RATCLIFFE, FRANCIS NOBLE

(b. Calcutta, India, 11 January 1904; d. Canberra, Australia, 2 December 1970), zoology.

Ratcliffe pioneered applied animal ecology and wildlife conservation in Australia. He wrote a best-selling book, Flying Fox and Drifting Sand: The Adventures of a Biologist in Australia(1938), and provided the scientific foundations for the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Background and Education Ratcliffe was born in India, the son of Samuel Kirkham Ratcliffe, editor of the Calcutta Times, and his wife, Katie Maria, née Geeves. He was educated in England at Berkhamsted School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he read zoology under (Sir) Julian Huxley. After graduating with first-class honors in zoology in 1925, he was appointed J. E. Proctor Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. His next post was with the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) in London, which led to his invitation in 1929 as a “scientific ambassador” to assist Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in a study of flying foxes in Queensland and northern New South Wales. In 1932 he returned to Scotland to lecture in zoology at the University of Aberdeen, but his Australian experiences had made him restless, and when he was offered a second chance to undertake a scientific mission for CSIR in Australia in 1935, he took it and remained in Australia for the rest of his life.

Flying Fox and Drifting Sand Ratcliffe’s first Australian mission was to advise on giant fruit-eating bats (Pteropus poliocephalus, grey-headed flying fox), a major pest species for fruit growers. Although “a considerable number of odd facts about the natural history of the Australian species of flying fox had been accumulated,” he commented, “an accurate picture of their population as a whole and what might be called their economy was conspicuously lacking” (1938, pp. 4–5). Like others of the generation of applied ecologists trained at Oxford under Julian Huxley in the 1920s, his approach was to consider the biology and behavior of the whole population. Charles Elton, who was part of the same cohort, wrote Animal Ecology(1927), a seminal text in this field.

Applied ecology demanded understanding of the migratory patterns of the giant bats; this kept Ratcliffe on the move over large areas, typically in places where his fellow travelers were “bullock-drivers, drovers and possum hunters” (1938, p. 4). He spent much of his time with those whose livelihood was threatened by flying fox invasions. He was interested not in “the animal” but in the intersection between it and the economics of fruit growing. Total destruction of the population would be economically futile, Ratcliffe ultimately argued, because the economic problem rested with “a numerically insignificant minority” (p. 5). The costly elimination of nonoffenders could not be justified.

Consistent with the aspirations of the EMB, Ratcliffe married ecology with economics in his biological research. The EMB, according to David Rivett, the first chief executive officer of the CSIR, was “a brilliant piece of Empire-building” (1934 manuscript). It analyzed markets, publicized empire products, and advocated “a biological outlook” in scientific research. Its secretary, Stephen Tallents, described it as “part of a movement away from a mechanical toward a biological conception of government.” It responded organically to circumstance rather than following a preordained path. Tallents reported to Rivett in 1931 that Ratcliffe was “much improved … by his time in Australia” (Tallents papers).

In 1932, at the University of Aberdeen, Ratcliffe took up writing “to lighten the darkness of the northern Scottish winters by calling up memories of antipodean warmth and sunshine” (1947, p. vi). His journalist father encouraged him to write for a popular audience, and writing “adventures of a biologist in Australia” maintained his interest in things Australian. When in 1935 Rivett offered Ratcliffe a new post as a “biological scout” in Australia, he seized the opportunity. This doubled the “adventures” for his book, and it also changed the context of his writing. He was no longer writing as a visitor; he had become an Australian. Agnes Marnoch, daughter of Sir John Marnoch in Aberdeen, agreed to join him, and they were married on 14 January 1936 in Melbourne.

Ratcliffe’s new task was to look into the problems of wind erosion affecting the interior from South Australia to Queensland. Even from Melbourne the extent of the problem was apparent, as dust storms darkened the city and mallee topsoil gathered on urban roofs. The snow-capped mountains of New Zealand were stained red. As with his flying fox work, he began by traveling to the people most affected.

“A Creeping Cancer of the Land.” The “Dirty Thirties” were nightmare years for pastoralists. Ratcliffe described soil erosion as “a creeping mortal sickness” of the land and inland Australia as “nothing less than a battlefield” (1938, pp. 326, 323). He saw the arid pastoral belt of inland South Australia and southwest Queensland denuded of its natural saltbush by overstocking, in the same years as the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains of the United States. In Australia, as in America, it was a time of extended drought—most of the stations he visited had failed to register average annual rainfall for fourteen consecutive years.

