The Land Down Under is home to only 25 million souls – to put that in context, more people live in the state of Texas than the entire nation of Australia. Yet despite the relatively small talent pool it has to work from, Australia has given the world some of the great athletes, such as Don Bradman and Margaret Court, actors like Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, musical talents like Keith Urban and Kylie Minogue – the list goes on.
As well as those famous Aussie celebrities in high profile niches, Australia has also brought some great technological innovators. Their names might not be as famous as Kylie or The Don, but their achievements and inventions have profoundly changed the world for all of us. Let’s raise our hats to them.
Dr John O’Sullivan created WIreless FIdelity.
That’s Wi-Fi to the rest of us, and in 20 years we have come to take it for granted. In any workplace, café, home, or even home, we can connect to the Wi-Fi and be online. If there’s no Wi-Fi within range, we create a hotspot from our cell phones.
In the early 1990s, Dr O’Sullivan led a team at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which patented the use of a technique for reducing multipath interference of radio signals transmitted for computer networking. This technology is core to all modern Wi-Fi implementations.
Len Ainsworth is the (great) grandfather of casino pokies.
The average Australian’s fondness for a wager is no secret. Industry statistics show Aussies gamble as much money per person per year as the second and third biggest spending nations combined! It amounts to about $25 billion annually; half of that is wagered on pokies. In 2024, you can visit online casinos offering hundreds of pokies in Australia. And all those casino games have one thing in common: they were inspired by Wild West, a game invented by Len Ainsworth’s team at Aristocrat Leisure. Before Wild West, slot games were just reels with fruit bars and bells. Wild West gave a first idea of what a video slot – or pokie – could look like.
Without Lars Rasmussen, there would be no Google Maps
Who? You might ask. In 1993, Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens founded a digital mapping business in Sydney called “Where To Technologies”. A year later Google bought it, in what was one of the company’s first significant acquisition.
That’s how Google Maps was born and practically every other online mapping site gave up and went home. Rasmussen went to Google as part of the deal and saw Google Map through to fruition. In 2010, he left Google and returned to Australia, where he has backed a number of tech startups, most notably Canva.
Dr David Warren’s personal crusade for safer flight
In 1934, Rev Hubert Warren from Groote Eylandt in Australia was among the nine passengers and two crew killed when the Miss Hobart, a De Havilland DH.86 crashed in the Bass Strait. His son David was nine at the time, and who can say how much the tragedy shaped his future career in aviation safety?
In the late 1950s, Dr Warren created the first “black box” flight recorder. Despite initial resistance to the idea, Australia was the first country to make the devices compulsory on all commercial flights.
Michelle Symonds could be the next Einstein
That’s Einstein minus the guilt complex, we should add. Symonds is one of the leading brains in quantum computing in Australia, or beyond. The quantum physicist is based at the University of New South Wales and is founding director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology.
In short, she is one of the leaders in a field that few of us can even begin to understand but one that could have as profound an impact on our lives as the internet or smart phone. Calling her the next Einstein might sound fanciful, but just remember – you heard it here first.
