HISTORY OF SCIENCE in Australia is a field intimidated by its subject. Historians have been too slow to examine the local context of knowledge production and use, deferring to scientists and their uncritical catalogues of the past. Historical analysis has given way, too often, to the antiquarian plod or the celebratory frolic.

In nineteenth century Australia, ‘progress’ was a popular theme whenever the scientifically-inclined paused to reflect on their discipline. By the latter half of the century, science was developing an institutional base with the establishment of universities, societies and government posts. History helped locate this fledgling enterprise within a grand progressive tradition. Catalogues of scientific achievement provided a preface to current endeavours. Obituaries of local workers portrayed them, stuffed and mounted, within a gallery of revered pioneers; there were no Darwins or Newtons amongst them, but their lives were still dedicated to the same glorious ideals. The collecting of history parallelled the collecting of specimens – the main scientific activity within the colonies. Science progressed by the steady accumulation of plants, platypi and people.

By the end of the century, science was changing. Experimental science was beginning to displace natural history; professional scientists were edging amateurs out of the vanguard of progress. With more scientists, more societies, more publications and a never-ending parade of anniversaries to be commemorated, disciplinary and institutional studies became commonplace in the twentieth century – predominantly in scientific journals. As science fractured into increasingly narrow specialisations, history seeped in to fill the cracks, smoothing the narrative flow of scientific progress. Many of these historical efforts were of the ‘amateur-antiquarian’ variety identified by Michael Hoare (‘The History of Australian Science: Prospect and Retrospect’, Newsletter of the Australasian Association for the History and Philosophy of Science, no. 5, 1974), but some disciplines have been better-served. T.G. Vallance and David Branagan in geology, and R.W.Home in physics, have helped us to understand how disciplinary communities coalesced and changed (e.g. Vallance and Branagan, ‘The Earth Sciences: Searching for Geological Order’, The Commonwealth of Science: ANZAAS and the Scientific Enterprise in Australia 1888-1988, ed. Roy MacLeod, 1988; Home, ‘The Beginnings of an Australian Physics Community’, Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison, eds Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg, 1987). Astronomy has been remarkably well-endowed, with detailed institutional histories, Beyond Southern Skies: Radio Astronomy and the Parkes Telescope (1992) and The Creation of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (1990), as well as a recent general work, Explorers of the Southern Sky: A History of Australian Astronomy (1996).

Significantly, much of this work has been undertaken by scientists. Despite the oft-heard protest that scientists look forward, not backward, scientific institutions have been major supporters of historical research in Australia. In 1962, the Australian Academy of Science established the Basser Library as a ‘centre for the study of the history of Australian science’. Ann Moyal and Michael Hoare used research positions within the Library to effectively pioneer the field, creating bibliographical resources and outlining many of the broad historiographical questions. The Academy continues to publish the only specialist journal in the field, Historical Records of Australian Science. Within this journal, however, scholarly historical articles are juxtaposed with biographical memoirs of deceased Academicians, written almost exclusively by Fellows. The memoirs are far-advanced beyond the taxidermic tributes of the nineteenth century, but the relationship between the articles and the memoirs is uneasy. Such biographies, as with many disciplinary histories, do not just comment on science past, they help to define science present. Scientists writing history are helping to establish, both within the scientific and broader communities, what makes a scientist and what counts as knowledge. In a powerful sense, the history of science is science. This nexus has been largely ignored, robbing the field of much analytical insight.

A lack of access to sources has sometimes been blamed for this historical inertia. But no more. The Australian Science Archives Project (ASAP) provides details of archival and published sources through its online database, Bright Sparcs (http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/). Few other fields of Australian history are so well served. In addition, some naturalists’ journals have been published, and collections of correspondence are appearing. A major project is under way to collect and publish the voluminous correspondence of eminent nineteenth century botanist, Ferdinand Von Mueller. Over the past few decades, tools such as these have been put in place to support an active research community, but where is the activity?

