Here’s the video of the talk I gave at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch on 21 October.

Keynote presented at the Annual Conference of the Japanese Association for the Digital Humanities, 20 September 2014, Tsukuba.

The full set of slides is available on SlideShare.

Cross-published on Medium.

This is Tatsuzo Nakata. In 1913 he was living on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, just off the northern tip of Australia.

From the late 19th century there was a substantial Japanese population on Thursday Island, mostly associated with the development of the pearling industry.

I’ll admit that I know very little about Tatsuzo, and I’ve selected him more or less at random from a large body of records held by the National Archives of Australia.

I present him here out of context and in too little detail, simply as an example. Working backwards from this photograph I want to restore some layers of context and reveal to you a complex and shameful history.

This photograph was attached to an official government form called a ‘Certificate Exempting From Dictation Test’.

From the form we learn that the 32 year-old Tatsuzo was born in Wakayama. He had a scar over his right eye.

Tatsuzo carried a copy of this form with him when he departed for Japan aboard the Yawata Maru in May 1913. When he returned the following year the form was collected and compared with a duplicate held by port officials. The forms matched, and Tatsuzo was allowed to disembark.

To help confirm his identity, the form carried on its reverse side an impression of Tatsuzo’s hand.

You might think that this was a travel document — an early form of visa perhaps. But at the top of the form you’ll notice a reference to the Immigration Restriction Act, a piece of legislation introduced by the newly-federated Australian nation in 1901. The Immigration Restriction Act and the complex bureaucratic procedures that supported its administration came to be known more generally as the White Australia Policy.

If Tatsuzo had tried to return to Australia without one of these forms, he would have been subjected to the Dictation Test, and he would have failed. Despite its benign-sounding name, the Dictation Test was a form of racial exclusion aimed at anyone deemed non-white. No-one was meant to pass. If he hadn’t carried this form exempting him from the Dictation Test, Tatsuzo would most likely have been denied re-entry.

This certificate is drawn from one of more than 14,000 files in Series J2483 in the National Archives of Australia. This series is solely concerned with the administration of the White Australia Policy. There are many other series from other ports and other time periods full of documents like this. The National Archives holds many, many thousands of these certificates documenting the lives and movements of people considered out of place in a White Australia.

Photographs, forms, files, series, legislation — this small shard of Tatsuzo’s life is preserved as part of a racist system of exclusion and control. But what happens when we extract the photos from their context within the recordkeeping system and simply present them as people?

I’ve created a site where you can explore some of the records relating to Japanese people held in Series J2483. Instead of navigating lists of files, you can start with faces — with the people, not the system.

I’m starting today with Tatsuzo and this wall of faces because what I want to explore are some of the complexities of context.

Shark Attack!

After a series of fatal shark attacks in Australian waters, the community of Port Hacking, in southern Sydney, began to wonder if they too were at risk.

In January 2014 the local newspaper published an article under the heading ‘Shark “cover up” in Port Hacking’ alleging that research into the dangers had been suppressed.

Ten days later the newspaper followed up with details of the area’s only recorded fatal shark attack in 1927. A local government member, it reported, had ‘unearthed the article on Trove’.

‘It’s long been a story that a boy was killed by a shark at Grays Point many years ago’, he said, ‘I knew about it 30 to 40 years ago but if you talk to people around here, nobody knows about it’.

‘A lot of people say there are no sharks in Port Hacking but this is rubbish’, he added.

Let me reassure anyone thinking about coming to DH2015 in Sydney next year that shark attacks are extremely rare.

What interested me about these articles was not the risk of gruesome death, but the relationship between past and present. The question of whether shark attacks were possible could be answered — simply by searching Trove.

Trove

For those who don’t know, Trove is a discovery service developed and maintained by the National Library of Australia. Like Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America, and DigitalNZ, it aggregates resources from the cultural heritage sector, and beyond.

It also provides access to more than 130 million newspaper articles from 1803 onwards. The articles are drawn from over 600 different titles — large and small, rural and metropolitan — with more are being added all the time.

Search for just about anything and you’re likely to find a match of some sort amongst the digitised newspapers. So of course I searched for Tsukuba…

Trove is also a community. Users correct the OCR’d text of newspaper articles. They also add thousands of tags and comments to resources across Trove.

• 138,000 users
• 3,000,000 tags
• 80,000 comments
• 139,000,000 corrections
• 58,000 lists

Perhaps my favourite example of user-generated content on Trove are the Lists. Lists are pretty much what they sound like — collections of resources. They make it easy for you to save and share your research. But more than tags or comments they expose people’s interests and passions. They give some insight into the many acts of meaning-making that occur in and around Trove.

Lists are also exposed through Trove’s Application Programming Interface (API) in a form fit for machine consumption. So with just a dash of code I can harvest the titles of all public lists and do some very basic word frequency analysis courtesy of Voyant Tools.

There’s nothing too surprising here — we know that family historians are our largest user group. But we can also see the long tail in action — the way that huge collections like Trove can support very focused, specific interests.

Which leads me back to shark attacks.

Old Speak

The Port Hacking article made me wonder how many other web pages there might be out on the wider web that cited Trove newspapers in a discussion of shark attacks. The answer was many. But what was most interesting wasn’t the volume of references, it was the variety of contexts — in blog posts, on Facebook, in fishing forums.

‘Ahh, old time newspapers are fascinating things aren’t they?’, notes one post in a weather forum, citing details of a shark attack in Sydney from 1952.

On a fishing site, a thread on bull shark attacks in Western Australia’s Swan River begins: ‘I found a great website to view really old newspapers in perth. Just found a few swan river shark storys [sic]…’.

The author follows up with a direct link to the Trove search page, prompting the exchange:

Redfin 4 Life: ‘Haha you would never know there had been that many incedents in the swan without seeing these…’

Goodz: ‘Oh how newspapers have changed the way the write… love the old speak!’

Alan James: ‘That’s right Goodz, and more often than not I’m sure they actually reported the truth.’

So a discussion of shark attacks turns to a consideration of the changing style of newspaper reporting.

Perhaps even more interesting is the way that digitised newspapers are used to test a hypothesis, challenge an interpretation, or argue a case. As in the Port Hacking case, questions about the history of shark attacks can be explored without needing to turn to experts, history books, or official statistics.

So when a local politician is quoted as saying ‘there have not been any serious or fatal shark attacks at Coogee Beach since records commenced in the 1800s’, a reader can respond with two Trove newspaper citations and the comment: ‘No previous shark attacks? Or are they only searching for fatalities?’

When a media outlet asks its Facebook followers whether the export of live sheep from Western Australia might be increasing the number of shark attacks off the coast, one follower can simply share a Trove link to a newspaper article from 1950 and ask ‘Did they have live sheep export in 1950?’

I don’t want to argue that these interactions are particularly profound or remarkable. In fact I’d suggest that they’re interesting because they’re not remarkable. 130 million digitised newspaper articles chronicling 150 years of Australian history are just another resource woven into the fabric of online experience. The past can be mobilised, shared and embedded in our daily interactions as easily as pictures of cats.

Traces

And it’s not just shark attacks. To explore the variety of contexts in which Trove newspaper articles are used and shared, I started mining backlinks.

Backlinks, as the name suggests, are just links out there on the wild, wild web that point back to your site. You can find them in your referrer logs, in Google’s webmaster tools, or simply by searching. I started with a ‘try before you buy’ sample of backlinks from an SEO service.

From there I wrote a script to harvest the linking pages, remove duplicates, extract the newspaper references, retrieve the article details from the Trove API, and save everything to a database for easy exploration. You can play with the results online.

I ended up harvesting 3116 pages from 1780 domains containing 13,389 links to 11,242 articles in Trove. Remember that’s just a sample of all the links to Trove newspapers out there on the web.

