Interview with Emeritus Professor Fyfe Bygrave Biochemist and forest ecologist

Interviews conducted 6 July 2010, at Emeritus Faculty
Producer, Interviewer and Editor - Peter Stewart
Engineer - Nik Fominas

Biographical introduction: This audio interview, with Professor Fyfe Bygrave, is part of the Emeritus Faculty‘s Oral History Program involving retired staff members of ANU who were part of the university in its earlier life.  The Oral History Program was initiated and developed by ANU Emeritus Faculty as a contribution to university and community understanding of the beginnings and development of ANU over the past six decades.  Emeritus Faculty has a special interest in this period, since the Faculty's membership includes many of the people who helped shape ANU in those early days, to make it the pre-eminent university it is today.

Fyfe Bygrave was Professor of Biochemistry in the Faculty of Science at ANU until his retirement in 2002.  He then became Visiting Fellow in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, continuing to write and lecture, and spending increasing time on a forest regeneration project which he and his wife Tricia initiated some decades ago on a derelict dairy farm on the mid-north coast of NSW.  This project aimed at achieving the cultivation of Toona ciliata (Australian red cedar), a valuable furniture and boat-building timber which was seriously over-exploited over the preceding century

Interview abstract: Fyfe Bygrave was born in Cambridge, New Zealand, in 1937, of parents then living in Fiji.  After primary schooling in Fiji, Fyfe went to New Plymouth Boys High School in New Zealand and then to the University of Otago, where he completed a BSc and MSc.  In January 1962 Fyfe married Tricia who would become his life-long mentor and best friend.  Soon after, they moved to Brisbane where Fyfe began a PhD at the University of Queensland, working on cancer cell metabolism.

Fyfe held post-doctoral appointments at The Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore (working with Albert Lehninger for two years), and a further two years with Theodore Bucher at the Institute for Physiological Chemistry in Munich.  In 1968 he was appointed Lecturer as a founding member of the new Biochemistry Department, in the ANU’s School of General Studies, with Michael Birt as Foundation Professor.  Fyfe’s research focus then evolved from ideas he had gained primarily during his PhD study on the role of calcium ions in cellular metabolism. This led to studies of the quantitative contributions of mitochondria and other sub-cellular organelles in regulating intra- and extracellular concentrations of calcium.  This work, and its extension into mammalian and human physiology, would occupy him for the following several decades, resulting in a prolific output from his laboratory of research papers, conference presentations, book chapters and reviews.  Fyfe acknowledges the important part that honours and graduate students, and research assistants, played in this remarkable and focused output in an important field of cellular metabolism and its regulation.  In 1984 he was awarded the LKB Medal by the Australian Biochemical Society in recognition of his distinguished contribution to research in the field of cellular calcium regulation. He has presented his research findings and ideas at many research institutes and universities, in Australia and New Zealand, and overseas.

Fyfe was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1969, to Reader in 1975, and to Professor in 1996.  With advance in his professional standing, Fyfe was progressively invited to take up administrative roles in the university: Deputy Dean of Science from 1982 to 1984, Dean of Students from 1987 to 1992, Dean of Science from 1999 to 2000; and member of the Resources and Steering Committees of the Board of The Faculties as well as numerous other university-wide committees.

From 1973 to 1975, Fyfe was Acting Head of the Department of Biochemistry in an extended interregnum between the departing head Michael Birt (appointed to Vice Chancellor at Wollongong University) and the incoming Professor and Head, John Williams.  Williams’ appointment soon became problematic for the Department, and Fyfe found himself in sometimes difficult situations as Professor Williams searched for causes of resistance to his authority among the academic staff of the department.  This unhappy state of affairs went on far longer than it should have.  Both Fyfe and the other academic staff observed that the apparent reluctance of the Chancelry to take decisive action in what was so clearly a case of leadership failure was damaging to what was (as a review committee later observed) a productive, efficient, and imaginative consortium of staff and students.  Fortunately, the non-professorial staff adopted a unified and positive approach to what was at many times a painful and enervating state of affairs, and adopted alternative, informal means of keeping the teaching and research activities of the department functioning more or less normally.

The non-professorial staff ultimately appealed directly to the Chancelry to overcome the division and differences between the Head and themselves by reviewing the department.  The review was agreed to and conducted by an external committee in 1981, and major problems identified.  Even so, the existing tenancy of the Head was renewed, and it took another several years before a non-professorial staff member was invited to lead the department, thus resolving the department’s problems.   

Fyfe has been an active member, and played executive roles, in national and international societies and boards overseeing research and teaching in biochemistry and cell biology, and has served on many research committees in Australia and New Zealand.  Prominently, he was Secretary General of the Federation of Asian and Oceanian Biochemists from 1980 to 1987 during which Mainland China became a member for the first time.  He has been a member of editorial boards of eminent international journals of biochemistry and cell biology.

Fyfe was for many years an active member of Rotary International and was awarded a Paul Harris Fellowship in recognition of his contribution to the organisation, particularly in the role he played in the establishment of a profitable community project which became known as Belconnen ‘Trash and Treasure’. This has become a much frequented social and trading centre for many Canberrans over the past forty years.

In the past thirty years, Fyfe and his wife Patricia have become active environmentalists and forest ecologists by way of a forest regeneration project they initiated on a derelict dairy farm on the mid-north coast of NSW.  Initially, this was a weekend pastime but it soon developed into a more serious project on the revival of the cultivation of Toona ciliata (Australian red cedar), a valuable furniture and boat-building timber which was seriously over-exploited over the preceding century.  Natural stands of it, abundant before white settlement, have been worked out, and the tree seemed not readily susceptible to plantation farming.  However, Fyfe and Tricia worked assiduously to explore and define conditions for sustainable exploitation of this significant tree species.  An important aspect of this has been the understanding of a damaging insect pest of this tree species, the tipmoth or shootborer (Hypsipyla sp.).  Fyfe used his cell biologist’s expertise to understand aspects of the host-parasite interaction of tree and insect.  In collaboration with ANU Forestry staff, he co-supervised a PhD scholar’s systematic analysis and documentation of this interaction.  In 2005, Fyfe and Tricia wrote the monograph Growing Australian Red Cedar and Other Meliaceae Species in Plantation, published by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, a measure of their dedication to this absorbing avocation.

Fyfe sees the ANU that he first joined in 1968 as something approximating an ideal university.  The department he joined was exemplary, with a remarkably capable Professor and Head (Michael Birt) providing leadership for a team of cooperative colleagues, and all of the staff challenging their students to think and speak for themselves.  He counts his graduate students, most of whom came from the ANU undergraduate stream, as being especially capable and dedicated.  Among the many administrative activities he was involved in over the years at ANU, Fyfe rates highly the establishment of joint/double degrees.  Fyfe believes emphatically in the advantages of science students doing double degrees, as these provide them with additional training and skills (for example, in commerce, or law, or information technology) which they might fall back onto should their scientific ambitions become frustrated for one reason or another.  Appropriately, Fyfe’s own children – Lee, Stephen and Louise – all graduated from ANU with double degrees.  All then went on to higher degrees, at ANU or at other universities in Australia and overseas. 

Fyfe acknowledges that little of what is described here would have been possible but for the continuing support and commitment of Tricia (herself a noted international academic) over the past 50 years.