Person

Boutakoff, Nicholas Aleksandrovitch (1903 - 1977)

Born
1903
Washington DC, United States of America
Died
1977
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Exploration geologist

Summary

Nicholas Boutakoff was an exploration geologist whose early career was in mapping and geological prospecting in the Eastern Belgian Congo and as an oil geologist in Trinidad. He became highly experienced in oil exploration, drilling operations and seismic surveying. In 1949 he migrated to Australia and joined the Geological Survey of Victoria. His projects included mapping the oil-bearing sediments in the Portland district and assessing the prospects of off-shore deposits in Bass Strait. He also, contrary to civil service regulations, acted as consultant to commercial enterprises. After three years as Deputy Director of the Survey, in 1962 Boutakoff became Chief Geologist of the Woodside (Lakes Entrance) Oil Company which was seeking expansion possibilities. Boutakoff played a central role in Woodside's exploration of the North West Shelf in the Timor Sea. His papers are in the Australian Manuscripts Collection at the La Trobe Library, Melbourne.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1923
Education - Bachelor of Secondary Education (Diplôme de Bachelier de l'Enseignement secondaire), Nice, France
1927
Education - BA (hons) in forestry, Université de Louvain, Belgium
1928
Education - BA in geology, Université de Louvain, Belgium
1937 - 1948
Career position - Geologist, Kern Trinidad Oilfields Ltd (KTOL)
1948
Life event - Naturalised as a British citizen
1949 - 1959
Career position - Field Geologist, Geological Survey of Victoria
1959 - 1962
Career position - Deputy Director, Geological Survey of Victoria
1962 - c. 1966
Career position - Chief Geologist, Woodside (Lakes Entrance) Oil Company
1966 - ?
Career position - Geologist, Timor Oil, Dili, East Timor

Related Corporate Bodies

Published resources

Journal Articles

  • Butcher, Mike; Collins, Yolande M. J.; and Purcell, Peter, 'Nicholas Boutakoff: a geologist's life revisited', Journal of Australasian mining history, 16 (2018), 39-58. Details

See also

  • Murray, Robert, From the edge of a timeless land: a history of the North West Shelf Gas Project (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin Australia, 1991), 207 pp. Details
  • Wilkinson, Rick, Where God never trod: Australia's oil explorers across two centuries (Balmain, N.S.W.: Davis Ell Press, 1991), 482 pp. Details

Helen Cohn

Created: 16 July 2019, Last modified: 21 August 2019

EOAS ID: biogs/P006469b.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/P006469b.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