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PHYSICS IN AUSTRALIA
TO 1945
PHYSICS IN AUSTRALIA
TO 1945
Inquiries and corrections to R.W.Home (home@unimelb.edu.au)
Publication, the dissemination of the results one has obtained, is an integral part of scientific research, while research, the quest for understanding, is central to the very notion of being a scientist. A person's publications are therefore the principal source of information available to the historian concerning that person's work as a scientist. Both individually and collectively, the publication record of a scientific community reveals the level of intellectual activity within it. The actual content of the publications in question is of course of greatest interest for what it reveals about the topics of concern to a particular scientist or scientific community at any particular time, the style and calibre of the work being done, and its significance in a larger scientific context. Attending to the works referred to in these publications can tell us a great deal about the access the scientist or scientists under examination had to the ideas of contemporary scientists elsewhere, while the titles and places of publication of the journals in which articles appear can indicate the extent to which their authors are working in an international as against a local context.
When I embarked, some years ago, on a historical study of the emergence of a physics community in Australia, thoughts such as these prompted me to begin systematically assembling information about the publications of Australia's early generations of physicists. So little conception did I have of the scale of the task that, for a time, I actually collected photocopies of all publications other than books; in other words, the bibliographical listing began as merely the index to my photocopy collection. In time, however, as the bibliography grew and grew, the photocopying project fell by the wayside and compiling the bibliography became an end in itself. From the outset, the listing, being classified by author, focussed on individual physicists. The subsequent decision to include biographical summaries, wherever possible, for the authors listed added enormously to the complexity of the task but also, I believe, to the value and interest of the resulting compilation. Authors become not mere names on a page but real people with individual lives and career paths in which the practice of physics occupies a greater or lesser place. Moreover, the biographical details provided offer the possibility of analysing the changing career paths and patterns of employment of Australian physicists over several generations. Some work of this kind is currently in train: others will doubtless wish to undertake analyses of their own. The results of such analyses will, in many respects, be representative of the place science has achieved more generally in Australian life, a subject on which all too little work has been done. They will also, however, reflect the history of the physics discipline in particular, a history that has special features of its own.
The listing is intended to be a complete register of all Australian publications in physics up to the end of 1945. The earliest item is an 1823 report by Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane on pendulum experiments carried out at the Parramatta Observatory. There are other reports from the same observatory later in the same decade by Christian Carl Rümker and a number of papers by Henry Kay, officer in charge of the Rossbank magnetic observatory, Hobart, dating from the 1840s. These latter include the earliest locally-published items in the listing - two 1842 reports on the work of the Rossbank Observatory that appeared in the initial volume of Australia's first scientific periodical, the Tasmanian Journal. Observatory reports continue to predominate into the 1870s and 1880s, but thereafter they are rapidly overtaken by papers dealing with laboratory-based investigations or with questions of theory.
Theory, however, is never strongly represented. Moreover, with the exception of the numerous publications of the well known molecular theorist William Sutherland, who never held a regular appointment, such theoretical studies as do appear in the listing are almost always the work of people holding appointments as mathematicians, not as physicists. In Australia, as elsewhere where British models prevailed, not until much later did theoretical physics become institutionalized as it did in Germany, for example, with chairs and institutes of its own. In so far as it had a presence at all, it was subsumed instead under applied (or 'mixed') mathematics. In Australia, even more than in Britain, physics came to be institutionalized in the universities and elsewhere as a laboratory-based experimental discipline, 'the science of precision measurement' in which the sophisticated armoury of the mathematician often found no more than a distant echo.
The rise of laboratory physics in the 1880s and 1890s is directly linked to the expansion of science teaching in the colonial universities and the creation of the first specialist chairs of physics (or 'natural philosophy', as it was styled at Melbourne). At the level of undergraduate teaching, this was the period when laboratory exercises became a regular feature of the curriculum, just as they did at about the same time in other parts of the world. In the bibliography below, the new emphasis on laboratory work shows up in, and indeed is confined to, the publication lists of the new professors and their assistants and research students. Not until some decades later, much later than in the major industrial countries, do other significant loci for such work emerge.
