1912 - 1981

Ruby Payne-Scott was a pioneer in the field of radio physics and radio astronomy and is thought to have been the first radio astronomer. She was born in Grafton, New South Wales in 1912 and in the early 1920s moved to Sydney to attend the Cleveland Street School, after which she attended Sydney Girls High. She was only 16 when she was accepted into Sydney University to study physics and maths, both of which she graduated in with first-class honours. Only two other female students had graduated in physics at the university before her.

From 1936 to 1938, she worked as a physicist at the Cancer Research Institute, and when the cancer-research project folded, she had to find another job because no positions seemed to be available for a female physicist. In 1938, she decided to obtain a Diploma of Education from Sydney Teachers’ College, after which she taught for a short while at the Woodlands Glenelg Church of England Girls’ Grammar School, in South Australia.

She next got a job at AWA (Amalgamated Wireless Australasia), at which the bosses were very wary of hiring women, even for jobs as typists and cleaners. They hired Ruby as a librarian, but she quickly turned the word ‘librarian’ into what would now be called multi-tasking. She first took on editing the company journal, followed by doing some of the research work in the standards laboratory, and before too long, her full-time job as a librarian had become a full-time job as a physicist and researcher.

Later, when she was working out of the Dover Heights–based field station run by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), she discovered three of the five categories of solar bursts that originate in the sun’s corona and contributed significantly to radio-astronomy techniques.

During her brilliant career as a physicist, she somehow found time to marry, and when she became pregnant, she had to cease her work in radio physics, because no maternity-leave provisions were in place in New South Wales. When she left the profession, she was earning one of the highest annual salaries of the CSIRO’s scientific staff members who weren’t in the administration – £920 – and had been promoted to the position of Senior Research Officer, Grade 1. 

Courtesy Peter Gavin Hall, the CSIRO and Waverley Library Local Studies Collection.