HAROLD BURNELL CARTER, BVSc, DVSc (Hon), FRSE, AM 3 January 1910 – 27 February 2005

Harold Burnell Carter died on 27th February 2005. His working life, though centred around a single theme, led him into two successive careers, in animal science and historical scholarship. The theme running through Carter’s life-long work was the Merino sheep as a producer of fine wool. The reason for this interest lay in the fact that Merino fine wool had long provided the backbone of the economy of Australia of which Carter was a native son. Typically over 50% of Australia’s export earnings from the 1830’s to the mid 20th century came from the sale of Merino wool. By the 1930s, as Carter began his work, major influences were about to affect the viability of this economy, including, as the most apparent, the rise of synthetic fibres. To the young veterinary graduate, Harold Carter, there was a clear need for scientific investigation into the biology of wool to sustain its economic value in world markets. To this idea he devoted his life’s work. Harold Burnell Carter was born on the 3rd January 1910 at Mosman in Sydney to Ruby (nee Burnell) and Norman St Clair Carter. His parents were descended from mid nineteenth century English immigrants to Australia. Successive generations of the family produced individuals with musical or artistic talent. Among the most notable was Harold’s father, Norman St Clair, a leading professional portrait painter and designer of stained glass windows in New South Wales (NSW). Harold Carter recalled the times he spent during weekends and holidays in his father’s studio at 76 Pitt Street, where he would read while his father painted. He remembers joining “endless lunchtime debates as other artists, architects, lawyers and journalists, took their tea and sandwiches with us around the sitter’s dais”. Other childhood experiences included living and working during holidays on a farm outside Sydney becoming familiar with the animals and machinery of Australian agriculture in the early 20th century. Carter attended state primary schools in Sydney, NSW, from 1917 to 1923. His secondary schooling, from 1924 to 1928, was at Fort Street Boy’s High School in Petersham, NSW, of which he was to become School Captain in 1928. In 1929 Harold Carter entered the School of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney, graduating with a BVSc.(Sydney) in 1933. This course was chosen not as a qualification for veterinary practice, but “as the most relevant professional and scientific one available at the time for anyone interested in the problems of Australian animal production.” From January 1933 to March 1936, with a scientific liaison with the CSIR. (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) he worked on a 32,000 acre Merino sheep station in New South Wales. There he gained firsthand experience of the animals and environments of Australian wool growing, and of the men and women involved in its primary production. It provided “wide experience in the current problems of the livestock industries and especially of stud sheep breeding, directing attention to fundamental gaps in biological knowledge.” While generations of sheep breeders had successfully achieved the fine wool fleeces of the Australian Merino, a slew of problems remained – fleece quality was highly variable, reversion to lower fleece quality could readily occur, climate and environment could have major influences on quality and quantity of fleece yield etc.. Scientific understanding of successful sheep breeding and management, or indeed of the biological nature of the fleece itself, was almost totally missing. Such knowledge, Carter was now convinced, would be necessary for a competitive future for the Australian wool industry. What had to be understood was the totality of the influences upon wool quality – physiology, environment, diet, genetics and whatever else might be relevant. Hence forward, all the directions of his working life would arise from, and to begin with were focused upon, the single question - “What scientific knowledge is needed to achieve the best economic value for Australian Merino fine wool?” Leaving his work experience amongst the Merino studs of south eastern Australia, in 1936 Carter gained a Walter and Eliza Hall Fellowship in Veterinary Science. This would base him in the McMaster Laboratory in Sydney, with affiliations also in Melbourne and Adelaide. It enabled him to contemplate his first independent scientific plans centring around investigations on the “growth, development and variation of the skin and fleece of sheep.” Following a year-long trip around the world to laboratories in Pretoria (South Africa), Leeds and Edinburgh (UK) and the USA, he returned with greatly expanded scientific and technical training for the path he intended to follow. On his return to Australia in April 1938, Carter now entered fully into what was to become the first period of his working scientific life - 15 years of often intense activity. As a CSIR scientist Carter and a group of associates formed the Laboratory of Wool Science at the McMaster Laboratory in Sydney within the Division of Animal Health and Nutrition headed by Lionel Bull. In 1940 he married Mary Brandon-Jones, a young English doctor. With world war in progress, many of Carter’s immediate colleagues, friends and family were now drawn into military service. Carter’s work, however, was deemed essential to the post war prosperity of the nation and he was retained within his civilian post. Carter and his