D+I 2007: DSTO: the history

1 August 2007

By Gregor Ferguson

Australia’s first defence scientist, Cecil Napier Hake, was appointed a century ago. He worked from the Victorian Government’s Explosives Department Laboratory in Melbourne before opening an office in Victoria Barracks; this eventually shifted to what became DSTO’s Maribyrnong site.

The focus of Defence R&D in those days was on munitions and explosives. An aeronautical and aero-engine research and test centre opened at Fishermans Bend in 1940 and a year later the Salisbury munitions factory was set up in South Australia.
These were the core components, which came together in 1974 to become the DSTO, along with the Navy’s Experimental Laboratory and metallurgical, food and tropical research facilities operated by Defence and the Army.

The scientists at Fishermans Bend, Salisbury and Woomera were very determined high achievers: the so-called ‘Black Box’ aircraft voice and data recorder is perhaps the best-known of DSTO’s iconic inventions; less well known is that fact that 1967 Australia became only the third country in the world to launch a satellite from its own soil, the WRESAT, which was designed by DSTO scientists at Salisbury and launched from Woomera.

The innovative Ikara anti-submarine missile was another DSTO invention, adopted by the navies of Britain, Australia and Brazil during the 1960s and 1970s to counter proliferating Russian submarines during the Cold War.
Plus, since World War II DSTO’s Fishermans Bend laboratory has been the world leader in airframe structural testing and extending the safe lives of aircraft – DSTO’s research has contributed directly to a major extension of the life of the RAAF’s F/A-18 Hornet fleet, and helped determine that the risks involved in keeping its F-111s flying will rise unacceptably beyond 2012.