What was more surprising than the raw numbers was the diversity of content across those pages. I knew that family and local historians were busily blogging about their Trove discoveries, but I didn’t know that Trove newspapers were being cited in discussions about politics, science, war, sport, music — just about any topic you could imagine.

Nor are these discussions just about Australia. A little quick and dirty analysis suggests that more than 30 languages are represented across those 3000 pages.

This is a work in progress. I hope to expand my hunt for traces — crawling sites for additional references, mining referrals, and inviting the public to nominate pages for inclusion. By adding a simple API I could make it possible for Trove to include links back to relevant pages, like trackbacks on a blog. I also want to understand more about the scope of the content and the motivations of its authors. What is going on here?

Undoubtedly some of these pages constitute link spam or attempts to game search engines, but most do not. Browsing the database you find many examples of interpretation, persistence, and passion. People around the world have something they want to say, something they want to share, and Trove’s millions of newspaper articles provide them with a readily-accessible source of inspiration and evidence.

It’s clear that those many small acts of meaning-making we can observe in Trove’s activity statistics extend beyond a single site — to a much much wider (and wilder) world.

Scale

One day earlier this year, Trove received more than three times its usual number of visitors.

The culprit was the WTF subreddit — a popular place for sharing the weirdities of the web. Someone posted a link to a Trove newspaper article describing the unfortunate demise of a poodle called Cachi, whose fall from a thirteenth-story balcony in Buenos Aires resulted in the deaths of three passers-by.

As well as causing a dramatic spike in Trove’s visitor stats, the post received more than 3000 votes and attracted 677 comments on reddit. Cachi was a hit.

Trove articles pop up regularly on reddit. The traffic spikes they bring are reminders that however proud we might be of our stats, we are but a tiny corner of the web. There’s something much bigger out there.

Michael Peter Edson has long sought to alert cultural heritage organisations to the challenges of scale. In a recent essay he described the web’s ‘dark matter’:

There’s just an enormous, humongous, gigantic audience out there connected to the Internet that is starving for authenticity, ideas, and meaning. We’re so accustomed to the scale of attention that we get from visitation to bricks-and-mortar buildings that it’s difficult to understand how big the Internet is—and how much attention, curiosity, and creativity a couple of billion people can have.

Libraries, archives and museums, he argues, need to meet the public where they are, to recognise that vigorous sites of meaning-making are scattered across the vast terrain of the web. Trove newspaper traces and reddit spikes are mere glimpses of the ‘dark matter’ of cultural activity that lurks beneath the apps, the stats, and the corporate hype.

People are already using our digital stuff in ways we don’t expect. The question is whether libraries, archives and museums see this hunger for connection as an invitation or a threat. Do we join the party, or call the police to complain about the noise?

Sharing

There’s something fundamentally human about sharing. Yes, it’s easy to mock the shallowness of a Facebook ‘Like’; to see our obsession with followers, friends and retweets as evidence of our dwindling capacity for attention — reducing engagement and understanding to a single click. But haven’t we always shared — through stories, gossip, jokes, performances, and rituals? Rather than being measured against a threshold of meaning, surely each act of sharing exists on a continuum from the flippant to the philosophical. Just because the act of sharing has been commodified by large social media services seeking to mine our preferences for profit, doesn’t mean it lacks deeper human significance.

A retweet can represent a fleeting interest, a brief moment of distraction. But it can also mark the start of a journey.

Cultural heritage institutions around the world have begun to recognise that sharing is not just a marketing strategy, it’s a mission. As Merete Sanderhoff notes in her foreword to the anthology Sharing is Caring:

When cultural heritage is digital, open and shareable, it becomes common property, something that is right at hand every day. It becomes a part of us.

Aggregation services, like Trove, the Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, and DigitalNZ, bring resources together to share them more easily with the world. Aggregation is only worthwhile if it serves discovery and reuse — it’s a process of mobilisation, rather than collection. As Europeana argues in their 2020 strategy:

We believe culture is a catalyst for social and economic change. But that’s only possible if it’s readily usable and easily accessible for people to build with, build on and share.

Of course the hard part is understanding what makes something ‘readily usable and easily accessible’. What balance do we need between push and pull? Between ease-of-use and technical power? Between licensing and liberty? Between context and creativity?

Busy Bots

The Mechanical Curator was born in the British Library Labs as part of their innovative digital scholarship program. In September 2013, she started posting to Tumblr random images automatically extracted from a collection of 65,000 digitised 19th century books.

It was, Ben O’Steen explained, an experiment in ‘providing undirected engagement with the British Library’s digital content’. The book illustrations moved from inside to outside, opening opportunities for discovery beyond the covers.

But that was just the beginning. A few months later the Mechanical Curator dramatically expanded its labours, uploading more than a million public domain images to Flickr.

What followed was something of a cultural feeding frenzy as people from all over the world starting sharing, tagging, collecting, and creating with this rich assortment of 19th century illustrations. Since then the images have been mashed up into new works, added and organised in the Wikimedia Commons, and featured in an installation at the Burning Man festival in Nevada.

Having been locked away within books for more than a hundred years, the illustrations were given new life online as works in their own right. Opportunities for innovation and expression were created by a rupture in context.

Meanwhile on Twitter, a growing army of bots was liberating items from cultural collections around the world. Inspired by the bot-making genius of Mark Sample, I created @TroveNewsBot in June 2013 to tweet newspaper articles from Trove.

He was joined by @DPLABot, @EuropeanaBot, @Kasparbot, @CurtinLibBot, @DigitalNZ.bot, @museumbot, @cooperhewittbot, @bklynmuseumbot, and no doubt others — all sharing random collection items. Of course @MechCuratorBot soon joined the fray from the British Library, and I eventually added @Trovebot to tweet material from all the non-newspapery sections of Trove.

The possibilities of serendipitous discovery are receiving increasing attention within the digital humanities. At DH2014, Kim Martin and Anabel Quan-Haase critically examined four DH tools — including @TroveNewsBot — in the light of existing models of serendipity. Their discussion noted that randomness is not the same as serendipity, and outlined how serendipity could be understood as type of encounter with information. I do wonder though if what makes the bots interesting is not randomness as such, but the way randomness can play around with our assumptions about context.

Steve Lubar observes that the random offerings of collection bots can also expose the choices that are made in the creation and display of cultural collections. Randomness can challenge our expectations. Describing the genesis of the Mechanical Curator, James Baker notes:

And so as what at first seemed simple descends into complexity the Mechanical Curator achieves her peculiar aim: giving knowledge with one hand, carpet bombing the foundations of that knowledge with the other.

The Trove bots I created do more than tweet random offerings, they also allow you to interact with Trove without ever leaving Twitter. Send a few keywords their way and they’ll do your searching for you, tweeting back the most relevant result. You can modify their default behaviour by adding a series of hashtags — #luckydip, for example, will spice your result with a touch of randomness.

More interestingly, perhaps, you can tweet a url at them and they’ll extract keywords from the web page and use them to construct the search. This means that @TroveNewsBot can offer commentary on current events.

Several times a day he retrieves the latest headlines from a news site and searches for something similar amidst Trove’s 130 million historical newspaper articles. What emerges is a strange conversation between past and present.

These bots do not simply present collection items outside of the familiar context of discovery interfaces or online exhibitions, they move the encounter itself into a wholly new space. Just as the Mechanical Curator liberates illustrations from the printed page, the Twitter bots loosen the institutional context of collections to allow them to participate in a space where people already congregate. They send collection items out into the wilds of the web, to find new meanings, new connections and perhaps even new love.

Broken & Repaired

But letting go can be scary. A 2008 survey of libraries, archives and museums revealed that one of the main factors inhibiting the opening up of online collections was the desire to avoid misrepresentation, mislabeling or misuse of cultural objects. Easy sharing brings the risk that our carefully curated content will be shorn of context and bounced around the web — adrift and abused.

