Born: 28 October 1938, Australia
Died: 20 February 2019
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: NA
This biography has been shared from The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, published by the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Alison Doley was a farmer and conservationist who from 1966 managed, with her husband John, the family’s wheat and sheep property Koobabbie in the northern wheatbelt of Western Australia. They worked to make the property ecologically and economically sustainable. Among the issues they dealt with were rising water-tables, soil salinity, over-clearing of land, the value of shelterbelts, and revegetation. Integral to this was a monitoring program, and surveys of the property’s indigenous flora and fauna including the identification of threatened species. Doley was keen to facilitate wider scientific studies and field trials on the property. She was a long-term member and active participant in various local naturalists and conservation groups and for nearly 30 years participated in the Western Australia Government’s Carnaby’s Cockatoo Recovery Team. Doley published a number of papers on the fauna and ecology of Koobabbie.
Chronology
1965? –
Education – Bachelor of Economics, University of Western Australia
1970 – 2019
Career position – Member, Western Australian Naturalists’ Club
1979 – 2019
Career position – Founding Member, Coorow Wildflower Group
1986 – 1995
Career position – Member, Waddy Forest Land Conservation District Committee
1990 – 2019
Career position – Member, Carnaby’s Cockatoo Recovery Team, Western Australian Department of Conservation and Land Management
1995 – 2019
Career position – President, Waddy Forest Land Conservation District Committee
1996 – 2017
Career position – Inaugural President, Coorow Heritage Committee
1996 – 2019
Career position – Member, Western Australian Land for Wildlife Scheme
1999 – 2002
Career position – Member, Northern Agricultural Region Regional Assessment Panel. Natural Heritage Trust
2001 – 2019
Career position – Founding Member, Buntine Marchagee Recovery Catchment Steering Committee
2017
Award – Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to conservation and the environment in Western Australia through revegetation and catchment recovery initiatives