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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
2014-07-03 Daily Xml
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Rathjen, Dr Tony

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (15:34): I rise today to pay tribute to a great South Australian who died last week. His is a name that is probably not widely known outside of agricultural circles, but Professor Tony Rathjen spent a lifetime and a career contributing to the grain industry here in South Australia. Tony was born in 1940 at Birdwood in the Adelaide Hills and remained his whole life living and working in South Australia. He was appointed as a wheat breeder at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute in Adelaide in 1965, where he spent his entire career.

In the early 1960s, wheat was considered as the most risky and poorly adapted of the cultivated crop species in Australia. That is a quote that comes from a book by Lynette Zeitz called The Waite, which documents in part the work of Tony Rathjen at that place. She goes on to say that:

…by the beginning of the twenty-first century, bread wheat was regarded as the best adapted of local crops, and despite some problems with stem, stripe and leaf rusts, the crop least vulnerable to pests and diseases.

All of Australia's major wheat breeding contributed to this transformation but the contribution made by the Waite's wheat breeding program led by Rathjen was disproportionately high.

At the same time as much of that great work was going on at the Waite, there was also a wheat breeding program going on at Roseworthy, and I am sure there was a lot of friendly rivalry between the two institutions as they competed for market share and for acreage across South Australia and indeed right across southern Australia. Gil Hollamby, who was the wheat breeder at Roseworthy at the time and worked in conjunction and in competition with Tony Rathjen, has said that he 'was the greatest lateral thinker that I've ever known'.

In fact, one of Professor Hollamby's daughters and grandchildren live in my home town of Cummins, so I do get to see Gil from time to time. I also had the opportunity of meeting Tony Rathjen on a couple of occasions. He was a lecturer as well as a wheat breeder. He was a lecturer at the Adelaide University Waite campus, and I met him.

Dr McFetridge: He was one of my lecturers.

Mr TRELOAR: Yes. The member for Morphett said that he was one of his lecturers. He was not one of my lecturers, but I met him from time to time on farmer field days and crop walks.

Over his career, Tony Rathjen released more than 20 wheat varieties. You have to remember right through that time and still today wheat is such a significant crop in South Australia. His first major bread wheat release was a variety known as Warigal in the late 1970s. I am old enough to remember that growing the variety Warigal. Each and every variety that Tony released was an improvement on the last and brought agronomic qualities that improved the yield and durability and adaptability of the wheats.

During the 1980s, he worked on soft wheats, releasing Molineaux, which was the first cereal-cyst nematode resistant wheat. This was a significant development, because CCN (or eelworm, as it was known) was widespread across particularly the alkaline soils of South Australia, and to have a wheat that was tolerant to this nematode was a real boon to wheat growers. Yitpi was another variety that Tony released in the late 1990s. It had the combination of being eelworm resistant (or CCN resistant) and also boron tolerant and was very popular, particularly in our Mallee soils.

He did a lot of good work. He developed durum varieties that took off during the 1990s and early 2000s and really had such a significant impact. Very rarely do we have an individual such as Tony making such a unique and overarching contribution to an entire industry. I wish Tony and his family well, and we as wheat growers right across South Australia thank him for his life's work and his contribution.

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