Earlier this year Sarah Werner took aim at Twitter feeds that pump out streams of ‘historical’ photos — unattributed and often wrongly captioned. But it wasn’t simply the lack of attribution that angered her:

These accounts capitalize on a notion that history is nothing more than superficial glimpses of some vaguely defined time before ours, one that exists for us to look at and exclaim over and move on from without worrying about what it means and whether it happened.

I have to admit that the excitement of seeing Trove’s visitor numbers suddenly soar thanks to reddit is frequently tempered by the realisation that what is being shared is yet another story of gruesome death, violence, or misfortune. 150 years of Australian history is reduced to clickbait by our tabloid sensibilities. Most of those who arrive from reddit read the article and click away — the bounce rate is around 97%. This is not ‘engagement’?

And yet, I can’t help but wonder about the 3% who don’t immediately leave, who pause and look around. Three percent of a lot is still a lot — a lot of people who might have been exposed to Trove and Australian history for the very first time. Similarly while the viral pics industry is frustrating and exploitative, it might yet offer opportunities to learn.

One of my favourite Twitter accounts is @PicsPedant. It monitors many of the viral pics feeds, researches the images, and tweets the results — providing a steady stream of attributions, corrections, critiques, and context. Not only do you find out about the images, you pick up research tips, and learn about the cannibalistic tendencies of the pic bots themselves — constantly recycling content from their kin.

@AhistoricalPics offers a different form of education, satirising the whole viral pics genre with its fabricated captions, and pricking at our own inclination to believe.

Freeing collections opens them to misuse, but it also exposes that misuse to analysis and critique. Contexts can be rediscovered as well as lost, restored as well as broken.

Generous signposts

It’s wonderful to see many Trove newspaper articles shared on Twitter. Unfortunately a significant proportion of these come from climate change deniers, who mine the newspapers for freak weather events and past climatic theories, imagining that such reports undermine current research. This is bad science and bad history. Their efforts are also well-represented in my database of web page citations, along with expressions of hatred and prejudice that I’d prefer to stay submerged. It’s depressing, but it seems inevitable that people will do bad things with your stuff.

In a recent post about the DPLA’s metadata licensing arrangements, Dan Cohen suggested we should look beyond technical and legal controls around online use towards social and ethical guidelines:

The cynics, of course, will say that bad actors will do bad things with all that open data. But here’s the thing about the open web: bad actors will do bad things, regardless… The flip side of worries about bad actors is that we underestimate the number of good actors doing the right thing.

Bad people will do bad things, but by asserting a social and ethical framework for the use of digital cultural collections we strengthen the resolve and commitment of those who want to do right.

Already there are examples in the work of the Local Contexts project which is developing a series of licenses and labels to guide use of traditional knowledge and cultural materials. Similarly, Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand have been developing an Indigenous Knowledge Notice to educate the public about what constitutes appropriate use.

We should remember too that footnotes have always been at the heart of an ethical pact. The Australian historian Tom Griffiths has described footnotes as ‘honest expressions of vulnerability’ — ‘generous signposts to anyone who wants to retrace the path and test the insights’. This ‘professional paraphernalia’ has, he argues, grown out of a series of ethical questions:

To whom are we responsible – to the people in our stories, to our sources, to our informants, to our readers and audiences, to the integrity of the past itself? How do we pay our respects, allow for dissent, accommodate complexity, distinguish between our voice and those of our characters?1

Such questions remain crucial as we consider the relationship between cultural collections and their online users. If we expect people to erect ‘generous signposts’ we have to make our stuff easy to find and share. If we want them to consider their responsibility to the past we should focus on providing trust, confidence, and support, not permission.

Responsibilities

If my wall of faces seems seems familiar, it might be because a few years ago I created something similar called The Real Face of White Australia.

The two walls use different sets of records, but they were constructed in much the same way: I reverse-engineered the National Archives’ online database, downloaded images of digitised files, and used a facial detection script to identify and extract faces.

The Real Face of White Australia was an experiment, built over the course of a weekend. But its discomfiting power was immediately evident. Where there had been records, there were people — looking at us, challenging us.

My partner Kate Bagnall is a historian of Chinese-Australia and we were working together on a project called Invisible Australians, aimed at liberating the lives of these people from the bureaucracy of the White Australia Policy.

The project was motivated by a strong sense of responsibility — not to the National Archives, not to the records, but to the people themselves.

We often talk about preserving context as if it’s an end in itself; as if context is just a set of attributes to be catalogued and controlled. The exciting, terrifying, wonderful thing about the wild, wild web is how it upsets our notions of relevance and meaning. Historic newspapers can find their way into contemporary debates. Century-old illustrations can be remade as art. Twitter bots can inspire conversations with collections. The people buried inside a recordkeeping system can be brought at last to the surface. Contexts are unstable, shifting. And through that instability we can glimpse other worlds, we can imagine alternatives, we can build something new.

What’s important is not training users to understand the context of our collections, but helping them explore and understand their responsibilities to the pasts those collections represent.

Let’s remove technical barriers, minimise legal restrictions, and trust in the good will of our audiences. Instead of building shrines to our descriptive methodologies, let’s create systems that provide stable shareable anchors, that connect, but don’t constrain.

Contexts will flow and mingle, some will fade and some will burn. Contexts will survive not because we demand it in our terms of service, or embed them in our interfaces, but because they capture something that matters.

The ways we find and use cultural collections will continue to change, but questions about responsibility, value, and meaning will remain.

1. Tom Griffiths, ‘History and the creative imagination’, History Australia, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2009.

Yes, I have a suit. On 8 May at the National Library of Australia I gave my suit an outing as I delivered my Harold White Fellowship presentation. Thanks to everyone who came along.

If you missed it or want to relive the fun, the NLA has made a podcast available. My slides are also online, so you can follow along for the full audio-visual-not-quite-3D experience.

Use your arrow keys to navigate through the slides, and yes the first page is intentionally left blank. If you linger for a bit on slide two or three, you’ll see the Trove API in action. The presentation itself was constructed using deck.js.

The slides also include links to lots of different examples and demos, and introduce my new favourite plaything. I don’t really know what to call it yet, or what it’s actually for, but it makes me happy, and it makes me think. TF-IDF FTW. I’ll write up some more details shortly.

Here’s the slides from the talk I gave recently in the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. Thanks to everyone who came and to the Scholars’ Lab for their hospitality.

A podcast version is now available.

On 26 September 1902, exactly 100 years ago today, the people of Charleville tried to make rain.

Stationed around the town were six Stiger Vortex guns, their long, funnel-shaped barrels aimed skywards.

At noon the guns were manned, and at the direction of the Mayor, ten shots were fired from each in quick succession’.

Charleville’s assault on the weather was marshalled by Queensland’s energetic, but irascible meteorologist, Clement Wragge.

[Wragge enters reading from paper]

‘Soon after the firing a few drops of rain fell, and at 2 o’clock a slight shower fell. At the time of firing the guns a strong wind was blowing, which doubtless interfered with the force of the vortices’.

Doubtless…

‘Later – A second experiment with the Stiger Vortex guns was made at half-past four this afternoon, but without any visible results. An accident happened to two of the guns, one stationed at Mr Ormiston’s paddock, and the other at Mr Spence’s residence; each of these guns had a large piece of iron blown out of the sides, making them worthless…’

[Slams down paper, takes up pen]

To the editor, Brisbane Courier, dear sir…

In regard to your account of the Stiger Vortex experiments recently conducted in Charleville, there are a few matters which I believe require clarification. The experiment was, of course, conceived by myself based upon my recent experience in Europe, and was supported by a number of generous… scientifically-minded subscribers. I arrived in Charleville on the 13 September to supervise the erection of the guns and to instruct the local inhabitants on their operation. Unfortunately, the experiment could not proceed as nary a cloud was to be seen, and so, my time being much in demand, I left the following Tuesday for Brisbane. There the matter remained until I received news a few days ago that the experiment had been tried, and failed.

