Fyfe Bygrave - Emeritus Professor, biochemist and forest ecologist

Abstract

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