Mini 17 Mary White

Hello My dear leaflets, 

This episode has plants, history, manslaughter and bloopers!  Enjoy hearing Dani try and say Woolemi Pine...(I forget the n)

https://www.uow.edu.au/alumni/honorary-alumni/honorary-doctorates/mary-elizabeth-white/ 

https://photovoltaicpoetry.com.au/memory-dr-mary-white/ 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-10/scientist-mary-white-daughter-granted-bail-over-murder-charge/10107158?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web 

https://brettdolsenphotography.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/dr-mary-e-white/ 

https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog?q=%22White%2C+M.+E.+%28Mary+Elizabeth%29%22&search_field=author 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, my name is Danny and I am a horticulturalist. Welcome to my little podcast, Leaves, Stems and Roots. I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land we are living. I would like to pay my respects to Alders past and present. Quote, everything is inconnected, and we must find and accept the place of humans in the overall scheme of things. Mary E. White after receiving an Australian Geographic Lifetime Award in 2010. Mary Elizabeth White, 5th of January 1926 to the 5th of August 2018. It's a mini! Hello, my dear leaflets. I never knew that my fascination in true crime would correlate with another of my ladies of horticulture. Unfortunately, unlike with episode 6 about Dr Joyce Vickery and her work leading to the conviction of 11-year-old Graham Thorne's murderer in 1961, the lady I am talking about today was the victim, or was she? This is a gardening podcast, so I won't be getting too much into the murder, or whatever it may be. However, as it is a part of her life and death, there will be mention of it. Mary was born on the 5th of January 1926 in southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in Africa. I love saying Zimbabwe. At 16, she studied her undergraduate at Cape Town University in zoology and botany. She stayed to complete her master's. Her professor at the time, Alex Dutolt, advised her to study paleobotany at the time. There was no study in this field in Africa, and there was a rich discovery of Gondwana to do. Side note, basically, what is Gondwana, anyone? Okay, briefly. Gondwana was a massive southern supercontinent that existed from the Neoproterozoic roughly 550 million years ago until it broke up during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, which was about 180 to 45 million years ago. And what did it include? Modern day South America, America, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, India, Australia, and Antarctica. So Alex Dut actually figured out there were two primordial continents. One, the one that we're going to be talking about, which was Gondwana in the south, and the other was Laurasia in the north. In 1955, Mary moved to Australia, which would have been positive for her continual study with husband Bill White, a geologist. I had the feeling, I would say it like Sheldon did on that show, you know the one, but I have always been fascinated in geology. I had a fantastic lecturer back in the day. Rocks! I love rocks! So shout out to those who are geologists. Love your work. As a paleobotanist, Mary White worked for the Bureau of Mineral Resources in Canberra, studying fossils until the early 80s. She was also consulting with the mining companies. In 1975, which is a brilliant year because I was born, she was hired as a research associate for the Australian Museum. She established a collection of how many do you reckon of plant fossils for the museum? If you guessed 12,000, wow, you were awesome! Amongst the many, there were descriptions of several new species, including Agathus Jurassica, which is an extinct species of coniferous tree from the Jurassic period, best known from the Talbraga fishbeds in New South Wales. This is in Australia, obviously. This was detrimental in the preservation, in the understanding of the evolutionary history of modern conifers like Woolamai Pine. I'm sure you've heard of this. Another example is Pentoxylin Australica. It is a late Jurassic fossilized wood found in Queensland. This was and is a rare and iconic find for collectors out there. Glossopterus from the late Permian era. These fossils are scientific evidence of the supercontinent Gondwana. They belong to the now extinct large group of seeds, plants Glossosopterus. The last example of those found from Mary White are from the early Triassic period. These were Clymoea, a new genus of Lycop. Side note, how many of you are still listening? I find all this very interesting. It's exciting to hear about plants of a million years ago who are still remembered today, and the evolved species linked to today's species, like the Woolame Pine, which is only one of three genre linked to the family Agathus. There will be photos on Instagram and Facebook. Mary White's husband passed away in 1981. From