Bill McClymont Article by Alan Bell

Several years ago UNE alumnus Alan Bell wrote the following article about one of his scientific "heroes" Gordon Lee (Bill) McClymont, AO, FASAP 1920–2000

Bill   McClymont   was born   and raised   in Sydney   but   spent his school holidays on relatives’ farms around Orange, New South Wales (G. L. McClymont, unpublished memoir). These early experiences stimulated his interest in agriculture, particularly livestock   production, and desire to go on to university. However, this ambition became possible only after he was offered a bonded traineeship with the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Agriculture on the condition that he study Veterinary Science rather than Agricultural Science at the University of Sydney (G. L. McClymont, unpublished memoir). The architect of this plan was Colonel Max Henry, the Department’s Chief Veterinary Surgeon (later, Chief of the Division of Animal Industry), who wanted to strengthen the expertise in livestock nutrition in his organisation. Bill graduated with first class honours and the University Medal in 1941, after completing a degree that was compressed because of World War II and punctuated by duty with the Australian Army Veterinary Corps and the Volunteer Defence Corps (G. L. McClymont, unpublished memoir).

Bill’s subsequent career was remarkable for its breadth in the application of science  to  improve the  productivity  of livestock beyond  a  narrow focus  on  animal health  and  to understand inter-relationships among  the animal,  plant  and soil sciences, as well as their integration with the social sciences.  His   broad interests in agriculture and   related biology, initiated during his early farm experiences at Orange, were reinforced by his first job as an animal nutritionist with the NSW Department of Agriculture. In particular, the latter gave him a great appreciation of the complexity of agricultural systems, the importance of application of science through extension and the need for involvement of producers in setting priorities and evaluating outcomes for the agricultural sciences (G. L. McClymont, unpublished memoir).

Bill was an accomplished and innovative researcher whose achievements covered multiple species and areas of nutrition and metabolism. His early research with the NSW Department demonstrated the association between feeding low-roughage diets  and  milk fat  depression  in dairy  cows  (McClymont 1950). At a time when PhDs were not offered by schools of agriculture in Australia, he was awarded a Walter and Eliza Hall Veterinary Research Fellowship for doctoral study at the University of Cambridge from 1947 to 1949. There he built on earlier work on rumen fermentation and post-absorptive use of volatile fatty acids, led by Sir Joseph Barcroft (Barcroft et al. 1944), to demonstrate that circulating acetate was a principal source of milk fat synthesis in dairy cows (McClymont 1951). This led to his development of the so-called glucogenic hypothesis for the metabolic origins of diet-induced milk fat depression (McClymont and Vallance 1962) that stood the test of time for almost half a century, until new evidence led to its replacement with an alternative explanation by Dale Bauman (see earlier in this article) and his colleagues.

My former La Trobe University boss, Bob Reid (see later in this article), was a student contemporary of Bill’s in Barcroft’s laboratory at  Cambridge. These  were heady  days  for both young Australians, each of whom would become leaders of the  emerging field  of nutritional physiology in their  home country. Bob had many anecdotes about their experiences and often mentioned Bill’s PhD research on bovine mammary metabolism. More than 20 years later, Bill’s work would be extended by two other people in this article, Frank Annison and Jim Linzell, at the nearby Babraham Animal Research Institute.

Bill’s research after he returned  to  Australia included studies at Glenfield Veterinary Research Station on pregnancy toxaemia  and brain  metabolism in  sheep (McClymont and Setchell 1955, 1956) with another young Australian veterinary scientist, Brian Setchell (see later in this article), and on drought-feeding with M. C. Franklin from the CSIRO McMaster Laboratory (Franklin et al. 1955). Although fully committed to research during this period, he and others were becoming increasingly concerned about the separation of education in agricultural science, focussed on plants and soils, and veterinary science, focussed on animal health, in Australian universities, without consideration of the complex array of disciplines that underpin pastoral animal production. In 1953, this led to a vigorous debate via Letters to the Editor of the Australian Veterinary Journal, including Bill’s contribution in the June issue (McClymont 1953), which came to the notice of leaders of the newly established UNE at Armidale. To my knowledge, this was Bill’s first public articulation of the case for creation of a new degree that would bridge the gap identified by him and others, a contribution that was influential in his appointment as the Foundation Dean of Rural Science at UNE in 1955. These same principles would be further elaborated in  Bill’s  inaugural lecture  that  year, entitled  ‘All  flesh  is grass’ (McClymont 1996).

