History
Once upon a time (like in the 1960s) the most exciting techniques in chemistry were chromatography and spectroscopy. They were to analytical chemists the windows into the composition and structure of organic mixtures and compounds. It can be considered to be the starting point for quality control as it is practiced today. There were many instrument manufacturers and each spent enormous amounts on promotion of their products...but in a very practical and useful way. They actually told us how the instruments worked, what their design principles were ...and you could actually take them apart to see the various components. The last was quite often with the encouragement of the trade representative, who in NZ had such a wide range of instruments to sell that any help from aficionados of the art (it wasn’t quite a science then) was very welcome. No surprise then that we had to help each other and find ways round delivery times for parts and materials that took months, not days to arrive. Now we get delivery in hours and days but we still have the questions “what does it do?” and “how does it do it?”
The NZ Institute of Chemistry held annual meetings and chromatography topics were presented regularly. At the 1972 conference, Don Ferry, Peter Robinson and Jerzy Zabkiewicz decided to form a Chromatography Discussion Group (named after the original Chromatography Discussion group in the UK). affiliated to the NZIC. This was followed by a letter in the Journal of NZIC re the formation of the Chromatography Group and at the August NZIC conference, the group held its first AGM. The Foundation members of the first administrative body were; Dr PG Robinson, General Secretary and Regional Co-ordinators Dr P Nelson (Auckland), Dr JA Zabkiewicz (Waikato), Mr I Grey (Manawatu), Mr W Wever (Wellington), Dr G Metcalf (Canterbury) and Mr D Ferry (Otago). This was followed rapidly by the first symposium on Chromatography in October 1973, held jointly with the Auckland branch of the NZIC.
The purpose of a specialist group within the NZIC such as the Chromatography Group (the “Discussion” was dropped quite early on) was to “promote the learned society aspects” and to nominate a spokesperson (actually a spokesman (sic)) with whom the next conference committee could liaise with. Specialist groups could not charge an annual subscription, and to this day we have not done so.
Instead they could charge a fee to defray expenses for functions they organised. Which we also still do! The "sponsorship” of the NZIC was very helpful in those days and in today’s terminology they were our “angel” who got us up and into virtual independence. The Chromatography Group became very active over the next few years, on its own as well as participating at the NZIC conferences. A range of meetings were held over the years (see Events History) but these have become infrequent since the mid 90s as the pressure of work all round has not allowed us to everything we would like to do.
The focus has turned to developing the training courses which from the start have been held in Hamilton. The first one was a basic Gas Chromatography course at the Waikato Polytechnic (now Waikato Institute of Technology) in 1979. Since then we have introduced a Capillary GC course in 1983 and a basic HPLC course in 1984. These still run each year, though with updated content and course names. In the period 1978-2008 we ran a total of 30 workshops or meetings, 69 training courses, and continue to hold 3 training courses each year to this date. In 2009 we will have our 100th event!
And finally, Peter Robinson and Jerzy Zabkiewicz are still running the CG.