Keith Boardman

Keith Boardman was born Norman Keith Boardman in Geelong, Victoria, on 16 August 1926, a twin, with an older sister born two years before. His father was born in Steiglitz, a gold mining town north-west of Geelong where his own father kept the store. He enlisted in the AIF in 1914, served at Gallipoli and in France, and was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. He later worked for the Victorian Railways. Boardman's mother, born near Ballarat and raised partly in Kalgoorlie, was a dressmaker. The couple married in Western Australia after the war and settled near Geelong in 1921.

Boardman said his interest in chemistry was sparked by his father's textbooks from an assaying course for gold, with equations written in the old-fashioned way. He attended Manifold Heights state school, where mathematics was his strongest subject, and enjoyed cricket, Australian Rules football and athletics.

At Geelong High School a chemistry teacher strongly influenced him, and after five years he moved on to complete a Leaving Honours year at Melbourne Boys High School, a selective school then housed in Camberwell. He studied pure and applied mathematics, physics and chemistry and shared the school science prize.

In 1944 he won a Dafydd Lewis Trust scholarship, which he later said covered his school fees, books and living expenses for seven years and was 'the only way I could have done it'. He graduated BSc from the University of Melbourne in 1946 and completed a two-year research Master of Science in 1949 under Associate Professor Heymann on the properties and thermodynamics of molten salt mixtures. In 1951 he went to St John's College, Cambridge, and completed a PhD in 1953 under Dr Miles Partridge at the Low Temperature Research Station on separating proteins by ion-exchange chromatography. Cambridge later also awarded him an ScD, and the University of Newcastle gave him an honorary DSc in 1988.

Boardman joined the Wool Textile Research Section of CSIR in Geelong in early 1949 and became part of CSIRO when it was established that year. His task was to shrinkproof wool by polymerising acrylic and methacrylic compounds onto the fibre. It worked in the laboratory but needed too much polymer to be practical, and the project turned his interest toward proteins.

At Cambridge he showed that ordinary proteins could be separated on ion-exchange resins if the pH and ionic strength were held within a narrow range, using coloured proteins (cytochrome c and haemoglobin) so that he could watch the bands move. With Gilbert Adair he separated foetal from adult sheep haemoglobin, and the method was later used by others to separate haemoglobins from genetic disorders such as sickle cell disease. After his PhD he held an ICI Fellowship at Cambridge.

In 1956 John Falk recruited him to the CSIRO Division of Plant Industry in Canberra to set up chromatography facilities. He purified a soluble protochlorophyll-protein complex from dark-grown bean leaves and followed its conversion to chlorophyll in a blacked-out laboratory lit with weak green light. Using digitonin, a natural detergent suggested by Fred Collins, he separated chloroplast fractions with different chlorophyll a to b ratios. With Jan Anderson and colleagues including Cyril Appleby, he characterised these particles and gave direct proof that photosynthesis uses two discrete photochemical systems.

As a Fulbright scholar at UCLA in 1964, working with Samuel Wildman, he achieved cell-free synthesis of chloroplast proteins and showed it ran on bacterial-like 70S ribosomes. Over the following decade he studied how photosystems develop as leaves green and, with Olle Bjorkman, compared photosynthesis in sun and shade plants, showing that plants adapt to light intensity by adjusting many parts of the photosynthetic machinery together.

Boardman served as Treasurer of the Australian Biochemical Society from 1957 to 1961 and chaired the biology panel of the Australian Research Grants Committee from 1975. In 1977 CSIRO Chairman Sir Robert Price asked him to join the Executive for a year while the Birch inquiry was under way. He accepted the full-time post afterwards, despite colleagues urging him to stay in research, and worked closely with Chairman Paul Wild to implement the Birch report, including grouping divisions into institutes and setting up planning and evaluation.

He became Chairman of CSIRO on 25 September 1985. Following an ASTEC review, the Hawke government split the role into a part-time Chairman and full-time Chief Executive under an independent Board. Neville Wran became Chairman and the Board appointed Boardman as the first Chief Executive in December 1986. He held the post until 4 March 1990, when he was succeeded by John Stocker.

Among the achievements he was proudest of were winning extra funding for biotechnology as a multisector program, expanding physical oceanography and climate research, moving marine science to Hobart with the research vessel Franklin, starting the CSIRO-University Collaborative Research Scheme with Ian Ross, supporting the Double Helix Club for young people, adopting a structured method of setting research priorities, and seeing the Australia Telescope completed under Ron Ekers. He also set a target for CSIRO to earn about 20 per cent of its funding from outside sources on top of its government appropriation.

In retirement he was involved with the Cooperative Research Centres program and served on a high-level review of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University.

Boardman met Mary Clayton Shepherd while she was a technical assistant at the CSIR wool research laboratory in Geelong. They became engaged before he left for England and she joined him a year later. They married at the Round Church in Cambridge in July 1952. They had five daughters and two sons: Ann, Helen, Jane, David, John, Clare and Philippa. Mary Boardman, born 3 May 1929, died on 9 August 2022. Boardman called their marriage 'a tremendous loving partnership'. At his death he had 21 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. He lived in Canberra for about seven decades.

As a young man Boardman was active in the Kooyong Young Liberals, alongside future Victorian Premier Lindsay Thompson, and like many members he opposed the 1949 proposal to ban the Communist Party as a restriction of freedom. He believed strongly in strategic long-term research as the way to solve practical problems, and valued research collaboration between people of different skills and backgrounds. He valued links between universities, CSIRO and industry, and credited his scholarship with changing the course of his life.

Boardman's work with Jan Anderson in the 1960s provided direct physical evidence that photosynthesis is powered by two distinct photosystems, a cornerstone of modern plant biochemistry. His earlier Cambridge work helped establish ion-exchange chromatography of proteins. As a leader he guided CSIRO from the Birch reforms of the late 1970s to a new governance model with a Board and Chief Executive, and moved it toward biotechnology, climate and ocean science and closer ties with universities. On his 100th birthday the Australian Academy of Science said his 'fingerprints are all over Australian science'.

David Syme Research Prize, University of Melbourne (1967). Lemberg Medal, Australian Biochemical Society (1969). Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (1972). Fellow of the Royal Society (1978). Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (1986). Honorary DSc, University of Newcastle (1988). Officer of the Order of Australia (1993 Australia Day Honours) for service to science and to CSIRO. Centenary Medal (2001).

Boardman was interviewed by Professor Ralph Slatyer in 1999 for the Australian Academy of Science series Interviews with Australian Scientists, and by Tom Spurling and Terry Healy in December 2017 for CSIROpedia. His CSIRO leadership is discussed in histories by Garrett Upstill and Thomas Spurling. No video interviews with him were found on YouTube; the videos on this page show CSIRO in 1986, during his time as Chairman, and projects linked to his work.

No personal controversies are documented. The institute structure he implemented after the Birch report was unpopular with many CSIRO division chiefs, who had previously enjoyed considerable independence.

Keith Boardman died in Canberra on 26 October 2026, aged 100. The cause of death has not been made public. A death notice in The Canberra Times described him as the much loved husband and wonderful companion of Mary for over 70 years. His funeral service will be held in the Jaeger Room at the Shine Dome, the Australian Academy of Science building in Canberra, on Friday 6 November 2026 at 10am, followed by a private burial. In lieu of flowers, the family asked for donations to WWF Australia.