Lesley Head, Melba Crawford, Anne Skates
Toni
O’Neill, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geosciences at the University
of Wollongong, died in April 1999 after a twelve-month fight with non-Hodgkins
lymphoma. Her death came as a particular shock because of the fullness of
her life, and the generosity with which she shared it with others.
Toni grew up in Buderim, Queensland, the only daughter and middle child of the late John (Jack) and Neta O’Neill. Jack, who spent a number of years on the Morobe goldfields of New Guinea, was described as a brave and sensitive man with a great sense of adventure (O’Neill 1979), all qualities clearly evident in his daughter. She used to tell of not being allowed to go to school till she was seven because she was too little to walk the three miles each way. This only made her more determined, and her love of learning was lifelong. The experience stood her in good stead for the more tedious aspects of her arid zone fieldwork, such as walking numerous transects in chenopod shrublands to groundtruth maps derived from satellite imagery. The determination was also evident in the effort required to undertake and complete her PhD while teaching and researching fulltime.
This was necessary because Toni came relatively late to academic life, having worked in a variety of areas, and travelled extensively overseas. Initially trained as a primary-school teacher, she went on to complete a B. App. Sc. At Canberra CAE in 1976. She then worked as an Education Officer at the Australian Museum, Sydney, with a particular interest and expertise in the marine biological sciences, classification, environmental studies and evolution. Toni developed education resources for students visiting the Museum, ran lectures, workshops and hands-on activities and field trips. She was part of the team that developed the human evolution gallery and was involved in other exhibition development. Toni ran the Museum on the Road program for a number of years (this was an outreach program of travelling exhibitions that went all over rural New South Wales). She coordinated the program and developed science education resources to go with each exhibit. Her M. App. Sc. (UNSW)(1987) was on the use of landsat multispectral scanner imagery to map landforms, soils and vegetation in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage region.
Toni began work in the then Department of Geography (later School of Geosciences) at the University of Wollongong in 1987. She was hired for her dual expertise in biogeography and remote sensing, two of the largest areas of student demand. Teaching in the remote sensing area meant establishing the infrastructure from scratch and in a constantly changing environment. In 1987 the cutting edge of departmental technology were two Mac Plus’s that were wheeled from office to office as required. Toni spent a great deal of time and effort applying for equipment and infrastructural resources, and establishing links with other institutions. As a result of her efforts the School now boasts a well-equipped Spatial Analysis Laboratory for research students and staff, which is to be named in her honour, and an undergraduate computer teaching laboratory. She was a great teacher who combined high expectations of her students with empathy for their circumstances and problems. She always had a bevy of enthusiastic honours and postgraduate students, and incorporated the Internet into her teaching long before it was straightforward to do so.
Toni was no computer nerd, however. She was very committed to the integration of field and laboratory work in research and teaching, and was probably happiest out in the bush. Eclectic in her choice of ecosystems, she had personal and professional interests in the arid and alpine zones, rainforests, eucalypt forests and marine ecosystems. Toni loved a range of outdoor pursuits including bushwalking and cross-country skiing, and many people’s favourite memories of times with her are of shared campfires in different parts of this and other continent s. She also loved the cultural life of cities, and was better than most of us at making time for theatre, cinema and music. These favourite memories also involve good food and wine, extreme sociability and great hospitality.
Although Toni’s personal and professional impact on students is well-known, her research contribution was also significant. She completed her Ph.D. while at Wollongong (O’Neill, 1994). The primary motivating factors in this were her insatiable curiosity and personal love of learning, rather than the requirements of the academic profession. Neither was she particularly concerned about academic boundaries; at various times she answered to the descriptions ecologist, geographer and biologist. Toni’s early work in land cover mapping focused on investigation of the capability of remotely sensed data acquired by optical sensors for discriminating the type and condition of vegetation in arid Australia. The successes she achieved using traditional multispectral space-based and airborne systems convinced her of the utility of the next generation of remote sensing systems for high resolution mapping. In recent years, she initiated research in the use of airborne hyperspectral systems for operational coastal mapping and studies of synthetic aperture radar for characterizing vegetation structure, geomorphological features, and topography.
A unique, unifying thread in all of Toni’s research in remote sensing was her obsession with understanding why a response was observed, rather than simply characterizing or applying the information. This ultimately resulted in interdisciplinary research projects with biologists, geologists, chemists, and engineers. In recent years her research affiliations extended beyond Australia to Europe, Africa, and the United States where she was a member of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pacific Rim radar research team She will long be remembered for her expertise, coupled with seemingly boundless energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to extending the frontier of research. She wryly commented that it was the scientist in her that insisted, beyond pain and hope, on seeing her bone marrow transplant procedures through to the end.
Her early family life instilled in Toni a great social conscience, and her politics were also shaped by growing up in Bjelke-Peterson’s Queensland. She spent much time and effort defending the rights of others (and perhaps not enough defending her own). Her considerable combative qualities were harnessed in support of students, the environment, and women. Toni had been active in Sydney WISENET (Women in Science Enquiry Network), and established a Wollongong branch after arriving at the university. This provided a support network for women in science at a time of severe under-representation within the faculty. It also added to her workload; standing up for the rights of women and having interdisciplinary expertise meant there were many committees waiting for her.
Toni’s particularly nurturing brand of feminism was inspirational to many of us. Her mature outlook, disdain for power for its own sake, certainty that there was life outside the university and supply of particularly apt cartoons sustained many younger female colleagues through crises that seemed insurmountable at the time. But her support was not reserved for women, and many individuals remember her personal thoughtfulness and insights. She loved children; watching her respectful interactions with them was to get some sense of how effective a schoolteacher she must have been. One of the perverse blessings of her illness was the chance for many people to give something back, and there is no doubt that she was sustained by support from many quarters.
Toni is survived by her much-loved family: brothers Bryan and Chris, their wives Adele and Maureen, her nieces Leonie, Bronwyn, Kirryn and Leila, and nephew Shea. In many ways her heart was always in Buderim, where the mangoes and prawns usually drew her at Christmas. She was a passionate aunt. Her niece Kirryn spoke after her death of hoping to be to Bronwyn’s children what Toni had been to her.
Any obituary is a travesty of a whole person and their complex life; this one seems particularly so. Perhaps the strongest thread of memory that links the people who shared Toni’s life is of her ready smile and laughter, and her genuine empathy with others. She is greatly missed, but would tell us to get on with making the most of life, and to look after one another in the process.
O’Neill, A.L. 1994 Reflectance characteristics of chenopod shrublands in semi-arid Australia. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, The University of New South Wales, Sydney.
O’Neill, J.D. 1979 Up From South. A Prospector in New Guinea 1931-1937. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Lesley Head, University of Wollongong
Melba Crawford, University of Texas
Anne Skates, Australian Museum
This article was originally published in Australian Geographical Studies 38 (1): 99-101
The University of Wollongong has established the Toni O’Neill Prize in Geosciences, an annual prize to be awarded for innovative student project work in the spatial sciences. Donations can be made by cheque in Australian dollars (bank draft for International donors) or money order payable to Faculty of Science. Please forward to Faculty of Science Office, University of Wollongong, NSW, 2522. Payments can also be made by credit card (phone 02 42213530).