Science as an extra dividend: Frontiers of science

Frontiers of Science, an Australian science newspaper comic strip that was published in the Sydney Morning Herald every weekday from September 1961 until 1979, retains the record of being the longest-running newspaper science comic strip in the world. It was syndicated internationally to over 200 newspapers, and was translated into 14 languages. Its educational aspirations, its 'omnipotent' (read white, English-speaking) perspective, and its existence at the edge of comics and on the border between science fact and science fiction offer an invaluable record of the ways that science was imagined and popularized (in Australia and in several other countries) in the second half of the 20th century. In this piece we argue that Frontiers of Science bears witness to the intimate relations between the popularization of science and the broader political and social contexts of science, and that Frontiers of Science demonstrates the specificity of Australia and its place in the world during the 1960s and 1970s.