Biographies have appeared for major scientific figures, though there are notable omissions and inadequacies. The ADB has paid increasing attention to scientists over the years, and its articles remain the authoritative sources for many significant workers. Scientist-cum-explorers have fared rather better, as in E.M. Webster’s biography of Leichardt, Whirlwinds in the Plain (1980). The belated impact of women’s history has encouraged efforts to recover the names and deeds of women whose contributions to Australian science has been heretofore overlooked. However, there have been few attempts to move beyond this cataloguing process, to analyse the structures and assumptions that circumscribe participation in the scientific community, though some of the contributors to On the Edge of Discovery (1993) do raise such issues. Recent years have brought a mixed bag of scientific biographies with subjects including Macfarlane Burnet, Crosbie Morrison and Ian Clunies Ross, but none really manage to blend the scientist with the person. The dilemma is revealed most clearly in Lyndsay Gardiner’s biography, E.V. Keogh: Soldier, Scientist and Administrator (1990) – Keogh’s scientific work is dealt with separately in an appendix by a scientist. Scientists will remain divided figures as long as biographers are intimidated by science.

Science has been quarantined within Australian history – unfamiliar and forbidding territory for historians – best avoided. W.K. Hancock, however, thought differently when he emphasised the economic significance of William Farrer’s wheat breeding heroics (Australia, 1930). Ernest Scott likewise showed no qualms when he took it upon himself to lecture the Australian scientific community on their own history (‘The History of Australian Science’, Report of ANZAAS, 1939). In the 1950s and 1960s science seemed to provide healthy fodder for historians exploring the boundaries of their discipline. Geoffrey Blainey recognised its importance within economic history, Geoffrey Serle mapped its development alongside other cultural markers, while George Nadel and Michael Roe began to explore the meanings and uses of science within Australian cultural history. An exciting program of research was unfolding, and yet faltered. Why?

The 1960s and ’70s brought a loss of faith in the benevolent bounty of science. Perhaps a growing sense of suspicion served to alienate rather than inspire historians, reinforcing not revealing the mythical ‘two cultures’ divide. Significantly too, the same period saw the rapid growth of the history of science as a separate discipline. The interests of such historians generally lay in the grand themes of science, such as the Scientific Revolution. Their models and mentors were international, not local. When attention was finally turned towards the history of Australian science, it was within such an international framework; Australia became a case-study in the diffusion of scientific knowledge. International conferences in 1981 (Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison, 1987) and 1988 (International Science and National Scientific Identity, 1991) explored, in a cross-cultural context, the development of the colonial scientific community and its interaction with Europe. Analyses of ‘colonial science’ extensively modified the crude diffusionist models. Roy MacLeod, for example, in his ‘Visiting the Moving Metropolis’ (Historical Records of Australian Science, 5:3, 1982), offered an alternate taxonomy, that recognised the complex trajectories of science and imperialism. Nonetheless, conceptions of Australian science have largely remained bound by the ‘top-down’ perspective assumed by the diffusionist program. Australia was a receiver of knowledge, not a creator of culture. As a consequence too much has been assumed and too little explained. The impact of isolation on the Australian scientific community, for example, has been much commented upon. Blainey’s clichéd ‘tyranny of distance’ is wielded as a causal mechanism without reflection upon the actual meaning of isolation within an Australian setting. Wade Chambers provides some antidote in ‘Does Distance Tyrannize Science?’ (International Science and National Scientific Identity, 1991), exhorting historians to challenge the ‘metaphorical power’ of ‘the myth of “tyrannical distance”‘. But his call-to-arms has brought forth few eager combatants.

Important contributions to our understanding of science in Australia have come from outside the mainstream discipline. Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific: 1768-1850 (1960) drew attention to the way the land and its inhabitants were perceived by European scientists. Tom Griffiths’ Hunters and Collectors (1996) revealed how amateur scientists and collectors were involved in the construction of Australia’s past. Environmental history has similarly explored how science is involved in the complex relationship between people and environment. ‘Australia’ is revealed as a participant in this process, not merely a receptacle for transplanted institutions. Greater awareness of indigenous knowledge systems has also highlighted the limitations of diffusionist models. Aboriginal knowledge systems, where they have been examined at all, have tended to suffer from ‘first chapter syndrome’. Used as an introduction to the history of Australian science, Aboriginal knowledge is paternalistically portrayed as containing the seeds of our ‘modern’ understanding. By implication or design, Aboriginal knowledge is embraced as familiar and then discarded as incomplete – as proto-science. Non-indigenous scholars now recognise the power and sophistication of such knowledge systems. Works such as Singing the Land, Signing the Land (1989), are beginning to demonstrate how indigenous knowledge stands alongside, not prior to, the western mode of science.

