In 1911, J. A. Leach published the first field guide to Australia’s avifauna in response to demand for a means to identify birds in the wild without shooting them first. Partly a digest of popular science, partly a conservationist polemic, and partly a nationalist homily, the book heralded a change in the relationship between people and birds. Thanks to the Australian Bird Book (and subsequent guides), birdwatching became a popular Australian pastime. With Leach in hand, birdwatchers not only learned how to identify birds, but also how to care deeply about their long-term survival.

By the late 1880s the existence of alkyl derivatives of metals such as zinc and mercury was well established but diethyl magnesium had been poorly characterised. Professor David Orme Masson and his student, Norman Wilsmore, at the University Melbourne failed in their attempts to synthesise it and concluded that it could not exist. They rationalised this on the basis of the atomic volume curve of Lothar Meyer, an unusual heuristic. The weakness of this argument was revealed when, near-coincidentally with Masson’s and Wilsmore’s publication of the results of their experiments, Philippe Löhr, working in Meyer’s laboratory, published successful syntheses of several alkyl magnesium derivatives by methods that had been unsuccessful in Wilsmore’s hands.

Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider (1891–1990), a refugee immigrant to Australia in 1938, was a student of Nobel Prize-winning physicists, Einstein, Planck, and von Laue. She combined a background in physics with a philosophical focus. Her intellectual life was spent in the borderlands between science and philosophy, but also science and society, as she engaged in public outreach with considerable success in the regional towns of NSW. Credit: Wayne State University Press (out of copyright).

Ross Henry Day was an experimental psychologist well known for his research on visual illusions and for his critical role in the establishment of experimental psychology in Australia. He created Australia’s first department of experimental psychology at Monash University in 1965, played a leading role in the formation of the Australian Psychological Society in 1966, and took a leading role in the study of human factors in engineering and ergonomics.

Hans Charles Freeman was a pioneer in crystallography in Australia, establishing his own lab, undertaking many of the first structural determinations of metal complexes and leading the team that determined the first metallo-protein structure in Australia. He also pioneered the use of X-ray spectroscopic techniques, strongly supporting others to make use of these techniques, activities that culminated in the building of Australian synchrotron facilities in Tsukuba and Clayton.