Sir Walter Murdoch Memorial Lecture (1975) Science in the Development of Western Australia: the Richest Harvest Lecture Delivered By: Professor E.J

Sir Walter Murdoch Memorial Lecture (1975) Science in the Development of Western Australia: The Richest Harvest Lecture delivered by: Professor E.J. Underwood Professor of History, Australian National University

I deeply appreciate the honour of giving the second Walter Murdoch Lecture. This appreciation stems firstly from the fact that I knew Walter Murdoch well, first when I was an undergraduate, then as a fellow-member of the staff of the University of Western Australia and later, after his retirement, as a friend of him and his wife and of his children and his grand-children. A second reason for appreciation of the invitation to give this lecture is that it gives me the opportunity to desert, for a brief while, the narrower field of science which has so filled my time and thoughts over the last year or so and to allow my vision to range over wider perspectives. Of course, I cannot hope to do this with the wit and wisdom and perceptivity that characterised Walter Murdoch's writings, but I hope to tell a story which will arouse some pride in the past of our great State of Western Australia and stimulate some worthwhile thoughts about its future.

May I say at the outset that I was tempted to tackle an even broader and more demanding topic; to speak on the rising tide of inequalities between nations of the western world and the third world, of the growing pressures of population growth on world food supplies, or of the rape of the earth's finite resources of minerals and fossil fuels. No thinking person can deny that these are problems of overwhelming importance to the future of mankind and are therefore worthy of consideration for a lecture such as this. However, I have spoken on these topics many times and decided against them partly because of a feeling that, as T. S. Eliot once wrote, ‘it is no longer possible to find consolation in prophetic gloom.’ I was also influenced by the fact that Walter Murdoch was a distinguished West Australian by adoption. Furthermore I have lived and worked most of my life in this State, so at the risk of accusations of parochialism, I decided to tackle a more local subject - hence the title of this lecture, ‘A Rich Harvest: Science in the Development of Western Australia.’

The Nineteenth Century and Gold For the first 70 years following the founding of the Swan River Colony in 1829 agricultural production barely kept pace with the modest requirements of the small population. This is understandable because the early settlers were faced with an environment which was always alien and generally harsh. The soils were mostly poor, the summers were long, hot and dry and there were few permanent fresh water streams. The crop varieties they brought with them were mostly ill-adapted to such an environment and there was no background of local experience upon which to draw and no scientific services upon which to lean. In these circumstances farming was confined to the few river valleys and better soils and the beginnings of a pastoral industry were undertaken by a few intrepid souls who moved further afield with their flocks and settled on huge holdings of sparse natural grazings.

This was the position until the great gold discoveries at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie came in the 1890's and the first big impetus to the development of Western Australia emerged. The State’s population rose spectacularly from a mere 50,000 in 1890 to 184,000 in 1900. A substantial home market with high prices for the products of the land immediately arose and for the first time essential capital for development became available. A unique feature of this early phase of development, never to be repeated, was its minute scientific, technical and engineering requirements. The exploitation of the gold resources of the area in its early days demanded only the most elementary technical knowledge, no expensive equipment and no complicated chemical or engineering processes. The lure of easy riches provided the economic stimulus and human cupidity supported men and women through incredible hardships and indignities. All went well until the ‘easy’ gold ran out and it became obvious that gold mining from then on must become an industry requiring machinery, capital and ore- processing know-how.

Within 10 years from the first great discoveries, that is by the end of the nineteenth century, goldmining in Western Australia declined to a fraction of its former size and thousands of men either left the State or, more importantly, sought other forms of employment. This included farming, as we shall see! However, this was by no means the end of the goldmining industry. The challenge of obtaining gold from ore-bodies of ever-increasing depths and ever- decreasing grades was met by mining companies supported by overseas capital and management and by the application of the latest scientific techniques. Gold was to remain a major source of export income to Western Australia and a major factor in its development for a further half-century. This fact is often overlooked and has become overshadowed by the spectacular mining developments with iron ore, bauxite, nickel and ilmenite of the 1960's and of today. Of this, I will speak later.

