Ann Moyal AM

Ann Moyal AM (1926-2019), historian, was educated in Sydney and Canberra, and gained her first class honours degree in Arts from the University of Sydney in 1947. Having won a scholarship to the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London in 1949, she became a research assistant at Chatham House. When the press baron Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, took up the writing of history, she worked as his personal research assistant between 1954 and 1958. Returning to Australia, from 1959 to 1962 she worked as a Research Fellow with Sir Keith Hancock at the Department of History, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, founding the Australian Dictionary of Biography. In 1962 she was appointed to the joint post of Research Associate at the Australian Academy of Science and the Research School of Social Sciences, charged with founding a historical archive of Australian scientists that would open the field of scientific history up to research. Marrying the mathematician Joe Moyal in 1963, after 1965 she travelled with him as he took up various academic posts. She was a science editor with the University of Chicago Press from 1967 to 1970, and for five years lectured at the New South Wales Institute of Technology, publishing, in this period, her second book, Scientists in Nineteenth Century Australia (1976). Having directed the Centre for Science Policy at Griffith University from 1977 to 1979, she left academia in 1980. She has written many books and papers on the social history of nineteenth and twentieth century Australian science, its participants and institutions, and aspects of its technological development, including Clear across Australia: A history of telecommunications (1984); ‘A Bright and Savage Land’: Scientists in Colonial Australia (1986); Women and the telephone in Australia (1989); The web of science: The scientific correspondence of the Rev WB Clarke, geological pioneer (2003); Platypus (2001; 2010); Koala: A historical biography (2006) and Maverick Mathematician: The life and science of JE Moyal (2006). Her highly entertaining memoir, Breakfast with Beaverbrook, was published in 1995, the year she established the Independent Scholars Association of Australia. A second volume of autobiography, A Woman of Influence: Science, Men and History, followed in 2014. In 1996 she curated The Clever Country: Scientists in Australia for the National Portrait Gallery, then a program of the National Library of Australia. She was made Doctor of Letters by the Australian National University in 2003, and received an honorary D.Litt from the University of Sydney in 2007.