Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria
Australian National Herbarium
Biographical Notes
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Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria |
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Robbins, Ross Gordon (1919 - 1997)Born in Wanganui, NZ, in 1919, died on 1 July 1997 in Redland Bay, Queensland.
Educated in NZ, probably attended Whanganui Technical College. He attended University of New Zealand and gained an M.Sc. studying the ecology of the bryophytes on
the coastal dunes at Woodhill north of Auckland in 1950.
He got a Ph.D. from University of New Zealand in 1957 on a thesis of NZ forest history.
From 1942-45 he was with NZ armed forces in the Middle East.
For a short while after the war Ross worked
for New
Plymouth firm of Duncan & Davies, where he had been a trainee before the war.
In 1953 Ross married G.E. Currie (1925-2014), a
Scottish woman who had emigrated to New Zealand
after the war.
From 1951-1956 he was a university lecturer in NZ with two years in Jamaca (1951-52).
He was Plant Ecologist with CSIRO Land Surveys from 1957-1960, taking part in CSIRO's
ambitious land resource survey program. He worked on four of
these surveys (the fourth being published only in
1976). His job was mainly one of description,
but he also made collections, of mosses
especially, and so brought to science a good
number of new species. Fellow botanist Dick
Schodde remembers him as being generous with his time,
easy-going, somewhat idiosyncratic but well
regarded by his fellow ecologists.
He was Research Fellow in Biogeography, ANU, 1961-1966. He collected and published
rather little at this time but did make short
visits to montane parts of Fiji and New
Caledonia in 1962, Malaya and Thailand in
1963, and the Philippines in 1965.
Briefly, for seven months he was appointed first Curator of the Canberra Botanic Gardens in 1966, before resigning to take up a position in Port Moresby, PNG.
He became the sole botany lecturer in the
Department of Biology at Port Moresby's new
University of Papua New Guinea. In 1968 he and botany tutor Mary Pulsford started
the UPNG herbarium.
Sadly, much of this effort was wasted, when most of
the early collections were destroyed ten years later
in a disastrous and disgraceful herbarium fire.
In August 1970 he accepted an appointment teaching biogeography at Canberra University. He did not re-establish himself there, nor did he continue
collecting. It appears that in the mid-1970s,
apparently after a divorce, he left Australia for a
position in the Department of Applied Plant Sciences
at Kenya's University of Nairobi – given the political
situation, this could hardly have been a wise
decision.
It is thought that he then returned to
Australia and may have taken up an irrigation
block near Mildura. He is known to have moved to
Brisbane towards the end of his life; he also married
again.
He died on 1 July 1997 in Redland Bay,
Queensland.
He had a lifelong interest in Esperanto and magic, he not only attended the 1938 Esperanto Congress in Wellington, NZ, but entertained it with a magic show.
Fifteen species have been named for Ross Robbins.
All are from PNG and have the epithet
robbinsii.
Source: Extracted from:
Flora Malesiana, Cyclopaedia of Collectors - Supplement II, p.80, (1974)
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q89158539
Gardner, Rhys (2022) 'Ross G. Robbins (1919-97), botanist'
in New Zealand and New Guinea'
https://bts.nzpcn.org.nz/site/assets/files/0/24/625/ak_bot_soc_journal_77_2_dec_2022_131-138.pdf
Portrait Photo: 1958, CSIRO Archive, L 394.007
Data from 2,494 specimens
