Charles Fenner and Early Landform Studies in South Australia

Abstract

Charles Albert Edward Fenner (1884–1955) was educated in Melbourne but spent the major part of his working life in South Australia, first as Superintendent of Technical Education and later as Director of Education, holding the latter post during the difficult years of the Second World War. He is best remembered for his role in the establishment of Geography as a university discipline and for his landform studies. He brought together earlier work on the tectonics of the Gulfs region of South Australia and introduced the term ‘shatter belt' to describe the complex of horsts and sunken blocks. He noted evidence pointing to recent and continuing earth movements, and suggested that such earth movements were responsible for the westerly diversion of the River Murray at Chucka Bend. He also conceived a hypothesis of ‘double planation' in explanation of the morphology of the Mt Lofty Ranges.