UNE scientists honoured on Australia Day

January 29, 2007

Two scientists at the University of New England - Dr Wal Whalley and Professor Keith Entwistle - were made Members of the Order of Australia (AM) on Australia Day.

Today's posting focuses on Dr Whalley, while Professor Entwistle will be the subject of a subsequent posting.

Another recipient of the same award this year was Professor Brian Hills (School of Medicine, University of Queensland), who was Head of the Department of Physiology at UNE from 1986 to 1994. Professor Hills, a specialist in respiratory physiology, died last year.

Dr Ralph (Wal) Whalley, now an Honorary Fellow in Botany at UNE, retired as Associate Professor of Botany at the end of 1998. Throughout his UNE career of more than 40 years, he and his students have played a leading role in researching and promoting the use of native grasses. They began by researching the various properties of the grasses, and were then able to move on to commercialisation in collaboration with seed producers.

During those 40 years, Dr Whalley has seen what he called a "dramatic change" in the understanding and use of such grasses. His award was "for service to conservation and the environment, particularly through research into Australian native grasses and the promotion of their use for pasture, lawn, and revegetation of degraded natural landscapes".

Dr Whalley led a UNE project that resulted in the commercialisation of three varieties of native weeping grass (Microlaena stipoides) that can be used in a wide range of domestic and agricultural applications. Seed of the first of these became commercially available last year.

The biggest change he has seen during his time at UNE has been in pasture management. One of his PhD students, Dr Greg Lodge of NSW Agriculture, completed research in the early 1980s that demonstrated for the first time that the species composition of pastures could be changed by grazing management alone. Later developments of this principle showed the huge advantages of rotational grazing. The beneficial results for grasslands have been "dramatic", Dr Whalley said.

"The aim is to manage the landscape for 100 per cent ground cover," he explained, "by keeping livestock in each paddock for only a few weeks each year. In this way, skilful managers can actually use their animals as a means of conserving species biodiversity. I did not expect a result like this back in the 1970s."

The view that has emerged, he said, is one that regards each property as an ecosystem, and the grazing animals as part of that system. The resting of pastures is a critically important part of management according to these principles. "The only way to manage is to use grazing animals very intelligently," Dr Whalley concluded.

Dr Whalley is the Editor of The Rangeland Journal, the author of many scientific papers and book chapters, and co-author of three books: Pasture Plants of the Slopes and Tablelands of New South Wales (2003), Grasses of New South Wales (2002), and Grassed up: A Guideline for Re-vegetating with Australian Native Grasses (2000).

Posted by Jim Scanlan at January 29, 2007 06:12 PM