The Development of the Wheat and the Dairy Belts Early in this century the first great wave of agricultural development in Western Australia began. This was the opening up of the wheatbelt. Two sets of factors were responsible-one socioeconomic and the other scientific or technical. The principal socio-economic factors were firstly the availability of large numbers of men with the physical vigour, courage and ingenuity displaced from the Goldfields and secondly a remarkably generous Government policy of providing loans for land purchase, clearing, fencing, water supplies and the like. But it was the advent of scientific knowledge and techniques for handling the formidable environment of the wheatbelt that enabled the pioneer farmers to take advantage of these economic stimuli.

Let us enumerate some of these vital technical advances. In the first place superphosphate, itself a product of scientific research and chemical industry initially in England, became available and was so successful in raising cereal crop yields that it became known as the ‘magic dust’. Secondly, Australian wheat breeders led by the great William Farrer and followed by the late Dr. George Sutton in this State, who was one of Farrer's pupils, produced a series of new wheat varieties better adapted to Australian and Western Australian wheat-belt conditions. Thirdly, the so-called ‘dry-farming’ techniques were evolved from the experiments of agricultural scientists of the State Department of Agriculture on their field stations, among which bare fallow became the cornerstone of successful cereal growing. So successful were these measures that wheat production in this State rose from 2 million bushels in 1905 to 53 million bushels in 1930-31. Of course, the State’s wheat yield has since been several times more than double this amount, for reasons which will become apparent later in this address.

The factors responsible for the development of the dairy-belt in the south-west corner of the State in the years following the first World War bear a certain resemblance to those of the wheatbelt. A similar combination of socio-economic and of technical factors operated. Large numbers of returned soldiers and of English migrants, willing to try farming as a way of life, became available and a bold Government migration policy and land settlement scheme provided the initial land, stock and finance that was necessary. On the technical side, the extraordinary suitability of subterranean clover to the environment and its capacity to produce luxuriant pastures when treated liberally with superphosphate were discovered and techniques of pasture production and management were developed.

For some years the wheat and dairy belts prospered, despite many personal hardships and tragedies, until the great depression of the early 1930's with its world-wide catastrophic decline in prices. The story of this period has been well told by Geoffrey Bolton in his book

‘A Fine Country to Starve In’. But the farmers at this time had still other problems to contend with. A serious disease of cattle, with high mortality, became manifest in the Group Settlement areas near Denmark on the south coast and a devastating disease of sheep, known as toxic paralysis or botulism, arose in the 1930’s in the wheat-sheep areas. I had the privilege of being actively associated with the scientific research leading to the understanding and practical prevention of both these problems, with great benefit to the productivity of large areas of farmland. Denmark wasting disease was shown to be due to a soil and pasture deficiency of minute amounts of the trace element, cobalt. The story of this discovery has been told by me elsewhere. It represented the beginnings of the trace element era which was to yield such rich dividends in this and many other countries of the world in the following decades. The toxic paralysis problem was found to be due to the development of a depraved appetite or pica in sheep in the affected areas which impelled them to consume rabbits and other carrion infected with the toxin of Clostridium botulinum. This disease could be completely prevented either by improving the sheep's diet to the point where they no longer displayed pica or, more economically, by periodic treatment with a suitable vaccine, so that the botulinus toxin no longer exerted its toxic effects.

The Light Land Revolution The next great step forward in the development of Western Australia began at the end of World War II. At this time the total area of cleared arable land in the State was about 15 million acres. By 1965, just 20 years later, the figure was close to 30 million acres. In other words, some three-quarters of a million acres of land was cleared and brought into production every year for 20 years. No other State in the Commonwealth approached such a remarkable rate of agricultural development during this or any other period. This situation was made even more remarkable by the fact that a high proportion of the new land brought into production was lateritic sandplain of extremely low inherent soil fertility. Despite this formidable handicap sheep numbers in the agricultural areas during the period increased from 6 to 16 million and cereal production quadrupled from some 25 million bushels to over 100 million bushels.

Let us now look at the factors responsible for developments of this magnitude. Again we find that they are socio-economic and scientific. The first of these was the high prices ruling for wool, wheat and meat in the years following the war and even more during the Korean War boom. This provided a powerful economic incentive to development, both by existing farmers and by new farmers brought in under Government-sponsored Soldier Settlement Schemes and in the Esperance region with outside, particularly U.S., capital and initiative, attracted by highly favourable conditions of land purchase and farm development.

