‘Where does a female plant pathologist work?’: Gretna Weste (née Parkin) AM DSc

Introduction

I first met Gretna Weste (Fig. 1) when I arrived at the University of Melbourne as a newly appointed lecturer in the School of Botany in 1984. The school had a long history of appointing women academics. Gillbank explains that a motivation behind Cambridge scholar and foundation Professor of Botany J. S. Ewart’s appointment of Jean White DSc as the first lecturer-demonstrator in Botany in 1909 was that a woman’s salary was half that of an equivalent man.¹ Nevertheless, it set a precedent of outstanding women botanists in the school that persisted. Associate Professor Ethel McLennan, appointed in 1914, was the first to identify Phytophthora cinnamomi (the pathogen that causes dieback) in Australia.² McLennan later taught mycology and plant pathology to Weste. Women academics, however, were not treated equally to men, and McLennan was overlooked as Australia’s first female professor when the university appointed another Cambridge man, J. S. Turner, as the second Professor of Botany.³

Fig. 1.

Gretna at her AM award ceremony, 1989 (Unknown).

Carey has identified three eras in the acceptance of women in Australian science.⁴ She recognised the indifference to gender under the meritocracy of the 1930s, where women were ‘neither rebels nor radicals’, as a highpoint for gender equity. Following the end of World War 2 women were increasingly marginalised, and the feminist movement emerged in the 1970s as a response to the discrimination experienced by women in society in general. Weste’s career spanned these eras and provides an intriguing insight into how she handled the overt and covert challenges commonly faced by women scientists.⁵

Weste had to work relentlessly to overcome sexism and misogyny in Australian science, but she did so without rancour and left a significant legacy. Her primary weapon against sexism was excellent science, communicated with directness, humour, generosity and deliberate blindness. Like many women scientists in post World War 2 science, Weste persisted when faced with gender-based obstacles including exclusion, marginalisation and gendered abuse.⁶ She made no claims as a gender activist, but on reflection in 1998 Weste noted that the feminist movement ‘was probably necessary, but not in our Botany School’.⁷

When interviewed in 1998, Weste stated that ‘she was never penalised for being a woman in the university’.⁸ Her story illustrates the tremendous benefits of gender balanced workplaces, and I was fortunate to have her as a role model demonstrating excellent academic research, and showing resilience in the face of unfair obstacles.

Weste nurtured an active group of research students in dieback research, and I could not avoid being swept up in their enthusiasm. As chair of the Organising Committee for the Fourth International Congress of Plant Pathology in 1983, Weste invited me onto her committee where my responsibility was to organise the conference satchels.

Weste was not someone to find comfort and refuge in the shadows. Everything she did was at full pace, as anyone who went on a white-knuckle ride in her Subaru will confirm. The damage to Australia’s forests caused by dieback was not going to wait for polite discussions by sedate gentlemen scientists and politicians.

Early life

In September 1917, Grace Parkin gave birth to a daughter in Dumfries, Scotland, and named her after the nearby border town of Gretna. Both Grace, a nurse, and her husband Arthur were Australians, but as a Master of Science graduate in chemistry, Arthur Parkin volunteered at HM Factory Gretna to make cordite for the war effort in Britain.⁹

At the end of World War 1 the family returned to Melbourne and settled in a huge house on four blocks of land in what was then the outer eastern suburb of Surrey Hills.¹⁰ Gretna turned two on the return journey. With her parents and younger brother, Gretna enjoyed regular extended camping trips in a rented greengrocer’s van. She first visited Wilsons Promontory when she was five, carrying her blanket on her back and camping at Darby River, Tidal River and Sealers Cove. Gretna credited her mother’s country upbringing for her fascination with the bush. When she was eight years old, the family, now extended through the addition of a baby sister, camped at Mt Buller. Seeing the beautiful blue wildflowers there inspired Gretna to become a botanist.¹¹

Gretna attended Mont Albert State School where she worked, talked and got into trouble, including getting the strap for not being able to draw! However she was awarded scholarships to attend the well-regarded Methodist Ladies College during the Depression years, and excelled at botany, English literature, French language, history and netball.