When such loci do appear, they do so chiefly in connection with the emergence of new fields of applied physics - the development of radio on the one hand, and of medical applications of X-rays and radioactive emanations on the other. Radio went through a sustained boom in the 1920s with the successful establishment of long-distance communications between Australia and the rest of the world, and the growth of commercial and domestic radio services. The importance of further research on all aspects of radio was recognized by both the government and the private sector. The result is apparent in the listings below, in the form of numerous publications by staff of both the government-sponsored Radio Research Board, set up under the aegis of CSIR in 1927, and Australia's pre-eminent supplier of commercial radio services and equipment, Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd. [A.W.A.]. At the latter, research laboratories were established in 1931 and rapidly expanded thereafter, and a first-rate 'in-house' journal, the A.W.A. Technical Review, was launched soon afterwards.
Publications on medical applications of radioactivity and X-rays date from the first discovery of these new phenomena in the 1890s. At first, however, they are scattered and irregular. Their number increases rapidly from the mid-1920s, reflecting the rise of new research institutions in Sydney and Melbourne devoted to questions of medical physics. Between 1925 and its eventual demise in 1938, the richly endowed but ultimately ill-fated Cancer Research Committee at the University of Sydney generated a large body of publications bearing upon the applications of X-rays to the treatment of cancer. In Melbourne, the government-funded Commonwealth Radium Laboratory (later the Commonwealth X-ray and Radium Laboratory), founded in 1929, embarked on a steady programme of research on radiation dosimetry and related topics. A series of annual Cancer Conferences also helped focus Australian research in this area, and papers presented at these feature regularly in the publication lists of those involved.
Departments of physics in the universities remained small throughout the period covered by this bibliography. Undergraduate teaching loads were heavy and it was difficult for lecturing staff to find time for systematic research. Numbers of postgraduate students increased only very slowly, and many of the best students stayed for only a year or so beyond the Bachelor's degree before going overseas, almost invariably to Cambridge, assisted by 'travelling' scholarships such as the 1851 Exhibition science research awards. From the lists of publications below, it is easy to discern that only at Melbourne under the leadership of T.H. Laby, and to some extent at Sydney under V.A. Bailey, did on-going research programmes develop. From the late 1920s, the presence of a Radio Research Board group in the Department of Electrical Engineering provided a further locus for research at Sydney.
Australian physics received a major boost in the late 1930s with the expansion of the Munitions Research Laboratories (founded in 1921) and the formation within CSIR of new Divisions of Aeronautics and Radiophysics, a National Standards Laboratory, and a very active Lubricants and Bearing Section devoted to research on the physics of surfaces. Unfortunately, following the outbreak of the 1939-45 war, the work of these new or greatly enlarged institutions, and later also that of the Chemical Physics Section created in 1944 within CSIR's Division of Industrial Chemistry, was diverted more and more into war-related work. (Radiophysics and Lubricants and Bearings were in fact created expressly with war needs in mind.) Much of the war work was fairly routine and of a kind unlikely to generate publications, while in other cases - especially that of Radiophysics - publication was inhibited by security considerations. Moreover, publication, even if permitted, was not always a high priority in wartime. Hence the dramatic growth of the Australian physics community that took place during these years is not as apparent as one might have expected in the bibliography below. Only in the cases of publications emerging from the Lubricants and Bearings Section and, to a lesser extent, from the Division of Aeronautics, does one get a sense of something 'new' so far as Australian physics is concerned. The full impact of the war-time expansion in physics activity is not manifest in numbers of publications until some time after the end of the war. It is thus not recorded here, since a cut-off date of 31 December 1945 has been set for this compilation.
The choice of 1945 as the end-point for the listing was initially dictated by my sense that that year marked a watershed for the Australian physics community, the size and scale of operation of which expanded even more dramatically in the years that followed; and that this therefore made a suitable point at which to bring the history upon which I was embarking to a close. To be sure, reasons of this kind do not necessarily make the same date a good end-point for a bibliographical listing. It is, however, clear that to bring the end-point much closer to the present would have greatly increased the number of both papers and authors to be included, with inevitable consequences for either the comprehensiveness of the work or the time it would have taken to bring it to a state fit to be published.