As soon as I learnt that two of the guns had burst, I wired to Charleville, and found that the accident was due to an overcharge of powder. I left full instructions with the Mayor of Charleville, and sent a copy to the Charleville Times, distinctly stating that the guns were only to be charged with 7oz of powder. I could not manage to stay at Charleville until a favourable opportunity of making the experiments occurred, and, of course, if the Charleville people will not carry out my instructions, I cannot help it.

I have been asked if the experiment was worth attempting with only six guns. Certainly six guns is the very lowest number we can hope to get results from. It would have been much better if there had been ten. Besides, even with the six, the people at Charleville did not carry out the experiment properly. A sufficient number of rounds were not fired. They only fired ten shots. Whereas they should have continued firing for ten minutes, at the rate of two shots a minute from each gun.

[Pen down]

The experiment did not fail, it was not properly attempted. Unintelligent people in Australia may continue to laugh at the Stiger gun, and heap scorn on us and those plucky enough to try it. But what does it matter? – facts are stubborn things, and light travels, laugh who will.

And don’t they laugh… Our position as “Boss weather prophet” for Australasia, as the people call us, is not one altogether to be envied, for if 99 forecasts out of a 100 turn out correctly, and the last one fails, don’t they come down on us like a thousand of bricks… ‘Tis human nature, and so ’twill be till the end. The public seldom think of the responsibility and ‘brain-fag’ involved in running a popular Weather Bureau. They forget that we only claim from 90 to 95 percent of accuracy in forecasting – that heads are not run by a dynamo, or by the precise machinery of a ship’s chronometer; and rapid though the strides have been in meteorology, it is hardly yet what is termed “an exact science”, though some day it may become one.

Yes, it is a strange fact that any single failure forms a rich subject for that cynical sarcasm and delicate irony on the part of the exceptional few who do not know the difference between an isobar and an isothermal line.

But, I suppose, our efforts to advance the science of meteorology are not wholly without recognition. I recently attended the International Meteorological Congress in Paris… it was worth the journey to Europe many times over, once more to be brought into contact with advanced minds and fellow spirits; with that touch of soul free from carping and jealous jibes, that makes true scientists kith and kin… Dr Walz, of the famous American weather bureau, was particularly complimentary of our efforts to establish a meteorological observatory atop Mount Kosciusko. ‘Your Kosciusko experiment needs encouragement’, he said, ‘and the work takes time’. Professor Mohn, the eminent meteorologist of Norway was with us at the time, and he added immediately: ‘Such observations must be valuable’. Well then, I thought, you scoffers in Australia at ‘Old Wragge’ and his work, here is a pill for you to swallow. Take it with your best grace, and may it purge you of prejudice!

It was, while visiting Europe, that we took the opportunity to learn as much as possible of the Stiger Vortex gun. The achievements of Herr Stiger are undeniable. Vineyards once at the mercy of destructive hailstorms are now protected. Winegrowers in Styria, Switzerland, France and Italy have adopted his methods, so that in upper Italy alone there are now actually 10,000 shooting stations. Scientific opinion is divided as to what actually takes place by the firing into the upper air, but the results are clear. The vortex guns break up the clouds and prevent the hail from forming. And not only so, for rain instead of hail frequently results.

We have stated, and again repeat, that the ‘Stiger Vortex’ has frequently resulted in rain when practised with a complete battery; and we hold to the opinion that if ten or more pieces could be discharged on an organised plan against the heavy ‘dry’ cloud masses of continental Australia, which so often promise rain and then pass away without any precipitation, a downpour would probably result. At any rate, it seemed the experiment was thoroughly worth trying.

And how is such service both to science and the people of Australia rewarded? At a time of drought, when accurate meteorological information is more important than ever, the Queensland Government has decided that it can no longer maintain a weather bureau. Can it be true? Who does not know of the Chief Weather Bureau, Brisbane? Who is there without interest in the weather? Who, in fact, among the entire Australasian people fail to read the general forecasts for the entire Commonwealth and the surrounding seas, New Zealand and New Caledonia, when they can get the daily papers? Does some fair lady contemplate a sea trip to Sydney – well, she studies the forecasts. Is a valuable horse to be shipped, crops reaped or lands planted; it’s all the same – ‘What does Wragge say?’ And the same question, from Sydney to Perth, and Thursday Island to Hobart, till we really fancy that we are of some use in the world after all. But that, it seems, is not enough.

Fortunately we have our supporters still. The Federal Government has agreed to free carriage of our telegrams, and the governments of Queensland and NSW will continue to subsidise our work. The weather bureau is now a private concern, but our efforts on behalf of all Australians shall continue. There is, however, the broader question of how the meteorological needs of the country might best be met.

Now the Australian is a grand fellow all round, and we like him, not only because of that downright good nature , which is born in him, but also because he is probably the greatest sky reader in the world in an amateur sort of way. For in this strange land of extremes – this country of long droughts and heavy floods – environment raises a meteorological race, and when he can find nothing else to speak about, he talks of the weather.

It seems only fitting then that this youthful nation should be served by a first-class meteorological service, thoroughly practical and for the benefit of every section of the community. It is time for the government of this fair commonwealth to establish a Federal Weather Bureau to replace the current unsatisfactory system where state observatories run by astronomers provide a service which is merely adequate. Please do not misunderstand me, astronomy, we all know, is the most sublime of sciences, and one that has entranced me from my youth. Sublime, however, as is the study of astronomical questions, meteorology is, par excellence, the more practical of the two, especially as regards the momentous and varied interests of these rapidly advancing colonies. Interesting indeed as it is for the astronomer to observe the umbrae of some gigantic sun-spot, in which the earth would lie as would a small pebble in the craters of our hugest volcano; absorbing as is the study of the configuration of Mars, and the wonderful characteristics of the lunar craters, old sea floors, and mountain chains – not forgetting also, the cloud belts of the mighty Jupiter, and the wondrous rings of Saturn, as instances – it is of infinitely more importance not only to the practical business men of Greater Britain, but also to every section of the Australasian community from the wealthy merchant to the humble housewife to be able to interpret aright coming changes in the weather, and the indications and use of their meteorological instruments – even if such be only a pet corn and a rheumatic joint.

I am not alone in my assessment, the Melbourne Age published a convincing case for the establishment of a Federal Bureau headed by an experienced and dedicated meteorologist.

‘Unfortunately, meteorology is not as yet an exact science’, the article notes, ‘and meteorologists are like poets in being born and not made’…

Poets… yes…

‘Mr Clement Wragge, in Queensland, seems to be one of the former, and possesses the enthusiasm for his occupation which alone can lead to great results. It is no slur upon the weather prophets in the other colonies, who combine the functions of astronomers and meteorologists, that they have neither the training nor disposition for the work. Indeed, the very mathematical accuracy which astronomy requires probably unfits a man for taking the broad view of meteorological data requisite for successful forecasting; and if ever a complete knowledge of atmospheric circulation and the laws ruling weather are to be secured, it will be by some enthusiast like Mr Wragge.’

Well said…

So what sort of man is needed to head a Federal Weather Bureau? Clearly he should be a practical scientist of sterling honour and integrity, strength of will, determination, and untiring energy, possessing sound judgment and diplomatic tact, called upon as he would be to deal with an ‘army’ of observers, staffs, and assistants in the various states of the Commonwealth. He should be a stern, but generous, disciplinarian, demanding of his assistants rigid punctuality and accuracy in all their work. He should be a man who would fearlessly do his duty in the interests of the Commonwealth, regardless alike of praise or blame by individuals or small sectional interests. He should push ahead and do his very utmost to bring the grand service over which he rules to the highest possible state of practical efficiency. However, he should not be like an automaton, ever glued or lashed with red tape to his office chair – red tape should be his servant, not his master – but disregarding personal inconvenience he should periodically visit his men, cultivate their acquaintance, treat them as gentlemen, study with kindness their idiosyncrasies and little peculiarities, and so by precept and example should inculcate the gospel of duty and the grand factor of love.