In 1988, Roy MacLeod noted that ‘we await works of synthesis… a new Hancock, who will convey and interpret for us the scientific enterprise, from colony to Commonwealth in the making’ (‘Introduction’, The Commonwealth of Science, 1988). And beyond. Only Ann Moyal, in a Bright and Savage Land (1986), has dared to move towards such a broadly integrative project. But hers is the work of a pioneer – a sketch rather than a detailed analysis. The 1988 Bicentennial prompted a surge in history of science publications. However, the main works, The Commonwealth of Science (1988) and Australian Science in the Making (ed. R.W. Home, 1988), were collections of articles – hors d’oeuvres only at the history of science banquet. The pickings are sparser still in relation to twentieth century science. R.W. Home has rightly directed attention towards the impact of World War II on the scientific community (‘Science on Service’, Australian Science in the Making, 1988), but D.P. Mellor’s volume of the Official History, The Role of Science and Industry (1958), remains the most comprehensive account. Boris Schedvin’s history of the CSIR, Shaping Science and Industry (1987), stands out as a the story of a scientific institution within its political and economic context, and also as a history of Australian science in the early twentieth century. However, the companion volume on the CSIRO has never eventuated.

While historians may have successfully occupied territory on the other side of World War II, scientists largely remain in control of the recent past. Academic interest in modern Australian science has more typically been within the realm of science policy or sociology of science, although with some interesting results. Life among the scientists (1989), for example, describes a quasi-anthropological study of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research. Such studies should give historians cause for reflection. Methodologies and insights drawn from the social studies of science can, and should, inform the practice of historians. In the same way, historians of Australian science need to explore the cultural context of their studies, moving beyond an examination of the culture of science, towards an understanding of science as culture. Our knowledge of science, as well as of Australian history, will greatly benefit.

On behalf of ASAP I’d like to welcome you all here to help celebrate our 10th birthday. This is a milestone that, at times, it seemed we might never reach, but here we are, stronger than ever. If you haven’t already guessed, this is a night of rampant self-congratulation, mixed with some myth-making, and perhaps also a little reflection – just how did we make it this far? I believe it had a lot to do with the ‘V’ word – vision.

These days no self-respecting organisation ventures into the public arena without a clearly articulated vision (or at least a mission – ASAP has both). But contrary to current business practice, a vision should be more than just a description, in the vaguest possible terms, of what it is that you do . A vision is an imagining of something beyond what is; it’s a hope, a dream, an ambition. Vision is not born in public relations departments, but in the minds of creative and committed people. ASAP’s vision lies not in slogans, nor leaflets, nor strategic plans, but in its people.

ASAP has been very lucky with its people. With the inspired casting of Gavan McCarthy in the lead role, backed up by many talented supporting players, we have created an ensemble that has made ASAP more than just a place to work. Oust a place to work. Of course, the original vision was Rod Home’s. He saw that an organisation like ASAP should and could exist, and he used his considerable entrepreneurial skills to make it happen.

But, shifting into myth making mode, for me it all began ten years ago with an electric typewriter. The real history of ASAP will be told soon-to-be-published volume, but my version starts here, with an electric typewriter, a filing cabinet and a cheery archivist with a beard. I was a research assistant in the History and Philosophy of Science Department, when Gavan McCarthy moved into one corner of the office I was sharing. The electric typewriter was the cause of some tension as my co-research assistant and I had to contend with a clunky, cast-off, manual machine. We watched with interest and envy as Gavan used this wonder of modern technology to type up neat labels for a series of (mostly empty) files. This man was truly an archivist, we murmured darkly.

