Introduction to the E.H. Davis Memorial Lecture

Mr Chairman, Mrs Davis, Ladies and Gentlemen –

After Professor Davis passed away in February, 1981, there was an unanimous feeling among the members of the Australian Geomechanics Society that his extraordinary contributions both to Geotechnical Engineering and to our community were such that we should honour his memory in a way in which we feel he would have approved. The E.H. Davis Memorial Lecture was accordingly established by the Australian Geomechanics Society in 1983.

After service with the Royal Engineers in World War II, Ted Davis came to Australia and joined the Faculty of Civil Engineering at Sydney University in 1952, and from then onwards he was a leader in the development of theoretical and practical methods for the solution of soil and rock engineering problems.

In the Australian and international communities, he made major contributions to the development of a unified theory of the behaviour of foundations and the application of plasticity theory to soil and rock mass stability. His deep knowledge of engineering fundamentals made him the ultimate authority in soil mechanics in this part of the world, and the person to whom we turned when we were faced with a problem too important or too difficult to solve alone. Quite often, I still find myself wondering: “What would Ted Davis have said about that?”.

In the words of Professor D. Campbell-Allen:

“We remember Ted Davis as a kind and civilised man, concerned for his family and his students, as a distinguished practitioner and contributor to the art and science of geomechanics but above all as one who insisted on the highest standards of intellectual rigour in the academic study of engineering subjects. His many colleagues and students who have learned from him provide a continuing memory of his work.”

The second E .H. Davis Memorial Lecture will be presented by Professor Harry Poulos, who was selected by a committee of the Australian Geomechanics Society as a person who had made “distinguished recent contributions to the theory and practice of geomechanics in Australia”.

To describe Professor Poulos’s career as “brilliant” would be an understatement. He graduated with First Class Honours in Civil Engineering from the University of Sydney in 1961 and has since received the degrees of Doctor of Philo.sophy and Doctor of Science in Engineering from the same university. He is the recipient of nine prestigous prizes and awards, including the W.H. Warren Medal of the Institution of Engineers, Australia, and the James R. Close Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He has this year been invited by the British Geotechnical Society to present the 1989 Rankine lecture. He is presently Head of the School of Civil and Mining Engineering at the University of Sydney.

He is the co-author with Professor Davis of two books; the author of five chapters in books and the author or co-author of 111 technical papers.

In what appears to have been his spare time, he gained the gratitude of all of us by converting Lambe and Whitman’s textbook into S.I. units.

Professor Poulos’s research has been concentrated on the analysis of the settlement and deformation of foundations of earth supported structures and by extension on the deformation of embankments and earth dams, on methods of improving the performance of soils and the behaviour of offshore foundations.

He has always made great efforts to present the results of his research in a form which is readily usable by practising foundation engineers, which he has generally achieved by means of graphically presented parametric solutions. In the words of one of his students, Neil Mattes: “Harry is the master of the French curve and the subscripted buggerfactor”.

Professor Poulos has been a consultant on a large number of the most difficult foundation problems encountered in Australia over the last 20 years and of particular note is his work on offshore pile foundations in calcareous soils.

We are honoured that Mrs Kitty Davis can again be with us tonight, and I would like now to call on her to present a framed certificate to Professor Poulos and to invite him to deliver his address on “From Theory to Practice in Pile Design”.