Historical Records of Australian Science最新文献

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.

Sugarcane is one of Australia’s major agricultural industries, with approximately 95% of the crop being grown in Queensland and the remainder in northern New South Wales. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, cane growers in northern New South Wales started to see a new disease that resulted not only in the death of plants but also in difficulties in the extraction of sugar. Theories about the cause abounded, but investigations by the New South Wales vegetable pathologist Nathan Cobb revealed that the disease, previously unknown to the world, was caused by a microbe in the creamy ‘gum’ that could be commonly found in the vascular tissues of affected stalks. He named the organism Bacillus vascularum (now known as Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. vasculorum). For some time after, the disease was known as ‘Cobb’s gumming disease of sugarcane’. The Australian bacteriologist Robert Greig-Smith was not convinced that Cobb had conclusively demonstrated that B. vascularum was the culprit, mainly because he did not satisfy Koch’s Postulates. However, the American bacteriologist Erwin Frink Smith came to Cobb’s rescue when he proved beyond doubt that B. vascularum was to blame. The disease is now known simply as ‘gumming disease of sugarcane’.

An Adelaide-born pharmacist, Oswald B. Lower, is a neglected figure in the pantheon of early Australian amateur entomologists. Specialising in Lepidoptera, he worked mainly around Adelaide and Broken Hill where he discovered hundreds of new species, especially in the semi-arid zone of southern Australia. Lower named almost 1000 valid new species between 1892 and 1923 based upon his own material and specimens sourced from contacts in other parts of Australia. His legacy of 40 000 specimens, assembled between the 1880s and early 1920s, forms the nucleus of the outstanding Lepidoptera collection at the South Australian Museum. Many are sourced from locations now lost or degraded and the collection will be an invaluable tool in the emerging challenge of habitat restoration in Australia.

The discovery of tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) was an important finding in Australian science, involving a self-educated field naturalist and a small team of plant pathologists who had to work in relative academic isolation and with inadequate glasshouse facilities. After its discovery in Melbourne in 1915, TSWV rapidly spread throughout Australia and by 1929, it posed an existential threat to the tomato industry. To address this problem, a joint project between the Waite Agricultural Research Institute and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research was initiated in 1926. This collaboration, led by University of Adelaide plant pathologist Geoffrey Samuel, was initially turbulent but ultimately highly productive. Within an eight-year period, significant advances were made in understanding the aetiology of the disease, particularly by establishing that it was caused by a thrips-transmitted virus. Aspects of the epidemiology and control of the virus were also elucidated such as investigating alternative hosts of the virus. This research was made possible through substantial improvements in mechanical inoculation techniques.

Millennia of evolutionary ecology have seen Australia become one of the driest and flattest continents on Earth—and in the process, home to more than 700 species of Eucalyptus. Colonial scientists named them using a binomial system, thereby overwriting local vernaculars that had persisted for tens of thousands of years. This paper traces the man commemorated in the Albany Blackbutt, Eucalyptus staeri, a tree unique to the Great Southern region of Western Australia, traditionally the land of the Menang Noongar people. Using a biographical lens, the paper examines the intersection of Western science and commerce in plant collection and naming, and the ways in which these processes exclude or discount Indigenous knowledge. The paper argues that a more holistic and inclusive historical interpretation of herbarium specimens of E. staeri is achieved by correcting and re-analysing information about the German settler after whom it is named, John Staer, while at the same time acknowledging the Noongar people’s deep knowledge (kartijin) of plants that has been passed down over many thousands of years.

George Rogers (1927–2021) was elected to Fellowship of the Academy in 1977 for his outstanding contributions to our knowledge of the molecular structure of keratins and the biochemistry of keratinisation. He was a pioneer in the application of electron microscopy to hair and wool ultrastructure and to that of the hair follicle. He discovered citrulline in keratin proteins, and the enzymes, roles, and histochemical localisation of transglutaminase and peptidylarginine deiminase (PAD). He was the first to demonstrate ribosomal-dependent keratin protein synthesis in 1965 followed by detailed studies of the biosynthesis of hair keratin proteins. His research initiated studies on the molecular events in the development of the feather follicle and later led to the cloning and characterisation of the clustered genes of feather and related avian keratins. He also cloned and characterised genes for the three classes of wool keratin proteins and studied the transcription of keratin genes. In 1977, he was awarded a DSc by the University of Adelaide in recognition for his work. In 2013, he was made an Officer in the Order of Australia.