Patrons
Sustainable Population Australia is delighted and very honoured to have the following eminent Australians as patrons -
Dr. Paul Collins
 Born in Melbourne, Australia, in March 1940, Paul Collins is an historian, broadcaster, and writer. In March 2001 he resigned from the active priestly ministry of the Catholic Church due to a dispute with the Vatican’s Congregation for the doctrine of the Faith over his book Papal Power.
For many years he has worked in varying capacities in TV and radio with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). He also writes regularly for many of Australia’s leading newspapers and magazines, as well as for the London Tablet, the National Catholic Reporter in the United States and for several Catholic magazines in Germany. At present he presents the ABC TV programme, Sunday Spectrum. It examines ethical, spiritual and philosophical/theological issues in the contemporary world.
He has a Master’s degree in theology (Th.M.) from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in history from the Australian National University (ANU). He has taught church history and theology in Australia, US and Pacific countries and worked as a parish priest in Sydney and Hobart. In 1998 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the ANU, and Ethel Hayton Visiting Fellow in Religion and Society at the University of Wollongong. He also has wide experience in tertiary and adult education.
Between 1988 and 1996 he was a producer-presenter in the ABC in radio and TV, and for three years he was Specialist Editor-Religion for the ABC. He is the author of Mixed Blessings [Penguin, 1986], No Set Agenda. Australia’s Catholic Church Faces an Uncertain Future [David Lovell, 1991], God’s Earth. Religion as if matter really mattered [Harper Collins 1995], Papal Power [Harper Collins, 1997], Upon This Rock. The development of the papal office from Saint Peter to John Paul II [Melbourne University Press, 2000], and From Inquisition to Freedom [Simon and Schuster, 2001]. He is at present working on a book on the ethics of population.
While he is well known as a commentator on the papacy, he also has a strong interest in environmental and population issues, and his book God’s Earth has been made into a major TV documentary by the ABC. He is a member of the Australian National Committee for the Earth Charter and he was also one of a thousand world religious leaders invited to attend the United Nations Millennium Peace Summit in August 2000.
Nowadays he works as a freelance writer, speaker and broadcaster on environmental issues, social ethics, theology, history and communication.
May 2001
Prof Frank Fenner AC
 Frank Fenner was born in Ballarat in 1914 and graduated M.B., B.S. in the University of Adelaide in 1938. He was awarded the
degree of MD in 1942, for papers on the physical anthropology of
Australian Aborigines. He served in the Royal Australian Army
Medical Corps from 1940 to 1946 and in 1945 was awarded an MBE
for his work on malaria control in New Guinea. After the war he
worked with Macfarlane Burnet at the Walter and Eliza Hall
Institute for two and a half years and then with Dr René
Dubos at the Rockefeller Institute for a year. In July 1949 he
was appointed Professor of Microbiology at the John Curtin School
of Medical Research, Australian National University and from 1967
to 1973 he directed the John Curtin School.
With a lifetime interest in environment from 1973 to 1979 he
was Director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies
in the Australian National University. After retirement at the
end of 1979 he was appointed a visiting fellow at the John Curtin
School, a position that he still occupies. In 1976 he was made a
CMG for contributions to medical research and in 1989 he was
awarded the AC for his contributions to preventive medicine.
His principal research work has been concerned with
poxviruses: mousepox, myxomatosis, vaccinia genetics and smallpox
and his writings with poxviruses, animal virology, smallpox
eradication, environmental problems and the history of science.
He has published some 290 scientific papers or book chapters and
has been editor of four books and author or coauthor of 14
books.
Since 1965 he has been a member of the World Health
Organization Expert Advisory Panel on Virus Diseases, and from
1969 onwards he was associated with the WHO Intensified Smallpox
Eradication Program, being Chairman of the Global Commission for
the Certification of Smallpox Eradication from 1977 to 1979 and
Chairman of the Committee on Orthopoxvirus Infections from 1980
to1985 and at its meetings as an ad hoc Committee in 1986, 1990
and 1994. In 1988 he shared the Japan Prize (Preventive Medicine)
with Dr D.A. Henderson (USA) and Dr I. Arita (Japan) for work on
smallpox eradication.
He is a Life Member of the Australian Conservation Foundation
and was Vice-President, 1971-73. He was a member of the
Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment from 1971 to
1976 and Editor-in- Chief, SCOPE publications, 1976-1980. From
1978 to 1982 he was a member of the Senior Scientific Advisory
Board for the UN Environment Program Project "The State of the
Environment: Ten Years after Stockholm."
He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science
and between 1967 and 1982 was a member of five and chairman of
two of its of its committees concerned with environmental
problems. He gave the Flinders Lecture of the Academy in 1967 and
the Burnet lecture in 1985. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society of London in 1958, gave its Leeuwenhoek Lecture in 1961
and Florey Lecture in 1983 and was awarded the Copley medal in
1995. He was elected a Foreign Associate of the US National
Academy of Sciences in 1977, has honorary doctorates from Monash,
Liège, Oxford, Brookes and the Australian National
Universities and was awarded the Albert Einstein World Award for
Science 2000.
Prof. Tim Flannery
 Professor Tim Flannery is one of Australia's best-known scientists as well as being one of our best-selling writers. His views are
often provocative, both intellectually and socially.
