University faculties of agriculture and veterinary science

The 19th century had been a period of discovery. Towards its end so many facts and principles relating to agriculture were known that a coherent scientific picture was clearly in sight. In 1802 de Saussure had found that the carbon in plants came from the air and not from manure. Forty years later von Liebig had laid the foundations to scientific plant nutrition, and within the next decades Lawes and Gilbert in England and Boussingault in France had conducted the first scientific experiments with fertilizers. The assimilation of atmospheric nitrogen by both free living and symbiotic organisms had been discovered. Plant diseases and pests began to be understood and controlled. Kellner and others had laid the foundations of scientific animal feeding.[38]

As these developments became generally known and understood community pressure was exerted on British universities for the introduction of specialised courses in agricultural science -pressures which were not always welcomed by academics in the traditional schools of classics, languages, mathematics and natural philosophy. In turn, such trends in Britain and Europe, together with the growing popularity of the Land Grant colleges in the USA, encouraged moves in Australia to develop tertiary level courses for the training of specialists in agricultural science.

As elsewhere, academic institutions, which were always short of resources even to maintain their traditional activities, showed no great enthusiasm for introducing new courses, particularly those of a technological sort. It was therefore left to the generosity of enlightened individuals or to the wisdom of the heads of the burgeoning State Departments of Agriculture both to persuade, and to make it possible for, universities to amend existing courses or to introduce new ones related to the science of agriculture.

Sir Samuel Wadham described the genesis of Australian Faculties of Agriculture in the following words:

In Adelaide, Roseworthy Agricultural College became formally associated with the University in 1905 when students with the College Diploma, who had matriculated, were given status in the Faculty of Science, and permitted to take a B.Sc. degree after passing a special two-year course, while science students could spend two years at the College in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree. The course did not make much progress until the foundation of the Waite Institute in 1924 led to a great upsurge of interest in the subject. Melbourne went a stage further in 1905 and created a Faculty; however, this had no special staff until 1911, when the State Government provided £1,000 a year for five years for the salary of the first Professor, the late Dr T. Cherry, whose appointment lapsed in 1916 while he was on Active Service overseas.

In Sydney the initial funds for the Schools of Agriculture and Veterinary Science came from the Berry Estate, which provided £5,000 to the University for these purposes; the University's acceptance of this sum was provisional on the Government agreeing to provide buildings and equipment. Professor R. D. Watt arrived in 1910 and immediately set out to devise the course and the means of implementing it until the buildings were erected (1916).

In the University of Western Australia, Sir Winthrop Hackett, in 1913, gave the sum of £18,000 for the endowment of a chair of Agriculture and in 1914 Professor J. W. Paterson started teaching under the Faculty of Science. A separate faculty was not created until 1937.

In the University of Queensland the Faculty began in 1927 with Professor J. K. Murray who was also Principal of the Agricultural College and High School at Gatton. He had with him three part-time lecturers. The relations with the Science Faculty were close and were maintained by the energy of the first Dean -the indefatigable Professor of Biology -the late Dr. E. J. Goddard.[39]

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering