Australian Science
- 10:30–11:00 Oliver Hochadel – A true bush naturalist: August Goerling and the riddle of the kangaroo birth
- 11:00–11:30 Maureen O’Malley and Daniela Helbig The woman who disappeared: Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider and her post-WW2 contributions to HPS
- 11:30–12:00 Ian Tasker – Funding Sydney Observatory between 1912 and 1941: Professor replaced with a Bureaucrat during a Constitutional Debate
- 12:00–12:30 Joel Lisk – Regulating Space: Industry driven regulation in Australia
Oliver Hochadel
Institució Milà i Fontanals for research in the humanities, CSIC, Barcelona
A true bush naturalist. August Goerling and the riddle of the kangaroo birth
August Goerling (1865–1941) emigrated from Germany to Australia in 1889. He eventually settled at “Marloo Station”, north-east of Perth. He entered the global animal trade and sold marsupials to German Zoos. In 1906 he observed a kangaroo birth and claimed to have solved a riddle that had tormented naturalists since the 1820s. How does the tiny newborn get into the pouch?
This paper will present new material on the life of Goerling and situate him in the commercial and scholarly networks of his time. It will show how his hypothesis was both, disputed and acclaimed, by whom and through which media (letters, newspapers, journals and books). It will argue that the quest to solve the riddle of the kangaroo birth was distinctly marked by colonial hierarchies that started to shift around 1900.
Being able to forcefully communicate one’s findings was just as important as having access to living kangaroos. Metropolitan scientists, zoo directors from Europe and the US as well as the Australian “bush naturalist” strove for epistemological hegemony. Zoo keepers, animal traders and publicists were also actively engaged in this dispute that eventually developed into a much larger discourse than a mere zoological conundrum. The focus on August Goerling will be instrumental to tease out the transnational and even global dimension of this case study.
Oliver Hochadel is a historian of science and a tenured researcher at the Institució Milà i Fontanals for research in the humanities (CSIC, Barcelona). He has published widely on the history of science popularization and the urban history of science. More recently he started to work on a global history of the zoo in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Maureen O’Malley and Daniela Helbig
maureen.omalley@sydney.edu.au | daniela.helbig@sydney.edu.au
University of Sydney
The woman who disappeared: Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider and her post-WW2 contributions to HPS
Histories of HPS in Australia focus on its institutional emergence in the 1960s and 70s (e.g., Alison Turtle’s analysis of Sydney’s ‘lost opportunity’ in institutionalizing HPS). We go back further, to the WW2 and post-war years, to show how a flourishing HPS environment existed that reached far beyond university walls. Our focus is Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider (1891–1990), a refugee immigrant to Australia in 1938, and a student of Einstein and other famous physicists. Her interests in physics, especially relativity theory, were very philosophical and concerned with the nature and possibilities of knowledge. Shortly after her arrival in Sydney, she undertook for the University of Sydney’s Extension Board a major outreach programme to regional towns in NSW, where she was fêted by her audiences as a highly accomplished science communicator. But at the same time, she was petitioning the Science Faculty back in Sydney to institute regular HPS courses for science students. She achieved this aim also, and from 1945 to 1952 ‘history and philosophy of science’ courses were obligatory for second-year undergraduates. In addition, she wrote several short essays on the relationship of fundamental theories in physics to Kantian epistemology, publishing these in general science journals in Australia. But despite all these achievements, her very name has disappeared from any institutionally focused recognitions of early HPS in Australia. We examine why this has happened, and whether it is worth recognising versions of HPS that existed before there were official departments of it.
Maureen O’Malley does philosophy and a little history of microbiology, as well as biology generally, in the School of History & Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney.
Daniela Helbig does history and philosophy of technology and theory of history, in the School of History & Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney.
Ian Tasker
16267637@student.westernsydney.edu.au
Western Sydney University
Funding Sydney Observatory between 1912 to 1941: Professor replaced with a Bureaucrat during a Constitutional Debate
History and Philosophy of Science seek to place astronomy in a cultural, social, economic, and historical context. Inspired by Lankford’s sociological research (1997), this study aims to take a historiographic narrative approach to an important Australian Constitutional debate around ‘Overlapping commonwealth and state services’ involving physicists, astronomers and occasionally premiers. The debate can be traced back to 1912 and went on to dominate a dozen national conferences held between 1927 and 1939. The debate focused not on the merits of the science being produced, but on which level of government was responsible for funding and executive oversight of the ‘overlapping services’, such as state observatories carrying out internationally managed science. Sydney Observatory will serve as my case study, with particular emphasis on the replacement by the NSW State Government of the Professor of Astronomy, W. Ernest Cooke, with an amateur astronomer/professional bureaucrat, James Nangle. The beginning of the twentieth century saw a new dynamic whereby politicians were replacing scientists with bureaucrats in astronomy and its related field of surveying in New South Wales. This significant Constitutional debate, its impact on the funding and output of Sydney Observatory, and the replacement of Professor Cooke with a bureaucrat have never been critically analysed or documented. This research and its findings will have important lessons about Sydney Observatory’s funding in the first half of the twentieth century and the flow-on effects of lost opportunities.
Ian Tasker’s study fits into the broader societal conversation around research funding, given that the federal government has been slashing funding of academia during the current global pandemic. He is a member of the executive of the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science; and co-chair Post-Graduate Conference Planning Committee, Western Sydney.
Joel Lisk
Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide
Regulating Space – Industry driven regulation in Australia
Few outside of the space industry are aware that Australia has actively regulated how Australian companies and individuals are able to access and return from outer space since the late-1990s. Each step the Australian Government has taken to regulate space follows from the demands of local industry. In the late-1980s and early-1990s, several international corporations actively planned to launch from Australia to sere what was considered a rapidly growing commercial space sector. Following the introduction of Australia’s Space Activities Act 1998, the Australian Government amended the legislation in 2002 in response to concerns from industry. Despite the somewhat rapid development of domestic regulation, no Australian launching industry manifested. In 2015, the Government undertook a significant review and reform process in response to a resurgence in the Australian space industry associated with rapid reductions in the costs associated with accessing space through the United States and Europe, with reformed laws taking effect in 2019.
This presentation will explore the role of industry in the development of Australian space-related regulation, with a specific focus on the space access and return sector’s role in prompting the development and reform of laws since the 1990s through to the present. This presentation will also compare Australian efforts to developments in similar nations such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom where legislation has been implemented or reformed quickly in response to similar industry pressures.
Joel Lisk is a PhD Candidate in space law at the Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide and an Associate at Adelaide-based commercial law firm Cowell Clarke. Joel’s PhD research explores how nations legislate for commercial activities in outer space whilst balancing the interests of private industry and their international obligations with a particular focus on how Australia’s laws have developed over time. Joel has presented on this topic (as well as others) at several domestic and international conferences, and published technical and broad-audience commentaries on Australian and foreign domestic law issues applicable to the space sector. Joel is also a practising solicitor, advising corporate clients on a range of matters but specialises in regulatory compliance in areas including consumer protection, Australian competition and anti-trust, international data protection, and not-for-profit law. Joel is also a founding Director of the Space Law Council of Australia and New Zealand Ltd – a not for profit, education charity specialising in space law and policy.