The Royal Society of Tasmania invites you to a lecture by Emeritus Professor Gustaaf Hallegraeff on Sunday 5 May 2024, at the Geology Lecture Theatre, UTAS Sandy Bay.

All RST members, their guests, and the public are welcome. Admission is free. Please register in advance using this link.

Time: 3.30pm for pre-lecture refreshments, 4pm for the lecture.

Microbes are organisms that are too small to be seen by humans without using a microscope. This talk takes us on a voyage of discovery from the first cyanobacteria and algae that created an oxygen atmosphere, through protozoan malaria parasites that affected the human genome, to the fungi that delivered us antibiotics, beer and wine, and bacterial (cholera, pest) and viral diseases (smallpox, measles, influenza, COVID) that shaped human ‘civilisation’.

Most microbes are beneficial to us and almost certainly will outlive us. We need to rethink how using advanced molecular tools we now better understand so that we can live in symbiosis with them rather than be at war.

Gustaaf Hallegraeff is a Professor at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania. He has worked on a wide range of Harmful Algal Bloom issues including shellfish toxins, climate change, ship’s ballast water and fish-killing algae. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences and Engineering, winner of the 2004 Eureka Prize for Environmental Research, and 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Society for the Study of Harmful Algae.

“Resurrection man” is the 19th century term for a person who secretly exhumes bodies from the grave to trade or sell for personal gain. In the 1860s and 1870s, stealing remains from graves from Oyster Cove and Flinders Island was an important sideline business for the prominent Hobart lawyer Morton Allport. This illegal activity has not been publicly known in Tasmania despite having been well-documented in his business letterbooks and accessible to researchers for many decades in the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts established in 1972.

Cassandra Pybus is a distinguished historian, author of thirteen books and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She has been the recipient of several Australia Council Fellowships and a Federation of Australia Centenary Medal for outstanding contribution to literature. Between 2000 and 2013 she was Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at both the University of Tasmania and the University of Sydney and has been Fulbright Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Texas, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at King’s College, London. Her current research interrogates the trade in First People’s skeletal remains for her forthcoming book A Very Secret Trade which is the last of a trilogy that interrogates the destruction of the First People of Tasmania, beginning with Community of Thieves, published in 1991, followed by Truganini in 2020 which won the National Biography Award.

Her Excellency the Honourable Barbara Baker AC, Governor of Tasmania, and Emeritus Professor Don Chalmers AO will host a Medal Presentation Ceremony at Government House on Monday, 22 April 2024 at 5.30 pm.

Winners of the 2023 RST medals and the 2023 Doctoral Award will be in attendance to receive their medals and award from Her Excellency.

All RST members and guests are welcome. The event is free but registration in advance is required. Please register via the Government House website as explained in the official invitation.

Registrations close on Wednesday 17 April.

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RM Johnston Memorial Medal

This medal is intended for a scholar of great distinction in any field. In 2023, two RM Johnston Memorial Medals were awarded.

Emeritus Distinguished Professor Paul R Haddad FAA, FTSE has made outstanding and internationally acclaimed contributions to the field of analytical chemistry.

Emeritus Professor John A Church AO, FAA, FTSE is a world leader in research on sea level and climate and has significantly advanced the field of climate science.

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MR Banks Medal

This medal is intended for a scholar of distinction in mid-career (8 to 15 years post PhD), in any field within the Society’s purview.

Associate Professor Alex Bissember is an emerging leader in research on chemical synthesis and catalysis, exploring the synthesis of valuable molecules.

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RST Doctoral Award

This award honours Doctoral (PhD) graduates who have made significant advances during their doctoral research, in any field within the purview of the Society.

Dr Tobias Stål is a geophysicist focusing on understanding the deep and shallow structure and properties of the Antarctic continent using a novel multivariate analysis approach.

The Royal Society of Tasmania invites you to a lecture by Dr Keith Corbett OAM on Sunday 7 April 2024, at the Geology Lecture Theatre, UTAS, Sandy Bay.

All RST members, their guests, and the public are welcome. Admission is free. Please register in advance using this link.

Time: 3.30pm for pre-lecture refreshments, 4pm for the lecture.

Dive into the geological wonders of Tasmania with Dr Keith Corbett. A Tasmanian-born geologist, Dr. Corbett brings over 60 years of expertise to unravel the unique geological makeup of the island. Join us at the Geology Lecture Theatre for an enlightening exploration.

Keith Corbett, educated at the University of Tasmania, has spent most of his working life in the mountains of Tasmania. In a distinguished career of over 60 years as a field geologist Keith was awarded the WH Twelvetrees Medal for contributions to Tasmanian geology in 2010, and a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2023.