Where could such a man be found… well… it is not for us to say…

We may be offered the position of Federal Meteorologist, or we may not; we may accept it or otherwise, but if the former, we never put hands to the plough and then draw back. No; we were educated in the positive school of “can and will”, not in the negative academy of “can’t and doubt”, and if the position is offered and accepted we both can and shall carry out a programme calculated best to serve science, the country, and the people.

[Break]

In-Clement Wragge delivered a lecture to a moderate audience at the Braidwood Literary Institute on Tuesday night last on astronomy, meteorology and other things. After disposing of these subjects, he dealt with the uses of radium, for which he adopted the extraordinary course of collecting a second admission fee, which came as a complete surprise to the audience. In fact, it had a most inclement effect.

– Queanbeyan Age, 21 November 1911

[Wragge re-enters tries to collect money from audience]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your… generosity…

From your attendance here this evening I must thankfully conclude that my reputation has not yet faded into obscurity. You will recall, I should think, that I was director of the Chief Weather Bureau in Brisbane until 1903, when state governments withdrew their subsidies, and, reluctantly I was forced to cease operations.

But, I have at least had time to travel. From my youth, the love of roaming was ever uppermost – a yearning for the sea and a knowledge of the world uncontrollable. What a charm, what a keen fascination, has travel to the intelligent mind! All the world is a playground, and change of latitude brings ever-varying phenomena, which, to a being in tune with the Infinite, are perpetual sources of instruction and profit. And so, after all the barometric reductions, percentages of humidity, vapour tensions and isothermals; after lectures galore and hard, hard, work; I was again as a lad off for a holiday, bound to the isle of youth and beauty – Tahiti.

Oh! those glorious tropic evenings at sea. How one luxuriates in the balmy air, how soft the Pacific zephyrs, how impelling to tales of love! The maidens sang sweetly by the break of the poop – those catchy airs of the “Summer Isles of Eden”, full of romance, that makes one’s ideas of peace and tender passion a home in the Pacific with Mahinna in the palm thatch, free from care, and dark-eyed pickaninnies gambolling on the coral floor.

The pathetic agony of the refrain sung by such voices was quite too touching, so we followed with an antidote, select versions of those dear old chanties, “Blow! My bonny boys, blow”, and “Leave her, Johnny, leave her”, real sailors’ songs of the old time, racy of the deep sea and redolent of spun yarn…

“For shame”, we hear some prude exclaim, “Fancy a respectable scientist, the former director of a Government Weather Bureau, indulging in such frivolity”.

But I must explain that we were once at sea; and do you imagine that we are some cynic parcelled with red tape and the etiquette of office? Do you suppose that because a man is a scientist he must needs be at zero with isobars for breakfast and isobrontons for dinner? Think you that we can eat the “black bulb in vacuo” and digest the rain gauge? No! We love to feel warm life in our veins, to enjoy while we may – that is true philosophy. Live in the eternal “now”, and make the best of it; autumn leaves will come in time.

[Pause]

One cannot work for ever, and a holiday is as necessary to the human economy as daily bread and the air we breathe. Work and rest, action and reaction, come within the realm of cosmic law as suns “die” and others are born, as winter follows summer and night the day; and if we would live in harmony with first principles we, too, must obey the dictum of God, or cords will snap and Nature be avenged by debiting our account in the Bank of Life with compound interest. What then can be better than a trip to the islands? Change of scene means renewed health. And if you are a lady, bored by the vagueries of artificial “society”, longing for the beautiful and the freedom of Nature, you come too and bring your relations. Go to the Union or the Oceanic Company and book for Tahiti. The fares are cheap enough; and, after all, what’s the use of money unless rationally used? You cannot take it with you across the Styx, and it may happen that you’ll get notions from your dusky sisters – only, for God’s sake, be yourself; drop all “side”, if only for a month, in the pilgrimage of life – and – don’t get jealous; don’t impute evil where there is none. Learn, oh, learn! That the world is wide, although but a molecule in an Endless Universe, and that people differ, and customs too, while yet belonging to the Eternal Whole.

How much one should value the present now, and bear in mind that “death” comes nearer.

And what am I doing now? You may know that I have emigrated to New Zealand, where I am occupied in building a new observatory, and planting my garden. I give lectures…

Before I left Australia, I was encouraged to believe that I might be appointed to lead the new Federal Weather Bureau, an organisation whose establishment I had long advocated. But did they choose the man who had established meteorological observatories on Ben Nevis, Mt Kosciusko and Mt Wellington, the man whose scientific achievements were recognised internationally, who had received the gold medal of the Scottish Meteorological Society. Did they choose the man who had advised the governments of Queensland and Tasmania, who had established the Chief Weather Bureau in Brisbane, serviced by a network of observing stations across Australia and the Pacific, the man whose authority and reputation for accuracy amongst the Australian populace were unmatched. No, they chose an assistant from the Sydney Observatory, Mr Hunt, whose achievements seem to consist solely of a prize-winning essay on the ‘southerly buster’….

But, I wish him well.

We must live in the now and not allow our regrets to fester. When I think of the service I could have provided the people of Australia, the advances in meteorology and climatology that could have been pursued, but… It is now for Mr Hunt to prove his abilities, and I wish him well. While I… give lectures.

[Pause]

But what are troubles such as these when viewed in the light of noble Science, in the light of a mind imbued with a sense of the Majesty of the Universe! Think of it – reflect!

Take even a leaf. What is it? Just a laboratory of cells, each one of which contains multitudes of molecules which are formed of atoms inconceivably minute and counted by the billion. These atoms in turn are composed of electrons whirling in symmetry; and force and motion are everywhere, and nothing is solid in Nature. Then, like a flash, review if you can all the wonders of Earth, with God in the fly, bird, beast, and man – God is everything that is, has been, and ever will be, with “Sermons in stones”, in flowers, and the crested wave. Hypnotise the body and free the Soul, and away it goes, with infinite speed, surveying the sun, the hydrogen flames, the great coronae – thence through the ether from planet to planet, calling on Vesta and steamy Saturn; on and away till Neptune is left and the whole Solar System becomes but a speck; onward, onward, on through the depths of the Milky Way, swamping the trillions multiplied by trillions, past the nebulae clashing in impact, viewing the suns in infinite variety – red suns, green, blue, violet orange; away past Sirius and great Canopus; by simple systems and compound systems, with planets galore and beings superb, suited to conditions in which they live, farther yet and never ending – ad infinitum! ad infinitum! With the music of the Cosmos pervading all in tune and harmony throughout the spheres and the anthem swelling for ever and ever, “Benedicte! Benedicte! Thou Infinite Dynamo who art in all, whose Laws are Life”.

[Pause]

Live in the eternal “now”, and make the best of it; autumn leaves will come in time.

Death! forsooth; what is it? Nought but a change.

In the course of a lecture in November 1922, Clement Wragge suffered a stroke. He died on 5 December 1922 in Auckland.

Compiled from a number of Clement Wragge’s writings (yes I’ll add the details when I can find them again).

Learned friends, a little over twelve months ago, I had the honour of addressing another distinguished gathering. My subject on that occasion was a rather unusual artefact that my colleagues and I had discovered – an item we came to call ‘The Cabinet of Curiosities‘. In the intervening months we have continued our researches into this object and have uncovered some disturbing facts. To be blunt, I believe that we have unearthed evidence of a widespread and long-standing conspiracy.

I warn you now that being made privy to our researches may expose you to intimidation and scorn, perhaps even derision. You may be forced to confront evil forces beyond your imaginings – forces that seek to compress our understanding, to contain our creativity, to maintain our silence. Yes you may be called into battle against those evil powers encircling and ensnaring us – politicians, accountants, managers, and science communicators…

I warn you now so that you have the opportunity to leave, to block your ears, or hide beneath your tables…

Thank you, you are a brave and sturdy lot indeed.

