[2] The Parkes Radio Telescope, completed in 1961, was the brainchild of E. G. "Taffy" Bowen, chief of the CSIRO's Radiophysics Laboratory.

Calling on this old boy network, he persuaded two philanthropic organisations, the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation, to fund half the cost of the telescope.

It was this recognition and key financial support from the United States that persuaded Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, to agree to fund the rest of the project.

[4] The success of the Parkes telescope led NASA to copy features of the design into their Deep Space Network, which included three 64-metre (210 ft) dishes built at Goldstone, California, Madrid, Spain, and Tidbinbilla, near Canberra in Australia.

These include:[11] The 18-metre (59 ft) "Kennedy Dish" antenna was transferred from the Fleurs Observatory (where it was part of the Mills Cross Telescope) in 1963.

Phase instability due to an exposed cable meant that its pointing ability was diminished, but it was able to be used for identifying size and brightness distributions.

In 1968 it successfully proved that Radio galaxy lobes were not expanding, and in the same era contributed to Hydrogen line and OH investigations.

[23] Analysis of the survey data found a 30-jansky dispersed burst which occurred on 24 July 2001,[24] less than 5 milliseconds in duration, located 3° from the Small Magellanic Cloud.

[26] More recent results confirm that magnetars, a kind of highly magnetised neutron star, may be one source of fast radio bursts.

[27] In 1998 Parkes telescope began detecting fast radio bursts and similar looking signals named perytons.

[35] Subsequent tests revealed that a peryton can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle.

[36] The telescope has been contracted to be used in a search for radio signals from extraterrestrial technologies for the heavily funded project Breakthrough Listen.

[42] When Buzz Aldrin switched on the TV camera on the Lunar Module, three tracking antennas received the signals simultaneously.