Study

Weste’s results were rewarded with a government scholarship to the University of Melbourne where she majored in botany, mycology (under Ethel McLennan) and chemistry (under G. W. Leeper), gaining a strong appreciation of the value of multidisciplinary approaches to understanding how organisms and ecosystems work.

Weste graduated with first class honours and the Botany Exhibition prize (shared with Alan Gordon) and was awarded a Howitt Natural History Scholarship. She enrolled in MSc research on reaction (or tension) wood in bends of hardwood trees at CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, later Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, CSIRO) Forest Products in 1938. Her discovery of the reason reaction wood was so strong earned her the nickname ‘Gelatinous Gretna’. It was during these studies that Weste developed her question-and-answer approach to research based on always asking ‘why?’.

Following her MSc work, Weste took time out to welcome the second professor of botany at the University of Melbourne, John S. Turner. She accompanied Turner on field visits to see the spectacular mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forests at Marysville, east of Melbourne, and developed a respectful professional relationship that later proved invaluable as Weste confronted a number of career obstacles.

A temporary typist

With PhD studies unavailable in Australia in 1939, Weste was appointed to positions, first in the library, then as a research officer, in the Forests Commission of Victoria (FCV) laboratory in the Treasury Building in East Melbourne.¹² Her role was to investigate the preservation of salvage logs from trees killed by the 1939 bushfires for a salary of £150 per annum. She found that either keeping the logs dry, or regularly spraying them with water prevented their decay, although her manuscript on wood rotting fungi on living trees was not published.

While Weste was always the only woman on fieldtrips, she remembered being treated with respectful collegiality by her male colleagues. However, she was puzzled when she discovered that, unlike her male colleagues, her salary was not automatically indexed, prompting her to appeal to the Public Service Board. Their investigation concluded that, despite having no typewriter in her laboratory or possessing any typing or shorthand skills, Weste was in fact a ‘temporary typist’, the only classification available for women in the Victorian Public Service.¹³ The board concluded that salary indexation did not apply to temporary positions.

Family life

In 1941, Gretna married Geoff Weste, a forester, and was obliged to resign from the Forests Commission of Victoria to comply with the public service rules that prohibited the employment of married women. Further study was not an option as PhD degrees were not offered in Australia. Later in her life Weste reflected on her conundrum at this time: ‘where does a female plant pathologist work?’¹³ Zernike notes that sexism was rampant in twentieth-century science,¹⁴ although Weste was perhaps only willing to acknowledge gender discrimination as a thing of the past. Restrictions on the employment of married women did not apply to universities and Professor Turner promptly recruited her back to the School of Botany to continue her research on the preservation of salvage logs under a Commonwealth Research Scholarship.

As was the experience of many women scientists, Weste’s research came to a sudden end when she became pregnant.¹⁵ Over the next two decades she raised three children—a son and two daughters—and cared for an ill husband. To support her family, Weste taught science at Firbank Girls School in Melbourne, 1955–60, where she was regarded as an inspirational and demanding teacher.¹⁶ Geoff died in 1975.

Return to Botany

In 1961, when her children reached high school age, Weste was invited back to the School of Botany by Professor Turner and Dr Ethel McLennan as a full-time coordinator and senior demonstrator in botany, and enrolled in a PhD (by then available in Australia) in her spare time under Dr Peter Thrower, lecturer in mycology and plant pathology. Characteristically, Weste dismissed her appointment as due to a shortage of staff, not because of her own abilities.¹⁷

Her workload expanded to include teaching forest pathology to BSc Forestry students, and continued after forestry was transferred to the Faculty of Agriculture as the BForSc degree in 1973. Perhaps insulted by her treatment at FCV, Weste and colleague Dr Olive Lawson, challenged their classification as demonstrators and were both appointed assistant lecturers.¹⁸ Weste was later promoted to senior lecturer in 1974, reader in 1980 and senior associate upon her retirement in 1982. Her DSc by publications was awarded in 1983.

