Editors’ page

As we begin our seventh year as editors, we are pleased to note that the journal is receiving a steady flow of historical articles, a situation that pleases us and the Australian Academy of Science, but from time to time articles in hand exceed our tight limit of 100 pages an issue. One of our responses is to hold over some articles for the next issue, but this does not affect their availability as all are published online early as soon as they have passed through the referee and editing process.

Our other strategy for keeping within our page limit is to place as much as possible in Supplementary Material—things like primary source documents, lists of appointments, and bibliographies that accompany biographical memoirs.

The publication of biographical memoirs of deceased fellows of the academy is a key activity of the journal, but preparation of a memoir is a major task for writers who nobly accept commissions to write them, and there is a considerable backlog of unfinished memoirs. Professor Chris Dickman is working with authors to bring memoirs to the point where we can publish them, but this issue is the first for a very long time that does not include a biographical memoir. The good news is that a few are in sight and we should have them for the next issue, in July 2021.

Of the seven historical articles in this issue, three are part of a collection on the history of archaeology in Australia and the Pacific, coordinated by Dr Hilary Howes. They will be included, together with some from our last issue, and one yet to come, in a ‘virtual special issue’ that we will publish in association with a significant event in this scholarly field.

The authors of the free Open Access article in this issue, ‘A re-examination of William Hann’s Northern Expedition of 1872 to Cape York Peninsula, Queensland‘, are both related to the original expeditioners, with Peter Illingworth Taylor descended from the geologist, Norman Taylor, and Nicole Huxley from the Indigenous translator, Jerry. Together these authors model a new kind of co-production in settler and Indigenous Australian science history and their article attracted media interest from the time of its publication online early at the end of November 2020.

The other historical articles in this issue cover a range of personal, technological and organizational histories. The first of these is about some developments of inorganic chemistry in Australia in the middle of the twentieth century, written by an author with substantial knowledge of the field. The second is about the international astronomy conference held in Sydney in 2003, and follows the author’s account of a similar conference held in 1973, that we published in our last issue. The final one is an account of the interactions of CSIR (forerunner of CSIRO) with Australian industry, being the third we have published that comes to us from the study of the organisation’s history by the group at Swinburne University.

The bibliography of history of Australian science, compiled by Helen Cohn, is #41 in this long-running series, covering the twelve months to September 2020 and containing 295 entries, an increase of eleven over last year’s. The book review section with ten incisive and informative reviews, compiled under Dr Peter Hobbins’ guidance, and these two sections add substantially to the value that readers of history of Australian science can find in Historical Records of Australian Science.

Sara Maroske, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria

Ian D. Rae, University of Melbourne