Edition: 2024 August (Larneuk - Gariwerd calendar - pre-spring - season of nesting birds)

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology

• Find People [ Find people born 100 years ago ]
• Find Organisations and groups [ Find entities founded 100 years ago ]
• Find Archival and manuscript collections
• Find Publications (offline and online)
• Find Awards, prizes and medals
• Find Innovations, inventions and significant cultural objects
• Find major Events and expeditions
• Find major Journals
• See entries grouped by Tag, for example: occupation or function
• Search (using Google Custom Search) e.g. name of organisation, person, phrase or word

Featured in the edition:

Resources for the History of Australian Science and Innovation

• Browse Archival Resource Indexes A-Z [2024 August edition: total 3,037 entries. 2 new entries.]
• Browse Bibliographic Indexes A-Z [2024 August edition: total 26,247 entries. 614 new entries, 367 amended entries, and 5 duplicates deleted.]
• Latest Annual Bibliography [no. 44 2022/23], published in Historical Records of Australian Science, 2024 - download the pdf for free

Scientists, Organisations, Innovations and featured entries

• Browse Entity Indexes A-Z [2024 August edition: total 9,760 entries. 80 new entries, 1217 amended entries.]
• Zietz, Amandus Heinrich Christian (1840 - 1921): was a palaeontologist who, before coming to South Australia in 1883, reputedly studied under German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. He was appointed preparator at the South Australian Institute's museum eventually becoming Assistant Director.
• Batteard-Jordan Australian Polymer Medal (1973 - ): was inaugurated in 1973 by the Polymer Division of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Awarded occasionally, initially in 1974, the Medal recognises outstanding contribution to polymer science in Australia.
• Fuhrer, Bruce Alexander (1930 - 2023): was one of Australia's foremost nature photographers. From an early age he was interested in natural history; he combined this with his professional career which began when he opened a photography business in Portland, Victoria.
• French, Charles (1842 - 1933): was a nurseryman who spent his early career in the Melbourne nurseries of James Scott, Alex Bodie and Joseph Harris. He joined the staff of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens in 1865 as a propagator, specialising in native ferns and orchids. French was also an expert on insects, leading to his appointment as Government Entomologist in 1889.
• Australian Council for Aeronautics (1941 - 1947): a research advisory committee to the Federal Government, was inaugurated on 5 August 1941 by the Prime Minister, Rt Hon R. G. Menzies KC, in a letter addressed to the Ministers for Aircraft Production, Air, Civil Aviation and Munitions and the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney.
• Industrial and Technological Museum (1870 - 1945), Colony and State of Victoria: opened to the public in 1870, in the Great Hall of the building which had housed the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866 - 1867. Its first director (styled Scientific Superintendent), Cosmo Newbery, used as his model the Museum of Irish Industry in Dublin with four sections: geology, phytology, zoology and mechanical inventions.
• Morgan, Francis Joseph (Frank) (1940 - ): was appointed the Director of Research in Molecular Biology at the St Vincent's School of Medical Research, Melbourne, in 1973. By the end of his term in 1988 the School had been renamed the St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research (SVI).
• Bell, Genevieve (1967 - ): is a cultural anthropologist and technologist who is internationally respected for her research in the field of technological development and digital transformation, and how these intersect with cultural practice. For 18 years she worked for the Intel Corporation, U.S.A. ultimately becoming a Vice-President. In 2017 Bell returned to Australia to become the Director of the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance (3A) Institute at the Australian National University (ANU), a collaborative venture with CSIRO's Data6. She was also appointed the inaugural Florence Violet McKenzie Chair in the College of Engineering and Computer Sciences, and in 2021 the Director of the School of Cybernetics. Bell became Vice-Chancellor of the ANU in January 2024.
• McKenzie, Florence Violet (1890 - 1982): was Australia's first female electrical engineer. She owned an electrical contracting business and "The Wireless Shop" in the centre of Sydney. Her interest in radio prompted her to obtain an amateur radio operator's license in 1922, the first woman in Australia to do so, and co-found the magazine The Wireless Weekly.
• Pybus, Cassandra, A very secret trade: the dark story of gentlemen collectors in Tasmania (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2024), 318 pp.: In the nineteenth century, collectors and museum curators in Europe were fascinated by the antipodean colony of Tasmania. They cultivated contacts in the colony who could supply them with exotic specimens, including skeletons of the thylacine and the platypus. But they were not just interested in animals and plants. The belief that the original people of the colony were an utterly unique race and facing possible extinction had the European scientific community scrambling for human exhibits.

Introduction:

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation brings together information from a broad range of sources. It is a register of the people and their communities including the many industries, corporations, research institutions, scientific societies and other organisations that have contributed to Australia's scientific, technological and medical heritage through all time. Importantly, it includes references to related archival materials, museum objects and collections, and a bibliography of historical published literature.

Research, curation and web publication is supported by the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology. Web publication is by serial editions with at least four editions per year. Each edition contains new entries or articles as well as corrections and additions to existing entries.

The Encyclopedia acknowledges all Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples of Australia, the traditional custodians of country. It recognises and supports their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past, present and emerging, and extend that respect to all First Nations people of the world. We are incrementally building a gateway to sources documenting Australian First Nations' knowledge: see Theme: Australian First Nations.

We aim to be a 'living archive' and strive to represent all knowledge in an honest and respectful manner.

On 24 November 2022 (5.45pm), the Centre for Transformative Innovation at Swinburne University of Technology hosted an event at the Hawthorn Campus to celebrate the next phase in the life of the Encyclopedia. For more information see Launch 2022

Exhibitions - selected stories explored in more depth

• All exhibitions from 1996 onwards

Other useful resources

• Historical Records of Australian Science, Australian Academy of Science and CSIRO Publishing. The history of science, pure and applied, in Australia, New Zealand and the southwest Pacific.
• Trove , National Library of Australia. Australia’s free online research portal. Trove is a collaboration between the NLA and hundreds of Partner organisations around Australia, including this Encyclopedia.
• History of Australian science, Australian Academy of Science. An introduction to the historical resources of the Academy.
• CSIROpedia, CSIRO and Swinburne University of Technology. Innovation shaping Australia and the world since 1916.
• IsisCB Explore, An open access discovery service from the History of Science Society; built on 50-years of data in the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science.
• Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community. An advanced subject search of "Australia" is good starting point.

Data Overview

In all, there are well over 2.3 million data elements captured in 44 data tables. The data can be made available in postgresql format and json-ld courtesy of project with the Australian Research Data Commons.

If you would like to explore the network graph of the links between entities, shown below, go to the SVG view of the data for this edition. Hint: use the sliders to locate the graph - it is large. Also, you can use "Find in the Page" to find Entity ID numbers and use the Zoom function to move in and out. For example: A000200 is the node for the Australian Academy of Science.