Person

Fraser, Lilian Ross (c. 1908 - 1987)

Born
c. 1908
Kurrajong, New South Wales, Australia
Died
5 October 1987
Hornsby, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation
Botanist and Public servant

Summary

Lillian Ross Fraser was a botanist whose work identifying fungi and viruses was hugely beneficial to the New South Wales citrus industry.

She identified several highly destructive diseases including Phytophthora citrophthora fungus (root rot), seedling yellows, woody gall and Australian citrus dieback. She also did pioneering research on many other established diseases.

Details

In 1940 Lilian Ross Fraser was employed as assistant plant pathologist at the New South Wales Department of Agriculture, the first woman to be employed in that position.

In the early 1940s she identified the soil-inhabiting Phytophthora citrophthora root rot fungus, which had caused major damage to the New South Wales citrus industry. She was the first person to do so, and also established which citrus species were resistant to the fungus.

For this work she became the first woman accepted into the Fellowship of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science.

In 1960 she was appointed Senior Biologist at the Department, before being promoted to Chief Biologist at their Biological and Chemical Research Institute in 1968. In 1973 she retired from the Institute.

Chronology

1930
Education - Bachelor of Science in Botany (Hons.), University of Sydney
1931 - 1936
Award - Linnean Macleay Fellowship (Botany), for study at the University of Sydney
1937
Education - Doctorate of Science in Botany, University of Sydney
c. 1938
Education - Studied fungal taxonomy at the Imperial Mycological Institute, London
c. 1938
Education - Studied fungal taxonomy at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London
1939 - 1940
Career position - Commonwealth Research Fellow studying fungal decay in apples, University of Sydney
1940 - 1960
Career position - Assistant Plant Pathologist, New South Wales Department of Agriculture
1948 - 1949
Career position - President. Linnean Society of New South Wales
1957 - 1958
Career position - President. Linnean Society of New South Wales
1960 - 1968
Career position - Senior Biologist, New South Wales Department of Agriculture
1963 - 1987
Award - Fellow, Australian Institute of Agricultural Science
1968 - 1970
Career position - Chief Biologist, New South Wales Division of Scientific Services
1970 - 1973
Career position - Chief Biologist, Biological and Chemical Research Institute, New South Wales
1973
Life event - Retired from the Biological and Chemical Research Institute.

Related Awards

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

  • McCarthy, Gavan; Morgan, Helen; Smith, Ailie; van den Bosch, Alan, Where are the Women in Australian Science?, Exhibition of the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, First published 2003 with lists updated regulary edn, Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, 2003, https://eoas.info/exhibitions/wisa/wisa.html. Details

Journal Articles

  • Barkley, P., 'Lilian Ross Fraser 1909-1987', Australasian Plant Pathology, 16 (4) (1987), 96. Details
  • Fraser, Lilian R., 'Daniel McAlpine Memorial Lecture: diseases of citrus trees in Australia - the first hundred years', Australasian Plant Pathology Society newsletter, 5 (1976), 37-42. https://doi.org/1o.1071/APP9760037. Details

Resources

Rebecca Rigby

EOAS ID: biogs/P004916b.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/P004916b.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