The Past
Pat
Woolley
BSc 1955, PhD 1966
I began a degree at UWA with the intention of studying mathematics, as I had been inspired and encouraged in that area by a teacher at Leederville Technical College. In those days, university was free; I would not have been able to go if there had been fees as my father (a medical practitioner) had died when I was ten leaving my family in rather strained financial circumstances. However although I had an easy transition from school, I had a poor first year. I found university mathematics extremely boring and lost interest in physics as well, but I also was doing zoology and decided to major in that field. After graduation I worked with Professor Harry Waring as a research assistant and ended up helping four PhD students with their research on marsupials. Then in 1960 I left Perth to move with my husband to Canberra where he had a position at John Curtin School of Medical Research. After a short period of domesticity I decided that this was not the life for me and I moved to part-time work demonstrating in zoology, which was often how women were employed in universities in those days. Following a temporary position as Lecturer in the new ANU Department of Zoology I decided to get a PhD. I had been intrigued by the topic of differentiation of sex in mammals and chose a dasyurid as my study animal following a talk on an Antechinus species given by Basil Marlow (from the Australian Museum) that I attended at an ANZAAS conference in Brisbane. In the course of my research on the life history and reproduction of Antechinus agilis, I found that the males either did not survive or became reproductively sterile following the brief, frantic breeding season. This work attracted the attention of organisers of the first symposium on comparative biology of reproduction held in London by the Royal Society and I was able to scrape up the funds to present the work myself. This curious life history pattern, now called the die-off, has led to many subsequent PhD projects and I would say is my most important contribution to marsupial biology.
Following the completion of my PhD I worked briefly at the Waite Institute in Adelaide with Professor Vic MacFarlane on fat and water metabolism in fattailed dasyurids. I then was appointed as a Lecturer in Zoology at La Trobe University, Melbourne and was able to set up some colonies of animals immediately, though most of my time in the first year involved starting up teaching programs. Subsequently my research on Antechinus reproductive patterns included the discovery that penis morphology defined the genus Antechinus; splitting off 5 species from the 12 then described and placing these in 3 separate genera. I also was able to spend nearly a full year of study leave in New Guinea in 1980-81 working on the Antechinus species there and have been back 18 times through the 1980s and 1990s. More recently I moved to research in Australia on the dasyurid genus Sminthopsis, including studies on penis morphology of the twenty or so species, and on the ecology and reproduction of the endangered Julia Creek Dunnart, Sminthopsis douglasi. My days are now mostly spent writing up a huge backlog of work.