In this mood of all-knowing nostalgia, I can see the electric typewriter as a sign of what was to come. ASAP was already pushing at the boundaries; it was a project with an attitude. Who cares if the electric typewriter was really necessary, it was a case of looking beyond current circumstances to the future, of looking beyond what was necessary, towards what was possible.

Was it necessary for ASAP to develop the Register of the Archives of Science in Australia (RASA)? No, but it has become a resource of great national significance. Was it necessary for ASAP to devise its own archival processing system and software? No, but ASAP ADS is now an extremely powerful processing tool, that generates much of ASAP’s income. Was it necessary for ASAP to establish its own WWW site? No, but ASAP now maintains one of the main Internet sites in the world for information on the history of science, technology and medicine. It is this capacity to move beyond what is expected, to take advantage of opportunities as they arise, and to have confidence in our own initiative and enthusiasm that feeds the ASAP vision.

Several generations of office technology have come and gone, but ASAP survives. No, ASAP flourishes. From one member of staff and an electric typewriter to over 20 staff, offices in Melbourne and Canberra, and lots and lots of computers. It is tempting to say that we could never have imagined this, but the truth is we could have, and we did. Not the details perhaps, but certainly the outlines. ASAP’s original charter to preserve at-risk archival collections was never the limit of our vision. We wanted to do more, and we wanted to find better ways of doing it.

One day the ASAP Melbourne Office had an unannounced visit from the Director of the Contemporary Scientific Archives Centres Centre in Oxford, the project on which ASAP was originally modelled. At this stage we were just beginning to explore the ways in which we could use databases to streamline our archival processing work, so I described to him how computers had become crucial to our work. He looked quite bemused by my enthusiastic ravings and said, ‘All my archivist ever asks me for is a big table’. It made me realise how different ASAP was.

It also makes you wonder whether ASAP has achieved all that it has because, or in spite of our lack of permanent funding. Certainly, dire financial circumstances have forced us to review what we do and how we do it. We have had to look at ways in which we can generate income from our skills and resources. But while impending joblessness can encourage a certain amount of creativity, you still have to have people with ideas and enthusiasm. Desperation is no substitute for vision. It is significant that the turning point for ASAP came when we achieved substantial funding from DEET. Over this three year period the Canberra Office was established, and much of the groundwork was laid for ASAP ADS. The DEET funds gave us the space to turn some of our dreams into reality. Who knows what we could achieve if we had a permanent source of funding? Well, actually, we know, and if you have the money, we’d like to tell you all about it.

I’ve come this far in describing the ASAP vision with barely a mention of science, histce, history or archives. This is no accident. I think it would be fair to say that, ultimately, it is our commitment to ASAP, to the organisation, to each other, that keeps us going. Within that commitment we have many aims and ambitions, some shared, some not. I joined ASAP as a historian, and I believe that ASAP has an important role to play in raising awareness of the history of Australian science. But this, to me, is not an end in itself. Australia’s scientific heritage is not a playground for uncritical nostalgia. It is a resource that we can draw upon to understand ourselves and our society. It is both a fund of exciting and inspiring stories and a political tool. As I wrote in ASAP’s submission to the Centenary of Federation Advisory Committee:

Just as Australia has looked overseas for advice and expertise, so ordinary Australians have tended to see science as an an external source of authority rather than as a constituent part of their own culture. They are expected to adapt to technological change, but are given little opportunity to participate in the processes by which such change is implemented. But Australia’s scientific heritage provides a ready antidote to the mystification of science and technology. Scientists become people with the same sorts of ambitions, loves, hopes and fears that we all harbour. Technology is robbed of its omnipotence, and is recast as the fruit of human ingenuity and endeavour.

I believe that ASAP can help open up the world of science and technology to public understanding, participation, celebration and criticism.

It is in this breaking down of barriers that I think the ASAP vision lies – barriers between what is necessary and what is possible, between the expected and the achievable, between archives, museums and historians, between science and society. ASAP has important links with the archives profession, the scientific community, the academic world and government organisations, but we are beholden to none. We exist in a realm of our own making. ASAP is ASAP. ASAP is what ASAP does. Our vision, the same one that motivated Rod Home a decade ago, is that an organisation like ASAP can and should exist. With your help we must sustain that vision.

What am I doing here? I work for a non-profit organisation attached to the University of Melbourne. What can I say about “Doing Business on the WWW”? You all know universities have it easy, large IT departments, huge bandwidth connections – it’s a different world!

But life’s not quite like that at ASAP. For a start, ASAP (the Australian Science Archives Project) is totally self-funded. Through consultancies and grants we support our activities, aimed at preserving and making accessible Australia’s scientific heritage. We’ve been doing it now for ten years.

I’m sure you’d be surprised at the richness of Australia’s scientific past. The problem is both to communicate that richness to a wide audience, and to provide specialist resources for researchers – all on a non-existent publishing budget. As you’ve probably guessed, we are increasingly using the WWW to achieve these ends. Along the way we have established one of the main sites in the world for information on the history of science, technology and medicine. On the WWW a small organisation can have a big impact. Our experience demonstrates that there is much to be gained when the information producers rise up and take over the means of distribution – there is a world to win and you have nothing to lose but your evenings!

Our quest for world domination began modestly in 1993 when we made a few plain text documents available through the gopher and ftp sites of the Coombs Computing Unit at ANU. A year later we published our first WWW page – again a fairly modest effort. Gradually we added resources: general information about who we are and what we do; copies of our newsletter; the text of some of our published guides to archival collections. These were all documents we had created for different purposes. They were just sitting around, feeling lonely and unwanted on the hard disk of my computer, until the WWW gave them the chance to be reborn. Text became hypertext.

With this new life came new meaning. Publishing on the WWW is not the same as running off a couple of thousand glossy leaflets. The sense of connection between publisher and the reader is more immediate, more direct. Once the leaflet has been taken, scrunched into pocket or bag, the connection is broken. On the WWW, your readers are your guests. They have come through your door, marched up to the reception desk and asked to be told all about you. They can question you, they can complain, they can make orders or leave their contact details. When you publish on the WWW you don’t just distribute information, you open a pathway for communication.

Recently we were visited by an archives student from the University of Washington. He came out to Australia specifically to do his practical work with us. Why? Because he had found us on the WWW. He read about us and the sorts of work we do and made contact. Would he have been as likely to follow up his interest if he had come across a copy of our newsletter in his university’s library? I don’t think so. The WWW provides a sense of community that overlays its informational content. There are people behind the documents.

The more you participate in this community the better. While I was putting together our first WWW documents I began to collect links to other history of science related resources on the Net. I thought I might as well make this list of links available to others, so on to the WWW it went. This has grown into the WWW Virtual Library for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, with links to over 150 sites and with around a thousand users per week. This is work we undertake for the good of the community, but the spin-offs are substantial. We now have a significant international presence. The Director of ASAP recently spent twelve months overseas visiting universities in Europe and the US. He was surprised to find how many people were aware of ASAP. How did they know us? Through the WWW of course. This sort of exposure in turn creates new opportunities for cooperation and development, opportunities that we could never have planned.

Too much WWW is never enough, after our initial foray we were quickly hooked. All of a sudden new possibilities began to emerge. We had for some time been discussing the possibility of developing a multimedia CD-ROM on the history of Australian science. We already had a database containing information on over 2,000 Australian scientists from the 18th century to the present. We knew that there was plenty of pictorial material and sound. What we didn’t have was money, and in the dark days before Creative Nation such ‘high-tech’ initiatives were viewed suspiciously by funding bodies.

Then came one of those moments of inspiration: “Why don’t we do it on the WWW?” It seems obvious in hindsight, but at the time it was pretty exciting. Once again it was a case of liberating our data – of taking material that we already had, equipping it for life on the WWW, and then sending it out into the world. I simply HTMLified reports from our database, ran the output through a few simple macros and ended up with thousands of little HTML files – kludgey but effective, it was on the WWW within a few weeks of the initial inspiration. Bright SPARCS (Scientists Present in Australia’s history Resource CD-ROM) had become Bright SPARCS (Scientists Present in Australia’s history Resource Collection Strategy).