Thrower left soon after Weste started her PhD research, and while Turner became Weste’s formal supervisor, he told her not to ask him any questions as he knew nothing about the disease. Her PhD research established that the cause of take-all disease of cereals was the root-infecting fungus Ophiobolus (now Gaeumannomyces) graminis rather than barley yellow dwarf virus. She confirmed pathogenicity using Koch’s Postulates, and showed cereal genus-specific infection by ascospores. She demonstrated that ascospore production required exposure to blue light and that soil microbes suppressed the disease by reducing the survival of the pathogen. During these studies she also developed a deep appreciation of the value of field observations and trials. Weste’s thesis resulted in twelve published papers, and laconically she noted the benefit she had had over modern plant pathologists through the assistance received from typists.¹⁹ Her PhD was awarded in 1968.

Dieback

In 1969, Lionel Stubbs, the new Professor of Agriculture, argued that take-all research was an agricultural problem that should be studied in the Faculty of Agriculture, situated across the System Garden from the School of Botany. In any case Weste had become fascinated by a new disease killing vegetation in the Brisbane Ranges west of Melbourne, first observed in 1970 by ecologist Dr David Ashton and student Frank Podger.²⁰ Podger identified Phytophthora cinnamomi as the pathogen responsible for jarrah dieback in Western Australia in his University of Melbourne MSc Forestry studies (the degree established during Weste’s employment at FCV in 1942). Weste started by demonstrating Koch’s postulates to causally link the pathogen with dieback symptoms in many native plant species. Thus began three decades of foundational work on dieback by Weste and her students that produced over 100 published scientific papers, starting in 1970 with her first PhD student, Peter Taylor.

Weste’s team carefully mapped the spread of dieback in the Brisbane Ranges, then at Wilsons Promontory, Gariwerd (Grampians) and Kinglake. They clearly demonstrated the role of humans as vectors introducing the pathogen to new sites and spreading the disease. She described how in 1962 a bulldozer constructing a fire track at Wilsons Promontory was parked in a gravel pit.²¹ Contaminated mud from the bulldozer washed off the bulldozer into the gravel pit and that gravel was then used for roadworks, spreading the pathogen. This was confirmed in studies showing the role of logging, mining and recreational activities, and Weste advocated strongly for stricter hygiene controls at a seminar organised by National Parks and Wildlife Service in 1972. While her message was heeded by the National Parks and Wildlife Services and the Forests Commission, it was ignored by local government engineers and Phytophthora continued to be spread by council roadworks.

Weste’s appreciation of the value of multidisciplinary research, learned during her undergraduate studies, contributed to a more complete understanding of interactions between Phytophthora cinnamomi, its hosts and environmental factors. She developed collaborations with biochemists and physicists to study how Phytophthora caused disease in some, but not other, plants, and showed the seasonal pattern of infection in spring and dieback in summer. Her research showed that while the pathogen may be present in wet sclerophyll forests, dieback disease is suppressed by abundant soil microbial activity in the rich organic matter content of those soils. Her long-term monitoring of field sites revealed a succession of invasive disease leading to depleted ecosystems of resistant plants such as sedges and grasses, followed by sporadic regeneration from seedbanks in the soil. Dieback re-appeared to kill regenerating susceptible species following wet spring seasons.²²

In her later work, Weste and her students focussed on the impact of Phytophthora cinnamomi on rare and endangered plants and their ecosystems.²³ At least twelve native plant species were shown to be vulnerable to Phytophthora cinnamomi and at risk of extinction because of coincidental habitat loss, limited genetic diversity and dependence on vegetative rather than seed reproduction. Thus, even when post-epidemic Phytophthora populations decline these species have no dormant seedbank to support their regeneration. This helped prioritise conservation efforts.

