AASP Primary Records Program

AASP Newsletter 31(3): p. 6-7, 1996.

OBITUARY
WILLIAM FRANCIS HARRIS
1903-1997

Bill Harris was the doyen of New Zealand palynology, even though he came into this science relatively late in his career. From about 1937, and after his retirement in 1968, till his recent death he retained his interest in palynology, science in general, and in the ongoing careers of his fellow scientists. Only those people who worked closely with him knew just what a broad range of interests he had, how many courses of study he had completed throughout his long life and his constant thirst for knowledge. The most abundant books on his book shelf were a series called "Teach Me" covering a wide range of subjects all of which he had absorbed. He had a marvellous linguistic ability - a polyglot - and a wide searching scientific mind and was constantly sharing his ideas and encouraging and teaching his junior staff. His modesty, kindness, love of privacy, and lack of personal ambition has meant that his achievements have not netted him the general recognition that he deserves. The rooms housing the palynologists at the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences are named the Harris suite in his honour.

Bill Harris never liked to cause a fuss. And it was the same when he died, no fuss. He lived his last years in a rest home in Whakatane, a bit off the beaten track in northern New Zealand, where it was warm all year round but where past colleagues would not normally pass through unless just to see him. None of his old science colleagues knew that he had died until many months after the event. Letters suddenly were not answered, and it was not until Cohn Lennie, a technician who had last worked with Bill in the early 1960's, visited late last year that all his science colleagues learnt that he had died some months previously.

Bill was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 18 June 1903. His father was a gardener who encouraged Bill to assist and instilled in him a love of the soil and a love and knowledge of the plants that grew in it. Bill was educated in Christchurch, leaving high school in 1917 to work for a local county council while studying commerce and music at Canterbury University College. In 1926 he moved to Wanganui where he played the violin in orchestras, mostly cinema orchestras, and taught music. But overwork and stress made him decide to change to an outdoor career. He then took a variety of farm jobs in Australia and New Zealand until in 1937, working as a gardener in Auckland, he decided to return to study for a Diploma in Horticulture. This he did. Bill had at this time a particular interest in the native ferns and he repeatedly visited the fernery at the Auckland Domain to learn to recognise and identify all the ferns growing there. The caretaker took an interest in what Bill was doing and persuaded him to see Lucy Cranwell at the Auckland Museum.

With Lucy's encouragement Bill prepared some pollen slides in the laboratory of Pharmacy School where he was doing a course in Pharmacy, a necessity as part of the Diploma in Horticulture. Erdtman's new acetolysis method was used and the results so impressed Lucy Cranwell that Bill was employed to prepare pollen slides from herbarium and fresh collections. Thus in 1939 under Lucy's tutelage Bill, now aged 36, was encouraged to change tact from Horticulture to do a Science Degree at Auckland University. However, he had no sooner completed his first year, Stage I botany and zoology, than he found himself in the army.

We know little about his war experiences. At 36 years of age, with a disability, he must have volunteered. But we do know that after four years with the 2nd Echelon 2 New Zealand Expeditionary Force, Bill returned to New Zealand with a wife, Nellie, whom he met and married while in Cairo, Egypt. Bill, who had suffered from poliomyelitis as a child and had a cleft palate, was declared medically unfit for active service but after some pulling of strings he finally enlisted in the medical core and was posted as batman to the officer who had originally declared him unfit. His role seems to have been purely administrative, but it involved recording the physical and particularly mental state of senior army personnel and was, understandably highly confidential. Bill maintained this confidentiality throughout his life. His cleft palate was not operated on until the late 1940's when Bill was in his late 40's. At this time he wanted to ensure that the excitement he felt about the new science of palynology, was passed on to others, and he wanted to ensure that he was perfectly understood.

Returning to New Zealand in 1943 Bill, now aged 40, found that Lucy Cranwell had also married and was leaving for the United Sates. He was given the opportunity to succeed Lucy at the Auckland Museum but chose instead to join Botany Division of the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). Bill also recommenced his science degree, this time at Victoria University of Wellington.

