University faculties of agriculture and veterinary science (continued)

This problem was solved in various ways: by a system of bonded cadetships introduced by the NSW Department of Agriculture; by Agricultural Education Acts (1920 and 1923) in Victoria which, in addition to providing cadetships, also authorised the Minister of Agriculture to appoint a specified number of graduates by direct contract, and in Western Australia where good relations between the University and the Government Department resulted in jobs for the new graduates without recourse to legislation or any formal agreements. Although formal provision was made for the engagement of agricultural scientists by the South Australian government in 1927, this was later withdrawn and, consequently, the numbers of undergraduates in the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Adelaide remained small for many years.

With the passage of time the demands for agricultural graduates greatly increased in all States. Departments or agencies of Education, Land and Soil Conservation, Water Supplies, Quarantine, and the Environment, as well as Agriculture, all came to recognise the value of staff who had received a broad training which included instruction in the basic sciences, engineering, the social sciences, economics and crop and animal husbandry. Similarly, the steady growth of federal government departments and statutory authorities, including CSIRO and commodity marketing boards, created further employment opportunities for agricultural scientists, while significant numbers also came to be employed by local authorities, the media, and a variety of firms and business houses that serviced farming or processed and marketed its products. This growth in demand for agricultural scientists resulted in the establishment of further Schools or Faculties at the University of New England (1954), the University of New South Wales (1949), the University of Tasmania (1962), and at La Trobe University (1967).

The development of agricultural education at the tertiary level, and of the resources (staff, buildings, field stations and recurrent budgets) that were needed to sustain it, was assisted greatly, as was university education in Australia as a whole, by the report of the Murray Committee (1958) and the major involvement in higher education of the Federal Government which resulted from the adoption of this Committee's recommendations. With the proliferation of institutions, courses, facilities and staff came greater opportunities for students to select a course from a diverse range, each of which had its own particular strengths or catered for particular interests. At the same time, believing that the essential strength of any such training is to be found in the breadth of its scientific base, most undergraduate courses still offered only limited opportunities for specialisation and there was a compensating growth of opportunities for the advanced study of particular disciplines, such as plant or animal breeding, plant or animal nutrition, entomology, soil science, agronomy, agricultural economics, rural sociology and extension, and so on, at the post-graduate level.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering