WISENET Journal 34, March 1994, pp.15-16.
Vicki Harriott is an internationally recognised marine ecologist specialising in coral community surveys and research on coral larval recruitment processes which are fundamentally important for the maintenance of Australia's coral reefs. She is currently employed at the Southern Gross University in northern New South Wales.
She graduated from Queensland University in 1975 and did her Masters and PhD atJames Cook University, working in exotic locations such as Heron and Lizard Islands. After her PhD, Vicki worked in the Australian Museum, at James Cook University, and as an environmental consukant. Between 1987 and 1990 she was Assistant Curator at the Great Barrier Reef Aquarium, Townsville, where her primary responsibility was to collect and maintain living corals in the reef tank exhibit and to conduct research into the conditions conducive to increasing coral survival rates.
She moved to Southern Cross University (as it now is) in 1990, and has risen to senior lecturer, carrying a heavy teaching load and starting a research program working on the southern corals of Lord Howe and the Solitary Islands. Her story, however, is best told by herself.
My plans to become a marine biologist in my early teens were put on hold when I was informed that I would have to go to University for 5 years, and such a long spell of study was unimaginable. Now I find that I have been associated with Universities as either student or staff for 18 of the last 21 years!
A lack of definite career plans at the end of high-school led me to accept a teaching scholarship to University of Queensland. I was re-diverted back to marine biology when I visited the Heron Island Research Station at the end of my second year. I saw real live researchers in action for the first time, and knew that this was how I wanted to spend my life, and so began a long association with a series of islands. I abandoned my teacher's scholarship and supported myself through a M.Sc. program, examining the ecology of sea cucumbers at Heron Island, by part-time demonstrating.
At the conclusion of my Masters project in 1980, I accepted a Ph.D. scholarship to James Cook University, where I worked at Lizard Island on the population ecology of corals. I also took a break of one year to work for the Echinoderm Department at the Australian Museum in Sydney, from where I commuted to Lizard Island in north Queensland every eight weeks to maintain my field program. When my Ph.D. was submitted in 1983, I had a series of short contract jobs, lined up a two year post-doctoral program through James Cook University, then sat back to await the arrival of my first child, a daughter, born in 1984. Through a combination of intensive planning and great luck, my post-doctoral project work was shared with my partner, also a coral biologist, and we both worked half-time, based in Kuranda near Cairns while we investigated the recovery of the coral reef at Green Island from predation by the crown-of-thorns starfish. We also ran a small environmental consultancy business in our "spare time".
At the end of that project in 1987, I accepted a position with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority as the Assistant Curator of the then forthcoming coral reef Aquarium in Townsville. My partner continued in the environmental consulting business, based in Townsville, and his mobility and flexibility have been important in allowing me a broader range of career options, though co-ordinating field schedules has proved tricky. There followed two years of intensely hard work helping to establish the displays for the new Aquarium, with limited money and time, and very little background information from other projects on the same scale. I was able to travel to other aquariums in the USA and SE Asia, with the assistance of a Churchill Fellowship. Once the reef tank in the Aquarium was well established, I worked for a further year researching factors which might increase survival for the captured organisms.
I accepted a lecturing position in the Centre for Coastal Management at Southern Cross University in Lismore, then known as the University of New England, Northern Rivers. I demonstrated very bad timing when my second child, a son, arrived 9 months after I started work, and a few weeks before I was eligible for maternity leave! There is also no doubt that pregnancy and breastfeeding play havoc with an intensive scuba-diving field program, so new research projects had to be put on hold for a year. With support from my department, I took some leave without pay, followed by two years of part-time work (3 then 4 days per week).
My research program is now well established, and while I don't visit tropical islands with the same frequency as before, I have discovered local compensations with projects on largely unexplored subtropical reefs at Lord Howe Island and Solitary Islands, near Coffs Harbour. I have several post-graduate students, and found it most enlightening to view supervision from the other side, and I have taught undergraduate courses in Ecology, Marine Biology, Statistics and Aquaculture. I have enjoyed teaching, apart from the pressures of balancing the time required to be a good teacher, with that required for all the other aspects of academic life, and the need to be active, keep up-to-date and publish in a research field.
Overall, I feel fortunate to have been able to balance time with my children with maintaining progression in my career, and during this time, I have been able to continue to work on coral reefs, the field of my choice. Now, I just have to take my children on my field trips as often as possible so I can enjoy both sides of my life at the same time.