Taipan is many things: the Taipan project is a complete refurbishment of the 1.2m UK Schmidt Telescope; the Taipan topend is a new multifibre positioning system comprising up to 300 autonomous 'starbug' robots; the Taipan spectrograph is a new dual arm spectrograph covering 370-870 um at R~2000; in short, Taipan is a fully automated spectroscopic observing˜ facility. In the week that I write this abstract, we have hit a major technical milestone: the Taipan positioner is finally operational, commissioning has begun, and we expect to start early science in January. The Taipan galaxy survey is a 5 year observing campaign to obtain redshifts and optical spectra with near total completeness for an optically-limited sample of 1.6--2.5 million galaxies at z<~0.3, spanning 2pi steradians: fully half the sky. The Taipan galaxy survey has three main science goals: 1.) an all-in-one measurement of the Hubble parameter to ~1% precision; 2.) the ultimate peculiar velocity and bulk flow experiment, with an homogenous set of Fundamental Plane distance measurements for all ~80000 z<0.1 early type galaxies in the Taipan area; 3.) a unique laboratory to study the baryon lifecycle in and around galaxies, as a function of galaxy mass and environment. I will provide an update on Taipan commissioning and early science operations, and priority science plans for 2020. I will stress the complementarities between Taipan and other large Australian-led survey projects including FunnelWeb, SkyMapper, Devils, Wallaby, Emu, Hector, and WAVES. I will also describe a proposed 4MOST redshift survey of up to 5 million galaxies, specifically targeting z < ~0.1, to begin in 2023. In concert with LSST, VHS, WISE, and SKA, the 4MOST hemispheric survey (4HS) will establish a unique laboratory for **resolved** studies of the baryonic lifecycle in and around galaxies, as a function of mass and environment.