A CELEBRATION OF THE HISTORY, CULTURE, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF RECHERCHE BAY
CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research Auditorium Hobart, Tasmania
26–28 February 2007

Introduction to the National Academies Forum symposium
Dr Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe, FAA

Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe, FAA, is a biologist who has studied the reproduction and ecology of marsupials in New Zealand, Australia and South America. He wrote the first textbook on marsupials, Life of Marsupials in 1973 and last year published a new edition with the same title. From 1976 to 1995 he successively led the Marsupial Biology Group and the Vertebrate Pest Control group in the CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology. He is a Fellow of the Australian Mammal Society and the Australian Academy of Science, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Two sites in Australia have especial significance for science: Botany Bay in New South Wales and the North East Peninsula of Recherche Bay in Tasmania. At these two sites many of Australia's unique plants were collected by botanists for the first time and they became the type specimens to which all later botanists must refer. While Botany Bay has long been a site of national heritage, the Tasmanian site had been largely forgotten until 2002, when new evidence of the original French visit emerged. The Australian Academy of Science supported the move to preserve the site in perpetuity, so when in February 2006 the site was formally vested in the Tasmanian Nature Conservancy, with the support of the Tasmanian Government, it proposed a National Academies' Forum to celebrate the cultural, historical and scientific significance of the site. The proposal was enthusiastically supported by the three other Academies – Humanities, Social Sciences and Technological Sciences and Engineering. It was agreed that the Forum should be held in Hobart and it should review current work on the history of the French exploration; the scientific implications of the discoveries at Recherche Bay, then and now; the subsequent history of the area; and its socio-political significance today. Each speaker has been asked to address a particular topic within their expertise, either on the French discoveries themselves, or on the consequences and implications for today.