Let us first go back to the beginning – to the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities‘ itself. For those of you who were not present at the Cabinet’s unveiling last year, let me recapitulate our initial findings.

The Cabinet’s origins were obscure. It is known that some two hundred years ago a young botanist by the name of Joseph Banks visited these shores and collected a great number of plant and animal specimens. These were transported to Britain aboard the Endeavour, contained within an assortment of wooden chests. While it appeared there may be some connection with these, this Cabinet was clearly a much more complex item.

Indeed, it was reminiscent of the collector’s chests assembled by gentlefolk in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such chests often displayed natural history specimens along with human artefacts. The memento hominem, on the other hand, was biographical in intent. Presenting items that together told the story of a life. What could not be doubted was that this Cabinet also told a story. It is in seeking to unravel this story that we began to discover the Cabinet’s meaning – and, might I add its warning.

A clue to the purpose of the Cabinet was contained within an inscription found on the top panel. If I might read it:

This Cabinet holds many treasures. Two hundred years of Australian science are arrayed for exploration and reflection. The curiosities contained are those of Australia’s men and women of science, and your own. Open, examine and understand.

There follows a quotation, dated 1939, from Sir William Bragg:

‘The spirit in which knowledge is sought, and the manner in which it is used, are more important, more real, than knowledge itself’ – Sir William Bragg, 1939.

Two hundred years of Australian science… in a box. It seems preposterous, a mere folly. But as we shall see, its intent is far from frivolous.

And so to the unravelling… If we are to explore ‘Australian science’ as the inscription on this Cabinet suggests, we might perhaps examine what we see… or see what we examine… Australia offered new horizons for scientific discovery and yet these were largely perceived through old eyes – European eyes. This changed of course, but how and when?

Then, of course, there is the matter of communication. Science cannot function without it, and yet Australian scientists were isolated – victims we presume, perhaps too hastily, of the ‘tyranny of distance’. But what did isolation mean, and how was it overcome?

One might also examine the role of empire – those political and economic forces that create the space within which science is able to flourish. Or is science more of a participant in this process than a product?

In our initial study of the Cabinet we therefore identified three themes:

• The way in which the Australian environment was perceived… ‘all things queer and opposite’, as was inscribed on the minute book of a scientific society in Tasmania;
• The counterposed forces of isolation and independence;
• And the role of science, as some commentators have described it, as the ‘handmaiden of empire’.

My colleagues and I believe that these themes correspond to the three sections of this Cabinet of Curiosities… Did I mention there were three sections, divided thus, and held together by this arrangement of iron bars and locks.

In this first section, corresponding we suppose to the first theme, there are four trays. The first contains a series of paintings which, to my eye, represent a verdant land despoiled, then restored. Remaking upon remaking. Re-vision upon revision. It is difficult to imagine that our colleagues of some 130 years prior regarded the bush as silent, and sought to introduce British songbirds to alleviate this auditory oppression. But they did. However, amongst these same scientists were the first to argue for protected areas to preserve the Australian environment. This Cabinet offers no glib slogans, no easy answers, suggesting, nonetheless, that in remaking we are…remade.

The second tray, appears to be a map. This land, of course, became known to science through exploration, through mapping – the creation of legends, both cartographic and otherwise. Many of our famous explorers were scientists – Leichardt, a naturalist; Wills (of Bourke and…) was lured away from the Magnetic Observatory on Flagstaff Hill in Melbourne. But what conventions were used in such mapping? What was sought, and what was found?

The next tray offers a rather different perspective – it looks up, to the heavens. As well as a new land, Australia offered a new sky for exploration. On being appointed Governor, amateur astronomer, Sir Thomas Brisbane, exclaimed ‘With a virgin sky, what might not be achieved?’ Indeed, astronomers like John Tebbutt followed in Brisbane’s wake, carving out an international reputation. But astronomical achievement is surely more than just a matter of geographic positioning. The means and the will are also required – there are many views to be figured.

The last tray in this section is, curiously, empty. Have its contents been lost, or was it left deliberately blank. It may be that its silence speaks more eloquently than any installation. Asking us whose voices are heard and whose are not. Even as we begin to perceive the contours of western science in Australia, we become aware of its meeting with alternative ways of knowing – those of the country’s original inhabitants. This emptiness perhaps represents opportunities missed, paths not taken, messages not heard – or… yet to be heard? It may lay empty… waiting.

Now let us direct our attention to the second section – this bank of six drawers. As I have mentioned, our hypothesis is that this section relates to issues of isolation and independence, and indeed the complex interrelationship of the two. Interestingly, the drawers seem to be grouped in pairs.

From the first pair peers the puzzling platypus, a reference perhaps to the perceived oddness of the land examined in the first section, but a symbol, too, of new knowledge. How is knowledge created? Its claims authenticated? The naturalist George Bennett laboured over many years to unravel the mysteries of the platypus’s reproductive system. Bennett procured and pickled a plenitude of platypi. He observed them in the field, and gathered many reports, nonetheless, it was his correspondent in Britain, Sir Richard Owen, who drew the conclusions. Owen firmly believed that the platypus gave birth to live young, and Bennett deferred to his well-positioned colleague, despite evidence he had collected that suggested they lay eggs. But was this the only option for colonial scientists? Were they of necessity confined to roles as mere collectors servicing the British men of science?

The second pair of drawers appears to elaborate upon this theme, moving the focus to botany and taxonomic determinations. The main reference would appear to be to Australia’s premier nineteenth century botanist, Ferdinand von Mueller. Mueller travelled widely throughout the country, collected and described thousands of specimens and yet was allocated a subsidiary role in the production of the Flora Australensis. Authority was reserved to a British expert with ready access to the botanical type-specimens stored at Kew Gardens. Sensible enough. Like Bennett, the Baron found himself on the outskirts of a scientific network centred on Europe. But wait… the picture is more complex, for Mueller himself was the centre of a network of collectors throughout Australia – people of varying background and experience, whose loyalty and diligence Mueller deliberately cultivated. There are networks within networks, worlds within worlds. Each drawer we unlock opens more paths for exploration.

It is communication that knits together these networks and sustains these relationships. In the third pair of drawers we find hints of correspondence, the remnants of a science practised over time and distance. By careful analysis, we have identified William Henry Bragg as the author of a number of these fragments. Other images seem to refer to Frank Macfarlane Burnet. Significantly, both were Nobel prize-winners, Bragg for physics and Burnet for medicine, though almost half a century separated their awards. Perhaps more important, however, is the contrast in their career paths. Although Bragg began his research in Australia, isolation from the leading practitioners forced him to move to Britain. Burnet, on the other hand, rebuilt the field of immunology from within Australia. Apparently he felt no such isolation. Why this difference? The Cabinet asks us.

From the personal to the political – the final section encourages us to investigate the political and economic context of science in Australia. Curiosity is not the only factor that shapes research. Indeed, the first drawer reminds us of the many, potentially devastating problems that faced the agricultural industries in the early decades of this century. Introduced pests and weeds, animal diseases and soil quality were included in the challenging check-list presented to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research when it was established in 1926. Australia’s research agenda thus reflected its economic position – though this arrangement was not without its tensions.

Fragments of scientific formulae discovered within the final drawer have been found to relate to radio astronomy. You will recall that this exciting field of endeavour arose out of radar research during the Second World War. Australian scientists led the way. Indeed, the war reshaped Australia’s scientific community, and science itself emerged from the war with a new, should I say awesome, reputation. The consequences of this are only hinted at. There is so much to consider. Layer and layers of meaning. Questions… many questions…

These were the limits of our original hypotheses, and I would like to express once more gratitude to my esteemed colleagues in this endeavour – Greg St John, David Watt, Lisa Cianci, Nola Farman, David Nugent, Kate Murphy, Neil Roberts, Antoinette De Morton, Peta Cross, and Adrian Jones. Since then we have continued our studies both here and abroad, travelling with the Cabinet by ship to London for further research. We have been most fortunate in discovering a set of papers (you might call them records) relating to the Cabinet and its creators, in particular to the activities of an individual whom we know only by the pseudonym Professor Duckbill.

