Who are some famous pioneers from Australia?

Answer 1

• Captain James Cook: the first Englishman to recognise the potential of Australia's east coast. However, he was neither the discoverer, nor the founder of Australia.
• Captain Arthur Phillip, the first Governor of New South Wales, and the one who founded Australia.
• Matthew Flinders, who was the first explorer to circumnavigate and chart the Australian continent.
• Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth, who were the first to cross the Blue Mountains and find good grazing land on the other side. This enabled the colony of Sydney Cove to expand. There were many famous explorers after these three men crossed the Blue Mountains. They included John Oxley, George Evans, Charles Sturt, Hamilton Hume, Sir Thomas Mitchell, Ludwig Leichhardt, Eward Eyre, Robert O'Hara Burke and William Wills, John McDouall Stuart, just to name a few.
• Edward Hargraves, the man credited with being the first to discover payable gold, and hence the one who started the Australian goldrush.
• Sir Edmund Barton - first prime minister
• Sir Henry Parkes - father of federation
• A.B.'Banjo' Paterson and Henry Lawson, both patriotic authors and poets of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
• Charles Perkins - fought for indigenous rights and first indigenous person in Australia to graduate from a university.
• Charles Kingsford Smith. He completed the first non-stop crossing of the Australian mainland and the first flight from Australia to New Zealand. In 1930 he flew 16 000 kilometres single handedly and won the England to Australia air race. He is particularly well-known for being the first to cross the Pacific from the United States to Australia, which he did in 1928, in the Southern Cross, a Fokker FVII-3M monoplane.

Answer 2

• Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet: immunology and virology
• Professor Dorothy Hill: geology and palaeontology
• Professor Robert Street: development and properties of magnetic materials
• Professor David Craig: Theoretical chemistry
• Professor Brian Anderson: control systems; signal processing; telecommunications
• Professor Richard Stanton: metallic ore deposits; volcanic and metamorphic geochemistry
• Dr Patricia Woolley: zoology
• Dr Elizabeth Blackburn: Biophysics and Biochemistry

More Australian scientists can be found at the related link below.

Answer 3

It depends upon the field.

Pioneers in exploration include Oxley, Flinders, Eyre, Burke & Wills, Ludwig Leichhardt, Sturt, Stuart (although none of these was born in Australia), Mawson.

Pioneer aviators would be Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and Lawrence Hargrave.

The pioneer of the School of the Ait was the Reverend John Flynn.

Pioneer statesmen include William Charles Wentworth (who was actually born on a convict ship on the way to Australia), Sir Henry Parkes and Sir Edmund Barton.

Answer 4

Edmund Barton, Henry Parkes, Alfred Deakin, Kevin Rudd, John Howard.

Answer 5

Fred Hollows - Ophthalmologist