At UNE, Bill managed to continue collaborative research on a range of topics, including poultry nutrition, with Rob Cumming and others (Sathe et  al.  1964), and the  pharmacology and toxicology of carbon tetrachloride in sheep, with Alex Kondos (Kondos and McClymont 1961). However, notwithstanding these and his earlier research achievements, Bill McClymont is best remembered as a visionary educator who, through his initiation and leadership of the Faculty of Rural Science at UNE, influenced the lives and successful careers of many hundreds of students, including myself.

When I enrolled in Rural Science in 1965, Bill was about halfway through his 21-year tenure as Dean and at the height of  his powers  as  a teacher  and  administrator. As  a lowly undergraduate I  did  not get  to  know him  well  personally. However, despite  his lofty  aura,  he was  very  obviously a kindly   man who   derived   great satisfaction   from   his involvement with students in the classroom and elsewhere. He was not a great lecturer in the classical sense. Nevertheless, his passion and the power of his message, especially about his concept of agricultural ecology, penetrated even the densest undergraduate skulls and, with hindsight, most of us feel privileged to have taken his courses. I am not sure whether Bill actually coined the term ‘sustainable agriculture’, as has been claimed, but the idea surely was deeply ingrained in his thinking  at  a time  when  the  environmental consequences of agricultural practice were recognised by few of his contemporaries.

Bill McClymont’s educational philosophy was summarised in  what he  termed the ‘perpetual pentagram’ of evolution, ecology, economics, ethics and education (McClymont 1970). Its  successful implementation in  the  Rural Science  degree program depended greatly on  his  ability to  inspire similar thinking among a  group of  mostly younger scientists with strong affiliations to traditional disciplines. My impression as a Rural Science undergraduate during the 1960s is that the spirit of interdisciplinary thinking and integration of the animal, plant, soil and social sciences was a tangible and distinctive feature of the teaching program. However, with growth of the faculty came fragmentation and the creation of multiple departmental fiefdoms, a process that accelerated after Bill stepped down as Dean in 1976. This was associated with progressive departures from the ethos and integrated delivery of the Rural Science degree and increased opportunities for specialisation within that degree or in newly created alternative degrees in agriculture. These developments and the subsequent decline in student enrolment during the 1980s greatly dismayed Bill who, before and after his retirement in 1980, continued to press for a return, with modifications, to the model he had created (Ryan 2007).

An aspect of Bill’s professional life that is perhaps less well known is his involvement with industry through promotion of extension and outreach and the participation of producers in  setting  and implementing the  agricultural research agenda. Despite an incredibly busy schedule of teaching, research and administration, he was always keen to engage with the practical beneficiaries of his academic efforts, not only to inform them but to seek their advice. It occurs to me that with his early experience in extension with the   NSW   Department of   Agriculture   and some familiarity with the American Land Grant system gained during a US tour in 1949, Bill might have missed an opportunity  to formally  incorporate  agricultural extension as a university responsibility after his appointment as Dean in 1955. However, considering the already monumental early challenges he faced and the adherence of Australian universities to  the  British model  of  restricting academic pursuits to in-house teaching and research, this may have been a step too far. Despite the efforts of individual scientists to engage with industry stakeholders, this unfortunate attitude still persists in Australian academia. There are modestly encouraging signs of  change  in  a  handful of  institutions. However, more widespread and meaningful change in the academic culture may need a reincarnation of Bill McClymont to lead the charge!