Guest editor’s page: the path to food security in Australia through better plant disease management

Australia is one of the most food secure nations in the world. It is estimated that its farmers produce enough to feed three times the country’s population.¹ The success of agriculture in Australia undoubtedly reflects the fact that it has the second largest area of cropland relative to population size (1.22 ha per person) and, also, one of the largest areas of permanent pasture in the world.² However, these statistics tell only part of the story. Australian farmers have had to overcome many challenges to grow their crops—extreme weather variability, shallow and infertile soils, and attacks by pests and pathogens. Early attempts to transplant European farming practices into Australia often failed, and a great deal of scientific research had to be done before the current level of success was achieved.

Plant pathogens are components of every natural ecosystem and play a critical role in structuring plant communities and maintaining plant diversity.³ Little is known about the impact of plant pathogens on Indigenous food systems in Australia and whether there was active intervention by the Peoples to prevent or treat plant diseases other than by fire management, which would have reduced plant pathogen inoculum levels. However, one would anticipate that the impacts of plant diseases would have been much less severe than now, as the Indigenous Peoples had learnt over more than 50,000 years of habitation to cope with the boom-and-bust nature of the Australian environment. Indigenous family units were not anchored to a single plot of land like European farmers, and local declines of a plant species due to disease would not have posed the same threat to food security because of the mobility of these peoples. Indigenous communities also utilised a much more genetically diverse food base, both at the individual plant species and plant community levels. One of the major causes of plant disease epidemics in modern cropping systems is the planting of large areas of genetically uniform plant varieties that are a susceptible to one or more plant pathogens.

It did not take long after the British colonisation of Australia for plant diseases to make an impact. Stem rust and smut disease of wheat appeared in the convict settlement of Sydney as early as 1802–3, and they caused crop failure.⁴ Wheat was the staple starch crop, and the arrival of these two diseases would have been hardest felt by the very poorest in society, who lived mainly on bread and cheese, supplemented by butter and meat if they could afford them.⁵ Continuing epidemics of wheat stem rust throughout the nineteenth century prompted the appointment of the very first plant pathologist in Australia, Daniel McAlpine, who in May 1890, was made Consulting Vegetable Pathologist to the Department of Agriculture in Victoria (the term ‘Vegetable’ was used in the traditional sense, to refer to all edible plant matter).⁶ It is thought that this was the very first fulltime appointment of its kind in the British empire. The Government of New South Wales was quick to follow and appointed Nathan Augustus Cobb as its plant pathologist in August 1890. The other colonies (later states) took longer to act, and McAlpine and Cobb served the plant pathology needs of much of Australia for at least a decade. The readers of this issue of the journal are referred to the historical articles of Stanislaus Fish and Neville White for comprehensive accounts of the development of the plant pathology profession in Australia during the twentieth century, including the establishment of training programs within the universities.⁷

This special issue of Historical Records of Australian Science is devoted to the history of plant pathology in Australia. Special attention is paid to describing some of the major plant diseases that affected agriculture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several common themes emerge in these articles. Firstly, there was no scientific specialisation among the early plant pathologists—they were equally adept at researching plant pathogenic bacteria as fungi, swapping between the subject areas with ease. Joseph Bancroft was a practicing medical surgeon when he discovered Fusarium wilt of banana, and even joined the royal commission to investigate the rabbit problem!⁸ Secondly, these plant pathologists had to work in isolation, not aware of what was happening in the neighbouring jurisdictions, let alone overseas. The discoveries they made are even more remarkable because of this fact. Thirdly, the problems of communication and the very small scale of research in Australia meant that there was slow recognition of the discoveries made in Australia within the scientific powerhouse nations of North America and Europe. Rupert Best deserved to be a joint Nobel Prize winner with Wendell Stanley for the physico-chemical characterisation of tobacco mosaic virus. However, as lamented by Best himself, the chances of an Australian scientist based in Australia winning a Nobel Prize prior to World War 2 were virtually nil.⁹

History should not be viewed through ‘rose-tinted glasses’: the early plant pathologists and the organisational structures within which they worked had many flaws. One striking feature of the articles featured in this special issue is the gender bias towards men. Gretna Weste (née Parkin), one of the pioneering female plant pathologists of Australia, suffered much prejudice and misogyny. It may seem ridiculous today, but her salary was not automatically indexed, and the only classification available for women in the Victorian public service at the time was ‘temporary typist’.¹⁰ Racial prejudice was also widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of it officially sanctioned by the Australian Government through the ‘White Australia policy’. Australians of Chinese and South Pacific Islander heritage were victims of this racial prejudice in the banana and sugarcane industries, respectively.¹¹ Finally, many of the early male plant pathologists were very egotistical, and interstate rivalry was rife even a few decades after the federation of Australia. There was much unnecessary bickering that impeded the progress of research.¹² The contributions of lay farmers to solving plant disease problems were also ignored or not properly recognised by the scientists.

This special issue of Historical Records of Australian Science covers a diversity of crops and corresponding diseases, too many to mention here, and the reader is referred to the table of contents for a brief summary of each published paper. A history of plant pathology in Australia would be incomplete without a discussion of our plant quarantine system, which is the envy of the world. Richard Davis and colleagues describe the history of the Northern Australia Quarantine Strategy, which has been responsible for providing early warning of economically very important plant pathogens, such as the fungus responsible for black Sigatoka disease in bananas.¹³

The preparation of papers for this special issue has aroused great interest in the community of plant pathologists about the history of their discipline. Some papers that were not prepared in time for this issue are carried forward to the next issue of Historical Records of Australian Science.