There is, of course, a difference between being fit to be published and being 'complete'. Any compiler of a work such as this will know the frustration of being unable to elicit items of information that, to all appearances, ought to be obtainable. Especially have I found this so with respect to establishing biographical details for some of the authors listed. Nevertheless, at a certain point one has to conclude that one's efforts are drawing rapidly diminishing returns. Thus the career of Richard Threlfall's first demonstrator at the University of Sydney, J.F. Adair, following his resignation from the University in 1890, remains unresolved, as does the fate of one of Threlfall's favourite students, J.H.D. Brearley, after he apparently left the New South Wales railways and tramways authority in 1903. Was the J.F. Hughes, who in 1927 was one of three authors of a paper on geophysical prospecting, the John Frankland Hughes who obtained a bachelor of engineering degree in electrical engineering from the University of Melbourne in 1926 and who, according to the University's records, died on 5 October 1975? Probably; but I have been unable to establish the point to my satisfaction, and so the entry on Hughes remains frustratingly devoid of any biographical information. Who was E. Josephs, who read a paper to the Victorian Section of the Electrical Association of Australia in 1914; or Douglas N. Linnett, who published a paper on antenna constants in 1934; or R.J.W. Kennell, who wrote on the 'Q' meter two years later; or L.S. Thomas, who was apparently an engineer at A.W.A. in the 1930s but of whose employment the company now has no record? In many such cases there will undoubtedly be people still alive who can provide answers. Efforts to track them down have, however, proved unavailing, and it would be pointless to delay publication indefinitely in the hope that such information might one day turn up.
Inevitably, the problem of rapidly diminishing returns for a given amount of effort also arose in assembling the bibliographical listing. No doubt items have been missed that ought to have been included and that further searching would have discovered. I believe it is unlikely, though, that any significant publication has been overlooked.
In the course of compiling the bibliography, various policy decisions had to be made regarding the categories of work to be included. One of the earliest made was that unpublished writings would not be recorded: this was to be a listing of publications only. But what constitutes a publication? For present purposes, publication has been taken to mean that the work in question was made publicly and openly available to potential readers. Pre-print and other typescript materials distributed informally or on a limited basis only are thereby excluded. In particular, 'in-house' technical reports, the circulation of which was more or less confined to the originating laboratory, have been omitted on the basis of this rule. Among reports of this kind, those that were believed to warrant it were subsequently formally published; in other words, not listing the others is in accord with a distinction that was made at the time. Nevertheless, the policy has caused some anguish, since large numbers of the 'in-house' reports prepared during the Second World War, especially in the newly created Aeronautical Research and Radiophysics Laboratories, were subsequently published, but not until after 1945. They are therefore excluded by their date of publication, even though the bulk of the work upon which they were based was done within the period covered by our listing and did lead to a 'proper' publication. Unfortunately, no obvious solution to this dilemma presents itself that would not bring problems of its own.
During the Second World War, some reports were kept 'in-house' not because they were judged unready for publication but for reasons of security. For the purpose of this listing, however, no attempt is made to discriminate between these two categories: all are excluded. In these same years, A.W.A. produced at least one 'confidential supplement' to the A. W.A. Technical Reviews. Presumably, the material in question was judged too sensitive to be made openly accessible: In line with the policy just set out, it too is omitted from the listing below.
Also omitted are items, even though published, of a more juvenile, ephemeral or journalistic nature, such as articles in school or (with a few exceptions) undergraduate magazines, publicity brochures, and newspaper articles or letters to the editor. Thus although both William Sutherland and the Adelaide professor Kerr Grant, to name but two, wrote regularly for the press on scientific subjects, the details are not recorded here. Letters to the editors of journals such as Nature are, of course, in a different category, and have been included.
Not only full papers but also abstracts that appeared in publicly accessible works such as the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London or the published reports of meetings of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science have been listed. In one case, that of H.M. Andrew, the first person to occupy a chair of physics in an Australian university, some items are even included where only the title of the paper was published. On the other hand, items included in books of abstracts of conference proceedings, the distribution of which was confined to those attending the conference, have been judged not to constitute 'real' publications and so have been excluded. In this case, too, the decision has caused anguish, because abstracts in two such compilations, prepared for national conferences of physicists and astronomers held in 1928 and 1929, constitute the only 'publications' by one of the most eminent physicists Australia has produced, Harrie Massey, prior to his permanent departure overseas. They thus provide (according to another of our working rules) the only possible basis for including Massey in our listing. Consistency, however, won out: there is no entry for Massey in the bibliography below.