Ratcliffe traveled alone, listening, observing, and asking questions: The people were as much his subject of study as the land. He visited deserted homesteads where the drift sand piled to the top of the windows, where stockyards and even riverbeds were buried. “We breathed sand, drank sand and ate sand; and when we blinked our eyeballs grated. Sand was in the butter, in the sugar, in the cake, and in the vegetables” (1938, p. 280). Dinner was sometimes even served under a tablecloth; Ratcliffe and his hosts ate blind, poking underneath the cloth and snatching mouthfuls before too much sand collected in the food.

The “kingdoms of dust” threatened not just the economy but sanity. Ratcliffe’s solution for soil erosion was not about science but rather about Australian society and expectations of the inland. Australians “had every reason to be intensely proud of their record in settling the great spaces of the inland,” he commented. “They are only to be blamed in that they seem to have done the job too thoroughly” (1938, p. 332). Australian inland settlement needed a whole landscape solution, with a social as well as natural balance:

The essential features of white pastoral settlement—a stable home, a circumscribed area of land, and a flock or herd maintained on this land year-in and year-out—are a heritage of life in the reliable kindly climate of Europe. In the drought-risky semi-desert Australian inland they tend to make settlement self-destructive. (p. 323)

At a time when populating the inland was regarded as a patriotic duty, Ratcliffe regretfully concluded Flying Fox and Drifting Sand with a contrary edict: The only thing that would preserve such country would be “consciously to plan a decrease in the density of pastoral population of the inland.” It was, he wrote, “not the answer I wanted or hoped to find” (1938, pp. 331, 326).

The Cost of Inland Settlement Ratcliffe’s report of 1936, Soil Drift in the Arid Pastoral Areas of South Australia, was immediately influential. Rivett gave a public lecture that year about the environmental cost of production, noting that “the conservation of our soils is no doubt one of our major obligations as a people” (1937, p. 2). Soil conservation authorities were established in New South Wales in 1938 and Victoria in 1940.

In 1937 Ratcliffe redirected his “applied ecology” skills to insects, particularly the pests of stored wheat, in his work as senior research officer in CSIR’s Division of Economic Entomology in Canberra. The imperatives of war drove new research on mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases, particularly malaria, scrub typhus, and dengue fever. In 1942–1943 he traveled extensively in the southwest Pacific area. Ratcliffe’s research in the postwar reconstruction period focused on termites, a major concern for the development of northern Australia.

Ratcliffe’s Flying Fox and Drifting Sand had been published in London in 1938 but not in Australia until 1947, and its influence gathered pace in the postwar years. It was reprinted seven times between 1947 and 1976. One reviewer noted that Ratcliffe’s writing revealed “an abiding admiration for the qualities of the men and women” he had encountered in his work (Sydney Morning Herald, 26 March 1938, p. 6). The review in the London Spectator concluded:

The chief impression that remains after reading this book is of the indomitable spirit of the stockmen and boundary riders and drovers (and still more, perhaps, of their wives) who are fighting what may be a losing battle against drought and drifting sand. (28 January 1938, p. 142)

Its celebration of pioneering culture recommended it as a text for Australian high schools. It could also explain Australians and their country to the world: It was one of five books chosen in the late 1950s to be printed for the “Cheap Books Scheme for Asia,” a secret plan to combat communism by competing with “the flood of cheap books provided in Asia by Soviet Russia” (R. G. Casey to H. E. Holt, 1959). The plan was not implemented, but the government clearly felt that publicizing the limits of Australia’s “empty” lands might protect them from invasion.

Rabbit Research In 1949 the CSIR expanded to become the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), and Ratcliffe was appointed officer-in-charge of the new Wildlife Survey Section, established to undertake a comprehensive survey of the nation’s biological resources, a recommendation at the 1935 Congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science. The biological survey, however, became second priority for the Wildlife Survey Section behind the scourge of rural politics, the rabbit. The contribution of the exploding rabbit population to soil erosion in inland Australia was described by Ratcliffe in 1959 as “one of the world’s significant ecological events” (p. 545). He worked closely with the virologist Frank Fenner on myxomatosis, the rabbit-specific disease that dramatically reduced rabbit populations for many years. The loudest critic of Ratcliffe’s cautious approach was the medical scientist Jean Macnamara, who had advocated the introduction of myxoma since first observing it at Princeton University in the 1930s. Ratcliffe commented wryly that he regarded him as “a boil on the bum of progress” (Warhurst, p. 62).

