Newsletter February – March 2025

Dear RST members,

In some ways the year still feels at its beginning, but I am pleased to report that every Royal Society of Tasmania committee has been hard at work preparing for the 2025 year. In early February, 25 of us met in Campbell Town, three via Zoom, in a day-long workshop and Council meeting where we discussed our hopes and aspirations for the future of the Society. It was an excellent day with great camaraderie and discussions, and at the end, I believe all came away with a feeling that it had been a very useful day.

I do thank all who attended, contributed ideas during the day and in thoughtful submissions before the meeting. We had two scribes on the day, John Williamson and Bernard Pryor OAM, and this will make the writing of the document come together fairly quickly. We have agreed that we will have a ‘Plan on a Page’ on the website soon. I have drawn your attention to our membership of the Royal Societies of Australia. Together we are working on two projects of national significance. I am a member of the steering committee for the Pre-conditions of Well-being project, which aims to develop a platform of public policy measures conducive to allowing Australians to thrive. Although there are centres of expertise in the multitude of specialist fields relevant to health and well-being, the rationale for bringing our combined expertise together is our desire to be a forum able to foster dialogue across the disciplinary, sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries. As an Australia-wide organisation with scientific expertise across all the disciplines, we have an opportunity to affect public policy and discourse. The second project, the Land and Seascape Policy Hub, is an initiative that stemmed from a webinar series, Stewardship of Country, presented by the Royal Societies of Australia and the Royal Society of Victoria who style themselves as Inspiring Victoria’, with support from the CSIRO, in February and March 2021. The series involved an historic collaboration between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experts, land and sea managers, carers and policy makers, industry practitioners and thinkers. Their core questions to answer are how we can transition to a different way of thinking that matches the reality of the biophysical world, and make governments and community aware the reality that individual well-being is largely determined by the well-being of society. Our representative on this group is Professor Nathan Bindoff (pictured left. Image utas.edu.au).

It is with great pleasure that we look forward to the AGM on Thursday 6 March at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania where we will hear from Professor Bindoff. The Southern Ocean and Antarctica are changing rapidly. New discoveries and understandings are pointing to a growing role of the Southern Ocean in our changing climate. The loss of ice mass in Antarctica, the slowing of the southern hemisphere circulation and the remarkable loss of winter sea-ice in the last two years will be discussed. There is an urgent need to understand these changes and track the human contributions to these changes in order to support policy makers in this critical decade. This will be a first-rate lecture at which Professor Bindoff will
certainly advance our knowledge of how the global oceans are warming and losing oxygen, and how the changing patterns of salinity reflect an accelerating water cycle. In advance, I thank Nathan for his leadership in this area and for providing us with the opportunity to hear about his latest work.

Our South and Northern Branch Lectures series are full of some of the best speakers that our nation has to offer. I look forward to the Aboriginal Lecture this year being presented by Rob Anders which will be hosted by the Northern Branch. We made the decision to expand the geographic reach and impact of these talks by sharing it between north, south and, we hope, the north- west. In our desire to reach all parts of the State, our Art Committee has planned a series of regional art exhibitions to the West Coast, Woolmers in the north, and Oatlands. We are styling the exhibition Hidden Treasures, and it will consist of a touring exhibition of curated artworks in high quality prints from our Art Collection which focus on each geographic region. The Oatlands exhibition will be the first of our exhibitions in the second half of the year. The exhibition is warmly supported by the Council and community at Oatlands. The Art Committee, led by Distinguished Professor Ross Large AO, is hard at work on several initiatives and 2025 will be a very full year for them. I thank them all for their work and creativity in finding ways to ‘advance knowledge’ in this field. As you will know, in 2021, the Royal Society of Tasmania (RST) and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) apologized to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community for past wrongs. The apology was a response to the mistreatment and theft of cultural artifacts, including the exhumation of Aboriginal remains. It has long been part of our plan to create an official ‘apology marker’ to permanently
acknowledge this important apology. After discussions with both parties, it is good to be able to report that the plan is now able to progress to the working party stage with a full meeting of representatives from TMAG and the RST to be held later in February this year. I will keep you informed as this progresses.
The RST would like to congratulate Curtis Salter PSM (BA, MBA, GradCertPubHlth, GradDipPubHlth) who received the Emergency Services Medal in the Australia Day Honours List. There is much to look forward to in 2025. I hope that you have had an opportunity to read the high-quality papers contained in the Papers and Proceedings 2024. Thank you, Dr Sally Bryant AM, as Editor for a year-long project to bring
this to fruition. The Annual Report will be published for the AGM and contain a full account of the work of the Society in 2024. I thank most sincerely the committee chairs who have worked throughout the year to prepare the programs and events, and I especially acknowledge our Newsletter Editors Bernard Pryor OAM and John Williamson who create this as a permanent record of our proceedings.

With best wishes,
Julie Rimes
RST President