The other rule that worked against Massey's inclusion was one of several devised to deal in a consistent way with the fact that many authors whose names appear in the list spent only part of their careers in Australia. These rules may be summarized as follows:
Rule (2) will undoubtedly be seen as the most controversial, and it has certainly in a few cases given rise to anomalies. When applied to the case of Raynor C. Johnson, for example - an Englishman who came to an appointment as Master of Queen's College at the University of Melbourne in 1934 with an established record as a research physicist but who never worked in this field again - it results in an extensive list of publications being provided even though not one of these derived from work done in Australia. Yet in most cases application of the rule generates information of considerable value to the historian of Australian physics. For the most part, those to whom it has been applied came to Australia to take up senior positions within the Australian physics community, most notably chairs in the various universities. Their publication lists prior to arrival provide considerable insight into both the basis on which they gained their Australian appointments and the kinds of expertise they brought with them.
Rules (1)-(3) have been applied consistently. In the case of Rule (4), however, some flexibility of interpretation has been allowed. On the one hand, a few people who came and stayed for a considerable time before eventually departing again - Richard Threlfall, for example, first professor of physics at the University of Sydney, W.C. Parkinson, long-time observer-in-charge at the Watheroo Magnetic Observatory in Western Australia, and Richard Woolley, director of the Mt Stromlo Observatory, 1939-55 - are treated as if they fall under Rule (2). In other words, the fact that they eventually left Australia again to take up appointments elsewhere is ignored, this being more than offset in most cases by the significance for Australian physics of the years they spent in the country. On the other hand, those who came as visitors and collected data and ideas which they subsequently wrote up after returning home are not included at all. In this category fall, for example, the navigator Matthew Flinders, who did much of his important work on ship's magnetism while charting the Australian coast during the first years of the nineteenth century; several 'magneticians' employed by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who visited Australia in the 1910s and '20s to undertake magnetic surveys in various parts of the continent in connection with the Institution's general survey of the Earth's magnetic field; the Dutch geophysicist F.A. Vening Meinesz, whose world-wide survey of the Earth's gravitational field in the 1930s included determinations made in and off the coast of Western Australia; and the American physicist Lloyd Berkner, who during a visit to Australia later in the same decade had lively discussions with D.F. Martyn on the physics of the ionosphere that led, following his return home, to a spirited debate, in print, with Martyn and his colleague G.H. Munro. (The contributions of Martyn and Munro to this debate are, of course, listed.) An important consideration in the case of such short-term visitors was whether their work was published in Australia, or while they were still in Australia.
Papers based on work someone did shortly before departure from Australia usually did not actually appear in print, of course, until after departure. As Rules (1) and (4) indicate, publications in this category have been included. Usually, such publications appeared within a few months of departure. However, in the case of Georg Neumayer, founding director of the Flagstaff Observatory, Melbourne, items that were published over thirty years after Neumayer's return to Germany are included on this basis!
This work is intended to provide a bibliography of Australian publications in physics. Yet boundaries between scientific disciplines are notoriously difficult to define, and moreover they shift with time. Here, an inclusive rather than an exclusive policy has been adopted; that is, in cases of doubt, works are listed rather than not. On the other hand, an effort has been made to be discriminating. For example, while some papers in fields such as physical chemistry or strength of materials are judged sufficiently close to the boundary of physics to be included, others have been judged to belong unequivocally to the fields of chemistry or engineering respectively, and so are omitted. Papers on astrophysical or geophysical topics are systematically included, whereas papers dealing with matters of positional astronomy or traditional geological or physiographical questions are equally systematically excluded. Similarly, compilations of weather records are not listed, while works dealing with physical principles underlying the weather or with the development of meteorological instrumentation are. More generally, publications on the development of all kinds of new or improved measuring instruments have been included, in line with that view of physics developed in the late nineteenth century to which reference has already been made, that saw it as the science of precision measurement.
A distinction is sometimes drawn between work in pure and applied physics. No such distinction is invoked here, and papers are included dealing with a wide range of applications of physical techniques - soil analysis using x-ray diffraction techniques, the acoustic design of buildings, electrical power distribution, and the surveying of mineral prospects using geophysical methods, to mention only a representative few - as well as with questions of 'pure' physics. An attempt has though been made to distinguish the point at which the application of a new technique becomes purely routine, so that the interest no longer lies in the physics of the technique but in the results that can be achieved with it. In making decisions of this kind, attention has been paid above all to the kinds of questions to which answers are being sought in each case. In a paper on the use of X-rays in treating cancer, for example, is the author concerned primarily with the X-ray techniques or with the clinical outcomes? In the one case the paper will have been deemed 'physical' and included in the bibliography; in the other it will not.