Thanks to the WWW, a stalled project was given new life, a good idea became a useful resource. But the WWW incarnation of Bright SPARCS is quite different to the original proposal. It is a work-in-progress, rather than a finished product. It is the framework for an ongoing, collaborative endeavour, not just an electronic publication. By making what we have available, we are encouraging other people to do our work for us. Through their corrections and additions Bright SPARCS will grow and mature.

At the same time we are undertaking collaborative projects that link into Bright SPARCS, creating a detailed resource network. We recently produced a WWW version of Physics in Australia to 1945 a biographical and bibliographical register of Australian physicists. This is cross-linked with Bright SPARCS, so that a single click will switch you between resources. Similarly we are in the process of developing a WWW edition of the Australian Society of Archivist’s Directory of Archives in Australia. Once again this will be integrated with Bright SPARCS – a user will be able to follow his/her researches through to the point of finding the contact details of repositories holding archival materials relating to Australian scientists. In both cases the basic data was already in electronic form, it was just waiting to be liberated. Just think of the potential resources that you must have locked away in your computers. This cruel oppression must stop. Your data wants to be free!

But let’s not leave printed documents out of our revolution. The Australian Academy of Science recently provided us with funds to scan and process over 100 detailed biographical memoirs of Australian scientists, originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science. Freed from the printed page, these articles too have joined the Bright SPARCS movement.

Data gathers data. The WWW grows not by consuming resources, but by linking them. The document that you liberate from your hard disk may be the seed for something much larger, even unexpected.

The WWW now provides the focus for most of our outreach activities. It is also useful as an internal staff communication device. ASAP has offices in Melbourne and Canberra, as well as workers at a variety of sites throughout Victoria. All of our staff have access to the Internet, and email is our main form of communication. The WWW provides us with the equivalent of a staff noticeboard in the tea-room. This is the place where notices are posted, and where embarrassing photos are displayed. By using forms and cgi scripts all staff can contribute without having to know much about HTML. It’s a means of maintaining communication and building solidarity.

ASAP has achieved all that it has with minimal resources. Most of our WWW development has been done by our Canberra Office, which until early this year, meant me. Our only connection to the Internet, until a few months ago, was a dial-up line to the ANU. More recently we established our own server, and I had to learn the hard way about Unix system administration. Being in Canberra we receive little technical support from the University of Melbourne. We are pretty much left on our own, but I believe this is an advantage rather than a handicap. We have been forced to develop our own skills and ideas, we have seen the world rather than a single institution as our audience. Unfettered by bureaucracy, unable to avoid responsibility, small organisations are in an excellent position to harness and express the enthusiasm which drives all that is best in the WWW.

As I have said, the WWW is more than just a publishing medium, but how much more? Who knows? The WWW is a continuing experiment. New uses will be found, new types of resources will be developed. You cannot know how your organisation will use the WWW, until you start using it. Those organisations that will benefit the most will be the ones high on enthusiasm, who fling open the drawers of their filing cabinets and push the WWW to its limits. It’s a journey into unmapped territory, an adventure.

The development of WWW resources is not simply an investment in technology, it’s an investment in people and ideas. As our experience shows, the WWW can open up unexpected opportunities, but you have to set things going. This a not just a world of IT expertise, but of imagination and creativity. And no I don’t mean fantastic graphics that consume huge amounts of bandwidth. I mean finding new methods of communication, new uses for existing resources – taking that database that sits on your hard-disk and turning it into a innovative, accessible resource. I’m sorry, but you’re not going to be able to hire somebody to have your ideas for you. You know your organisation, you know your subject. You have to make the connections. Say goodbye to your evenings, say hello to obsession, the WWW has arrived to take over your life.

If the WWW is to be more than just a second-rate marketing tool we have to pay more attention to the important issue of bandwidth – intellectual bandwidth. There has to be space for innovation. Lack of imagination and the heavy hand of managers will do more to restrict our use of the Internet than any technical bottlenecks. Within our organisations we have to use the WWW not just as a tool, but as an incubator of new ideas, as the canvas upon which our grandest dreams are sketched out.