It would appear that most of our original hypotheses were correct, some of Duckbill’s notes elaborate on the basic themes of the Cabinet, and I quote:

The Cabinet of Curiosities is intended to provide a representation of the development of science in Australia. Or is that the development of Australian science? Is there a difference? What does it mean to say that Australia has developed its own scientific culture?… Questions about the development of science in Australia cannot be easily divorced from questions about science itself. Science is international, but it is also local, it permeates our lives and our histories. By exploring the experience of Australian scientists we learn more about the way science is disseminated, encouraged and, indeed, retarded. But by reflecting on the processes and structures of science we gain new perspectives on the Australian experience.

Duckbill concludes:

The Cabinet of Curiosities is neither about science, nor Australia, but about the sites at which these two meet – within the experience, achievements, hardships and glories of Australia’s men and women of science.

But for us the question that remains is – ‘WHY?’ Why did Duckbill go to all this trouble? Why embed a dissertation on Australia’s scientific past within such a odd structure? Why did he choose to communicate through these mysterious signs and symbols, through hints and insinuations rather than a more conventional means of discourse. The answer is – conspiracy. A conspiracy to suppress all attempts to explore the history of Australian science. Duckbill’s papers reveal that he spent many years seeking to raise awareness and understanding of Australia’s scientific past, until he was eventually overtaken by the forces of ignorance and banal utility.

The Cabinet was the only means of communication that remained, its messages were buried deeply enough to escape the notice of those conspiring against such narratives. Its very complexity and richness of meaning allowed it to pass into posterity where someone might discover it and begin to unravel its stories. It is an encoded message that has slipped past the censors of memory, the dictators of our past, the manufacturers of our …’heritage’.

But where is the evidence of this conspiracy? I tender first a publication which may be familiar to you – A History of Australia, by Manning Clark. Volumes 5 and 6 of this mammoth work encompass the period 1888-1935, but a perusal of their indices is revealing – there are no entries for science… nothing. But surely more recent works have redressed this imbalance? I further tender Volume 4 of the Oxford History of Australia. This volume covers the period 1901-1942, a time of great change in Australian science, which included the establishment of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Let us look under ‘science’… nothing. Hmmm, perhaps under Council for Scientific and Industrial Research? Ah yes, page 226:

The National-Country Party administration… made a major initiative of the Commonwealth Institute of Science and Industry, recognised and greatly expanded in 1926 as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

That appears to be all…

Where is science in Australian history? To quote from some of Duckbill’s early writings:

What sorts of images are conjured up when we think about Australia’s history? Intrepid explorers perhaps? Brave Anzacs on the shores of Gallipoli? Or maybe gold rushes, and the development of the wool and wheat industries. But science and scientists? How many Australian scientists can you name? Can we really say Australia has a scientific heritage?

“Can we really say…”, is this an indication that Duckbill was already aware of the ways in which Australia’s scientific heritage was being marginalised, if not actively suppressed? His next passage provides us with some compelling evidence:

Have you ever looked closely at the faces on the $100 note? On one side is Douglas Mawson, antarctic explorer and geologist. On the other side is the astronomer John Tebbutt. That’s right, they’re both scientists. What about the $50 note? There you will find Ian Clunies-Ross, chairman of the CSIRO from 1949-1959, and Howard Florey, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin. Yes, another two scientists. On the $20 note? Laurence Hargreaves, aeronautical engineer…

So, by special arrangement with my bankers, I have a $100 note with me tonight. If you inspect it as Duckbill suggests, you will find no scientists. Nor on any of the other notes. Scientists have been erased from our currency! I ask, who is responsible for this? Surely some evil conspiracy to obliterate all evidence of Australia’s scientific achievements is afoot?

Ahhh, you say, there is no conspiracy, after all are we not in the midst of ‘Science Week’, a period specifically set aside to celebrate Australian science? Am I alone in finding something disturbing, nay insidious, in this event – in this science week. Is this just another way of partitioning science off from the rest of our culture, of maintaining the separation so obvious in our history books. We dedicate a week to science, so we can ignore it the rest of the year. And instead of promoting inquiry into the way science is tightly bound to the whorls of our history, our society, our very being, we are treated to a cavalcade of the queer and the quizzical – a celebration of trivia.

The time is past for putting eggs in milk bottles!

The time is past for gooey green slime!

It is time to know who we are!

Duckbill did, at one point, begin to investigate the role of science in our understanding of what it is to be Australian. To quote him:

The stump-jump plough, the Coolgardie safe – there are examples of technological innovation wedded to versions of our national identity. The idealised bushman had an ingenious streak that always enabled him to ‘make-do’, no matter what the circumstances. But such innovation was constrained by a narrow, conservative pragmatism, that dared not think beyond immediate needs. For every Victa mower or Hills hoist, there are many other inventions or ideas that were ignored, rejected or ridiculed. Lawrence Hargrave, a brilliant inventor whose work did much to hasten the development of powered flight, commented in 1892: ‘The people of Sydney who can speak of my work without a smile are very scarce’.

How is this to be overcome, Duckbill argues:

An understanding of Australia’s scientific heritage might help prise open the grimly locked jaws of narrow-minded pragmatism. The portrait of the Australian who merely responds to circumstances could be replaced by one of the imaginative thinker, the long-term strategist, the creative spirit, the visionary. The history of Australian science can provide a reservoir of images and examples to build this new identity, and establish a creative environment for future growth and prosperity.

But we should recognise there is a danger here as well – a danger that in seeking to gain popular attention we may ourselves trivialise Australia’s scientific past, reducing it to a parade of the ‘great men of science’. It is all to easy to lapse into the cult of hero worship, to reduce people to icons. As a culture we are scared of complexity. It is simplest and safest to put scientists in boxes – whether they be marked, hero, villain or nerd – the result is the same, they are not us. They are something other to our experience, to our lives.

I myself have been inclined to fall into this trap. I remember indeed, that at the time of my first Cabinet presentation, I was interviewed on a wireless program. ‘Who do you think was Australia’s greatest scientist?’ the presenter asked me. I answered not with one of our Nobel prizewinners, like Howard Florey or Macfarlane Burnet, but with David Rivett. ‘What did he discover?’ came the question in response, leaving me momentarily at a loss. I babbled something about his significance not relating to any particular discovery, but to his work in establishing CSIR as a world-class scientific organisation, to his great idealism and passion for science which he would not resign even in the face of brutal political attacks. But my answer was clearly unsatisfactory, the presenter wanted labels not issues, trophies, not people.

More recently I heard a discussion on the wireless relating to ‘unsung heroes’ of Australian history. Apparently it is a regular item, and it just so happened that the two heroes being sung on this occassion were scientists – Ferdinand von Mueller, and John Tebbutt. However, my initial pleasure at having scientists included in such a forum, quickly turned to frustration.

I have already spoken of Mueller’s significance, but what were the two key achievements proclaimed by this commentator to justify Mueller’s inclusion in the pantheon of “unsung heroes”. First, that he sent eucalyptus seeds around the world, so that we can now see gum trees in California; and second, that he planted marrum grass on Australian beaches to prevent erosion. That was it. There was no indication of Mueller’s broader scientific achievements, no understanding of the development of science in Australia – indeed, I doubt whether the words science or scientist were used at all. It seemed rather that Mueller and Tebbutt were being included almost apologetically – ‘well, you know they were scientists, but they did some interesting things as well’. Instead of being introduced as active contributors to our knowledge of the natural world and to Australian culture, they were presented as oddities – mere trinkets on the sideboard of Australian history.