The only way to advance “pure” scientific knowledge in such a pragmatic political climate was to undertake CDK (“Chief Doesn't Know”) projects. Ratcliffe ensured that one day per week should be available to “unfundable” projects that gave his section’s scientists personal satisfaction. Under Ratcliffe’s nurturing expectations, some scientific studies of non-pest wildlife (particularly birds) emerged.

When a directive was issued in 1955 that all research results had to be published by CSIRO, Ratcliffe appealed to the head office to grant him, as officer-in-charge, “a certain amount of discretion” about what might be regarded as “official”:

Many of my staff publish, or want to publish a lot of unofficial stuff; and sometimes the line between the official and the unofficial is quite impossible to draw. Sometimes work which started as a purely hobby interest, done in a man’s spare time and at weekends, may develop into a piece of official research—the best example of this is Harry Frith’s interest in the Mallee Fowl, and the physics of its egg incubation. (National Library of Australia MS 2493, 16 August 1955, p. 1)

Research for Wildlife Conservation Five years later, on 22 July 1960, Ratcliffe wrote to the Australian ornithologist Dominic Serventy of his frustrations about the lack of progress with scientific wildlife research:

You will probably realize, when you read my Report, that I was deliberately angling for an official blessing on basic research activities. Hitherto my policy has been to “get away with” as much as we could without over-publicizing our academic work. I felt that when we had the results to show the world we could risk seeking an official blessing for this type of study. (MS 2493, 22 July 1960, p. 1)

In fact the committee that reviewed the section’s work in 1960 was enthusiastic about its broad program but offered no guidance as to how the section could continue this work alongside “the applied side—our responsibilities to the taxpayer and the land-holder you might say” (1960, p. 2). Ratcliffe trusted his staff, and it annoyed him that he was not granted either the resources or the discretion to develop a quality scientific program. His preferred approach was intense and time-consuming, demanding long immersion in fieldwork. He was convinced by his own earlier work that “the cheapest and most profitable [method] in the long run is to send a good man into the problem area to spend a year or so … making his own onthe-spot assessment of the problem.”

Recommendations needed “first-hand local knowledge,” Ratcliffe wrote to Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe in 1958, when he was a promising junior mammalogist considering the problems of red kangaroos in Western Australia. “Many field pest problems are half solved when they have been assessed and re-stated by a man combining ecological and commonsense after a fact-collecting survey of six months or so” (24 March 1958). Too busy with management to maintain his personal research projects, Ratcliffe sought to create an environment in which good ecologists with people skills gathered local knowledge and facilitated what was later called “community participation.”

Ratcliffe worried constantly about work undone and sought alternative support for a national conservation program. The Wildlife Survey section had not collected or collated even basic “data needed for appraisal of the present situation” or “information on the status and distribution of the more interesting species” or assessed the biological adequacy of reserves. A survey of “the status of marsupials in the State of New South Wales” was the sole achievement of the first eight years of the section’s research effort, and that was only achieved with additional funding from the state government, he wrote on 1 May 1957 (AAS, file 1002). Ratcliffe saw the foundation of the new Australian Academy of Science as a possible umbrella for something “planned, positive and national” for the endangered Australian biota. He recognized that this required “more than a dash of idealism” and appealed for support and sponsorship (p. 1). The academy promoted nature conservation through its committees but did not have the capacity to do more than “point the way.”

Australian Conservation Foundation Ratcliffe had hoped that emerging political enthusiasm for the environment would provide a new source of funds for science. He had stepped aside from the Wildlife Survey in 1961, returning as assistant chief to the Division of Entomology until his full retirement in 1969. This freed him to undertake the position of honorary director of the new Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) in 1965. He regarded ecological science for nature conservation as a cause worthy of both government and non-government funding, and the academy and the CSIRO supported his “backroom” scientific efforts.

In 1968, at the height of a major minerals boom, Ratcliffe wrote Conservation and Australia, bemoaning the fact that “any suggestion of restraint, or request for second thoughts on some local development guaranteed to provide a quick and sure economic pay-off, is only too easily brushed aside as unrealistic or even unpatriotic” (p. 5). Ratcliffe argued that conservation demanded reconciliation between “economic conservation” and “nature conservation.” It should include the wise use of economically important natural resources and also the preservation of “the less tangible things … for a full and satisfying life,” including wildlife and the natural beauty of the landscape. He separated the intangibles from the commodities, recognizing that natural resource managers often failed to take these into account. Conservation in Australia, written before the world had come to hear terms like green, foreshadowed the agenda of the 1970s environmental movement. Ratcliffe’s “applied ecological” turn of phrase acknowledged the place of species other than humans in nature and the role of the natural in human life.