Bill work now involved studying atmospheric pollen, peat (but not the pollen it contained), allergies, melissopalynology and archeology. He did not fare well as the botany directors at the time thought that studying pollen was a waste of time since pollen dispersed so far and wide that you could not tell a coherent story about them, particularly when pollen occurred in peat. However, that did not stop Bill from earning a D.Sc. in 1957 for his work on the spores of the New Zealand Pteridophytes, and in 1968 finally publishing his book on peat classification by pedological methods.

In 1954 Bill became vice-president of the Palynology Section of the International Botanical Congress, and attended the conference in Paris in this capacity. His verbal reports of this conference consisted of as much a tour guide of the art galleries and descriptions of the art works, as they were scientific reports on the various outcomes. However, his written reports indicated that he had attended to his conference duties with dedication, enthusiasm and competence.

In 1958 Bill joined Ashley Couper, whom he had previously introduced to palynology, at the New Zealand Geological Survey (NZGS) working on a palynological study of the Quaternary Ice Ages and the Post-glacial, but also dabbling in much older material. particularly in late Cretaceous and Cenozoic sediments found in petroleum drillholes. The search for petroleum in New Zealand was gaining momentum at this time and palynological work was proving very useful in both marine and non-marine sediments. He was a pioneer in the use of the computer in palynology, but was constantly frustrated that as soon as palynological records were placed on computer the records became unusable because they were incompatible with the next generation of computers. During his 10 years at NZGS, till his 'first' retirement in 1968, he also worked on diatoms, dinoflagellates, rhizopods, cuticles and the palynology of Mesozoic, Cenozoic and Pleistocene rocks while training technicians and younger palynologists who appeared from time to time. Bill finally retired in 1978, aged 75, after spending a lot of these last 10 years pioneering the palynological studies of cores of early Tertiary age from the off-shore Maui gas field, now New Zealand's largest producing gas field.

Bill's contribution to science, and to New Zealand science in particular was the keeping alive of palynology as a viable and useful science from the pioneering days of Lucy Cranwell and the encouragement and assistance he gave younger staff Many of these "younger" palynologists went on to become leading world experts in their fields - Ashley Couper, Dave McIntyre, Geoffrey Norris, to name a few. His contribution of 2 books and over 60 papers illustrates his world standing in the field of palynology. However, his published work does not adequately reflect the wide range of work that he did.

He was involved in a number of innovative science discoveries, described all spores of native New Zealand ferns and fern allies, classified New Zealand peat types, and catalogued a number of past natural changes in the New Zealand environment. In the early to mid 1940's he and his co-worker Doris Filmer, discovered that locally produced honey, implicated in a poisoning outbreak, contained pollen from Coriaria, a plant that was well-known as causing death in cattle. In the late 60's and early 70's Bill, with Dave McIntyre and Geoff. Norris, demonstrated the usefulness of palynology in deeply buried coal measures found in petroleum exploration drillholes. This lead to a rapid rise in the profile of the science. In the early 1970's he with co-worker Geoff. Norris, recognised that certain groups of pollen kept recurring through Quaternary (and Mesozoic) time. This lead to a paper on the ecological significance of recurrent group of pollen and spores in New Zealand Quaternary sequences. The mathematics involved in this work and other statistical analyses of Quaternary sequences was subsequently published in a paper on species clustering and the ecological information that this gave.

This is but a brief summary of the very full and active life. One could also mention his love of painting (Bill considered himself a better artist than musician) with his portraits of saleable quality and music (he lived in a very small house with a lounge dominated by a grand piano). He also studied astrology, free masonry, occultism, theosophy, photography, classical music (a passion shared with his classically trained pianist wife), opera, violin, organ, indoor bowls, bridge, and languages. Bill's proficiency at languages is evidenced by his ability to speak Esperanto, French, German, Arabic, Bulgarian, Russian, Dutch, and Italian, and he could read a number of others. Nor have I mentioned his love/hate relationship with cars, the road and anybody or anything on it or along side it, the battles he had with management to get updated equipment (he once put in a requisition for a calculating machine and received a slide rule), his scrupulous honesty, which we realised went as far as not claiming allowable rebates on his tax returns, his superb memory (he apparently never took notes at any of the university lectures he attended), and his love of wine.

Bill was devoted to his wife Nellie who died about five years after his final retirement. She had been in poor health for quite a while and Bill had been constant in looking after her in those final years. They had no children.

Dallas Mildenhall, Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, Lower Hutt, New Zealand.