Trailblazers

Yes, Australia is a remote and sparsely populated country. But when it comes to innovation, it punches well above its weight with world-changing discoveries.

Medicine

Trailblazing Australian scientists have made a difference to the health of millions of people globally. Immunologist Professor Ian Frazer and his team at the University of Queensland, in collaboration with Chinese virologist Dr Jian Zhou, developed the world’s first cervical cancer vaccine in 1991. More than 200 million doses of Gardasil or Cervarix, as the vaccine is branded, have been administered worldwide over the past decade.

Fifteen years before Frazer began his groundbreaking research, Australia’s major scientific research organisation, CSIRO, pioneered an ultrasound scanner after discovering how to convert ultrasound echoes bouncing off soft tissue into images. It was the first medical instrument to provide good pictures of internal organs without using potentially harmful X-rays and has revolutionised prenatal care around the globe.

And let’s not forget those other lifechanging Australian discoveries: spray-on skin for burns victims, disposable syringes and proving that stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium, not stress.

Transport

The tyranny of distance has been a catalyst for Australian innovation. Air travel is vital for crisscrossing the vast continent, as well as going overseas, and safety has always been a focus. Australian scientist Dr David Warren, for example, invented the black-box flight recorder in the 1950s after realising how helpful it would be for crash investigators to have a recording of crew conversations and cabin sounds before a plane crashed. Warren, whose father had died in 1934 in a plane crash, came up with the idea of the almost-indestructible (bright orange) black box, which is now compulsory for commercial flights globally.

A decade later, another Australian, Jack Grant, who worked for Qantas, developed the inflatable escape slide that doubles as a raft for water landings.

Technology

In 2003, Danish-born brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen teamed up with Australians Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma to found a digital-mapping company, Where 2 Technologies, in Sydney. Never heard of it? Google bought the company a year later and turned their innovative technology into Google Maps.

World-leading technology was also behind the Reserve Bank of Australia issuing the first polymer banknotes, in 1988. By 1996, Australia was the first country to have a complete set of plastic notes, which are more difficult to counterfeit and last about 10 times longer than the traditional paper or cloth-fibre banknotes.

Wi-fi

When Dr John O’Sullivan (above) pays for wi-fi at a hotel, his wife teases him: “Don’t they know?” She’s referring to the fact that her husband led a team of five trailblazing scientists who invented wi-fi technology back in 1992. It has proven to be Australia’s biggest science commercialisation, earning royalties of more than $430 million for CSIRO. The pioneering technology is used globally across more than five billion devices such as laptops, smartphones, games consoles and TVs.

To understand what visionaries O’Sullivan and his team were, cast your mind back to 1990 when portable computers and mobile phones were just emerging and office computers were connected via thick cabling. In CSIRO’s radiophysics lab in Sydney, O’Sullivan was thinking about his boss’s challenge to use his radioastronomy skills – honed while searching for exploding black holes in space – to make a difference. “I wondered if it was possible to wirelessly connect computers at the same speed as the best wired connections,” he recalls. Immediately, he knew radio waves were the answer.

Over the next year or so, the team pushed the boundaries of physics to come up with the high-speed wireless local area network (WLAN) but it wasn’t until 2001 that their breakthrough was converted into commercial products.

The next hurdle? Making the global tech giants pay royalties for using the patented technology in their devices. In 2009, CSIRO won a lengthy legal battle in the United States to recover those lost royalties.

Even today, O’Sullivan, who is now retired and living in Sydney, is still stunned by the global impact of wi-fi. “We knew it would be big but I’m just blown away by how big it became,” he says. “I don’t think anyone fully foresaw the potential.”

Cochlear implants

As a schoolboy growing up in Camden, NSW, Professor Graeme Clark told his teacher that he wanted to “fix ears”. He’d seen first hand the frustration and isolation of people with hearing loss, as his pharmacist father struggled to hear customers.

Clark’s early aspirations proved prescient. Not only did he “fix ears” as a surgeon, he also spent years developing the world’s first “bionic ear”, or multi-channel cochlear implant. His life-changing invention has helped more than 450,000 people worldwide to hear. It also spawned an ASX-listed company, Cochlear Limited, valued at $7.6 billion.

In 1967, when Clark began his pioneering research, he focused on electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve to process sound. Sceptics in the scientific and medical communities argued that the inner ear was too tiny and too complicated to house an implant. But a walk on the beach led to the realisation that the flexibility of a blade of grass meant it could reach deeply into a seashell with a similar spiral shape to the cochlear.

In 1978, Rod Saunders became the first patient to have his hearing “switched on” with a cochlear implant.

Today, Cochlear Limited is the world’s leading hearing implant company, thanks to Clark’s “never say never” determination and tenacity. And through Cochlear’s partnership with Salesforce, a community of some 3000 people are able to share their experiences and give advice to those considering implants. That’s trailblazing.