Australia Yearbook - 2001

872 Year Book Australia 2001
Research failed after he had shown interest. The
ANU was successful in recruiting to professorial
and other positions in the Schools several leading
researchers who were to achieve outstanding
international reputations. The most notable was
John Eccles who shared the Nobel Prize for
Physiology or Medicine in 1963.
The Research School of Chemistry and Research
School of Biological Sciences were added in 1967,
and the Research School of Earth Sciences was
formed from the Research School of Physical
Sciences in 1973. Professors Arthur Birch and
David Craig, very distinguished expatriate
chemists, returned from the U.K to head the
Research School of Chemistry. A Research School
of Information Sciences and Engineering was
created in 1994. The Mount Stromlo Observatory,
which had its beginning as the Commonwealth
Solar Observatory in 1924, was transferred to the
ANU in 1955, the year in which a new 74-inch
telescope was commissioned.
The ANU established an observatory at Siding
Spring in Northern New South Wales in the mid
1960s and was successful in having the joint
150-inch Anglo-Australian telescope located there
in 1975. The Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring
Observatories were part of the Research School
of Physical Sciences until 1986 when they became
autonomous. They are now the Research School
of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
In the post-war period there was a large increase in
undergraduate numbers in the State universities
and more post-graduate students after the
introduction of the PhD degree. The
Commonwealth provided scholarships and some
financial assistance to the State universities but
funds for research were meagre. The CSIR provided
some grants for research projects, but it was not
until 1966 that the Commonwealth founded the
Australian Research Grants Committee and
provided the funding for competitive research
grants to university academics.
The Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and
Geophysics was founded in 1946 as a division of
the Department of National Development, with
H. Raggatt as Director and with the primary
functions to research exploration techniques and
survey the continent at a broad scale for
prospective areas for minerals and oil. The broad
surveys of the Bureau were of considerable value
to exploration companies in their choice of
prospective areas for investigation. The Australian
Atomic Energy Commission was created in 1953
to assist in the mining and treatment of
uranium deposits and develop practical uses
of atomic energy. A laboratory and nuclear
reactor were built at Lucas Heights near
Sydney for research and the production of
short-lived radioactive isotopes for medicine
and other uses.
CSIR emerged from the war years stronger
and more diversified, and with an enhanced
reputation. The contributions of its scientists
to the war effort were widely recognised, and
in the post-war years the Commonwealth
Government provided increases in
appropriation funding to CSIR in successive
budgets. CSIR also was the major beneficiary
in the allocation of substantial research funds
from the Wool Research Trust Account. There
was a compulsory levy on wool growers for
research and publicity, and the Government
paid a matching amount to the Wool Research
Trust Account for the conduct of scientific
research. In addition, a separate Wool
Industry Fund was established from the profit
on the sale of surplus wool bought by the
Government during the war. This fund was
reserved for equipment and the construction
of laboratories for wool research.
Before the war there was an arrangement with
the Wool Industries Research Association at
Leeds in England, that wool production
research would be done in Australia and
research on wool processing research in
England. In 1945 CSIR decided to expand its
wool research to include basic investigations
into the chemical and physical properties of
wool and wool processing. There was
concern with the competition from synthetic
fibres, where the manufacturing process had
advantages over wool processing. The
Executive Committee had intended to form a
single new Division to conduct the research,
but failed to attract a suitable person to head
the Division. Instead it established three
separate laboratories, a protein chemistry
laboratory in Melbourne to investigate the
properties of wool keratin, a wool physics
laboratory in Sydney to study the physical
properties of wool fibres and fabrics, and a
wool textile laboratory at Geelong for wool
processing.
After the war there was also a significant
expansion of wool related production
research in several of the existing primary
industry divisions. A new Division of Animal