Wednesday, 30 October 2024
Government House
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley

Thank you, Professor Durrant-Whyte,

Bujari gamarruwa

Diyn Babana Gamarada Gadigal Ngura

I welcome you in the language of the Gadigal, the Traditional Owners of these lands and waterways, I pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

When we have award ceremonies such as this, the focus is, rightfully, on the honour it confers on the recipient. People rarely think of the honour it is for the person who confers the honour. That is also rightfully so, because the conferrer is not, and should never be, the main game.

However, tonight there is difference. On the 15^th of May, 2019, just under two weeks after I was sworn in as Governor of NSW, I presided over my very first Investitures ceremony, investing recipients who had been awarded Australian honours in the Australia Day Honours list that year.

The first recipient I invested was a scientist who had been made an Officer of the Order of Australia - fitting in itself in our 21^st century world that it was a scientist. The abbreviated citation on that occasion included that she had been described as one of the “15 Women Changing Our World”^[2]. That is quite an accolade. 

So tonight, I am focussing for just a few moments to say what an honour it is for me to again be in the same room as Professor Helen Christensen, as she is announced as the 2024 NSW Scientist of the Year.

Congratulations Professor Christensen. Your work is so obviously important, and so obviously deserves to be lauded. It is also important, and we thank you for this, that you act as an inspiration for those whom you directly lead and those in the wider scientific community.

I should add that we are proud that so many of our NSW Scientists of the Year have been pre-eminently recognised by the award of Australian Honours, amongst them those with us tonight: Professor Gordon Wallace, Professor Jim Patrick, Professor Glenda Halliday, and Emeritus Professor Trevor McDougall.

This brings me immediately to the other recipients. Your achievements as scientists are outstanding. That we in Australia, which is by global standards a small nation, have world-class scientific research is because we have world-class scientists, and that’s you.

We are all familiar with the famous quote attributed to Thomas Edison (although he probably neither came up with the idea nor put it quite so succinctly)^[3], “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.”

There is another lesser-known observation, made by Professor Walter Isaacson, which in many ways reflects what science has always been about, but which today is probably more relevant than ever. Professor Isaacson, who is a writer of a unique biographical genre called “geniuses”, explains that while high intelligence may be a prerequisite, the defining feature of a genius is “is creativity, the [extraordinary] ability to apply imagination to almost any situation”^[4].

Whether or not you identity as a genius – which I really say tongue-in-cheek because, in my experience, scientists are one of the more understated groups of professionals I meet – there is no doubt that it is not only the Edison concept that rings true in the work that sees you recognised, it is also your creativity and your imagination which takes scientific investigation into the realm of ground-breaking research and its application in ways that may never have been thought of.

We also know that a love of science starts at school with excellent education and outstanding teachers, also recognised in these awards.

I thank the Premier and the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer for the continuing recognition of excellence in science that these Prizes represent. The work of the scientists we are here to celebrate tonight is exciting and it is vital.

You, the scientists, are ensuring our future.

[1] Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte, NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer

[2] Fifteen Women Changing Our World, Research@UNSW, available here

[3] See Maseena Ziegler, ‘7 Quotes you Didn’t Know were from Women’, Forbes online, 15 September 2014, available here

[4] Walter Isaacson, ‘What Makes a Genius? The World’s Greatest Minds Have One Thing in Common”, Time online, 16 November 2017, available here