In a couple of cases, deliberate decisions were taken to flout this convention. At some stage during the late 1920s or early 1930s, some aspects of the physics of electronic circuitry became sufficiently established to pass out of the hands of physicists into those of a new kind of technologist, the radio (or electronics) engineer. In this as in other cases, for the purposes of this bibliography an inclusive rather than an exclusive policy has been adopted, and a number of items on radio engineering topics have been included that can probably only marginally be regarded as falling any longer within the domain of physics. Beyond this, however, once it became apparent that under existing policies a very high proportion of the papers in the leading Australian journal for electronics research of the day, the A.W.A. Technical Review, was going to be included in the listing anyway, it was decided to include all the papers published in this journal during the period covered.
Something similar occurred in the field of geophysical prospecting, where techniques that were still highly experimental in the late 1920s had, a decade later, become almost routine. In Australia, the latter stage was reached at some point during the lifetime of the Aerial, Geological and Geophysical Survey of Northern Australia, 1935-41, through the work of those engaged on this project. Just when it became a matter of routine would, however, be difficult to specify. Instead of attempting that thankless task, I have here included the full set of geophysical survey reports to emerge from the project.
A final policy decision has led to the inclusion of some items that are definitely not to do with physics at all. For most of the authors listed, no attempt has been made to provide a comprehensive listing of their publications: only those items have been included that are deemed, according to the criteria just set out, to fall within the domain of physics. In a few cases however, namely those authors who held distinct appointments in Australia as physicists - and there were remarkably few such appointments prior to the Second World War - a full publication list up to 1945, including non-physics items, is provided. In practice, this has led to the inclusion of a few writings on other topics by senior physics staff, especially the professors, at the larger universities - on mathematical prodigies, for example, by the Sydney professor V.A. Bailey, or on the causes of the great Depression, by Melbourne's T.H. Laby. In addition, full listings are given for a few other authors such as J.P.V. Madsen or J.C. Jaeger who, though they did not hold formal appointments as physicists, were nevertheless prominent in the development of the physics discipline in Australia.
With these few exceptions, however, inclusion in this bibliography is determined by the content of the publication in question. Authors appear in the list because they published at least one item judged appropriate according to the working rules just set out and not, for example, on account of any particular appointments they held.
With some exceptions, each author of a multi-authored item gets an entry of his or her own. The exceptions are of three kinds. First, in the case of papers produced by 'Australian' authors during time spent abroad - listed here in accordance with either Rule (2) or Rule (3) above - non-Australian collaborators do not get separate entries. Thus neither Ernest Rutherford, co-author with M.L.E. Oliphant of a number of very important papers on nuclear transformations among the light elements dating from Oliphant's period at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the 1930s, nor C.P. Snow, who wrote several papers with another Australian physicist working in Cambridge at the same period, F.P. Bowden, has a separate listing here. Secondly, in the case of work in which a physicist collaborated with a non-physicist in such a way that their respective contributions remained more or less separate, only the physicist qualifies for an entry. At one point, for example, the Melbourne physics lecturer E.F.J. Love collaborated with a group of physiologists and biochemists in a study sponsored by the Institute of Science and Industry on the refrigeration of meat, Love handling questions of refrigeration and temperature control while his collaborators studied what was happening to the meat itself. The paper that emerged is duly recorded below in Love's list of publications, with all authors noted; but the other authors do not get separate entries of their own. Again, when the physicist C.E. Eddy collaborated with a medical clinician, J. O'Sullivan, in studying the effect of using filters when treating cancers with X-rays, the resulting paper is recorded only in Eddy's list; no separate listing is created for O'Sullivan. Finally, if a non-physics item is included, as explained above, in order to complete the publication list of someone for whom a full listing of all publications is being provided, co-authors again do not get a separate listing of their own. Thus a paper by V.A. Bailey on the statistics of animal populations, co-authored with the entomologist A.J. Nicholson, appears in Bailey's publication list but has not prompted an entry for Nicholson.
