Shirley Aldythea Marshall Seymour Andrews
Aboriginal rights activist, Biochemist, Communist, dancer and historian
Category Archives: Science
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Marcia Lynne Langton
Marcia Langton is a leading academic and Indigenous spokesperson who has held the foundation chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne since February 2000.
Gertrude Abbott
Using an inheritance from Woods, she established St Margaret’s, a non-denominational maternity home in 1893, and for the next 30 years was involved in its management, initially as president and later as matron.
Ann Moyal
Science historian Ann Moyal’s leading work included Clear across Australia: a history of telecommunications (1984); A bright & savage land: scientists in colonial Australia (1986; second edition 1993); and above all Platypus (2001; published in the US under the title Platypus: the extraordinary story of how a curious creature baffled the world), which was a great success and remains in print.
Bettye Washington Greene
Industrial research chemist Bettye Washington Greene was an early African American pioneer in science. She was the first African American female Ph.D. chemist to work in a professional position at the Dow Chemical Company, where she researched latex and polymers.
Louise Crossley
Scientist and environmentalist Louise Crossley (1942 – 30 July 2015) was closely involved in the establishment of the Tasmanian Greens and the Global Greens.
Elsa Beatrice Kidson
Elsa Beatrice Kidson became a world leader in the research into magnesium deficiency in apples, and did extensive work on the vitamin C content of fruits, the relationship between calcium deficiency and the disease bitter pit in apples, and the link between mineral constituents and nutritional diseases in tomatoes. Her research was of fundamental significance to horticulture and, especially, to the fruit-growing Nelson region.
Ruth Mason
Over approximately two decades she devised various handling and drying techniques and collected and documented some 13,500 specimens, including a number from Australia in 1955 and from Nepal in 1972. She constantly strove to clarify the taxonomy of the plants she studied, and this became an essential component of her water-plant field work.
Jessie Bicknell
Jessie Bicknell helped establish postgraduate and specialist training for nurses in New Zealand.
Joan Wiffen
Joan Wiffen was a self-taught palaeontologist who greatly advanced knowledge of fossil reptiles in New Zealand. Wiffen, who described herself as ‘a rank amateur, a Hawkes Bay housewife in fact, with no scientific training, just … a great deal of curiosity’, made some of New Zealand’s most important scientific breakthroughs. Despite a lack of formal education or specialised equipment, Joan’s excavations of fossil remains in a remote Hawke’s Bay valley produced the first evidence that dinosaurs had once lived on the New Zealand landmass.