomical Union for the years 1964 to 1970, as President of the International Union of Radio Science, URSI, from 1978 to 1981, and subsequently as Honorary Life President in 1984, and as Foreign Secretary of the Australian Academy of Science from 1981 to 1985. Major subsequent developments in radio astronomy and wireless communications on the global scene stand as a legacy to Chris's approach to his work and to the development of those who worked with him.