Travel

Innovative Australia

The Australian Government is committed to building a strong national innovation system, in recognition of the vital role innovation plays in productivity and economic growth, and in meeting the challenges Australia faces.

Australia has a strong record of innovation and achievement in many fields including the sciences, medicine, industry and agriculture.

The innovations and achievements range from the earliest tools developed by Indigenous peoples and European settlers to contemporary medical and scientific breakthroughs.

Recent successes include:

Did you know?

In 1969, an Australian radio telescope in Parkes, New South Wales, transmitted to the world the first pictures of the moon landing.

Australian research strengths are particularly apparent in fields such as clinical medicine, biology, immunology, environmental sciences and space science.

Australian publications in these fields achieve an impact well above the global and European averages. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), for example, is ranked in the top 1% of the world’s institutions conducting research in the field of environment and ecology, and animal and plant science. Together with James Cook University Australia, they are ranked as the top two organisations in coral reef ecology.

Australia’s strong skills base represents another dividend of our investment in science and education. Australia also consistently performs above the OECD average on a range of educational, skills, and access to technology indicators. In 2004, over one third of Australians aged 25-34 had a tertiary education, which is more than 5 per cent above the OECD average. In 2004, there were eight researchers per 1000 labour force, ranking Australia eighth out of OECD countries.

A range of organisations in Australia play major roles in research across the public and private sectors, and across national and state and territory jurisdictions. They include 39 higher education institutions (universities) and some large, and thousands of small, private companies in all industries such as agriculture, mining, manufacturing and services.

One of the most important organisations is the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which is the biggest and most diverse government research and development institution in Australia. Founded in 1926, it employs around 6500 staff located across 56 sites throughout Australia and overseas. Their research covers agribusiness, information technology, manufacturing, health, sustainable energy, climate change, water, mining and minerals, space, environment and natural resources.

CSIRO manages three National Research Facilities: the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, the Australian National Telescope Facility and the oceanographic research vessel the RV Southern Surveyor.

Other Australian Government science initiatives include:

Science Connections Program

The Science Connections Program (SCOPE) aims to raise community awareness of the important contribution science and technology make to Australia's sustainable economic growth and social well-being.  It seeks to encourage students to consider continuing with science studies into senior secondary school and beyond. SCOPE also supports a range of activities including the Prime Minister's Prizes for Science, National Science Week, ABC Science on-line, the Australian Science and Mathematics Olympiads, the Science and Engineering Challenge and EngQuest.

International Science Linkages

The International Science Linkages program supports Australian scientists, from both the public and private sectors, to collaborate with international partners on leading edge science and technology in order to contribute to Australia’s economic, social and environmental well-being.

Cooperative Research Centres

The Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) Program fosters innovation by promoting long-term strategic links and collaborations between researchers, industry and government. The Program brings together Australia’s geographically and institutionally dispersed scientific and technological resources for the benefit of innovation, industries and the national economy.

Australia’s scientific heritage      by Robyn Williams

Australia simply had to become a scientific nation. Just look at the world map. All that unexplored ocean, land and sky to know about. Our first European contact was through Dutch navigators in the early 17th century, botanically minded buccaneers (William Dampier, 1699) and then Captain Cook seeking the Transit of Venus (1770) and discovering much more. Even Napoleon took an interest in our unique plants and animals.

Now, in the 21st century, Australia’s scientific strengths are clear. Marine research is flourishing, from the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland to the blue whales off Rottnest Island in the west and those giant whale sharks of Ningaloo. Now a major concern is the health and survival of our fisheries and corals.  Geology is vital, both for the huge mining industry in the west and our need to understand those extraordinary fossils that keep turning up. Astronomy was established soon after the First Fleet’s arrival with the knowledge that the southern skies are quite different. Centres of research include the Anglo–Australian Telescope near Coonabarrabran, the radio array (Australia Telescope) at Narrabri, both in New South Wales, and Mount Stromlo Observatory near Canberra, now nearly rebuilt after the devastating bushfires of 2003.

Australia’s ancient landscape is a challenge both to agriculture and conservation. The soils are different and the rise of salt inexorable. Western Australia alone is five times the size of Texas so the scale is daunting. Then there is the commitment to the huge territories of Antarctica, led from Hobart.

Research to tackle all this is organised on a three-pronged basis: from the universities (nearly 40 of them); CSIRO, now over 80 years old; and the Cooperative Research Centres, a unique combination of campus, industry and other agencies.

Australia has also built scientific strengths not obviously connected to its geography. In medicine we have immunology, centred at the renowned Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne where legendary Nobel laureate Sir Macfarlane Burnet revolutionised the field; paediatrics and burns treatment in Perth, where Professors Fiona Stanley and Fiona Woods are world leaders; and biotechnology in Brisbane, where the state government has encouraged massive investment. Queensland is also home for the supersonic scramjet, which may be the basis, one day, for flights between London, Los Angeles and Australia of barely 4-5 hours!

But what can one make of St Peter’s College, a secondary school in Adelaide that has, alone, produced three Nobel Prize winners? Sir Lawrence Bragg, still the youngest anywhere to win a scientific Nobel (he was 25!), inventor of molecular biology; Howard Florey, the real hero behind penicillin; and Robin Warren, now working in Perth with fellow laureate Barry Marshall, who transformed the treatment of peptic ulcers.

