Editors’ page

In this issue we publish one ‘Historical article’ and one ‘Historical document’ in which authors present original research, and four ‘Biographical memoirs’ commissioned by the Australian Academy of Science to commemorate the lives and work of deceased Fellows. The supplementary material for each of these memoirs includes a complete bibliography of the Fellow’s publications. In addition, there is a selection of ‘Book reviews’ by experts, and the annual ‘Bibliography of the history of Australasian science’.

Readers will also notice that we have changed our documentation style. For many years both notes and references have appeared in the Endnotes. In the new system, endnotes have been replaced by footnotes that contain comments and also an abbreviated form of referencing (author, date). The full citations are in the separate list of References. The new system allows the reader to click on the reference and be taken, provided the cited material is accessible on the internet, to the cited material. It also allows the journal to provide copies of contributions in html, thereby improving their accessibility to readers.

A biologist (Jan Anderson), two mathematicians (George Szekeres and Joe Gani) and a physical chemist (Robin Stokes) are the subjects of the memoirs in this issue. Jan Anderson was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, so the memoir is being published by both bodies. The Stokes memoir also contains information about his wife, Jean née Wilson, who was also a physical chemist. She was an early collaborator of Robin’s and also made her career in chemistry.

The memoirs of both mathematicians contain some serious mathematics, a point that causes me to raise the issue of the audience for the biographical memoirs. Memoirs include information about family, education, appointments and lifestyle but the core of a memoir is an exposition of the scientific work of the Fellow and its impact on his or her field of research. While much of the content will be accessible to a wide audience, there will in many memoirs be sections that are addressed specifically to specialists in the profession and perhaps less accessible to others.

Turning to the contributed work, Anthony Bean’s ‘Historical document’ is about the mid-nineteenth century work of a botanical collector, Edward Bowman. It draws on Bowman’s correspondence, a selection of which is in the Supplementary Material as transcriptions.

Garrett Upstill has examined the ways in which the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation (CSIRO) supported and influenced Australian industry, and this article has been made Open Access so that readers may access it without charge. Two further articles about the work of CSIRO are in the late stage of editing. They will be published Online Early in 2019, with formal publication taking place in the middle of the year in volume 30(2). In the articles, a group of participants describe the way that staff of CSIRO and other organisations assisted with the landscape and land resource mapping of Papua New Guinea, both before and after independence.