Kate Wilson

I would like to also acknowledge the traditional owners – the Gadigal and Guringai people – and I acknowledge the longstanding and continuing knowledge they and other indigenous Australians hold about country and the environment.

Presiding Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Dean of Science, Staff of the faculty of Science, Distinguished guests, Family, Friends and most importantly those of you who are graduating today from the Faculty of Science. It is an honour to speak to you.

Science is awesome

My job takes me to incredible places in this beautiful state of NSW.  I’m going to tell you about three of the places I have visited over the past year, from the rocky coast, to the snow scattered Australian Alps, to the red-earthed outback – and how in each of these places we are using science to shape how we manage and live in harmony with the land.

The first is one of the most well-known suburbs in Sydney, Manly.  Last winter I spent a very wet morning in an inflatable dinghy zooming around the headland, looking at how NSW’s only mainland colony of little penguins manages to live alongside the humans who flock to this iconic harbourside location.

The second is the highest mountains in Australia, Kosciusko National Park, where a helicopter took us over the park, landing to marvel at pristine alpine vegetation in some areas and to see the impact of the wild horses, known in Australian folklore as Brumbies, in others.

The third took me 4 wheel driving across the saltpans of far Western NSW, to camp out on country near Lake Mungo with a group of indigenous leaders. This is where the bones of the earliest known inhabitants of the Australian continent have been found – Mungo man and woman have been carbon dated to approximately 40,000 years before the present.  I visited one of the sites where fossilised human footprints from that era have been preserved. I stood on the dunes, looking at footprints that are as clear as those we leave on the beach today, and yet are among the oldest known footprints of modern humans, Homo sapiens, on the planet.

I visited these three places in my role as head of science for the NSW environment and heritage agency.  I have a wonderful job, no doubt about it.  But what I want to illustrate to you is that I am not using my technical scientific skills, which are in molecular biology – I am using my scientific training. My understanding of the importance of scientific rigour and excellence.  My capacity to probe and question and challenge.  My ability to synthesise different subject matter to come up with something new.  And these are all skills that you all, as graduates in science in 2016, now have as well.

Science is creative – use it to add value

In preparing for this occasional address, I looked around for examples of other such addresses.  One of the most interesting was given at another Sydney University by the two time Oscar winning actor Cate Blanchett.   Cate Blanchett talked about the arts as the driver of innovation and exploration, two qualities normally associated with science.  She talked about creativity as “putting your imagination to work” and the “process of having original ideas that have value”. 

Science is a process of immense creativity and innovation. Scientific advances do not simply fall out from collecting facts and feeding them into a computer program.  They need all the creativity and imagination the human brain can apply to those observations, or those laws of physics.

As you move on from your university education to put your creative minds to work, think how you can innovate, how you can add value.  This might be through new knowledge, it might be a new way to manage weeds in a cropping system, it might be designing new medical technology. 

The important element of creativity and innovation is to add value.  And I do not mean just monetary value, though of course this is an important role for innovation, and one on which our economies depend.  I mean enduring value, an advance that will have a lasting net positive impact on people and the planet.  The issues I am involved in are not great blue sky discoveries.  But if we can use science to help the penguins live alongside humans, to manage the coexistence of brumbies and fragile alpine peat bogs, to understand the long history of indigenous Australians and work with them to manage country now and into the future – we are using science to add real value.

By thinking about what value you are adding, this also helps you to stay true to your own values. 

In my journey to where I am today, I think back to when I was a young girl on a beach in Cornwall, south-west England.  My family used to holiday there every year, and I grew up playing in the rockpools, catching hermit crabs, watching fish darting around, poking my fingers in luscious red anemones that stickily closed around them.  This started my love of science.  But in the summer of 1967 everything was changed at that beach.  In March that year the oil tanker Torrey Canyon foundered on rocks while taking a short cut along the coast and spilled 120 million litres of crude oil.  It was the first ever massive oil-tanker spill in the world, and the clean-up was literally attacked with a military operation.  But despite all the clean-up, that summer I was discovering oil-covered fish in the rock crevices, and when we built sand castles, the sand was black and sticky below the surface.  And this image has never left me.  Through my career from molecular biology to agricultural microbiology to marine science and now environmental science, I know my belief in the value of using science to understand and look after our natural environments has persisted, and led me to where I am today.

So congratulations to all of you. You have navigated the many subjects this great university offered you, completed the practicals, handed in the assignments, completed research projects and passed the exams, so that you are sitting here today as proud graduates in science. 

So I say to you, science is awesome. Go forward, be immensely proud to have the skills you have acquired here at the University of Technology, Sydney, use your creativity and add value to the world.  Embrace your scientific training and expertise, wherever it takes you. And strive to leave your metaphorical footprint on this planet, just as the people at Lake Mungo did millennia ago.

Thank you.