This part of the world continues to astonish. A giant tree, the Wollemi Pine, thought to have been extinct since the time of the dinosaurs, was discovered in 1994 in a gorge only 200 kilometres from Sydney and is now being cultivated for sale at the Royal Botanic Gardens (Australia’s oldest research institution, founded in 1816). A new species of human ancestor, dubbed ‘the Hobbit’, was unearthed in 2003 at Flores in Indonesia by a team from the University of New England in Armidale, and remains highly controversial. Lumps of Mars and the Moon are regularly found in Antarctica and the Nullarbor Plain. The Nullarbor was also the site, recently, of the discovery of full skeletons of the prehistoric marsupial lion (Thylacoleo carnifex) in subterranean caves.

Australian science is superbly connected to that of the main centres of research globally. The challenge at the moment is to strengthen links to the needs of South Pacific and Asia. The challenges of climate, biodiversity, conservation and cities are scientific priorities, as they need to be in this turbulent twenty-first century.

Robyn Williams has been a science journalist since 1972 and a broadcaster with the ABC Science Show since 1975.

Did you know?

The Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, Australia’s pre-eminent science award, is given annually to an Australian individual or group that has made an outstanding contribution to science with demonstrated benefit to human welfare or society.

The 2007 award went to Dr Peter Waterhouse and Dr Ming-Bo Wang for their discovery of a new way to control plant genes by using a plant’s own viral defence mechanisms. The discovery has generated more than 100 patents to date and is helping the world understand the workings of plant, animal and human genomes.

A record of achievement

Well before Federation in 1901, Australians had demonstrated how innovative they were. Thousands of years ago, Indigenous Australians developed tools like fish traps, boomerangs and woomeras to assist with hunting. They lived in harmony with nature using the native flora and fauna as a source of food and medicine.

When the European settlers arrived in this harsh, isolated land, they also had to be ingenious to survive and thrive. Early inventions included the windmill, the stump-jump plough, the stripper harvester, mechanical shears and ice-making machines.

In 1901 William Farrer released the Federation wheat strain, resistant to fungal rust disease and drought.  While the German firm Bayer first produced aspirin, a Melbourne pharmacist George Nicholas and experimenter, Henry Woolf Smith in 1915 produced a high-grade aspirin product, ‘Aspro’, that later took over the international market.

Reverend John Flynn was the founder of the world’s first Aerial Medical Service, now known as the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS). In May 1928, Dr St Vincent Welch made the first official RFDS visit. And in 1928 Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and his crew performed the world’s first air crossing of the Pacific Ocean.

More medical development took place in 1941 when Penicillin, extracted and refined by a team led by Howard Florey, was trialled successfully on humans, and went into production in time to aid casualties of World War II.

And Australia has a long history of dealing with insufficient water. In 1947 scientists at CSIRO conducted the first successful cloud seeding experiments, making rain fall near Bathurst, NSW.

In 1952 Sir Alan Walsh of the CSIRO invented an instrument used for high speed chemical analysis of metallic elements. A decade later in 1961 George Kossoff and David Robinson built the first ultrasound scanner at the ultrasonics institute in the Commonwealth Department of Health.

1970 was the year when Professor Earl Owen from Sydney pioneered microsurgery techniques by performing the first microsurgery operation when he rejoined an amputated index finger.

And almost ten years later the Bionic Ear was developed. A cochlear implant, designed to help the hearing impaired and profoundly deaf, was invented by Professor Graeme Clark of the University of Melbourne in 1979.

The discovery of gene shears – molecules used to prevent harmful and unwanted genes in plants and animals – was made in 1986 by CSIRO scientists, Dr Wayne Gerlach and Dr Jim Haseloff.

In 1991 the world’s first biodegradable marine degreaser, made from naturally-occurring marine oils, was developed by the CSIRO and Beku Environmental Products Ltd.

The world’s first anti-influenza drug was developed in 1996 by the Victorian College of Pharmacy, Monash University and Biota Holdings. In 2000, the drug was approved for release in Australia, Europe and the USA.

And the Hybrid Toilet, a lightweight, fully-enclosed toilet system which requires no water and minimal maintenance was released for sale in 1997.

The Cooperative Research Centre for International Food Manufacture and Packaging Science developed new biodegradable packaging materials based on starch in 2000.

And the world's first vaccine to prevent cervical cancer with the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives was developed by Professor Ian Frazer and others at the University of Queensland during the 1990s and eventually approved for use in USA in 2006. The vaccine, known as Gardasil™ and Cervarix™, was released into the market in 2006.

In 2007 the Hyshot Scramjet Engine – a very high speed air-breathing jet engine - was developed by a team from the University of Queensland led by Professor Allan Paull. And in June 2007, in a combined American-Australian test, it was successfully used to boost a test vehicle to hypersonic speeds.

Australia’s Nobel laureates in science

The Future of Australian Innovation

The story of modern Australia is one closely tied to scientific discovery and technological innovation. Problem solving, creative ideas and new technologies are also vital to meeting the social and environmental challenges Australia face as a nation – from population ageing to climate change.

A key Australian Government initiative is the $200 million Enterprise Connect network, aimed at connecting businesses to new ideas and new technologies. This will include a national network of Manufacturing Centres, a Clean Energy Innovation Centre, a Creative Industries Innovation Centre and a Remote Enterprise Centre. 

And a thriving economy demands a highly-skilled, highly educated workforce.  Australia has a good breadth of research effort across the humanities, creative arts and social sciences, as well as scientific and technological disciplines, but more is being done to vitalise Australia's public research sector.  New initiatives are being put in place to double the number of Australian Postgraduate Awards – scholarships for PhD students – and investment in Future Fellowships will ensure further development of skills in high-level research.

Online