group began experiments on influences, e.g. dietary and genetic, affecting wool growth. They undertook pioneering studies on the histology of the wool fibre through its embryonic development to maturity, describing the formation and growth of fibres of “primary” and “secondary” origin. Carter’s connections with the pastoralists and their Merino studs continued. At a population level he began to discover the variety of fleece forms among Australia’s Merino studs. A defining feature of the Merino fleece in comparison with other sheep breeds was, not only the general fineness of the wool fibres, but also the much greater number of secondary fibres relative to primary. When different Merino studs were examined striking variation was found among them in the uniformity of the individual fibres of primary and secondary origin. The highest quality fleece derived from those studs which produced greatest uniformity in fibre diameter. The work demonstrated a major component of the basis of Merino fleece “quality”. Other studies indicated a strong genetic basis to the variation. A foundation had been laid towards a scientific understanding of “quality” in Merino fine wool. Carter, however, was not satisfied that the issues were by any means dealt with. Much more, he realised, must be known and understood to guide policy for the economic development of Australian fine wool. All aspects of the study of sheep and wool biology - physiological, cellular, dietary, climatic and genetic - would have to be brought together in an interconnected set of scientific investigations. To this end, during 1942, he conceived the idea of a central national laboratory for the scientific investigation of sheep and wool biology. The ideas were to be shared and discussed with Lionel Bull and with Ian Clunies Ross. Ten years Carter’s senior, Clunies Ross was also a graduate of the Sydney veterinary school. He had been the first officer-in-charge of the McMaster Laboratory from its founding in 1931. In 1937 he accepted a three year secondment to the London headquarters of the International Wool Secretariat, created to promote wool in international markets. Clunies Ross was elected its first Chairman. He returned to Sydney in 1940 as Dean and Professor of Veterinary Science. Carter’s plans developed through early 1944 and a site was identified for the laboratories at Prospect Hill in the environs of Sydney. In the following year, after sittings by a parliamentary panel of enquiry at which Clunies Ross, Bull and Carter were called independently as witnesses, the building of a “Sheep Biology Laboratory” was authorised under the 1945 Wool Uses Promotion Act of the Australian Parliament. There seems to have been no doubt in the minds of those directly involved in the project that Harold Carter would continue to be the front man in overseeing it to completion and, in the eyes of some, an obvious choice for its first director. The next several years were, indeed, ones of intense activity. Progression of the Prospect project formed only a part of this along side his own scientific research on the biology of the Merino fleece. In 1946 he was appointed officer-in-charge of the Wool Biology Laboratory within Bull’s Division of Animal Health and Production. Carter’s principle associates included Margaret Hardy and Ken Ferguson. Hardy would achieve the first in vitro culture of sheep skin as a further means towards its histological study, and was later Professor in the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph in Canada. Ferguson, a physiologist, would become a leader in animal science in Australia and, from 1978 to 1986, the year of his retirement from government employment, was the first Director of CSIRO’s Institute of Animal & Food Science within which all aspects of research on animal science were, by then, gathered. He was to become a strong critic of the hegemony of quantitative genetics in Australian government sheep breeding policy as it was to emerge in the late 1940’s onward. Meanwhile, within a packed and complicated programme of activity, Carter’s own research work frequently involved extensive overland travel with his field laboratory equipment mounted in a Chevrolet truck. In it he would drive thousands of miles between Merino stud sheep stations in south eastern Australia collecting material for analysis in the laboratory. The years 1951 to 1953 saw the erection of buildings at Prospect Hill to the point where the first animal experimentation could begin. Harold Carter was in charge of on-site management throughout. However, when a committee was appointed to find a director of the laboratories it selected, not Carter himself, but Sydney University’s Professor of Veterinary Physiology, C W Emmens, as Acting Officer-in Charge. Carter now had the additional task of briefing Emmens - who had had no involvement with its creation - on the concepts and purpose of the laboratory. An additional frustration was a decision by Ian Clunies Ross, now Chairman of the CSIRO., Australia’s governing scientific body, to exclude genetics from the remit of the Prospect laboratory. In 1953 Carter resigned from the CSIRO. and accepted an appointment within the UK’s Animal Breeding Research Organization (ABRO) in Edinburgh, Scotland. With his family settled in the environs of Edinburgh, Carter began work that involved genetic experimentation with a small flock of Tasmanian fine wool Merinos. Carter had negotiated the waiver of an Australian Government embargo on their export on the condition that