Interview with Interview with Peter Stewart – microbiologist and biotechnologist

Interview conducted 5 October 2010, at Emeritus Faculty
Interviewer – Fyfe Bygrave; audio production – Peter Stewart
Engineer - Nik Fominas

Biographical introduction:Peter Stewart joined ANU in 1969 and was Reader in Biochemistry and Microbiology in the Faculty of Science at ANU from 1976 to 1993, when he took early retirement to become a volunteer scientist with a biotechnology program in the UN Food and Agriculture Program in Hanoi, Vietnam.  For a number of years subsequently he worked as an independent volunteer with the Vietnamese Agricultural Genetics Institute, and the Department of Genetics at Hanoi University.

In the past decade Peter has worked throughout Australia with the organization Indigenous Community Volunteers, as an adviser in Aboriginal community development and training.  He intersperses this with a coordinating role in ANU Emeritus Faculty’s Oral History Program.

Interview abstract: It takes only a cursory glance at Peter Stewart’s curriculum vitae to appreciate the contribution he has made as a scientist and community worker over the years, both within and beyond this university.

Peter was born in Mildura in 1937. During his later school years he developed an enthusiasm for reading and learning.  Offered an education department studentship, he delightedly enrolled in agricultural science at Melbourne University.  Influenced both by an older brother and his own ambitions, he then completed a PhD at Melbourne in 1963, working on the molecular mechanisms of wheat-flour dough plasticity and elasticity. This connection between fundamental knowledge and practical reality confirmed for Peter that science could be exciting as well as useful.  Then, in postdoctoral studies at Western Reserve University (US) and Sheffield University (UK), he characteristed a group of enzymes which regulate the synthesis of small molecules which are precursors in cholesterol synthesis in living cells. These years taught him another important lesson about science – it is a passport to international travel and friendships.

Peter and his wife Margaret and first daughter (of eventually three) returned to Melbourne in 1966, where Peter had been appointed lecturer in biochemistry at Monash University.  In 1969, dissatisfied with the quality of research leadership at Monash, Peter joined ANU.  He was appointed senior research fellow in developmental biology in the new Research School of Biological Sciences, working in Dennis Carr’s department, free to pursue his own research interests in organelle biogenesis.  He soon realized, however, that in RSBS he was missing the contact with undergraduate students that had enlivened him at Monash.  Staff in the IAS (and thus RSBS) did no undergraduate teaching in those days.  His opportunity came in 1973, when he was offered a senior lecturership in Michael Birt’s Department of Biochemistry in the Faculty of Science at ANU.  There, he inaugurated a microbiology program in the Faculty of Science, a discipline until then not available to ANU undergraduates.  This popular program provided an important option for science students  in the Faculty. In 1976, he was promoted reader; for three years from 1978 was Dean of Students at ANU.

During his ANU years Peter worked closely with a number of senior members of the university and regards the following as outstanding contributors to the university, and important in his own development as a scientist, teacher, and searcher: Dennis Carr and Ralph Slatyer (in RSBS), Michael Birt, (Faculty of Science), Vice Chancellors Tony Low and Ian Chubb, and Colin Plowman (Assistant Vice Chancellor for many years).  Old friends such as Tony Howells, Ken Reed and Maurice Weidemann (his contemporaries at Melbourne University, and later colleagues in the Biochemistry Department) were also important scientific and personal exemplars for him. He felt and still feels a sense of great privilege to have been a member of ANU in their company.

Along with other staff in the Biochemistry Department, Peter confronted the problems presented by a new Professor and Head of Department when Michael Birt left ANU for the University of Wollongong at the end of 1974.  Michael’s exemplary headship had been such that in little more than six years he oversaw the creation of a top level department, highly successful in teaching, research, and campus football.  Unfortunately the policies and attitudes of the new appointee to the headship were such that the staff were soon embroiled in serious contention and division.  Sadly, it was not until some years later, after universities generally in Australia recognized that senior non-professorial staff could be as effective as professors in management and leadership positions, that Maurie Weidemann (a Reader) was appointed Head, and peace then returned to the department.

