Person

Farquharson, Robert Alexander (1883 - 1959)

OBE

Born
2 May 1883
Dinedin, New Zealand
Died
27 December 1959
Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Occupation
Petrologist

Summary

Robert Farquharson was a petrologist with the Geological Survey of Western Australia from 1911 to 1922. He published a number of significant reports for the Survey, including Petrological contributions to the geology of Western Australia (1912) and (with colleague E. C. Saint-Smith) Geology and mineral resources of Yilgarn Goldfield, part I (1913). He also contributed the petrological section to other Survey reports. Between 1922 and 1938 he was Government Geologist and Director of Agriculture in British Somaliland. Farquharson retired and returned to Perth in 1938.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1906
Award - 1851 Exhibition Scholarship (declined)
1906
Award - Rhodes Scholarship, St John's College, University of Oxford
1906
Education - Associate of the Otago School of Mines, New Zealand
1908
Education - BA, University of Oxford
1911 - 1922
Career position - Petrologist, Geological Survey of Western Australia
1912
Education - MA, University of Oxford
1922 - 1938
Career position - Government Geologist and Director of Agriculture, British Somaliland
1932 - 1934
Career event - Seconded to the Anglo-Abyssinian Boundary Commission
1938
Award - Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE)
1938
Life event - Returned to Western Australia

Published resources

Books

  • Blatchford, T., Honman, C. S., Simpson, E. S., Farquharson, R. A., The geology and mineral resources of the Yilgarn Goldfield, part III : the gold belt north of Southern Cross, including Westonia (Perth: Government Printer, 1917), 321 pp. Details
  • Clarke, E. de C.; petrology by R. A. Farquharson, mineralogy and underground waters by E. S. Simpson, The geology and ore-deposits of Meekatharra Murchison goldfield (Perth: Government Printer, 1916), 342 pp. Details
  • Honman, C. S., The geology of the country between Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie: with a petrological contribution by R.A. Farquharson, and a mineralogical contribution by A.J. Robertson (Perth: Government Printer, 1914), 83 pp. Details

Helen Cohn

Created: 23 July 2026

EOAS ID: biogs/P008106b.htm

This Edition: 2026 May - New Office
Chunnup - Gariwerd calendar - Winter: late May to end of July - season of cockatoos
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-chunnup-season-of-cockatoos

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

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?

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/P008106b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

"... 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