The fantasy of Australians' collective powers

The belief that Australians are a uniquely original and innately inventive people is one of the great Australian legends. But are we really any more inventive than, say, the Japanese - or the English, Chinese, Americans, French or Canadians?

The story of Australian inventiveness is perpetuated by a number of anecdotes, traded in schoolyards, expounded around suburban barbecues, and integrated into the national consciousness.

Australians love to be reminded of the fact that their country developed the world’s first heart pacemakers and the world’s first ultrasound scanners. Australians adore hearing that one of their compatriots led the team that proved the clinical efficacy of penicillin. Australians delight in having won seven Nobel Prizes in science - or nine, depending on how you count them. Australians are also rightly proud of having pioneered the world’s first pre-paid postal service, and of having invented the ballot box.

But scattered throughout the pantheon of national inventions, there are also a number of lesser achievements, soberly elevated into pride of place among those few wild and shining exemplars of brilliance.

Excessive powers of observation, for example, are not required to see how Australians like to congratulate themselves whenever they remember (and this is not infrequently) that one of their own invented the aircraft voice and instrument data recorder, the famous black box. Never mind that this happened way back in 1953. Never mind that the jumbo jet has more than six million parts and represents as assemblage of who knows how many tens of thousands of inventions, of which the black box is but one.

In Australia, we have made ourselves so proud of this single innovation that it has almost come to define Australian brilliance. As a cultural critic once told me: “For contemporary Australians the black box is the most important advance in the history of aviation since the Wright brothers.”

But it doesn’t stop with the black box. Some years ago I met a South Australian engineer who espoused a rock-solid opinion that South Australian engineers and technologists had especially rarefied abilities. I asked him to give me a few examples of great inventions from his part of the world - that is, of totally new creations, not simply innovations or improvements to existing technologies. All that he could recall, now more than a hundred years after the event, was that one of his tribe (Richard Bowyer Smith, of Kalkaburry, South Australia) once dreamed up something called the “stump-jump plough”.

If the South Australian temperament is so truly, deeply and madly inventive, I thought, one has to wonder what on earth they have been doing with all their bottled brilliance over the intervening century. Still, full marks for trying.

I think sometimes that in Australia we are desperate to believe that we possess a particular kind of intelligence. I once saw it advertised by an Australian research agency, as a boast no less, as if it were a really marvellous, wondrous thing, that Australians in the middle of the 20th century built the world’s fifth electronic computer and that they had a crack at electrostatic photocopying even before Xerox in the US patented a much better process that was eventually commercialised so profitably by umpteen Japanese companies.

Whoever wrote that pamphlet knew exactly what they were doing. There is no better way to flatter Australians than to tell them stories about local inventiveness, even of a half-cocked kind. One can only be astonished that the agency in question didn’t also mention the work of Sydney engineer RJ Hastings, who in 1947 invented the world’s first automatic crumpet manufacturing machine, and who followed through soon afterwards with the world’s first machine for the automatic manufacturing of pikelets. Or that they omitted to describe the brilliance of Cyril Callister, who, in 1922, invented a vegetable extract called Vegemite.

Arguably, there is across Australian society an epidemic of vanity about the potency of the national imagination. Many Australians can’t help themselves: even though we believe on the whole we are a self-deprecating lot, many Australians are also intensely proud of their country and an awful lot of them seem to be the happy victims of a fantasy about our collective powers of invention.

Indeed, while most of us do at least have the capacity to approach a few ideas like the Hills hoist, the two-stroke lawn-mower and the wine cask with a degree of ironic sensibility, the very selectivity of this attitude serves mostly just to quarantine all other examples of apparent Australian inventiveness from hard scrutiny.

A very different, generally much blander, picture emerges from the available quantitative evidence. Australians currently produce just under 3 per cent of the world’s scientific papers - impressive, at first glance, for a country that has only a 0.3 per cent of the world’s population, 1 per cent of the world’s trade, and 1 per cent of the world’s economy. However, many of the papers in that 3 per cent represent work conducted in collaboration with overseas researchers. When joint authorships with foreign scientists are taken into account, it turns out that Australia’s share of the world’s scientific articles is really much closer to 2 per cent.

This still compares positively with Australia’s population size: in 2005, the OECD ranked Australia eighth out of all developed countries in terms of the number of research publications produced in proportion to its population. But the argument can also be made that 2 per cent of the world’s scientific output is exactly in line with what one should expect considering the size of the Australian economy. Australia’s economy, after all, is about 2 per cent of the combined economies of all developed nations, where most of the world’s scientific research is performed.

But that’s not all. Moving from papers to patents - another common measure of inventiveness - the picture is even less inspiring. Australians currently own less than 1 per cent of the world’s share of major patent families registered with the world’s three major patent offices: the European Patent Office, the Japanese Patent Office, and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Adjusted for population, that ranks Australia’s ownership of major international patents at a lower level than most of its competitors, with the exception of a handful of countries such as New Zealand, Spain and Ireland.

In fact, accounting for its population, Australia has less than half as many patents granted at the US patent office as does Canada, and less than a third as many as are granted to inventors in Germany, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan and the US.

Patents are a highly imperfect measure of inventive capacity, since in many businesses new ideas are protected via means other than patenting. Arguably, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with our present patenting levels - probably, once again, they are more or less in line with what you’d expect considering the structure of the Australian economy, which is heavily weighted toward smaller business and toward industries that tend to protect intellectual property in other ways. But the country’s contribution is hardly mind-blowing: it is a very long way from the top performing nations, and it certainly does not indicate an unsurpassed talent for inventive originality.

Though it will disappoint those who continue to believe Australia must be in all things a country of extremes, the quantitative evidence suggests that Australia is neither a uniquely clever country nor, fortunately, a uniquely stupid one. In terms of our fundamental abilities to make new discoveries or to create completely new technologies, Australians are fairly average in performance.