there she wrote many very in-depth science books. Her most famous was The Greening of Gondwana in 1986, The Nature of Hidden Worlds in 1990, and after the greening, The Browning of Australia in 1994. This book received one of the 1995 Eureka prizes. In 2003, she bought Falls Forest Retreat, a large forested property in between Tari and Port Macquarie, New South Wales. Here she established a convenant to protect the land and preserve its biodiversity. In 2013, the property was sold, but with the convenant, the land could not be disturbed. In 1999, she was awarded the Riversley Medal for Excellence in Promoting Understanding of Australian prehistory. In 2001, Professor Gerard Sutton, Vice-Chancellor of Wollongong University, awarded Mary White Doctor of Science Honorus Causa, which means it is an honorary Doctor of Science. Side note, many articles described her as Doctor White, but many other articles referred to her as just Mary White. And she can't actually be called Doctor unless it's in like at the university where she became Doctor. So she's known as Mary White, but still bloody good. In the same year she was awarded the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science Moore Award. This isn't the first later we've talked about who won this medal. There was Sophie Ducker who won it in 1996. And another lady we will be doing in the future, Winifred Curtis, won it in 1995. Back to Mary White. In 2009, she was made a member of the Order of Australia for service to botany as a researcher and through the promotion of increased understanding and awareness and the unnatural world. And in 2010, she received a Lifetime of Conservation Award from the Australian Geographic Society. Mary White continued to write until she was about 80-ish when she began to suffer from vascular dementia and had a stroke. She went to live with her daughter and son-in-law for a few years before moving into a Warrigal aged care centre. From what I learnt, Mary White was about to be moved to a new facility as her daughter did not think her mother was getting the proper care. It was said the faculty were gentle and caring, but they were not seeing to her comfort and pain management properly. There are records of this from her daughter, Dr. Barbara Ecclesley. Dr. Ecclesley, a doctor in veterinarian physiology, researcher in obsterics and gynecology, and artist was charged for the manslaughter of her mother. She had given Mary barbites, which she had left over after her time as a volunteer of euthanizing severely injured wildlife. This led to her mother's death. Dr. Ecclesley said she hadn't planned to kill her mother. She was spared jail time, instead, being sentenced to two-year community corrections order on what the judge termed her low moral culpability due to a diagnosis of severe depression. For those of you like me that didn't know what a community corrections order is, it is a flexible court-ordered sentence served in the community and not in a jail. There are conditions and provisos on this sentence. When I started researching this, the first article I saw screamed, renowned scientist killed my daughter. The salacious headlines fueling my imagination. And then I started to read more into it. And yes, the daughter did give her mother barbiturates left over from her volunteering days, euthanizing injured animals to lessen her mother's pain. Her brilliant mother, who had been reduced to a blob in a bed, in pain and not being able to look after herself or talk, that brilliant brain addled by the awful disease and stroke. Her daughter also did detailed scientific illustrations in her mother's books. They say dementia is harder on the family than on the patient. However, Barbara was sure her mother knew what was going on. And the daughter had severe depression. And if the facility where her mother resided was not giving any extra attention to her, look, I'm just talking. Probably talking out of turn. It's just interesting. And I guess it's incredibly sad that a brilliant paleobotanist's life was reduced to nothing at the end of her life. I do hope her family, including her daughter, have found her found the strength to carry on. As this is a horticulture podcast that was a little bit morbid. So I'm going to do something a bit different and jazz it up. A few bloopers! Woo-hoo! Who knew? Woolamy Pine was so hard to say. At the Woolamai Pie. Sorry. At the Woolamai Pie. There you go. Please remember to rate and review. It really does help. If you feel like you'd like to buy me a coffee to keep the brain ticking, then head over to buymeacoffee.com slash stems leaves roots. I will give you a shout out in the next episode. Woohoo! Thank you, my dear leaflets. Until next time, tiddle oo. At the Woolamine Pie. All media pertaining to this episode will be in the show notes. Please follow through Instagram and we now have a Facebook group. Please remember to rate and review and remember to pull up your plants so we can get dirty. Blop blop.