The Royal Society of Tasmania

The advancement of knowledge

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RST Medal Presentation Ceremony, Government House, 22 April

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.

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.

RM Johnston Memorial Medal

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

Professor Paul Haddad

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.

Professor John Church

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.

MR Banks Medal

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

Associate Professor Alex Bissember

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.

Dr Tobias Stål

Gondwana’s child – the geological making of Tasmania

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.

RST Book Chat for “Tasmania Reads 2024”

The Royal Society of Tasmania is a supporting partner of Hobart UNESCO City of Literature activities. The Society is running an activity as part of “Tasmania Reads 2024”, to be held statewide from 17 – 23 March. The aim of “Tasmania Reads” is to help Tasmanians discover and rediscover the benefits of reading.

The RST activity is

“Book Chat: Challenge yourself – read something new!”

• Choose something new to read: perhaps a biography, a non-fiction release, a novel, a historical work, a classic you’ve never got around to reading, a picture book to share with a child … the sky’s the limit!

• Get together with some friends, colleagues or family members to chat about what you’re reading. You could all be reading different things, or you might like to agree on something new to read. Perfect for your morning coffee break.

• Take a photo of your Book Chat and post it on Facebook or Instagram. Tag @librariestasmania on Facebook and Instagram. Use the hashtags #TasmaniaReads, #WhereDoYouRead and #RoyalSocTas

We’d love to hear about your Book Chat and your reading recommendations. Please send a short report and/or a photo for our RST newsletter and webpage, to: admin@rst.org.au, marked “Tasmanian Reads 2024”.

Find out more about Tasmania Reads using this link.

Any questions? Please get in touch by emailing admin@rst.org.au

The late Tony Hope awarded Australia Day honour

The late Anthony Ronald Hope (1940 – 2023) recently received the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his services to the mining industry and China-Australia relations. Tony Hope was a geologist and author, and until recently, a member of the Royal Society of Tasmania.

Tony was born in Hobart and graduated with a BSc from Sydney University in 1961, majoring in geology. Tony worked as an exploration geologist in many locations including Mt Morgan, Queensland, the Philippines, Browns Creek NSW, and the Murray Basin, Victoria, gaining enormous experience in technical and managerial roles and mine feasibility studies.

He was a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, a member of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, and fellow of the Society of Exploration Geochemists.

Tony published several books including the highly successful A Quarry Speaks in 2006, The Hope Factor on exploration and mining in Australasia in 2014, Friends across the Ocean in 2017, and Showcasing Tasmania and its connection to Fujian, China in 2017. Most recently he published a book on Captain James Kelly, trader and explorer in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1800s.

Tony fully deserved his OAM and is well remembered for his achievements by his loving wife Suzy and many friends and colleagues.

Professor Ross Large AO

Notice of RST 2024 Annual General Meeting

The Annual General meeting of The Royal Society of Tasmania will be held on Thursday 7 March 2024, at 4:30 pm at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, Marieville Esplanade, Sandy Bay, Hobart.

All RST members and guests are welcome. Admission is free. Please join us for a complimentary drink before the formalities begin.

Following the AGM, Professor Cassandra Pybus will present a lecture titled: “Morton Allport: the resurrection man of the Royal Society of Tasmania, 1862-1876”. Learn more about the lecture and register here. 

Annual General Meeting business summary

    1. Approval of RST Rule changes

    2. Presentation of the 2023 Annual Report

    3. Appointment of Auditor

    4. Election of 2024 Office Bearers

    Nominations for positions on The Royal Society of Tasmania Council are now open for election at the Annual General Meeting. The following positions are open for nomination:

    • Three Council members (for 1- and 3-year terms to be determined by ballot at the first Council meeting after the AGM)
    • Honorary Secretary (1 year; may be re-elected)
    • Honorary Treasurer (1 year; may be re-elected)
    • President (1 year; may be re-elected for 2 years maximum)
    • Vice President (1 year; may be re-elected for 2 years maximum)
    • Early Career Researcher (3 years)

    Nominations must be received by the Returning Officer, Professor Ross Large, by midnight Thursday 29 February 2024.

    The nomination form can be downloaded and is also available from the RST Office which is open Thursdays from 9:00 am to 12 noon.

    The completed and signed form may be returned by mail to:

    The Returning Officer
    C/- The Royal Society of Tasmania
    GPO Box 1166
    Hobart TAS 7001

    Or delivered to the RST office at 19 Davey Street

    Or a signed and scanned copy may be emailed to admin@rst.org.au.

    For further information, please contact the Honorary Secretary at secretary@rst.org.au.

    Morton Allport: the resurrection man of the Royal Society of Tasmania, 1862-1876

    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.

    Morton Allport portrait, 1854.
    Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania.

    “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.

    Professor Cassandra Pybus.

    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.

    View a recording of the lecture by Dr Annaliese Jacobs-Claydon – December 2023

    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

    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.

    Call for Volunteers to help upload Art Collection cataloguing data

    The Royal Society of Tasmania recently received a grant from the National Library of Australia towards the purchase of museum/gallery standard cataloguing software for the RST Art Collection.

    This software program will allow the RST Art Collection to become available online for everybody to see. The catalogue will be an incredible asset for the Society, and to people interested in Tasmanian art, history and culture.

    Marley Large and RST Art Curator, Dr Anita Hansen, have been learning how to use the program (eHive) and are now looking for a group of volunteers interested in helping to upload data onto the site. Volunteers will receive training and the use of an online user’s manual.

