Vale Beth Gott, AM, MSc (Melb), PhD (Lond.) Plant Physiologist, Ethnobotanist, Teacher (25 July 1922 to 8 July 2022)

Dr Beth Gott, a legendary Australian botanist, passed away recently at the age of 99. Beth made an outstanding contribution to Australian botany, in the fields of plant physiology, plant anatomy, ethnobotany, and teaching.

Beth’s interest in plants began at a very early age, while still at primary school. Her academic life began as an undergraduate in the Botany School at The University of Melbourne in 1940 – wartime, but also a time of hierarchy, collegiate familiarity, and intrigue. This was a time when female staff were generally appointed to junior (casual) positions with salaries considerably lower than their male counterparts. Universities at that time tended to be very formal and position was of prime importance within the Botany School. She won the Trinity College Council Exhibition in 1940 and completed her BSc, majoring in Botany. Her 1st class honours brought her a Caroline Kay Scholarship, and this, in 1943, enabled her to continue on as a Post graduate student. She completed her Master’s degree, and used a CSIR studentship to enrol as a PhD student at Imperial College, London, also using the facilities of the ancient Chelsea Physic garden for field work. Strangely, this was a rather remote harbinger of her Ethnobotany research she pioneered many years later at Monash University. On returning to Australia to the Botany School she was interested in the overseas work that had been done on plant responses to day length and the response of plants to cold as well as the cold treatments of seeds that prompted germination. It was at this time that words such as photoperiodism and vernalisation (prompting flowering and germination) entered the botanical language. At Melbourne Botany, with Rural Development Funding, her research showed that the developing ear of wheat was most sensitive to low temperature stress and her work also investigated the effect of day length on the varieties of wheat grown in Australia at that time. Beth presented papers at the 1955 ANZAS conference, and her paper summarising this new work was published in Nature (Gott 1957). She operated in several roles at Melbourne as a plant physiologist, and taught extensively to Botany and Agricultural Science students.

Beth later taught at Universities in the USA and Hong Kong and then in 1980 she joined the Botany Department at Monash University as a Plant Physiologist, contributing to the teaching of Plant Physiology and Physiological Plant Anatomy. However, her interests, possibly coming from her time at the Chelsea Physic garden in London, drifted to plants used by the original groups of people in Australia. This venture became an interest of students and all manner of groups at a time when there was a passion for growing native Australian plants. The ‘Aboriginal Food Garden’ to the west of the Botany Department at Monash became a pilgrimage site for many native plant groups with Beth out there regaling the audience with details of by whom, and for what, the roots, stems or leaves were used by the original inhabitants of Australia. Beth compiled exhaustive data bases on Aboriginal food and structural plants, including their use of fire to manage the environment. She worked with support from groups within the University and the original garden morphed into the Aboriginal Educational Garden as it is now. Her publications on how Aboriginal people managed Murnong, Microseris scapigera, (Gott 1982, 1983) are classics of ethnobotanical literature. A special edition of The Artefact (the journal of the Archaeological and Anthropological Society of Victoria), which was dedicated to Beth and her work, was published in 2012. It was an academic festschrift, with a series of articles by various people acknowledging Beth’s incredible contribution to knowledge and her impact upon their own work (Ma Rhea and Russell 2012). Her extensive research on plant use by Aborigines can be found simply, in this electronic age, by typing her name into the appropriate search engine, and a wealth of information on research papers and books, and indeed her rich and generous life, tumbles out (e.g. https://www.monash.edu/science/schools/biological-sciences/staff/beth-gott; https://www.monash.edu/about/our-locations/clayton-campus/gardens-at-clayton/aboriginal-gardens; https://qram.com.au/2019/06/25/greg-talks-to-living-legend-beth-gott-ethnobotinist; https://celebration.u3app.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Movers-and-Shapers-1.pdf).

In 2017, she was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in recognition of her contribution to biological sciences as an ethnobotanist specialising in the use of native plants by indigenous people. Beth was a wonderful source of information on so many things, often coming from a time that is so unsearched by undergraduates in 2022. Beth’s interest in plants was kindled at a very early age, exploring coastal and native plant reserves such as the Beaumaris Heathlands as a child and she maintained that interest in native plants for almost 100 years. She was also adventurous, with regular trips to Erith Island, in Bass Strait between Wilsons Promontory and King Island, in the summer; these were multigenerational expeditions with friends and the occasional postgraduate students from Monash Botany. Her botanising adventures provided valuable herbarium material of the Kent Group of islands that was passed on to the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife service.

To those who knew her, she was a teacher, scholar, guide, story-teller and a friend. There are very few (if any) of Beth’s type left, but hers is a legacy that will endure for generations to come. She is sadly missed.