Peter’s research interests centred on the molecular genetics and epidemiology of transmissible antibiotic resistance in bacteria (particularly the staphylococci), the evolution of transposable genes in bacteria, and the development of molecular tools for epidemiological analysis of hospital infections caused by multiresistant bacteria.  He was interested also in the application of appropriate and sustainable biological technologies to agriculture and environmental protection, learning about these developing technologies as he and his colleague Geoff Smith taught them in undergraduate classes. Peter’s publications include three books, and numerous papers, reviews, and chapters from his research and teaching.

Early in the 1990’s, Peter began to consider early retirement.  He felt that he had made a worthwhile contribution to academic life, and saw his early retirement as providing for some younger scientist the same privileged opportunity he had enjoyed for more than three decades at ANU.  Moreover, the timing (1993) coincided with a reorganization of molecular biology and biochemistry in the Faculty of Science, as parts of the original Zoology Department were merged with the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, to become the division known as BAMBI.

After a short period of consideration, Peter settled on his next vocation. Over the next four years he divided his time between Hanoi and the ANU. In Vietnam he worked initially as a volunteer adviser for an FAO/UNDP Molecular Genetics Program, located in the Agricultural Genetics Institute in Hanoi.  For the final two years he joined the Biofertilizer Project at Hanoi University as a volunteer consultant (and avid student) in agricultural technology.  Each summer he returned to ANU as a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Continuing Education, and in BAMBI.  He also served as a Visiting Scientist in the Centre for Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture (an ANU/CSIRO collaboration providing knowledge and skills to scientists in developing nations), as a consultant in molecular biology in the Australian Quarantine and Import Service, and as co-director (with Maurie Weidemann, who had taken early retirement from BAMBI at the same time as Peter) of the CCE’s National Science Teachers’ Summer School.  He also Chaired Assessment Panels on Hazards of Genetically Modified Microorganisms for cooperative research centres in CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems.

In 1999, after being ‘warned-off’ by the Vietnamese security authorities (a consequence of working in that Confucian country without obvious means of support, ie. as a volunteer), Peter sought other opportunities in social action.  He became a volunteer with Indigenous Community Volunteers (sponsored by the Australian government, aimed at recruiting vocational advisers in Aboriginal communities), working with a number of Aboriginal communities, remote and regional, around Australia.  This led inevitably to a stint as a volunteer adviser with the Dili Institute of Technology, East Timor, in 2007, assisting with reconstruction and repair of material and social damage caused by civil disruption in the years since that nation’s independence in 1999.

Peter joined with the founders of ANU Emeritus Faculty (John Molony, Barry Ninham and Colin Plowman) in its earliest days to re-establish, under the Faculty’s aegis, the national science teachers’ summer schools which he and Maurie Weidemann had set up nearly decade before.  When the summer schools ended, about six years ago, he has become coordinator of the Emeritus Faculty Oral History Project, in the course of which he has interviewed many faculty members and recorded their views and impressions of the ANU’s past decades.

As he reflects over his years at the ANU Peter is not a happy witness of the ANU as it is now. The spirit of collegiality, so important as an organizing principle in departments, faculties and schools in the ANU’s beginnings, no longer seems to matter.  He is concerned in particular that the ANU, like many universities, has become a ’poorer’ university as corporate micromanagement increasingly prevails.  A more commercial and vocational approach to research and teaching has also not helped.  As for providing advice to budding scientists, Peter agrees with his departmental colleague Fyfe Bygrave that students ought to be encouraged to undertake double degrees, to expand their intellectual and skills base, and then be prepared to switch out of science should their dreams as young scientists not be realised. 

Peter lives quietly and happily in one of the genteel, unpretentious areas of the inner north of Canberra, a close bicycle ride from libraries, swimming pools, and his old university.  And a comfortable pedal from the homes of his three daughters and their husbands, and his eight grandsons.