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The history of science, pure and applied, in Australia, New Zealand and the southwest Pacific
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EDITORIAL (Open Access)
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‘Where does a female plant pathologist work?’: Gretna Weste (née Parkin) AM DSc

David I. Guest https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4138-5635 A *
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A School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Sydney Institute of Agriculture, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia.

* Correspondence to: david.guest@sydney.edu.au

Historical Records of Australian Science https://doi.org/10.1071/HR24008
Published online: 1 July 2024

© 2024 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the Australian Academy of Science. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

Gretna Weste was a remarkable plant pathologist born to Australian parents in the United Kingdom (UK) during World War 1. She studied at the University of Melbourne and was employed in the Forests Commission of Victoria as a ‘temporary typist’ while investigating the preservation of timber logs burnt in the 1939 Black Friday bushfires. Weste returned to the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne briefly before raising a family. Once her children reached high school she returned to the School of Botany as a senior demonstrator, and enrolled as a PhD student part-time to study the cause of take-all disease of wheat. She was awarded a PhD in 1968. After take-all research was claimed by the Faculty of Agriculture in 1970, Gretna’s focus shifted to the newly discovered dieback disease affecting the forests of Western Australia and Victoria. Her research laid the foundations of our understanding of dieback disease, and underpinned the recognition of Phytophthora cinnamomi as a Key Threatening Process under the Australian Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999). Dr Weste was awarded a DSc in 1983, appointed Member of the Order of Australia in 1989 for her significant service to plant pathology and became an Honorary Member of the Australasian Plant Pathology Society in 1992. Her distinguished career reflects a spirit and resilience that enabled her to overcome, or dodge, a series of gender-based obstacles in research, government and university hierarchies.

Keywords: botany, ecology, forestry, gender equity in science, Melbourne, Phytophthora Dieback, plant pathology, women in science.

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