Ralph Slatyer

Who was Ralph Slatyer?

Ralph Owen Slatyer AC, FAA was an Australian ecologist, and the first Chief Scientist of Australia from 1989 to 1992.

He was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1929, and was educated at Perth Modern School and Wesley College, Perth, then the University of Western Australia from which he graduated with Bachelor’s Master’s and Doctoral degrees in agricultural science.

In 1951, he joined the Division of Land Research at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, becoming Associate Chief of that division in 1966. In 1967, he left the CSIRO and became a Professor of Biology at the Australian National University in Canberra. While at ANU, Slatyer travelled twice to the United States where he worked as a Visiting Professor at Duke University and the University of California. In the United States, he was appointed a Senior Fellow of both the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation. In March 1975 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society

In 1977, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser offered the position of Australia's Ambassador to UNESCO to Dr. Slatyer. Fraser had originally offered the post to Sir John Kerr, who as Governor-General had been responsible for the dismissal of Gough Whitlam's government in the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, but considerable public pressure prompted Fraser to withdraw the offer to Kerr, and offer the post to Slatyer instead.