In this “Child of Gondwana” lecture Keith describes the geological makeup of Tasmania, explaining how the unique geology of the island state came to be created. Tasmania has a wonderful diversity of rocks and is a veritable textbook of geological time and Keith’s lecture will assist our understanding and appreciation of our deep history.

The Royal Society of Tasmania invites you to a lecture by Professor Cassandra Pybus on Thursday 7 March 2024, at the Royal Yacht of Tasmania, Marieville Esplanade, Sandy Bay.

The lecture will immediately follow the Annual General Meeting at 4.30 pm.

All RST members, their guests, and the public are welcome. Admission is free. Please register in advance using this link.

“Resurrection man” is the 19th century term for a person who secretly exhumes bodies from the grave to trade or sell for personal gain. In the 1860s and 1870s, stealing remains from graves from Oyster Cove and Flinders Island was an important sideline business for the prominent Hobart lawyer Morton Allport. This illegal activity has not been publicly known in Tasmania despite having been well-documented in his business letterbooks and accessible to researchers for many decades in the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts established in 1972.

Cassandra Pybus is a distinguished historian, author of thirteen books and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She has been the recipient of several Australia Council Fellowships and a Federation of Australia Centenary Medal for outstanding contribution to literature. Between 2000 and 2013 she was Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at both the University of Tasmania and the University of Sydney and has been Fulbright Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Texas, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at King’s College, London. Her current research interrogates the trade in First People’s skeletal remains for her forthcoming book A Very Secret Trade which is the last of a trilogy that interrogates the destruction of the First People of Tasmania, beginning with Community of Thieves, published in 1991, followed by Truganini in 2020 which won the National Biography Award.

Sometime between 1850 and 1860, a Chukchi umialik (a whaling captain), drew a map of the Bering Strait on sealskin. The map was a rich depiction of an animate and changing world, and it included several whaling ships gathered to hunt Aġviq, the bowhead whale. Like the short-tailed shearwater, one of them might have made the long journey from Tasmania.

We are used to thinking of Hobart as an Antarctic gateway, but this talk will turn things around, and examine some of Tasmania’s Arctic histories. How did islanders impact the Arctic regions, and how have this island’s histories have been shaped by Arctic environments, animals, and people?

Following the tracks of migrating animals and the people who pursued them in (roughly) the first half of the nineteenth century, we will look at how Tasmanians were entangled in the shifting politics of dynamic Arctic worlds, and how those threads were woven in turn into the fabric of Tasmanian history. We will also stop with Tasmanians in the places they called home and look at how they used Arctic stories to make sense of their pasts and imagine their futures. Indigenous people and Indigenous networks of trade and information are central to these stories, connecting the Bering and Bass Straits in surprising and important ways. These polar perspectives might help us reckon with the living legacies of Tasmania’s colonial history, a history that includes the changing polar regions that many will never see.

Dr Annaliese Jacobs Claydon was born and brought up on Dena’ina land in Southcentral Alaska. She began her career as a historian and archaeologist with the U.S. National Park Service in two Indigenous-owned Affiliated Areas, the Iñupiat Heritage Center (Utqiagvik) and the Aleutian World War II National Historic Area (Unalaska/Dutch Harbor). She earned her PhD in British and Imperial History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015, after which she worked for the State Library and Archives Service at Libraries Tasmania as an Archivist until 2022. She is now an Adjunct Researcher in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Tasmania. Her first book, Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in early 2024.

Despite major improvements in risk factor control and clinical care over the last decades, cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the leading cause of death worldwide. Although overt CVD may not appear until later in life, the risk factors for CVD begin to develop in childhood and are associated with adverse outcomes in adulthood. Importantly, these risk factors are increasing in prevalence in Australian children, particularly in those who come from areas of social disadvantage.

Rachel’s work aims to identify the determinants of cardiovascular health in childhood and their association with future health; establish tools to detect early CVD risk in young people; and develop effective and acceptable strategies to improve CVH of children who come from social disadvantage, with a particular focus on regions of Tasmania.

Dr Rachel Climie is Research Fellow at the UTAS Menzies Institute for Medical Research, an Exercise Physiologist and advocate for public health. After completing her PhD at UTAS in 2016, Rachel was awarded two internationally competitive fellowships for postdoctoral training in France. Rachel was then awarded a Heart Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to return to Australia and the Heart Foundation’s Paul Korner Award for most innovative postdoctoral fellowship application. In 2022, Rachel was awarded an NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellowship (<10% success rate) and Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship (<15% success rate). Rachel has received over $3.9M ($1.8M CIA) in competitive national and international grant funding. She has published >70 peer-reviewed (39 first/senior author) papers. Rachel has received 7 international and 6 national awards in recognition for her work including Victorian Young Tall Poppy Award for excellence in research and science communication and High Blood Pressure Research Council of Australia Young Investigator Award for best scientific presentation by a young researcher.