Ratcliffe’s last years, despite ill health, were spent defending scientific nature conservation. He was increasingly worried that the ACF was becoming professionally political rather than providing scientific advice to elected politicians. He died in 1970, still “in harness,” working as technical adviser to the House of Representatives Select Committee on Wildlife Conservation. In a large country with very few ecologists and that still lacked baseline surveys for mammals and reptiles, such work laid the foundations for an Australian Biological Resources Study, which tentatively commenced operations in 1973 and was made permanent in 1978.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The National Library of Australia has almost all archival materials, apart from letters from Ratcliffe in other collections.

WORKS BY RATCLIFFE

Soil Drift in the Arid Pastoral Areas of South Australia. Melbourne: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), 1936.

Flying Fox and Drifting Sand: The Adventures of a Biologist in Australia. London: Chatto and Windus 1938. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1947.

Weevil Control: Information for Guidance of Wheatgrowers. Melbourne: Government Printer, 1941.

With F. J. Gay and R. N. McCulloch. Studies on the Control of Wheat Insects by Dust. Melbourne: CSIRO, 1947.

The Rabbit Problem: A Survey of Research Needs and Possibilities. Melbourne: CSIRO, 1951.

With F. J. Gay and T. Greaves. Australian Termites: The Biology, Recognition, and Economic Importance of the Common Species. Melbourne: CSIRO, 1952.

“The Rabbit in Australia.” Monographiae Biologicae 8 (1959).

With Frank Fenner. Myxomatosis. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1965.

Conservation and Australia. Canberra: Australian Conservation Foundation, 1968. Reprinted from Australian Quarterly40, no. 1 (March 1968).

Commercial Hunting of Kangaroos. Parkville, Australia: Australian Conservation Foundation, 1970.

OTHER SOURCES

Casey, R. G., to H. E. Holt. 14 August 1959. Series A1838/283, item 563/6/5. National Archives of Australia.

Dunlap, Tom. “Ecology and Environmentalism in the Anglo Settler Colonies.” In Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, edited by Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin. Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997.

Griffiths, Tom. “Going with the Flow: Flying Fox and Drifting Sand.” In Storykeepers, edited by Marion Halligan. Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001.

———. “Francis Ratcliffe and Changing Ecological Visions.” In Perspectives on Wildlife Research, edited by Denis Saunders, David Spratt, and Monica van Wensveen. Sydney: Surrey Beatty & Sons, 2002.

Noble, J. C., and G. H. Pfitzner. “‘They Know Not What They Do’: On William Rodier and His Mission to Exterminate Rabbits and Other Pests.” Historical Records of Australian Science 14, no. 4 (2003): 431–457.

Oakman, Daniel. “The Seed of Freedom: Regional Security and the Colombo Plan.” Australian Journal of Politics and History46, no. 1 (March 2000): 67–85.

Powell, Stephen. “‘Why Misguided Humans Have Attempted to Make Their Homes in It Is More Than I Can Comprehend’: Francis Ratcliffe’s First Impressions of Australia.” Eras1, 2001. Available from http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/eras/edition_1/powell.htm.

Rivett, A. C. David. “The Empire Marketing Board.” Australian Rhodes Review, Melbourne, 1934.

———. “A Talk about Wool: R. M. Johnston Memorial Lecture,” 8 November 1937. MS 83/19, file 1002, National Parks. Australian Academy of Science Archives, Canberra.

Robin, Libby. “Nature Conservation as a National Concern: The Role of the Australian Academy of Science.” Historical Records of Australian Science10, no. 1 (1994): 1–24.

———. “Ecology: A Science of Empire?” In Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, edited by Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin. Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997.

———. “Collections and the Nation: Science, History, and the National Museum of Australia.” Historical Records of Australian Science14, no. 3 (June 2003): 251–289.

Tallents, Sir Stephen G. Papers. ICS 79, file 10. Institute of Commonwealth Studies Archives, London.

Tyndale-Biscoe, C. H. Private archives.

Warhurst, John. “Francis Noble Ratcliffe 1904–1970.” In Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 16, edited by John Ritchie and Diane Langmore. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002.

Libby Robin
Tom Griffiths