The main scientific discoveries which made the light land revolution possible were firstly the delineation of the nutrient deficiencies of the soils and of economic means of overcoming them. These were found to include, in addition to the major elements, nitrogen and phosphorus, a range of trace elements, especially zinc and copper. It should be realized that the additions of traces of zinc and copper can mean increases in crop and pasture yields in areas such as the Esperance Plain, not of a conventional 20 to 30 percent, but of 200 to 300 percent or more. Furthermore, a single initial dressing of some 51bs per acre, or should I now say 5 kg per hectare, of the zinc and copper compounds generally suffice for from 3 to 6 years. The second scientific development involved the evolution of techniques for clover establishment, nodulation and management and the demonstration that such legume-based pastures are powerful soil fertility builders which greatly increase the stability and stock- carrying capacity of light sandy soils.

The development by farmers of ley-farming practices based on these findings was a potent influence on improving and maintaining soil structure and fertility and cereal productivity. Finally, among the scientific factors of importance during this period mention must be made of the high degree of rabbit control achieved by the introduction of myxomatosis. This was an Australian, but not a Western Australian achievement which must rank, as a striking example of the effectiveness of biological control, with the control of the prickly pear pest in Queensland with the introduced parasite Cactoblastis cactorum.

Before moving on to look at developments in the 1960's and 1970's, I want to draw attention to several features of this earlier expansionist period of which I have just been speaking, if only to highlight the striking changes which have since taken place. Perhaps the first point to make is that it was commonly assumed that profitable markets for our agricultural products would continue to expand and that our great trading partners U.K., U.S.A. and Japan, would continue their industrial growth and their rising prosperity so that the more we had to sell the more they would continue to buy. The second feature of the period is the rapidly rising dependence of our rural industries upon imported fossil fuels. Few people stop to realize the extent to which modern technological and mechanised agriculture increasingly uses these fuels directly and indirectly.

I am not referring only to the obvious uses of these fuels in powering tractors and trucks and farm machinery. I mean also their ever-increasing hidden usage in chemical industry for the production and distribution of the wide range of chemical fertilizers, weedicides, pesticides, feed additives and anti-biotics upon which the modern farmer has become so dependent. In U.S.A., and the position in Australia is not much different, it has been calculated that the energy of 1250 litres, or 330 gallons, of gasoline is expended to feed one person per year. If

such a system of food production, processing, distribution and preparation were to be extended to a world population of 4000 million, and that is certainly the trend however far away its execution, the equivalent of 5000 thousand million litres of fossil fuel would be required to meet our food requirements alone, i.e. if such fuel was used for no other purpose at all. Clearly this is an impossibility and scientific research should immediately be oriented towards developing a food production and distribution system requiring lower direct and indirect energy inputs. This is the challenge to scientists and engineers of the future-this is one of the research priorities of the 1970's and beyond. There is not time in this short address to spell out the particular research and development needs which this situation demands. However, I cannot refrain from mentioning the encouraging recent advances made by scientists in C.S.I.R.O. Canberra, in the University of W.A. and in Canada, in developing a means of cultivating the nitrogen-fixing bacteria, Rhizobium, separate from their host plants, the legumes. This breakthrough opens up the possibility in the future of using these bacteria in association with nonleguminous crop and pasture plants, so reducing their dependence on nitrogenous fertilizers. This would indeed be an input-saving development providing a ‘rich harvest’ for the world.

The third feature of this earlier period is that it precedes the present concern for the environment and for what is often described as the `quality of life'. In those days environmental protection was the desolate cry of a small band of conservationists and a few devout bird-watchers. Furthermore, the social sciences were even more the poor relations of the scientific family than they are today. In fact, sociological studies of the impact of technological developments were virtually non-existent. The emphasis was upon production and ever more production, with the minimum of concern for the wider and longer-term issues of environmental change.

The Mineral Boom of the 1960's Although any expertise that I possess clearly does not extend to mineralogy and mining engineering it would be absurd for a lecture on aspects of development in Western Australia to exclude any mention of the recent spectacular developments of the mineral industries. In a sense these can be said to have begun with the lifting of the ban on the export of iron ore by the Commonwealth Government in December 1960 and with the recognition by Mr. Lang Hancock, in 1953, of the massive iron ore deposits in the Pilbara. In early 1962 Mr. Tom Price, then Vice President of Kaiser Steel Corporation, who had been brought to the Pilbara by Lang Hancock, remarked ‘There are untold millions of tons of iron ore in the Pilbara deposits. I think this is one of the most massive orebodies in the world. There are mountains of iron ore-it is like trying to calculate how much air there is’.

I do not propose to bore you with masses of statistics of iron ore production and export, or with the figures of the development of the rich nickel deposits at Kambalda, the bauxite in the Darling Ranges or of the titanium-rich ilmenite near Bunbury. Most people are familiar with the rich harvest of export income that has already been obtained from the exploitation of these mineral resources. Even richer harvests will come as further deposits are discovered and developed and the huge natural gas reserves are exploited.

The local scientific input into these great ventures has so far been quite small-certainly far smaller than the local scientific input into our agricultural industries. The reasons for this are not hard to find. In the first place environmental differences tend to be much less crucial in mining than they are in agriculture. The big companies were therefore able to import an efficient technology, as well as capital, and apply them directly to the local ore deposits with a minimum, although not an entirely negligible need for innovative practices based on local scientific research. In the second place mineral development in this State has mostly proceeded only to relatively crude beneficiation or upgrading of the ores. For example, the iron ore is exported mostly in crude form, with pelletisation as the most important beneficiation process; bauxite is converted only to alumina, i.e. aluminium oxide, not aluminium metal; and ilmenite to rutile, which is about 95% titanium oxide, not titanium metal. Even the nickel refinery of Western Mining Corporation produces only relatively small amounts of nickel metal from its nickel sulphide deposits. If and when our great mining industries move further into the more sophisticated processes of metal refining it can be expected that scientific research will contribute more significantly to their efficiency and their development.

It would be wrong of me to convey the impression that mineral development in this State has had no input from local science and technology. The methods of classical geology have greatly extended our discoveries of iron ores and nickel ores; a combination of mineralogical and electrochemical studies by the C.S.I.R.O. Division of Mineralogy have made it possible to recognise in material at the surface the nature of the sulphide ores below; the upgrading of ilmenite to rutile by Western Titanium has profited by research initiated by the W.A. Government Chemical Laboratory and subsequently extended by C.S.I.R.O. and the Company itself; and Hamersley Iron Pty. Ltd. have collaborated with C.S.I.R.O. scientists to greatly improve the iron ore pelletization process. Finally, the development of atomic absorption spectrometry, with its potential for cheap, rapid and manifold chemical analysis, has played its part in facilitating geochemical exploration.

The Changing Emphasis of the 1970's In the concluding part of this address I plan to discuss the changing pattern of development and of scientific research which is beginning to emerge and the growing recognition of the importance of the simple but sadly neglected fact that progress is for people. One of the most far-reaching of these steps was the setting up in the 1960's of the Environmental Protection Authority headed by scientists and staffed by scientists and with the proper legislative powers and responsibilities under its own Act. We have already seen one striking example of its powers and its long-term interest in the environment in the stand taken over the location of the proposed Pacminex refinery. But the recent record of several of the big mining companies, often quite unfairly cast as the villains on environmental issues, is also extremely encouraging. Two examples of such efforts should perhaps suffice.

Western Titanium have a carefully planned restoration programme for all their mined areas south of Bunbury, which is already well under way. This is changing the topography of the area, replacing dunes and marshlands with undulating pasture lands, running down to a series of lakes with islands and promontories and stocked with trout and marron. Alcoa Pty. Ltd. has a vigorous and costly programme of forest plantings and soil regeneration in their bauxite mining areas which has a long way to go, but which has already produced some extremely attractive landscapes. Such reclamation and regeneration programmes are not only costly, they are difficult and require considerable and continuous inputs of scientific research and development for their success.

This is exemplified by the results of recent research by the Australian Mineral Industries Research Association and the Division of Plant Industry, C.S.I.R.O. in bringing under control the dusty mining dumps, which are a conspicuous blot on the horizons of most mining towns. The work began several years ago at Broken Hill, where for decades the residents suffered from a persistent dust problem. It is expected to be another year before the experiments can be called conclusive but the results show successful vegetation of the dumps with several plant species and means of overcoming the heavy metal toxicity, which previously limited plant growth, have been developed. This important research will not only provide a solution to the dust problem and greatly improve the appearance and aesthetic appeal of the town, it will provide a lead towards the solution of similar problems in other mining settlements in this State and elsewhere in Australia.

