Kath Grey: A struggling start to field geology and studying stromatolites

Kath Grey, retired from a 50-year career with GSWA, relates her difficult start in becoming a field geologist and her first opportunity for survey field work that ultimately led to her becoming a world expert in stromatolites.

Transcript

00:01 Kath

The regional mappers kept finding stromatolites everywhere they looked and they wanted somebody to go and work on them. So I was saying “I'll go, I'll go”, and I rushed off and got a textbook to check what stromatolites were because I didn't know at the time.

00:17 Julie

Welcome to The Rocks Beneath Our Feet. In this series, five geologists talk about their years devoted to working for the Geological Survey of Western Australia. From understanding early life, to the tectonic processes that shaped our planet, and making the maps that unearth our understanding of Western Australia’s geology, they reveal their shared passion for discovering the stories in the rocks beneath our feet.

I’m Julie Hollis.

In this episode, Kath Grey, retired from a 50-year career with GSWA, relates her difficult start in becoming a field geologist and her first opportunity for survey field work that ultimately led to her becoming a world expert in stromatolites.

00:56 Kath

I’m Kath Grey. I went to an all-girls grammar school and I was always the odd bod because where the other girls entered flower collections or shell collections to the collection competition, I entered rocks. I also remember going to a careers evening and having explained that I would very dearly like to work in something that involved fieldwork, the careers officer gave me rather sniffy look and said, “Well, for women, there's teaching or nursing. Which do you fancy?”

However, I was very lucky with my choice of subjects at school and in the first year at university. It meant at the end of it all that I could select to do geology if I wanted to. Again, the professor was very discouraging for the seven females who’d applied to do geology that year. But when I said I'd develop such an interest in it after the first year, of course, he said, “Yes, okay, well, that sounds good. Welcome aboard.” 

I had a rather checkered career because I injured my back several times along the way. I injured my back first when I was 14. I fell over the front doorstep and I crushed some discs. So, I was in hospital for one term and then in my fifth year, I think it was, I was going to hospital three times a week to have traction.

02:23 Julie

Wow.

02:24 Kath

And having got through all that and having to repeat a year at school to make it up, I'd no sooner got to university, I bought my hammer for geology very proudly put it in my shoulder bike – and Sheffield's a city with very steep hills – I got on the top deck of the bus and just as I was sitting down, the bus set off with the real jolt and threw me back against the hammer and it activated the old injury.

I spent most of my first term at university in a hospital bed and I only just got through the midterm exams. Well, I didn't actually pass them. I nearly passed them. And I had a lot of work to make up. I had some very good tutors. They paid some of the PhD students to tutor me with the work I’d missed, for which I'm eternally grateful because it got me up to speed to go through to the second year.

When I was in hospital, I wrote to the professor of geology and said, “Yeah, I'm going to miss the whole term. What can I do?” And he said, there was a big text book called Holmes’ Physical Geology, and he said read Holmes from cover to cover. It's about 10 inches thick. I couldn't actually lift it. So the nursing staff set me up with a table and a mirror. But the problem was, it was back to front. So I had, at that stage I could read back-to-front writing quite fluently. I was just so determined to get through and do what I wanted to do. Even adversity helps you in some respects.

And as time progressed and I did different subjects, I became very interested in paleontology. Sheffield, which is the university I was at, was renowned for its paleontology and sedimentological work.

When I finish my BSc, I didn't get high enough grades to get through to go straight on and do a PhD. That was because the area I was mapping for my BSc ended up being the only area in the country that still had foot and mouth disease on it after that big outbreak. So I had to change the area completely and start again from scratch.

04:45 Julie

Oh no.

04:45 Kath

And of course it was another pile of work to try and make up.

04:49 Julie

Yeah.

04:49 Kath

I got a 2-2 in English degrees, which is about 70. Not good enough to do a PhD. But they were quite happy to accept me to do a master's degree in palynology, which is studying microfossils and spores and pollen. And again, Sheffield specialized in that and they had a big school of palynologists.

Then I injured it again when I was doing my Master's Degree and I had another whole term in hospital.

05:18 Julie

Wow.

05:18 Kath

And they told me at that time I'd be in a wheelchair by the time I was 40. So I've got a bit of the history of proving these predictions to be wrong, but it's been an uphill struggle. 

05:30 Julie

Yeah.

05:30 Kath

I learnt a lot of patience in the process. Whilst I was going through doing my master's degree, about eight people finished their PhDs and took up all the available places in oil companies. So I was scratching around looking for a job and I just applied for everything I saw advertised. And among them was one in the newspapers for Western Australia. Well, actually for Perth. I had to check up which side of Australia Perth was on. And because it was just after the mining boom, and most of the survey geologists had got more lucrative jobs in the mining industry, the survey was desperately recruiting overseas. And I got taken on in the editing section to begin with and luckily there was a vacancy in the paleontology section about a year later. And that was it. I moved into that.

