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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The RST Honours and Awards Committee recently assessed nominations for the 2023 Doctoral (PhD) Award. This award is intended to recognise recent PhD graduates who have made significant advances in the course of their doctoral research. The value of the award is $1,000 (AUD).

Dr Tobias Stål was selected as the winner of the 2023 RST Doctoral Award. Dr Stål is a geophysicist focusing on understanding Antarctica’s deep and shallow structure and properties. He completed his PhD at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, in 2021. The focus of his PhD research was a study of the Antarctic lithosphere revealed by multivariate analysis.

The Antarctic continent, with an area of about 14 million km², is larger than Australia; yet due to the ice cover and inaccessibility, its geology and lithospheric structure are to a large extent unknown. Advancing our understanding of the Antarctic continent addresses fundamental knowledge gaps in plate tectonics and understanding the interactions between the solid Earth and the cryosphere.

Dr Stål’s PhD research addressed challenging topics such as the identification of sub-ice lithospheric boundaries, and the determination of a new geothermal heat flow model for the continent of Antarctica. The research was enabled by innovations in computational and statistical methodologies, including the development of a new software library to enable the multivariate approaches that were ground-breaking for Antarctica.

Since graduating, Dr Stål has taken up a Research Associate position in computation physics at the School of Natural Sciences, funded by the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Antarctic Science. He is currently in East Antarctica conducting remote fieldwork until February 2024 as part of his research.