Controversy

While plant pathology research was relatively open to women, Weste’s research nevertheless challenged and upset some male colleagues. A CSIRO team in Canberra argued that P. cinnamomi was an endemic pathogen already widespread in Australia and that dieback was caused by soil disturbance that rendered plants susceptible.²⁴ However, Weste’s observations of discrete disease fronts moving slowly downhill after rain (Fig. 2) led her to think this was more typical of an invasive disease, and she argued that P. cinnamomi was an exotic pathogen. Her evidence showed that Phytophthora cinnamomi threatened entire dry sclerophyll forest ecosystems and not just a few grass trees (Xanthorrhoea australis). Weste debunked the Canberra group’s hypothesis in elegant field experiments combining disturbance with inoculation in field sites, and consistently isolating the pathogen from dying grass trees. Dieback only occurred when the pathogen was introduced and never by disturbance alone.

Fig. 2.

Dead and dying vegetation, habitat destruction and exposed soil at a Phytophthora Dieback site at Wilson’s Promontory, Victoria, where Weste did much of her fieldwork (David Guest, 2003).

The CSIRO group rebutted Weste’s proposition by claiming the pathogen was found in inaccessible and undisturbed areas never visited by humans,²⁵ but these sites were subsequently shown to have a long history of road building associated with mining and grazing activities. Weste was then awarded a grant from the Australian Research Grants Commission that the CSIRO team had coveted, and was sent ‘obscene’ letters from them.²⁶ Sexist abuse was not uncommon in twentieth-century science,²⁷ and unfortunately persists in the trolling and threats reported by women climate scientists today.²⁸

In 1989–90, Weste was commissioned by the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service to prepare and publish a national survey of Phytophthora Dieback and produced a report of 250 pages. For unexplained reasons the report was never released, although much of the information was subsequently released by others without acknowledgement. Zernike has observed that women are excluded from male-dominated scientific networks, including through unattributed plagiarism.²⁹ Phytophthora cinnamomi was eventually recognised as a Key Threatening Process to Australia’s biodiversity in 2000.

Professional and community contributions

Weste’s passion for bushwalking continued throughout her life and was not slowed after two hip replacements and a broken ankle that required a helicopter rescue from remote southwest Tasmania when she was 82. She was an active member of the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria (FNCV) and the Melbourne University Staff Association and Alumni Bushwalkers, and enjoyed walking on Mt Kilimanjaro, Mt Blanc, Patagonia, India, and at 83 conquered Machu Pichu.

Weste preferred to avoid committees, annual meetings and reports so she could just turn up and do the work.³⁰ Whether this was a natural instinct or a learned response to sexism,³¹ she made lasting and significant contributions to her profession and the community. She mentored scores of students and colleagues. As Weste became recognised as an authority on dieback in Australia, she became more confident and joined the Australasian Plant Pathology Society as a foundation member, was appointed an Executive Member of the International Society of Plant Pathology Committee on Phytophthora and Research Group Leader in the International Union of Forest Research Organisations.

Weste sat on the Conservation Council of Victoria, was a foundation member of the Australian Conservation Foundation, and local field naturalists groups. Weste generously helped others, including a productive collaboration with amateur mycologist and fellow FNCV member, Gordon Beaton, that resulted in 22 published papers, mainly on cup fungi. She chaired the Organising Committee for the Fourth International Congress of Plant Pathology in 1984, the first to be held in the southern hemisphere.

She was appointed Member of the Order of Australia in 1989, awarded Honorary Membership of the Australasian Plant Pathology Society in 1992 and was Patron of the Australasian Mycological Society from 1999 until her death.

Weste died at Kingston Beach, Tasmania on 30 August 2006, aged 88. She was a determined and energetic trailblazer who left a legacy of discovery and knowledge about her beloved bush, and a legion of inspired students and colleagues.