Person

Aston, Helen Isobel (1934 - 2020)

Born
1934
Died
26 March 2020
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Ornithologist and Taxonomic botanist

Summary

Helen Aston is a botanist recognised as an authority on Australian vascular aquatic plants. She started her research in this neglected field after joining the staff of the National Herbarium of Victoria in 1957. Her papers were often illustrated with her own botanical drawings. In 1973 she published the landmark Aquatic plants of Australia. For ten years she was Curator of the Herbarium. Aston is equally well-known as an ornithologist, being an active member of several ornithological organisations and participating regularly in bird population surveys. She published A bird atlas of the Melbourne region in 1978. The genus Astonia was named in her honour.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1957
Education - BSc, University of Melbourne
1957 - 1964
Career position - Assistant Botanist, National Herbarium of Victoria
1964 - 1965
Career position - Botanist, National Herbarium of Victoria
1965 - 1982
Career position - Senior Botanist, National Herbarium of Victoria
1971 - 1973
Career position - President, Bird Observers' Club
1973 - 1974
Career position - Australian Botanical Liaison Officer, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
1978 - 1988
Career position - Editor, Muelleria
1979
Award - Australian Natural History Medallion
1982 - 1991
Career position - Curator, National Herbarium of Victoria

Related Corporate Bodies

Related Journals

Published resources

Journal Articles

  • Aston, H. I., 'The herbarium and plant collections of Norman A. Wakefield (1918-1972)', Muelleria, 4 (1972), 251-63. Details
  • Aston, H. I., 'Dr David M. Churchill', Botanic magazine, 4 (1991), 31-2. Details
  • Aston, H. I., 'Obituary: Dr James Hamlyn Willis A.M. 28 January 1910-10 November 1995', Muelleria, 10 (1996), 21-5. Details
  • Aston, H. I., 'Jean Galbraith 28 March 1906-2 January 1999: a tribute', The Victorian naturalist, 116 (1999), 73-5. Details
  • Aston, Helen, 'Publication Dates of Early Scientific Journals in Victoria', Muelleria, 5 (1984), 281-288. Details
  • Aston, Helen, 'Villarsia - One of Mueller's Puzzles', The Victorian naturalist, 113 (1996), 151-152. Details
  • Presland, Gary, 'Helen Isobel Aston 26 March 1934 - 17 March 2020', The Victorian naturalist, 137 (3) (2020), 90-1. Details
  • Ross, Jim; and Walsh, Neville, 'Helen Aston 26 March 1934 to 17 March 2020', Australasian Systematic Botany Society newsletter, 186 (2021), 33-4. Details

Resources

Resource Sections

See also

Helen Cohn

Created: 12 March 2019, Last modified: 21 December 2021

EOAS ID: biogs/P006311b.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 the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 February (Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#kooyang
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/P006311b.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