Australian Dictionary of Biography

Sir Noel Stanley Bayliss (1906–1996), professor of chemistry, was born on 19 December 1906 in Brisbane, only child of New South Wales-born Henry Bayliss, journalist, and his wife Nelly, née Stothers, schoolteacher, born in Victoria. The infant Noel spent two years in Western Australia with his mother after his parents separated, before moving to Melbourne, where he attended Canterbury State School (1912–16), Coburg High School (1917–20), and Melbourne High School (1921–23), completing Leaving Honours as joint school dux, and with the exhibition in chemistry. Enrolling at the University of Melbourne (BSc, 1927), he gained exhibitions throughout his undergraduate years in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. He was a member of the Queen’s College rowing eight, and in October 1926 was elected secretary of the student representative council.

Selected as Victorian Rhodes scholar for 1927, Bayliss commenced his first research project, a study of the vapour pressure of concentrated magnesium acetate solutions in water, under (Sir) David Rivett at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (from 1949 CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization), before leaving for Lincoln College, Oxford, in August 1927. Rather than enrol for a doctorate, he accepted advanced standing and completed a BA. In 1929–30, for his Part II (honours) project, he investigated the ‘parachor’—in his words, a concept now ‘disappeared into oblivion’ (Bayliss 1990)—of organic liquids for hydrogen bonding.

First-class honours earned Bayliss a coveted Commonwealth Fund fellowship (1930–33) at the University of California (PhD, 1933), Berkeley, United States of America, where he carried out pioneering work on the electron absorption spectrum of chlorine, his results introducing him to the new science of quantum mechanics. On 9 February 1933, after accepting a senior lectureship at the University of Melbourne, he married Nellie Elise Banks, a chemistry graduate, at Reno, Nevada, and they departed for Australia.

In Melbourne Bayliss was mentored in the art of lecture-demonstrations for large classes by Ernst Johannes Hartung, while extending his research into the spectroscopy of bromine, later claiming that he was better at completing research projects devised by others than designing his own. After five years in Melbourne, he successfully applied for the chair of chemistry at the University of Western Australia (UWA), commencing in February 1938.

Bayliss spent that year setting up a lecture-demonstration course for first-year students in an understaffed and poorly equipped department, classes fondly remembered by his former students. In a department that had emphasised undergraduate teaching, he set about building a research culture focused on trace element deficiencies which had immediate practical applications in agriculture and forestry. He also incorporated aspects of the history of chemistry into his teaching. Such initiatives were delayed by the approach of World War II when, because of his knowledge of chemistry, the State government appointed him honorary chief warden for civil defence (1939–43). He was also recruited to lead the ‘alunite project’ (West Australian 1940, 6) which saw production of the key fertiliser potash and progress on the extraction of alumina. Following the war he returned to spectroscopy research, demonstrating in a 1948 paper that absorption spectra in conjugated compounds could be described quantitatively by a ‘free electron model’ (Bayliss 1948, 287).

After filling senior roles at UWA, which with typical modesty Bayliss described as simply rotating among professors, he served as acting vice-chancellor in 1948 and for eleven months between 1952 and 1953, when he was able, with other vice-chancellors, to directly lobby Prime Minister Menzies for assistance to Australian universities. This led to the government commissioning the 1957 Murray Report into higher education.

In 1945 and 1947 Bayliss served as State president of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI), and later (1955–56) as general president; in 1962 he accepted the presidency of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science for the Sydney congress; in 1954 he had been an inaugural fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and was later (1967–68) vice-president. He served (1956–73) as a member of the CSIRO State Advisory Committee (chairman 1956–61) and as a member (1956–61) of the Commonwealth Advisory Council. Having been joint winner of the RACI’s H. G. Smith memorial medal for chemical research in 1950, he was awarded the Leighton memorial medal in 1967. An inaugural member of the Australian Universities Commission in 1959, he held the post until 1970. In 1960 he was appointed CBE, and in 1968 UWA conferred on him an honorary DSc; in 1975 Murdoch University awarded him an honorary doctorate, the first in its history.

With compulsory retirement looming, in 1970 Bayliss accepted the full-time chairmanship of the planning committee for Murdoch, the State’s second university, and subsequently served as a member of the university senate until 1979. He was knighted in 1979 in recognition of his role in establishing the new university. Sir Noel loved opera and classical music, and when his rowing days were over, enjoyed golf and sailing. Described by a colleague as a man of ‘personal charm and intellectual strength’ (Jefferies quoted in Cole 1996, 207, he had a distinguished appearance and a modest and gentlemanly manner, and went out of his way to support his colleagues and students. Lady Bayliss died in 1993, and he moved into a retirement home. He died at Mosman Park on 17 February 1996 and was cremated; his two sons, Anthony and John, survived him. The rare carbonate mineral baylissite was named for him, and in 2010 the School of Molecular Science building at UWA was renamed to honour his memory.