Henley & Grange Historical Society is proud to announce the guest speaker for our July general meeting is Malcolm ‘Mac’ Benoy, 2026 SA Senior Australian of the Year!
When: 2pm to 4pm, Thursday 23 July 2026
Where: Ngutungka Henley, 378 Seaview Road, Henley Beach
Come along and enjoy Mac’s presentation entitled …
The farther backward you look the further forward you can see
This famous quote by Winston Churchill was the lodestar for one of Australia’s longest self-managed citizen science projects. For 20 years, our speaker has led the project at the Bureau of Meteorology resulting in the rescue and imaging of 110,000 pages of weather observations. From those images, close to one million critical weather observations for South Australia (1843-1957) were digitised. As partners in the global ACRE project run out of the British Met Office, the team’s data is stored in international databases used by global climate change researchers. The work of the citizen historians was recognised by the BoM with an Achievement Medallion, rarely awarded to members of the general public.
Mac Benoy will give an interesting and at times, amusing insight into the 20 years of this project where citizen scientists also work as citizen historians. Buried in the mainstream of the project, team members also got involved with the untold story of South Australia’s STEM pioneer, Sir Charles Todd. They inevitably got entwined with the Overland Telegraph and the many other responsibilities of “Mr. T.” As a result, they have an electronic library of over 8,000 documents that defy access without a useful tool to do so. If time permits, Mac will illustrate how this issue was resolved, first by an app that does sophisticated searches, then by a bespoke artificial intelligence app, created by a team of Honours students at Adelaide University, that writes a comprehensive answer gleaned from the full electronic library.
Malcolm Benoy
Meteorological Researcher
2026 SA Senior Australian of the Year
Malcolm ‘Mac’ Benoy has made a significant contribution to climate change research in his role as a volunteer citizen scientist, helping to preserve valuable records and data relating to South Australia’s meteorological history.
International climate change and meteorological researchers have used the group’s records to reconstruct historical weather patterns in the southern hemisphere, helping to better understand how the global climate is changing.
Mac’s professionalism, enthusiasm and insight continue to guide the team of citizen scientists in its work to document and preserve critical weather data.