“…Oliver Lancaster (1913–2001), the Foundation Professor of Statistics at the University of Sydney, was known to us in the SSAI (Statistical Society of Australia Inc.) both in that capacity and as a medical statistician. His first post in Sydney, from the end of World War II onwards, was in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, from where he ultimately submitted about fifty manuscripts to the Medical Journal of Australia in what he described as his Mortality Series (see Section 5 of Seneta & Eagleson, 2004). The most striking finding in his series of investigations on the prevalence of cancer was that death rates from malignant melanomas were higher amongst people living nearer to the equator.…”