The Past
Patricia
Mather AO
(née Kott)
PhD, DSc, DSc (hon caus), FAIBiol, FMLS
I was always interested in biology. When I was a student there was an interest in marine studies at the University of Western Australia, as was common at that time throughout all Australian universities – all near the sea! I did a thesis on bristle worms for a BSc (Hons) degree and subsequently was appointed plankton officer at CSIR Division of Fisheries in NSW. The Chief of the Division, Harold Thompson, had worked on ascidians (sea squirts) in Scotland and had always intended to work on them in Australia. However, finding himself spending so much time on administration, he never got around to it and he urged me to get involved with these organisms in my spare time. I did so, and added new material to existing collections in CSIR and the Australian Museum. CSIR was very generous with time for field trips along the coasts of NSW, St Vincent Gulf in SA and south-western Australia. In my spare time, as Harold Thompson had suggested, I produced the preliminary work on several groups of Australian ascidians.
After 18 months at Cronulla I received a CSIR overseas studentship and went to the famous Marine Biological Association of the UK laboratory at Plymouth. I was there from 1949 to 1951. It was a wonderful time. The war was over and students came to Plymouth from all over Europe in the summer and it was like being in a graduate school – a thing we didn’t have in Australian universities at that time. In late 1951 I returned to CSIRO (as CSIR had become) as plankton officer and continued my studies on ascidians.
Three years later (in 1955), at the end of the statutory three years that recipients undertook to work for the organisation at the conclusion of their studentship, I married Wharton Mather, a lecturer in the Zoology Department at the University of Queensland. When you got married in those days, you gave up work and I did the conformist thing. I didn’t think of doing anything else. I worked on research grants for the first couple of years of my marriage, one of those years in America where Wharton was on sabbatical leave. Periods of having children alternated with short terms of research. In 1961-62 I received a Commonwealth Graduate Student Award that enabled me to employ some help in the house and continue research, completing work that I had not finished before the birth of my first child and resulting in a PhD degree from the University of Queensland. I gave up the award when my third son was born, and at that time I never intended to return to science. However, in 1965 following an invitation and offer of funding that would enable me to do the work, I entered into a two year Personal Service Contract with the Smithsonian Institution to produce a monograph on Antarctic ascidians, based on the American national collections. The work was done in The University of Queensland where I had been appointed a Research Fellow. Subsequently the contract with the Smithsonian was extended for two more years for a supplement to the monograph. For this work particularly I was awarded a DSc from UWA in 1970.
The Smithsonian contract had set a pattern – I didn’t stop working after it had concluded – I continued as a Research Fellow in the University of Queensland, supported by an ARGC grant. Then, in 1973, after nearly 10 years on what we now would term ‘soft money ‘, I was appointed a curator in the Queensland Museum, becoming senior curator the following year, a position I held until my retirement in 1990. Since then, I have been an Honorary Associate of the museum, and continue my work, but without salary, my accommodation and support facilities being provided by the museum and my research (including an assistant) funded through successive grants from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Biological Resources Survey.
I have been so fortunate that even outside a normal career pathway, I have been able to document a large group of previously unknown organisms. The work underpin a whole bandwagon of research on the ecology of marine communities including symbioses with plant cells previously unknown in these organisms.
My career as a marine biologist has brought me in contact with many wonderful colleagues both in Australia and overseas and has provided me with opportunities to visit and work in laboratories around the world. Last but not least has been the opportunity available to me as a biologist to be an advocate for our rational use of the environment and of biological resources. In Queensland this has inevitably involved me in work for the Great Barrier Reef. I look on my years as Honorary Secretary of the Great Barrier Reef Committee, providing scientific briefing for Counsel for the conservation bodies presenting evidence to the Royal Commissions on Oil Drilling in the Great Barrier Reef (on which the subsequent Federal legislation for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act was based) as years of achievement and satisfaction, equalled only by the satisfactions and joy I have derived from my sons, their wives and my grandsons.