profile written by Carmel Macpherson
WISENET Journal No. 2, August 1985, p. 10
Dr. Elizabeth Truswell, Principal Research Scientist at the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics, has recently been elected to the Academy of Science. Along with Dorothy Hill and Molly Holman, Elizabeth is one of three women who are members of the Academy.
Her association with, and love of, natural history started early; she was born in Kalgoorlie where her father worked in the mines but the family moved to Perth where, an only child, she was educated at Kent Street High, a large government school. According to Elizabeth she followed the 'usual biology stream' and went on to a B.Sc. at the University of Western Australia (1959-1962). She was one of only four women to do a major in geology.
She attributes much of her early academic success to the active encouragement of her supervisor, Dr. Basil Balme, a pioneer in the field of Palynology (technique of looking at fossil pollens as an indicator of age and environment of rock sequences).
Her doctorate was done at Cambridge, where, despite the small numbers of women, she found the atmosphere positive and supportive. Again she found a mentor in Dr. Norman Hughes who actively supported her candidature.
Elizabeth then worked for Western Australian Petroleum for three years in their laboratory and followed this with two years post-doctoral work at Florida State. Florida State's involvement with Antarctic research and the Deep Sea Drilling Project were particularly appealing and Elizabeth found herself involved with both projects. She was only one of a number of women scientists, technicians and administrative staff to travel to the Antarctic.
Remembering her segregated field trips at the University of Western Australia with a wry smile, Elizabeth commented that sailing through the Antarctic seas some 13 years later with male and female colleagues (without pillage and rape) was certainly an indication to her that professional skills, regardless of gender, were being publicly recognised.
Like most, if not all, parents Elizabeth finds balancing career and private life extremely difficult. (We both nodded in empathetic sympathy with Erica Jong's assessment that one of feminism's major gains has been the right to be continually exhausted!)
Elizabeth is active in school visits, committee work, academic pursuits, parenting and desperately trying to find time for herself. She is on the EEO Sub-Committee in her Department. She is learning to say 'No!' although admits the difficulty of saying 'no' when you're often the only female on the committee or giving the paper.
I commented that Elizabeth had appeared to have come up against very little overt discrimination in her career and to what extent might this be attributable to Palynology being more 'acceptable' to male colleagues. She agreed that this was quite likely.
I later found myself thinking about Elizabeth and why she, unlike many other women, had had a relatively 'discrimination free' career. Being an only child is certainly a common denominator for many successful women. However, unlike the norm she did not find herself in a single sex private school. She spoke very highly of her teachers at Kent Street, so obviously the general environment was supportive. She was bright enough to pick up scholarships (including a CSIRO Junior Scholarship) and, unlike many women undergraduates, stumbled upon mentors who were world leaders in their fields and who had the breadth of vision and love of knowledge enough to find the gender of one of their brightest students a totally irrelevant factor. She emerged from Cambridge at a time when the mining industry in Australia was ready to take off and found a petroleum company that was more interested in expertise than gender.
The other major factor that seemed to me to have helped Elizabeth's career was her having her child later in life. Thus her early academic years weren't spent on the peripatetic spouse treadmill or in the nursery/laundry. These were the years in which she consolidated and developed a base and reputation that allowed a withdrawal for child rearing at a later stage to be accommodated with minimum trauma.
Her membership of the Academy promises to be a stimulating experience both for herself and her colleagues.