they were for experimental purposes only. Based on his experience in developing the laboratories at Prospect, animal housing and laboratories were built at Dryden farm near the small town of Roslin, outside Edinburgh. Experiments were set up and sampled for at least three years after his arrival. All, however, was beginning to go far from well. Relations between Carter and the Director of ABRO soured. In 1963, still in ARC. employment, Carter took a placement at the University of Leeds, Department of Agriculture. There he developed a strong working connection with the wool firm, Sir James Hill & Son, Bradford and Keighley. Its Director, David Knight, provided Carter with laboratory space in one of his company’s mills. Its purpose was to gather and apply biological and genetic knowledge of the wool fibre to its performance in manufacture. In 1970 Harold Carter retired from the ARC. to the village of Congresbury in Somerset where he lived with his wife, Mary, for the remainder of his life. It was not, however, one of idleness. From this base he developed his second working life - that of science historian. Carter’s interest in Merino origins had begun long before his arrival in the UK in 1954. It was an integral part of his larger quest. In his view the key to the future of the Australian Merino lay as much in its past as in any other scientific aspect of its study. On arrival in Edinburgh this interest continued. It’s first fruit came in 1964 with the publication by Angus and Robertson Ltd of Sydney, of His Majesty’s Spanish Flock. It was a significant achievement. The writing had involved assembling, transcribing and mastering a vast number of original writings, mainly in the form of correspondence. This he combined with detailed scholarship of trade, politics, diplomacy, war, agriculture, manufacture and much else that surrounded the activities of the men and women who in the late 18th century were, for the most part unwittingly, enacting the birth of the Australian wool economy. Prominent amongst the players were King George III of the United Kingdom, and, above all, the figure of Sir Joseph Banks. Arising from his research for the writing of His Majesty’s Spanish Flock, Carter had located a large collection of the letters of Joseph Banks in the Sutra Library in San Fransisco. It unlocked the task that would occupy him for the rest of his working life and culminate in his Banks biography, Sir Joseph Banks, 1743 – 1820 by Harold B Carter, 1988, British Museum(Natural History). To serve this work “The Joseph Banks Archive Project” had been established within the British Museum (Natural History) at Cromwell Road, Kensington, London with Carter as its founding Director. In addition to the Banks biography, The Sheep and Wool Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks 1781- 1820 edited by H B Carter, was published by the Library Council of New South Wales and the British Museum (Natural History) in 1979. These and related publications, however, he saw as by products of his larger task – the ordered assembly into one location of more than 15,000 items of correspondence and other papers relating to the 55 years of Banks’ working life, for use in historical investigation. To this and to his own original research and writing much of the present recognition of the significance and influences of the life of Sir Joseph Banks can be attributed. In 1996 Harold Carter was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Veterinary Science by his Alma Mater, the University of Sydney and in 1999 he was created a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in recognition of his contributions to wool science and to the historical background to Australia’s wool economy. In the Foreword to the 2007 edition of The Australian Merino by Charles Massy (Random House, Australia), Ken Ferguson concludes, “There is little doubt that Harold Carter was the most important figure in establishing the post-war biological research facilities for the wool industry in Australia and leading the research on the histology of the wool follicle.” In his lifetime Harold Burnell Carter had indulged the energy and optimism of youth for a public good in which he truly believed. As a young man he revelled in his work, its outdoor nature, the land and the animals he lived among, and a camaraderie with the people with whom he worked shoulder to shoulder. Never apparently hurried, he worked inexorably. Four hours per day was, he said, a day’s work; and, indeed, to be with him was to experience calm efficiency. Yet, as his travel diaries and personal memoire record, there were times when he worked, hard physical and mental work, for most of a 24 hour day and for days on end. His scientific data records are extensive and meticulous. His historical work was likewise based upon thousands of hand-typed transcriptions of original letters (of Banks and his correspondents and others) meticulously filed and indexed. In the latter decades of his life, on his retirement to Congresbury and the home, Yeo Bank, that he shared with Mary his wife, Harold Carter became an apparently more secluded figure. Yet the evidence of his correspondence and activities in historical research show him to have remained as energetic and engaged as throughout his life. Mary, his wife, survived Harold Carter by three years less a day. They are survived by their three sons. Richard Carter Harold Burnell Carter, AM. BVSc, DVSc (Hon), FRSE, FSB, FLS. Born 3 January 1910. Elected FRSE 1964. Died 27 February 2005.