Person

Kitson, Albert Ernest (1868 - 1937)

CBE CMG KBE FGS

Born
21 March 1868
Manchester, Lancashire, England
Died
8 March 1937
Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England
Occupation
Geologist

Summary

Sir Albert Kitson joined the Victorian Public Service (VPS) as a clerk in 1886. From 1899 to 1904, although still employed as a clerk, he carried out geological field work for the VPS. This work inspired him to take up part-time studies in geology, mining and surveying at the Working Men's College (Melbourne) and at the University of Melbourne. In 1904 Kitson was promoted to senior field geologist and headed many more geological surveys and published widely. His two most noted surveys were in the Gold Coast where areas of manganese and diamonds were discovered, and in Nigeria where rich coal deposits were found. In 1930 he retired from the VPS and returned to England. There he immediately took up the position of geological advisor to the Colonial Office and later joined the boards of several mining companies. Kitson was a Fellow and Lyell medal recipient of the Geological Society of London and he was knighted (KBE) in 1927.

Details

Chronology

c. 1878
Life event - Migrated to Australia (Victoria) with family
1886 - 1889
Career position - Clerk at the Victorian Postmaster-General's Department
1889 - 1896
Career position - Clerk at the Victorian Department of Lands and Survey
1896 - 1904
Career position - Clerk at the Victorian Department of Mines and Water Supply
1897 -
Award - Fellow, Geological Society of London (FGS)
1899 - 1904
Career position - Geological field work including the survey of Buchan Caves in East Gippsland (1900), Victoria
1904 - 1906
Career position - Senior Field Geologist in the Department of Mines and Water Supply
1906 - 1911
Career position - Principal Surveyor on the Mineral Survey of Southern Nigeria
1913 - 1930
Career position - Director of the Gold Coast Geological Survey
1916
Taxonomy event - Eucalyptus kitsoniana Maiden was named in his honour
1918
Award - Wollaston fund award, Geological Society of London
1918
Award - Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE), Britain
1922
Award - Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG)
1927
Award - Lyell Medal, Geological Society of London
1927
Award - Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE), Britain
1929
Career position - President, C (Geology) Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
1930
Career position - Geological Advisor to the Colonial Office in England
1930
Life event - Retired and returned to England
1934 - 1936
Career position - President, Geologist's Association

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

Book Sections

  • Farrall, Lyndsay, 'Kitson, Sir Albert Ernest (1868-1937), geologist' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 9: 1891 - 1939 Gil-Las, Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle, eds (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983), pp. 617-618. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A090619b.htm. Details

Resources

See also

  • George, Alex S., Australian botanist's companion (Kardinya, W.A.: Four Gables Press, 2009), 671 pp. Details
  • Hall, Norman, Botanists of the Eucalypts: short biographies of people who have named eucalypts, whose names have been given to species or who have collected type material (Melbourne: CSIRO, 1978), 101 pp. Details

McCarthy, G.J.

EOAS ID: biogs/P001076b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P001076b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260