When Mandyam Srinivasan first arrived in Australia from Yale University in the 1970s, he was stunned by the quality of resources Australia had to offer scientists like himself.
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The neuroscientist recalled the working conditions – even for a self-described "fringe" scientist like himself – were significantly better than in the United States, and Australia was a "hotbed" of research.
But, more than three decades later, he is watching helplessly as his students and younger colleagues are leaving the country in droves, in search of a better future for scientific research.
"It's especially the younger people. I'm getting close to the end of my career, so it probably doesn't matter for me personally, but for the younger people the situation looks very bleak," he said.
Professor Srinivasan was speaking on Thursday at the unveiling of a new portrait of himself, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.
Federal education minister Christopher Pyne was briefly in attendance at the launch, long enough to learn that the professor of visual and sensory neuroscience now joins a distinguished and growing coterie of scientists now represented on the walls of the national institution, an indication of the role scientific endeavour plays in Australian society and history.
But the future of scientific research now hangs in the balance, as jobs and funding are now contingent on the passage of the minister's controversial university fee deregulation policy.
Professor Srinivasansaid his message to the minister was that the scientific community was facing huge uncertainty.
"We really have to do something about it. People are leaving the country in droves, really, because they can't get funding for their research here. They're going to the UK, they're going to the US, many of my colleagues and my students are all going overseas, they're not staying in Australia," he said.
The portrait, painted by acclaimed artist Sam Leach, shows Professor Srinivsan relaxed in his laboratory, with a bee flying above him.
His work at the Queensland Brain Institute is focused on how vision guides and shapes behaviour, and the links between humans and animals, especially honeybees.
"The idea is to get biological inspiration from animals and see if we can build vision systems for aircraft, based on what animals do," he said.
"Boeing, for example, is keen to know what would happen if they lose satellite navigation systems, all of a sudden the GPS systems don't come and we have to rely on our own senses like a bird or an animal. That's what we're trying to find out and put that into aircraft systems as an emergency backup system for them to navigate.
"Bees are amazing, a bee can travel 10 kilometres in search of food and find some food, and it literally makes a beeline back home, it knows exactly how to get back home, so obviously there's something clever going on in their tiny little brains, and that's what we're trying to learn."
Leach said he had jumped at the chance to paint Professor Srinivsan.
"Always what I'm fascinated with in science is when we see this gap diminishing between humans and the non-human animals, and we can see how closely all of us are, really, on the planet," he said.
