This lecture commemorates the memory, so recent, of our esteemed and much-loved colleague, Steve Smerd, who died in Sydney a few days before Christmas day last year. The fact that there was a spontaneous move to pay our respects in this unusual way, dedicating an international scientific symposium to honour his memory, must mean that we are dealing with a special individual as a scientist. What do we remember about Steve, the scientist, that was special? I do not think it will be es pecially for his writings and publications. Although these included some that were definitive and highly significant, they were rather few in number. Although he has so much to tell Steve was not a good commu nicator through the written word. Though strictly logical, in a teutonic sort of way, his sentences had the tendency of never quite terminating, and their comprehension sometimes demanded of the reader the same kind of determined concentration as is required in the solution of a second order differential equation; he needed, and usually has, a co-author or a helper. To his Sydney-based colleagues by far his most famous writ ings were universally known as T the unpublished works of S.F. Smerd 1these, the mightly efforts that never quite came to the public eye, were voluminous indeed. No, Steve's method of communication was not through writing, but rather through a kind of oral evangelism. Paul Simon of Meudon Observatory, himself the holder of holy orders, once told me that a visit from Steve was like a visit from the Pope himself. It was not the fact that Steve was sometimes inclined to pontificate, but rather that, though a modest and self-effacing man, he spoke with such author ity and omniscient confidence about everything that one was left in no doubt that here indeed was the true word spoken by the priest from on high. Steve had many interests. I think always of his intense interest in politics which I described on another, more solemn occasion, as lying somewhere between old-fashioned liberalism and old-fashioned socialism. But his abiding interest above all else was the central point of his profession-the Sun. And in talking of the Sun and its basic under standing he interacted marvellously with his colleagues the world over. That is what makes him so special. He was always close to the observa-5