Again I would like to stress that this scientific effort is directed primarily at the living comfort and the environmental surroundings of the mining community, not at the productivity of the mines as such.

In 1973 C.S.I.R.O. made an important contribution to environmental problems in W.A. by setting up a Division of Land Resources Management with headquarters in Perth. Scientists from this Division and from several State Government departments are making a comprehensive study of the Darling Range which, among other things, supplies 90% of Perth's water. Water consumption is growing rapidly and is likely to treble over the next 20 years. This poses major problems because land-clearing for agriculture which went on so rapidly in the 1950's and 1960's as we have seen, has raised salinity in many streams. Furthermore, a fungus disease ‘jarrah dieback’ is spreading through the jarrah forests, in effect clearing thousands of acres a year. The principal research projects are aimed at: (i) finding out in detail how land-clearing and the salinity of run-off water are related. This should enable satisfactory predictions to be made on the effects of future clearing, by either man or fungus. (ii) controlling the dieback fungus Phytophthora cinnamoni, which has now infected close to half a million acres of jarrah forest and the infected area is growing by 9-10% each year. (iii) devising ways to reduce the salinity of run-off from cleared areas.

It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of these multidisciplinary investigations to the future development of this State.

While on the subject of water, our most precious resource, I should also mention the new Sirotherm process, the product of joint research by ICI and CSIRO scientists, which permits the desalination of brackish water to levels satisfactory for human consumption. This technique is also useful in desalting industrial and municipal waste water, thus enabling recycling. Lack of drinking water is a major problem confronting mining companies in remote arid regions, although brackish water is frequently available underground or from nearby lakes. This research seems destined therefore to confer great benefits upon the health and comfort of communities living in such areas.

Finally, it is a pleasure to briefly record the recent movement of CSIRO into the field of social science through the Remote Communities Environment Unit of the Division of Building Research. This Unit has sought to identify those areas in remote towns in tropical Australia which, if improved, would provide the greatest measure of community satisfaction. Already encouraging progress has been made and the Unit has been consulted by a number of mining companies and government agencies prior to their planning new towns or undertaking major expansions. It should be made clear that the aim of this research is not of itself to improve mining output or efficiency, though this may well be a by-product, it is aimed at improving community satisfactions and therefore the quality of human life.

I could go on with many other examples of the changed philosophy which now permeates much of our science and its application to the development of this great State, but I would rather close with one or two thoughts on the future. It is vital that concern for the human as well as the physical environment should continue as a part of all long-term development plans and activities and that it should be based on a sane and balanced community understanding of the complexity of the issues involved and their ramifications. This means that our schools and colleges and universities have an increasing role to play in producing a public more broadly educated, i.e. informed as well as concerned, on how best to use our great resources and with perhaps less emphasis on what George Steiner calls the present ‘hectic prodigality of specialized erudition.’ In his essay on Education Walter Murdoch wrote: ‘The house of the mind possesses a number of windows through which we look out on the great and moving spectacle of life. The educated man is the man able to use all these windows; if one of them is sealed to that extent his education must be called defective; if all of them are sealed, except one, he must be called-uneducated.'

In the past, far too many of us have merited the term uneducated, in Murdoch's definition, and we have been unable to look at the contributions that science could and should make to development except through our own narrow and usually short-term interests. We tended to forget that progress is for people. If this could be changed even a little, so that the encouraging changes of the last decade that I have touched on could receive still more community support and understanding in indeed be a rich harvest, not merely in production, but in human welfare. In this way, and in this way only, we can look forward confidently upon what Murdoch calls ‘the great and moving spectacle of life.’ Over 50 years ago John Dewey, the great American pragmatic philosopher and educator, wrote: ‘The great scientific revolution is yet to come. It will ensure when men collectively an knowledge to achieve and make secure social values.’

Well the scientific revolution, in Deweys terms, has still not come, but I hope I have given you indications of its beginnings here in this State and this nation. Our job is to see that it is continues and expands so that social values are indeed achieved and secured.