Tim was for a number of years the Principal Research scientist
at the Australian Museum in Sydney. He started out, though, doing
a degree in English. After graduating, he found a temporary job
at the Museum of Victoria in their Vertebrate Paleontology
department. This led him to a second degree in Earth Sciences,
and from there to a doctorate with the Zoology department at
UNSW.
He is renowned academically for his research into the mammals
of Melanesia, publishing several acclaimed books on the
subject…but he's best known by the broad public as the
author of The Future Eaters, one of the
best-selling non-fiction books in Australia and New Zealand. That
book won a shelf-load of prizes, including the Age book of the
year in 1995 and the inaugural South Australian premier's
literary award in 1996. His interests aren't restricted to
biology, though. Tim has a deep interest in early Australian
history which has also informed his understanding of the way the
Australian environment has been used, and often abused. He edited
and reissued 1788, A Complete Account of the Settlement of
Port Jackson, by Watkin Tench. This was first printed in
1789 and is the first published account of the earliest European
settlement in Australia. Flannery's book became another
bestseller. Since then he has published another about early
Australian history.
Tim appears regularly on radio and is often called on as
expert commentator on a wide range of environmental and social
issues. He's made numerous television appearances and made a
6-part television series for ABC TV based on The Future
Eaters. He has written articles for a broad range of
journals from literary magazines to specialist scientific
journals and mass-circulation magazines.
In 1988 he was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at
Harvard University and on his return to Australia took up the
position as Director of the South Australian Museum. Tim Flannery was named Australian of the Year on 25th January 2007. On 1 August 2007 he took up a new position as Professor in Division of Environmental and Life Sciences at Macquarie University in Sydney.
Prof. Ian Lowe
 Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University and an adjunct professor at two
other universities. His principal research interests are in the
broad area of policy decisions influencing use of science and
technology. He was Director of the Commission for the Future in
1988 and chaired the Australian government's advisory council
which produced the first independent national report on the state
of the environment in 1996.
He was named Australian Humanist of the Year in 1988 and gave
the ABC Boyer Lectures in 1991. A regular columnist for New
Scientist and various other publications, he has recently
completed a term of office as President of Australian Science
Communicators. Professor Lowe was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2001 for services to science and technology, especially in the area of environmental studies.
He is currently President of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF)
Dr. Mary E. White
Mary White grew up in Southern Rhodesia and attended the University of Cape Town where the subject of her Masters Degree thesis in Botany was Palaeobotanical. It was supervised by Professor Alex du Toit, a 'father' of Continental Drift, and from this chance association a lifetime's interest in Gondwana and its environments and biota has evolved. After University, an interest in systematic botany in Africa, travelling and living in the wilds with their geologist husband and young children, provided more background to understanding southern floras.
The White family came to Australia in 1955 and from 1956 until the 1980s Mary White was a consultant to the Bureau of Mineral Resources in Canberra, reporting on field collections of plant fossils and producing 55 BMR Records. She also worked part-time as a consultant to mining companies, while raising five children. As a Research Associate of the Australian Museum in Sydney since 1975 she has curated at the plant fossil collections, establishing a fully documented research collection of 12,000 specimens and writing scientific papers on her discoveries in the collection. This work showed her that there was no book which presented the big, interdisciplinary, picture of the evolution of a continent and its flora through time, and inspired The Greening of Gondwana. (First published in 1986 by Reed Books; Third Edition, published by Kangaroo Press/Simon & Schuster, in June 1998)
Since 1984, Mary White has been a full-time writer and lecturer, presenting her interests in the prehistoric world and the evolution of the Australian continent and its biota to the enjoyment of everyone interested.
The Nature of Hidden Worlds and Time in Our Hands, on the fossil record and semi-precious gemstones, (and four children's books) followed The Greening of Gondwana. An account of how Australia became the driest vegetated continent, After the Greening, The Browning of Australia was published by Kangaroo press in 1994 and won the Eureka Prize. (The Nature of Hidden Worlds has been released as Reading the Rocks -- Kangaroo press 1999 and Time in Our Hands is to be re-released in 2001) Listen ... Our Land is Crying, on the Australian environment, its problems and solutions, followed in September 1997. Its companion volume Running Down - Water in a Changing Land -- was launched on the 23rd of October 2000 by Dr Graham Harris, Chief of CSIRO Land and Water. It covers palaeodrainages; ancient river systems; what our rivers were like at the time of European settlement, and how they are today, groundwater and all aspects of Australia's most precious resource. Listen and Running Down explain how the geological history of the continent pre-determined many of the problems that European-style land and water use have caused.
The Greening of Gondwana, After the Greening, Listen and Running Down form a four part saga, a background to understanding why much of our current land and water use is unsustainable. Another book -- on the Biosphere; bacterial origins for life; symbiosis; the microbiology of soils; and how Australian ecosystems function -- is in preparation.
Macquarie University granted Mary White a Doctor of Science degree in recognition of her contributions to science through her books in 1995. The Queensland University of Technology granted her the degree of Doctor of the University on the 20th September 1999. She received the Riversleigh medal 'for excellence in promoting understanding of Australian prehistory' in December 1999. Running Down was short-listed for the Eureka Prize in 2001.
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