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Dr Isobel Bennett was interviewed in 2000 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Bennett’s career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers her studies of plankton in Australian waters and her involvement in an ecological study of the intertidal region of the New South Wales south coast. The publishing of this material was a first for Australian science. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Isobel Bennett was born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1909. She left school at 16 to go to business college and subsequently found a job as secretary in a patent attorney's office. In 1928 the family moved to Sydney, where she worked in the office of the Associated Board of Royal Schools of Music.
In 1933 Bennett started a temporary position in the Zoology Department of the University of Sydney, working with Professor William Dakin. This temporary position lasted nearly 40 years during which time she worked as secretary, departmental librarian, research assistant and demonstrator. She helped Dakin collect and identify plankton in Australian waters and this resulted in the first monograph ever published on plankton in Australia. Their work on the scientific ecology of coastal areas led to the 1952 publishing of Australian Seashores, the first such Australian guidebook.
In 1959 Bennett was with the first group of women scientists to visit Macquarie Island. She made many expeditions to the Great Barrier Reef between 1948 and 1970 and took part in a complete ecological survey of the reef in 1954. In 1971 she wrote The Great Barrier Reef, the first book to give a general picture of the whole reef. One genus, five species of marine animals and a coral reef have been named after her.
Never having formally studied science, Bennett received an honorary MSc in 1962 and an honorary DSc in 1995, both from the University of Sydney. In 1984 she received the Order of Australia, for her services to marine biology.
Participating in plankton studies
What kind of work did you do for Professor Dakin in the department?
His main research was plankton, the minute floating animals and plants of the sea. He had a small vessel, mainly crewed by university student volunteers, and when he discovered that I loved boats and never got seasick I was signed on as a permanent crew member – even to being hoisted up the mast to scrape it down when it needed revarnishing. On all our trips it was my job to put down the net, time it and make notes of the sea temperature and various other details, preserve the catch and take it back to the university, and then sort out what animals were in it (because neither he nor I knew). This was a rather difficult task, because there were absolutely no books of any kind available apart from details in huge tomes of various expeditions that had travelled round the world, mostly in the last century.
Professor Dakin was English, not Australian, is that right?
Yes. He was very familiar with the plankton of the British seas, but nobody had done any plankton work in Australia and there were no vessels available except this small yacht which the university had purchased for him. We did this for quite a few years, mostly at the weekends because he was working during the week. The work was published by the university in 1940 as a monograph of the Zoology Department, and was used by the Fisher Library in their reprint series for distribution. It was also sold to students and others. This was the very first study of plankton in Australian waters, and quite apart from the actual physical work of preparing the illustrations, the Professor included a very large bibliography. Had it been in a scientific journal, he would not have been able to use nearly so many illustrations. There was a bibliography for each chapter, his whole idea being to publish the book in such a way that it was a stepping-stone for all future plankton workers.
The introduction to the published text acknowledged your work. You actually dissected some of these organisms, I understand.
Yes. But a small crustacean, for example, might only be two or three millimetres in size, sometimes even smaller. In order to be quite sure of the identity, you had to try to dissect off the various appendages – which even under the microscope were minute – and put them onto a slide. The Professor then drew them. It was quite a task, but nobody could teach you; it is all a matter of practice, really. He gave me the microscope and the dissecting needles, and I just had to teach myself about that.
Developing as a research assistant
In 1935, when Professor Dakin took sabbatical leave for a year, the acting Professor allowed me to do the first year of Zoology – only the practical class, not the lectures. It was rather fun. He made me take the exam at the end of the time, and I was a bit disappointed that because I failed to take off a couple of the mouth parts of a cockroach I got only 98 per cent instead of 100.
Also whilst the Professor was away, I started on trying to put the library – which had masses of reprints and books from various past professors – into some kind of order.
When Professor Dakin came back, did your job change at all?
Well, it was decided that I knew enough about the animals to add demonstrating to first-year students in with all my other duties. I enjoyed it very much, because it gave me a lot more contact with the students. Representatives were needed of the various phyla but there was no actual museum, and very few animals in the class collection, so I made it one of my jobs to collect as much specimen material as I could.
The Professor was very concerned that there was little communication between the scientist and the man in the street, as it were, and he was asked to do a series of lectures for the ABC. His weekly series of talks, Science in the News, involved quite a lot of research on my part. I had a lot to do with the second printing of his book Whalemen Adventurers as well, because he put extra chapters in after having been overseas, and also I worked on getting the plankton monograph ready for publication.
And then, when the war broke out and Professor Dakin went to Canberra as the Technical Director of Camouflage, in the Department of Home Security, you went as his research assistant.
Yes. I was released from the university for the period of the war.
Searching the seashores for certainty
What did Professor Dakin do after the war, back at the university?
Having succeeded in getting the plankton monograph published, he chose the intertidal region of the seashore as his next subject for special research. A long series of studies was being conducted at that time around the South African coast, and he thought that we should do a similar one on Australia’s temperate shores, beginning with New South Wales. Because we had no idea what was on the shore – there were no Australian books like the seashore books in Britain – I had to spend almost a year on the various low tides, going to the rock platforms, the ocean beaches and the estuarine beaches and bays.
I drew up lists for the various phyla, for the crustaceans, the molluscs, the echinoderms and those sorts of things, and in 1946 I started off, with Elizabeth Pope (from the Australian Museum), on a scientific ecological survey of the New South Wales coast. We went from Sydney down to the Victorian border, checking off my lists, and as we went south to the colder waters some animals dropped out and others started to come in. Professor Dakin had been very ill from the end of 1945, but in 1947 he recovered enough to join us for the survey from Sydney to the Queensland border. This work was finally published in a scientific journal, and during his periods of recovering from operations he amused himself by scribbling the basis of a book on the seashore so that people of this maritime nation could know something about the animals round our coast. So that was how Australian Seashores started off.
Focus questions
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
crustaceans
echinoderms
estuarine beaches
ocean beaches
intertidal region
molluscs
plankton
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