    Uploading the data can be done at home, using your own computer, whenever suits you. It will be up to you how much time you wish to put into the project, which is planned to start in the new year. It will be a great opportunity to support the Society in a venture that will bring it international exposure.

    This project will be long-term. There are approximately 950 artworks, each with about 20 pieces of information to upload, so the project will be time-consuming. At the moment, it takes approximately one hour to upload the data for each artwork – and that is just the basic information.

    As we progress, the site will be populated with the information on the history and provenance of the artworks that Marley and Anita have worked very hard on for the past three years. It will become an invaluable tool for scholars and researchers.

    If you are interested in helping with this exciting project, please contact Anita at anita.hansen@utas.edu.au, to arrange to meet and discuss the project with you.

    Royal Society of Tasmania represented at the first Royal Societies of Australia meeting in Canberra

    The Royal Societies of Australia (RSA) is a national organisation established to advocate for the efforts and joint views of Australia’s Royal Societies, and to provide a mechanism for sharing ideas and operational practice among them. All six Australian states currently have operating Royal Societies.

    The RSA was incorporated as a company limited by guarantee on 3 August 2007 and the first formal meeting was held in Canberra on 2 February 2008. The operations of the RSA are governed by its constitution which is registered with ASIC. Although in existence for the past 15 years, the RSA has maintained a very low profile and there has been no interaction with The Royal Society of Tasmania for at least the past five years, possibly not for the past 10 years.

    The current RSA President, John Hardie AM FRSN (NSW) organised a meeting in Canberra of the six state Royal Societies at the Australian Academy of Science followed by a meeting with the Governor-General at Government House. President Professor Jocelyn McPhie attended representing the RST.

    Leaders of Australia’s Royal Societies at the Academy of Science, Canberra.

    The RSA meeting, held at the Academy of Science allowed very valuable sharing of information on society operations, successes and challenges. RSNSW and RST both have broad goals of advancing knowledge whereas RSV, RSSA, RSQ and RSWA all aim to advance science. RSV is blessed with a full-time staff position paid by the State Government, as well as owning a building and land in theMelbourne CBD.

    There was a consensus that the “Royal Society” label is not appealing, either for the state Royal Societies or the RSA. RSSA deals with this problem by combining the initials “RSSA” with the registered trading name of “Science South Australia”. It is worth considering whether the RST might follow a similar pattern, combining the “RST” with a registered trading name such as “Advancing Knowledge Tasmania”.

    While all Royal Societies are eligible to be members, at this stage, the RST has not formally joined, pending review of the recently revised constitution of the RSA.

    After lunch, the same group reconvened at a meeting at Government House, Canberra, with His Excellency General the Honourable David Hurley AC DSC (Retd), the Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, and Her Excellency, Linda Hurley. The Governor-General is the Patron of the RSA. Each state Royal Society leader gave a short presentation introducing their society to the Governor-General. The President of the RSA then summarised the role of the RSA and outlined collaborative projects suggested during the morning meeting.

    His Excellency General the Honourable David Hurley AC DSC (Retd), the Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, Her Excellency Linda Hurley (front row, centre) and leaders of Australia’s Royal Societies at Government House, Canberra.

    The Governor-General responded with strong encouragement of the activities of the Royal Societies and endorsed the role of the RSA. He believes that the Royal Societies can provide independent expert advice and commentary on major issues facing the nation.

    RST representative attends the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre’s 50th Anniversary Celebrations

    On Thursday 30 November, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) held an event at the Theatre Royal in Hobart to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the TAC. The event was for the Aboriginal community and for non-Aboriginal people and organisations who have supported the Aboriginal community in various ways. The Royal Society of Tasmania was honoured to receive an invitation to this event. As President Prof Jocelyn McPhie and Vice-President Dr Julie Rimes were unavailable, Past President Mary Koolhof attended to represent the Society.

    This is Mary’s report:

    “On arrival, I felt privileged to be offered an Aboriginal t-shirt marking the event, and to be invited by a leading member of the Aboriginal community to wear the t-shirt immediately. Before the formalities, a senior Aboriginal person told me that the Apology the Royal Society offered to Tasmanian Aboriginal people in 2021 had meant a great deal to her and to many other people”.

    “The event in the Theatre Royal took the form of a sequence of moderated forums. Presenters seated on the stage described important stages in the journey of the TAC and answered questions while archival film footage played silently in the background. Attendees were treated to an Aboriginal song, and also a dance performance. Some key achievements celebrated were the establishment of the Aboriginal Legal Service, the revival of palawa kani, and the return of Aboriginal ancestral remains. There was a very respectful stillness from all in the theatre when this process was described, and particularly when the film footage showed Tasmanian Aboriginal people carrying the boxed ancestral remains across the tarmac on their return from overseas.“

    “It was an honour to attend this event representing The Royal Society of Tasmania, and to meet more members of the Aboriginal community.”

    The RST remains committed to the promises made in the 2021 Apology to Tasmanian Aboriginal People and welcomes opportunities to promote Tasmanian Aboriginal scholarship. To this end, transcripts of three recent RST lectures by Tasmanian Aboriginal leaders, Rodney Gibbins, Michael Mansell and Kerry Sculthorpe have been published in the latest issue of the Papers and Proceedings of the RST.

    Mary Koolhof, RST Past President, wearing the gifted T-shirt marking the Aboriginal Centre’s 50th Anniversary.