It is not merely the people, but the processes of science that have to be revealed. Naming names, recalling feats, is only a beginning, a chink of light appearing around the corner of a door, slightly ajar. We must throw open this door. We must find the science that is in the fabric of who we are and what we do. As Duckbill says:

Just as Australia has looked overseas for advice and expertise, so ordinary Australians have tended to see science as 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 encouragement 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.

Dangerous words indeed. It is little wonder then that Duckbill was silenced, reduced to speaking through a mysterious wooden box.

Of Duckbill’s fate we are uncertain, the organisation he established here in Canberra was disbanded in unusual circumstances, and he disappeared from view. There are some who believe he is still alive, working underground, taking advantage of new technology to disseminate his ‘heresies’.

For the moment though we are left with this – the Cabinet of Curiosities. It stands before us as a starting point, a rallying cry, a call to arms – are we brave enough to meet its challenges?

On Sunday I was listening to the local ABC station, 2CN, when a bloke came on talking about “unsung heroes” of Australian history. Apparently it’s a regular spot, and it so happened that the two heroes being sung on Sunday were scientists – Ferdinand von Mueller the botanist, and John Tebbutt, the astronomer. However, my initial pleasure at having scientists included in such a forum, quickly turned to frustration.

Many, perhaps most, of you would have heard of Mueller. He was probably Australia’s greatest nineteenth century scientist: Victorian Government botanist for 40 years, an explorer who collected and classified thousands of specimens, a prolific correspondent who maintained a vast network of collectors throughout Australia, an international figure whose unequalled knowledge of Australian flora was widely recognised in the scientific centres of Europe.

But what were the two key achievements proclaimed by this radio commentator to justify Mueller’s inclusion in the pantheon of “unsung heroes”. First, that he sent eucalyptus seeds around the world, so that we can now see gum trees in California; and second, that he planted marrum grass on Australian beaches to prevent erosion. That was it. There was no indication of Mueller’s broader scientific achievements, no understanding of the development of science in Australia – indeed, I doubt whether the words science or scientist were used at all. It seemed rather that Mueller and Tebbutt were being included almost apologetically – ‘well, you know they were scientists, but they did some interesting stuff as well’. Instead of being introduced as active contributors to our knowledge of the natural world and to Australian culture, they were presented as oddities – mere trinkets on the sideboard of Australian history.

Perhaps this is not surprising, despite Australia’s strong record of scientific achievement, the scientist does not really fit our myths of national identity. The closest we come is probably the ingenious ‘make-do’ bushman, able to cobble together all manner of useful gadgets from a roll of barbed wire and a jam tin. But this is ultimately a conservative image, it is simply pragmatism, not a passion for knowledge, that is assumed to be the driving force. What is celebrated by such myths is not creativity, inspiration or genius, but simply a capacity to respond to circumstances. Consequently, we have had several generations of schoolkids believing that the heights of Australian scientific and technological achievement can be summed up in three words – STUMP JUMP PLOUGH.

At this point I must make a confession. I recently prepared an article for the Oxford Companion to Australian History on the history of Australian science, or rather the historiography of Australian science. In it, I argued that one of the problems with the field is that too much of the history of Australian science has been written by scientists. This seems a rather unfriendly thing to say on an occasion such as this, but let me explain. The point of my argument was not to denigrate the many thorough and detailed historical studies of scientific institutions, personalities and disciplines conducted by scientists, but rather to highlight the failure of the broader historical community to incorporate science into their studies of Australian life and culture. The historians aren’t pulling their weight. Where is science in the various survey histories of Australia? – if you’re lucky you may find a reference to William Farrer, or perhaps myxomatosis, but not much else. This separation between Australian history and Australian science continues, I believe, to the detriment of both.

But instead of just complaining, as I seem to do quite often, let’s chart a plan of action, inspired by Murray Upton’s fine example. After all, if the historians aren’t yet ready to take up the challenge, then the burden lies even more heavily with you – it is up to the scientific community to ensure that its own achievements, activities, culture and development are adequately documented, that its stories are told. But where to start? I foresee a battle waged on three fronts:

1. the records
2. the people
3. the history

the records

In the preface to his book, Murray makes some insightful comments about changing recordkeeping practices in science, and the likely impact of this on the work of future historians. As Murray mentions, perhaps the most frightening prospect is that presented by electronic documents – email, databases, notes – all those things you create on your computer on a day to day basis. We can still read Joseph Banks’s journal of the Endeavour voyage more than 200 years after it was written. In 200 years time will it be possible for a historian to read your records? This is not simply a job for archivists. The way such records are created and disposed of means that archivists and scientists need to be working together to develop strategies and procedures. In the past, institutions could put off any action on archives until the retirement of a long-serving staff member. But scientists now are often on short-term contracts, each time they move, change jobs, change institutions, records are lost. Institutions can no longer rely on archivists being able to come in and clean-up after the science has been done, if they do so, they risk losing a substantial chunk of their corporate memory – our scientific memory.

Why does this matter? Well, I’ve already gestured towards the cultural and historical arguments for preserving our scientific heritage, but there are also some important practical considerations. As you all know science is practised within an ever-growing regulatory framework. There are a raft of legal obligations, issues of intellectual property, patent rights, concerns about scientific fraud, all of which can only be dealt with by instituting adequate recordkeeping processes.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, as organisations such as Australian Archives (now National Archives) are beginning to recognise the special requirements of scientific recordkeeping, and of course the Australian Science Archives Project, is always willing to provide advice and assistance.

the people

I’ve always believed that one of the most important ways of getting the general public interested in the history of Australian science is through stories about scientists themselves. By exploring their achievements, their hopes, their failures, their passions, you break down the barriers of fear and intimidation that tend to alienate the public from science, encouraging instead the realisation that scientists are people too. Having met on the common ground of our own humanity, it is then possible to carry the audience beyond, to open up areas of science that had previously seemed remote and forbidding.

And so with a work like Murray’s we find that it is the characters that emerge most clearly – the tragic, the foolish, the heroic and the inspired. We recognise in these figures elements of ourselves, our friends, our colleagues and we make a connection. From there we begin to perceive the context, to assemble the pieces in our own minds and grasp the broader significance – entomology, CSIRO, Australian science, Australian culture. Murray comments that he found few documents recording ‘social history’ and yet within the lives of his characters we find many clues to the changing nature of Australian society: restrictions on the employment of women, for example, highlighted by the tragic suicide of Mary Fuller; or the Cold War hysteria surrounding the employment of Sergei Paramonov.

I’m not advocating wholesale hagiography. The establishment of a gallery of scientific heroes doesn’t really interest me as either a consumer or creator of history. I’m talking about revealing scientists as people, not about turning them into icons. In pursuing this task there are many lives left to be documented, many stories to be told. Record your memories, write down your anecdotes, pass on your stories.

As an indication both of what can be done, and what remains to be done, you might like to go away and explore Bright Sparcs. Bright Sparcs is a resource on the WWW that contains information on over 3,000 Australian scientists from the 18^th century to the present – it includes biographical, archival and bibliographical details, with links to some memoirs, obituaries and historical articles. Contributions are always welcome.

the history

When faced with such a thorough piece of work as Murray Upton’s history of the ANIC, it is perhaps tempting to cross the topic off the list and think ‘Well, that bit of history’s been done’. But, of course, history doesn’t work like that – there is no end, there is no final product. There will always be new perspectives, new interpretations, people and events will be examined in different contexts. By this constant ravelling and unravelling our insights and understandings develop.

I’m sure that Murray would join with me in urging you not to see this book as the final word on the subject. Murray’s meticulous research has provided us with a new baseline in the history of entomology in Australia – a new starting point, not an endpoint. In coming together today to congratulate Murray and the Australian National Insect Collection, we must also be aware that this book confronts us with a challenge – a challenge to continue this work.

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.