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On 1922 August 20, a 20-strong scientific team, together with a naval party of 10, left Fremantle on one of the major scientific expeditions in Western Australian history. After picking up further personnel at Broome, the party proceeded to the isolated post and telegraph station of Wallal on the northern coast of Western Australia. Their task was to measure with great care the deflection of starlight by the Sun during the total solar eclipse of 1922 September 21. Specially designed photographic equipment of very high quality was used and meteorological conditions were excellent. As a result, measurements were obtained for well over a hundred stars.

The equation of motion of charged incoherent matter, and hence of a test charge, in general relativity can be written as the geodesic equation of an affine connection. Here, the connection is chosen to satisfy a condition which has the form of one of the basic geometrical principles of Einstein's unified field theory. The symmetric part of the fundamental tensor of the geometry is chosen to be the metric tensor of general relativity; equations to be satisfied by the skew part, involving the electromagnetic field, are obtained. An alternative condition on the affinity is also considered.

This paper deals with the motion of incoherent matter, and hence of test particles, in the presence of fields with an arbitrary energy-momentum tensor. The equations of motion are obtained from Einstein's field equations and are written in the form of geodesic equations of an affine connection. The special cases of the electromagnetic field, the Proca field and a scalar field are discussed.

This paper deals with the motion of a point test charge in an external electromagnetic field with the effect of electromagnetic radiation reaction included. The equation of motion applicable in a general Riemannian space-time is written as the geodesic equation of an affine connection. The connection is the sum of the Christoffel connection and a tensor which depends on, among other things, the external electromagnetic field, the charge and mass of the particle and the Ricci tensor. The affinity is not unique; a choice is made so that the covariant derivative of the metric tensor with respect to the connection vanishes. The special cases of conformally flat spaces and the space of general relativity are discussed.

Mestel, Wang and Westfold (1984; ‘MWW’) have recently introduced a pulsar magnetosphere model in which electrons leave the star with non-negligible, but not highly-relativistic, speeds, and flow with moderate acceleration along magnetic field lines before reaching a limiting surface, near which rapid acceleration occurs. Such moderately accelerated flows are analysed here. A second class of flows, which do not encounter a region of rapid acceleration, is found.