Ralph Tate lifts science and Royal Society in South Australia from 1875; uncovers ancient Hallett Cove glaciation
Professor Ralph Tate with other members of W.A. Horn's 1894 expedition to central Australia, including F.W. Belt, Professor W. Balwin Spencer, G.A. Keartland, Professor Edward Stirling. J.A. Watt and C.G.A. Winnecke.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
The arrival of Ralph Tate in 1875, to take over the Elder chair of natural science at the year-old Adelaide University, helped revive the scientific awareness in the colony and beyond.
Tate’s rich background in England included being assistant curator to the museum of the Geological Society of London from 1864 and having published work in geology, particularly palaeontology, and in botany.
In Adelaide, he had published papers on local geology by 1878. He revived and converted the Adelaide Philosophical Society into the Royal Society of South Australia, becoming its first president.
In 1877 he had founded the colony's first continuing scientific journal: Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of South Australia.
In that year, he found impressive evidence of former glaciation at Hallett Cove. His interest in tertiary sediments in the coast south of Adelaide and in cliffs formed by the River Murray became the basis of his most notable work.
He was also associated with finding and studying Cambrian rocks on Yorke Peninsula and of Mesozoic strata in the Great Artesian Basin.
Tate’s university chair of natural science embraced botany and zoology as well as geology. His publications on zoology as distinct from palaeontology comprised about 20 papers, mainly on mollusca. About 40 contributions on botany culminated in his Handbook of the Flora of Extratropical South Australia (1890) and were the basis of present knowledge of the plants of the colony.
He persuaded the South Australian government to appoint its first permanent geologist in 1882 when he went with a parliamentary party to investigate the potential of the Northern Territory. He was a key member of the W. Horn expedition exploring the Finke River region in 1894. He belonged to numerous learned scientific associations in Australia and overseas and worked constantly for the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, being its president in 1893.
