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Be it the world鈥檚 first practical refrigerator or the wireless network enabling you to read this very sentence, world-changing inventions have long had Australian creators.

Now a doctoral researcher at the University of Sydney is calling on inventors across the country to share the nuts and bolts of their approach to innovation to help better understand the prevalence 鈥撀燼nd impact 鈥� of Australian ingenuity.听

Inspired by a 鈥榣ong, substantial and eclectic鈥� list of Australian inventions, Jonathan Englert is researching the cultural, historic and individual traits that yielded Australian inventions as wide-ranging as the black box recorder, the pacemaker, and the bionic ear.

鈥淢ost of all, it seems to me that no one has ever really explored Australian inventiveness the way it ought to be explored,鈥� said Englert, a doctoral researcher at the University鈥檚 Department of Media and Communications.听

鈥淭here have been a handful of children鈥檚 books and the odd inventor鈥檚 profile, but nothing that鈥檚 tried to dig down into the why of Australian inventiveness, nothing that鈥檚 looked for what might be different in the ways Australians approach invention.鈥�

Englert wants to pin down why and how it is that Australia has contributed so substantially to global invention 鈥撀燼nd he needs inventors鈥� help.

To aid this research, Englert is calling on inventors across Australia to share details of their process, practices and approach. His collaborators will need to be able to demonstrate that their invention story has a clear connection to Australia and that it is sufficiently advanced.

鈥淔irst, I want to learn about their invention process. How does it happen? An initial spark? Tinkering? A problem to solve? Boredom? And then I鈥檇 like to get them to speculate as to what distinctly Australian elements influenced their inventiveness, if any. If time and other factors allow, I may visit and observe them in the invention process,鈥� he said.

Australian invention is long and storied, as Englert recounts.

鈥淭he characters behind these inventions are fascinating; like Lawrence Hargrave who played a major role in the invention聽of聽the airplane and who was against patents (he was the open source pioneer of the 19th century), James Harrison, the journalist inventor of mechanical refrigeration to create ice, who made a disastrous decision around freezing beef and had to return to journalism, and Barry Marshall who overturned the medical establishment and won the Nobel Prize for discovering the cause of most ulcers.鈥�

Englert has interviewed a number of inventors in the initial stages of his research 鈥撀燼nd even now, there is the hint of a theme emerging.

鈥淚鈥檓 beginning to think a kind of fearlessness is very important [for inventors], but it鈥檚 not necessarily physical courage so much as it is a kind of essential confidence that one has a right to ask the questions that one is asking, and test the ideas that one聽wants to test. It鈥檚 still early days in my research, but this word聽鈥渇earlessness鈥� has come up again and again,鈥� he said.

You can follow him on Twitter at .听