There quite by accident I discovered that the father of radio astronomy was an American-born Tasmanian Grote Reber. "For nearly a decade he was the world's only radio astronomer." (wikipedia)
Then I accidentally stumbled on the Mt Pleasant Observatory in Cambridge near Hobart. Here is a piccie of the main 26m dish and one more of the now decommissioned Vela dish that was an instrument built in 1981 solely for observing the Vela Pulsar - which it did for 20 years, 18 hours a day!
At NACAA this year (Easter, Brisbane) the Perdrix address was about Grote Reber; his life and his work in radio astronomy. The fact that he was an amateur astronomer only adds to the surprise - he did groundbreaking research which laid the foundation for today's radio astronomy programs.