Our guest speaker for June is international consultant and geology expert John K Davidson who will speak on Tasmania and Revival of Continental Drift.

This free lecture concerns the history of human recognition of the movement of the Earth’s continents, now referred to as ‘continental drift’. It focusses on the last 4,000 years of recorded recognition of the Drift processes, the last one millionth of the age of the Earth.

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The lecture is scheduled for Sunday 2 June 2024.

Please join us for the occasion. Drinks in the foyer of the Earth Sciences Building UTAS from 3.30pm, with the lecture to follow in the Geology Lecture Theatre beginning at 4pm.

Please click this link to register your attendance. Details of the venue are provided in the link. Members and guests are welcome to this free lecture.

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John says of his talk that “the Earth was formed over four billion years ago and has evolved by three principal evolutions, Continental Drift as the ‘boats’, Plants and Animals as the ‘passengers’ that travelled through the Climatic Zones and evolved under the influence of glaciations.”

Most geologists assign the discovery of Continental Drift to Alfred Wegener in the early twentieth century, but the Minoans could ‘map’ the stars and sail from Crete to the mouths of the Nile River, 4,000 years ago.

The first mapped, movement of continents is seen in the reproduction of Eratosthenes’ of c.220BCE, followed by Ortelius’ 1596 map, then via geological and botanical advances and retreats until Professor S W Carey’s cartographically accurate map presented in Hobart in 1956, which put Continental Drift beyond doubt.

The major steps on this path from the Ancient Greeks to ‘get the Drift’ include a disproportionate number of visitors to Tasmania including the botanist Labillardiere in 1793, Charles Darwin the geologist in 1831, Joseph Dalton Hooker the botanist from 1839 and then ‘the locals’, the most recent being a lecture two months ago to the Royal Society by Dr Keith Corbett.

From this firmer historical basis, John will propose a pulsing Earth with a low but significant rate of expansion, contrary to the current paradigm of Plate Tectonics, an interpretation of Carey’s 1956, New Global Tectonics.

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John Davidson graduated at the end of 1969 with a first class Honours Degree in Geology. He joined Esso Australia in Sydney the following January and attended Exxon’s structural geology course in 1972 during which he was asked to invite Professor Carey to Houston and to accompany him to the second global conference on Continental Drift at Princeton. Prof. Carey introduced him to Lewis Weeks who used data Carey sketched for him when Carey held John Rogers’ Chair at Yale in 1960. It was an opportunity to meet Weeks and other earliest adopters of Prof’s 1956 Hobart Symposium.

 In 1974-75 John conducted Exxon’s corporate 3-week structural geology twice a year in the field from West Texas to the Canadian Rockies. He  had four years in London and a year as project leader of Exmouth Plateau where he had the Scarborough gas field drilled. He left Exxon in 1980 and commenced a 40 year career of worldwide consulting on the detailed application of his undergraduate structural geology studies under Prof. Carey. He conducted a North Sea based oil exploration course in the field, within the section William Smith introduced in 1815. 

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 ICC has issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and others in relation to alleged war crimes in Ukraine and is undertaking an ongoing investigation into the situation in Palestine, including in Gaza. Prof McCormack explains how the ICC has jurisdiction in Ukraine despite the fact that neither Russia nor Ukraine are States Parties to the Rome Statute and in Palestine, despite the fact that Israel is now a State Party. He discusses the likely role of the ICC in relation to the war in Ukraine and in Gaza including the prospects for bringing Vladimir Putin to trial in The Hague.

Tim McCormack is Professor of International Law at the University of Tasmania and the Special Adviser on War Crimes to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He has held prestigious positions including as the Charles H Stockton Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island (2015–16) and James Barr Ames Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School (2016 and 2020).

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.