With each author entry, an attempt has been made to provide the following personal and biographical details: full name; place and date of birth; place and date of death, if dead; professional or tertiary educational background, including institutions attended, qualifications obtained and years in which these were conferred; and career outline, that is, principal positions held, with year dates. In addition, major honours awarded are recorded. The listing of these is, however, confined almost entirely to imperial or Australian honours and fellowships of honorific scientific bodies such as the Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Society of London. Memberships of and awards from professional associations are not recorded, nor are honorary degrees. Only confirmed information is recorded, so that a number of entries lack one or more of the details just listed. The absence of a date of death may therefore mean either that the person is still alive, or that I have been unable to determine when (or whether) he or she has died. If someone is known to be dead but the date of death is unknown, the notation 'dec.' ('deceased') is used.
The sources of the biographical information presented are very varied and are not recorded here. With those who are still alive or only recently dead, every effort has been made to contact them or their families for confirmation of details. In most cases those concerned have been most co-operative. The various editions of Who's Who in Australia and its forerunners have been used extensively, the more so because information recorded there will generally have been supplied by the subjects themselves. The personnel records of many public and private employers and the graduate registers of educational institutions have also yielded a rich harvest, thanks to the patience and co-operation of staff who have been prepared to undertake searches, often quite time-consuming, on my behalf. In some cases, searches have been undertaken in official registers of births and deaths, in Britain as well as in Australia.
For earlier generations, other biographical compilations have been freely consulted, especially the Australian Dictionary of Biography. In all cases, however, details have wherever possible been checked independently, with the result that those given here sometimes differ from those provided elsewhere. In all such cases, I claim the greater reliability for what is stated here. Sometimes the differences are minor - for example, Neumayer's birthplace was not Kirchenbolanden as the A.D.B. would have it but Kirchheimbolanden as stated here - but occasionally they may be more significant for our understanding of noteworthy individuals. Thus despite the fact that all the principal biographical sources state that the long-time director of the Melbourne Observatory, R.L.J. Ellery, trained as a surgeon before emigrating to Australia in the early 1850s, that claim is not repeated here because, though it may be true, I have been unable to confirm it; Ellery's name does not appear on the register of any of the medical licensing authorities of Britain or Ireland of the period.
The bibliographical listings are the result of systematic searching in the most obvious (and some not so obvious) local and international journals, followed by detailed checking of references given in all articles located. For separately published items, the microfilm Australian national union catalogue NUCOM was searched, and also the catalogue of the British Library and the United States national union catalogue of printed materials. In many cases, obituary notices include lists of publications, and so too do applications for employment or promotion preserved in the personnel files of various employers. Authors themselves or their families have often provided details of additional publications in less obvious places. As well, a number of interested scholars who have consulted entries in the typescript of this bibliography have amply repaid the favour by drawing my attention to further publications of which I had, until then, been unaware.
To avoid the problem of 'ghosts' that besets many bibliographies, the principle was adopted from the outset of not including any item until its genuineness had been confirmed by direct inspection. Inter-library loan facilities have been used very extensively, and advantage has also been taken of visits for other purposes to Sydney and London in particular. Only once was that principle violated, when it was decided at the last minute to include geophysical reports published by the Aerial, Geological and Geophysical Survey of Northern Australia, and it was found that there was no complete set of AGGSNA reports that could be consulted in Melbourne. For assistance with the listing of these items, I am grateful to Ms. B. Allen, reference librarian at the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics, Canberra.
Many other librarians and archivists likewise co-operated most generously in the compilation of this work. To one and all, I record grateful thanks. Financial support for the larger project from which this work has emerged was provided under the Australian Research Grants Scheme. I am also most grateful to the Australian Institute of Physics and the new National Centre for Research and Development in Australian Studies at Monash University, which between them have underwritten the cost of publication. It is gratifying to see the Institute, which unlike similar bodies in Britain and the United States has not yet developed programmes for fostering studies in the history of its discipline, supporting historical work in this way; and also, given the previous neglect of science by most of those working in the field of Australian Studies, to see the Centre bringing the history of Australian science within the ambit of its activities.
During the early years of the project I was fortunate to have the services of an extremely thorough and competent research assistant, Paula Needham, who took on the awesome task of searching the journals and then systematically following up each reference. The bulk of the bibliographical listing is thus due to her: indeed, without her help the task would have been, quite literally, impossible. At a later stage, much of the checking for separately published items was done by another research assistant, Tim Sherratt. To both, I offer heartfelt appreciation. At a critical moment, Gavan McCarthy came to the rescue and completed most of the index. To him, too, I am most grateful. Also I believe the effort has been worthwhile. I hope they feel the same.