In 1978, A. L. G. (Lloyd) Rees, a physical chemist who had been elected in 1954 and served as Secretary (Physical Sciences) from 1964–68, and I (who had a similar experience on the biological side) suggested to the Academy Council that it would be useful to take advantage of the fact that so many of the founders of the Academy were still alive and well, to put together a short history of its first 25 years, in preparation for the Silver Jubilee of the Academy in 1979. To do this, we enlisted the help of many Fellows and the secretarial staff of the Academy. A hard-cover book of 282 pages (Fenner and Rees, 1980) was published and distributed to all Fellows and to other selected organizations.
In 1993, I suggested to Peter Vallee, the Executive Secretary of the Academy, that I should update the extensive Appendices of that book, in preparation of publication of a history celebrating the Academy’s jubilee in 2004. However, noting that The First Twenty-five Years was then out of print, he suggested that I should update and revise the whole book. The co-editor of The First Twenty-five Years, Lloyd Rees, had died in August 1989, and I agreed to do this. With the guidance of a small Advisory Committee (Fellows R. W. Crompton, L. T. Evans, N. H. Fletcher and the Editor of Historical Records of Australian Science, R. W. Home), the book was published in 1995. In the same format as the previous book, it grew from 282 to 503 pages, largely because of the inevitable expansion of the appendices. In preparing the first two versions of the history, I spent a great deal of time working in the basement of the Dome, searching through the many files of archives stored there. Once again, I depended on the assistance of a number of Fellows and members of the secretariat; it was essentially an edited book. By the time that the second version, The First Forty Years, was prepared, even more assistance was provided by Fellows and members of the Academy’s secretariat.
In 2002, in anticipation of the Jubilee celebrations in 2004, I began the update of The First Forty Years to The First Fifty Years. With the expert help of the publications Manager, Maureen Swanage, we greatly improved the format, largely on the basis of the arrangement of the fourth edition of Medical Virology, which David White and I had published in 1994. By judicious editing, the length of the text was reduced from 309 to 305 pages, but inevitably the length of the appendices and indexes increased, from 194 to 245 pages. On this occasion, however, instead of spending a great deal of time reading through relevant archives in the basement of the Shine Dome, I was able to consult the material on the Academy's website. As with the earlier versions, the task would have been impossible without the help of other Fellows, members of National Committees and the Secretariat.
As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, by 1988 the money available in the Fenner Environment Fund was sufficient, given adequate external sponsorship (shown in brackets in the below list), to initiate these conferences, which were nearly always held, over a period of three days, in the Shine Dome. They have been very successful in providing an opportunity for people from academia, government, industry and non-governmental organizations with a wide range of interests and responsibilities in environmental problems to meet in the Shine Dome of the Academy. The following list gives an idea of the wide range of topics covered. The majority were published; a list of publications can be found in Fenner (2005b).