06:24 Julie

Yep.

06:25 Kath

And I must admit, I really didn't know what I was coming to or anything. It was a big move for me leaving the family behind in the UK.

06:35 Julie

Yeah.

06:35 Kath

It was March 1971. So it's 50 years ago. But once I arrived, well my plan was to come out here and work and get some money for two years and go back to England and do the long-awaited PhD. Once I got here, I was just so engrossed with the place. It was just such an exciting place to be. And even though I didn't get to go out in the bush, the people I was working with were engaged in the big mapping project to complete the state mapping at one to 250,000 scale. And they came back full of all these hilarious stories about what had happened out in the bush, making me very envious.

07:19 Julie

Yeah.

07:19 Kath

I was told right at the start that women weren't allowed to go in the field and it took some years before I managed to persuade them that I was going to do field work.

07:30 Julie

When did you manage to get into the field?

07:34 Kath

Oh, it was about four or five years later. By then I'd moved into the paleontology section. And I'd been very upset about three years after I moved down there. There was a project going in the Kimberley to look at fossil fish. And I'd always been interested in fossil fish because one of my Sheffield lecturers was Alex Ritchie, who eventually moved out to the Australian Museum and was a world authority on them. So I’d developed an interest. And I was very upset to discover that they’d asked John Backhouse, who was the palynologist, to go and do a six-week trip with BMR to collect fossil fish.

And then about another two years later, the regional mappers, who were working on the Bangemall Basin, Peter Muhling and Albert Brakel, kept finding stromatolites everywhere they looked. And they wanted somebody to go and work on them. And Tony Cobain, who was the boss of the paleo section, and John Backhouse both had important projects going and didn't particularly want to go out in the field and didn't want to give up the projects they were doing for this one. So I was saying “I'll go, I'll go”, and I rushed off and got a textbook to check what stromatolites were because I didn't know at the time. And finally they relented and let me go.

09:04 Julie

Yeah.

09:05 Kath

But it was rather a difficult trip. Usually, a new geologist got sent out with one of the more senior geologists for a couple of weeks sort of breaking-in period, so they learnt the ropes. That didn't happen to me. I got sent out with a field assistant who was probably about 50 and I discovered afterwards was an ex-alcoholic and also something of a misogynist. And he was just determined that he was going to spend the whole time around the homesteads.

09:39 Julie

Oh no.

09:40 Kath

He liked chatting into the homestead people. And there were all sorts of strange things going on, like he suddenly came back one day from the station with a saddle and tried to convince me that we owed the station owner a 44-gallon drum of petrol, which he would use an LPO to pay for. And of course that really woke me up. I suddenly realized that the wool was being pulled over my eyes and said no.

10:08 Julie

Yep.

10:08 Kath

And of course that made things even more difficult because that wouldn't buy his saddle for him. And then after a few more days, I was determined to get out. We hadn't been in the field for two days because he was messing about doing things in the shearing quarters we were staying at. So I decided I'd take myself off in the vehicle. He was complaining that he wasn't feeling well.

10:33 Julie

Right.

10:34 Kath

When I came back, I discovered he’d got into the grog.

10:37 Julie

Oh no.

10:38 Kath

Well, I discovered afterwards half our beer supplies had disappeared plus half a bottle of brandy that was actually cooking brandy and I don't know how much had gone out of the wine cask. 

10:49 Julie

Oh dear.

10:50 Kath

And I think he’d taken painkillers as well. So I disappeared off down the creek and finished writing my notes up whilst he slept it off.

He also made a rather embarrassing call to the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The problem he had was, it was something a lot of the geologists got because the vehicles were so badly sprung, which was a hair growing the wrong way up the rectum. He proceeded to, in the middle of the general traffic as well, kept asking them to, “Would you please tell the doctor that I've got a pain in my bum? Bravo Uniform Mike”. I can still hear his voice to this day. I'm sitting in the creek going, Oh God, you know, because you knew everybody in the neighborhood knew about it.

And then the final straw was that he had go come pick petrol up from a homestead.

11:40 Julie

Yeah.

11:41 Kath

And I decided I'd go and once I hit the rocks, I was fine. I knew what I was doing. There wasn't a problem, which he'd been making out all the time that there was and that my schedule was complete rubbish and wouldn’t work. It only wasn't working because he wouldn't do it. Anyway, he went off to pick up the fuel and I went to the outcrop and I took my swag roll and food with me fortunately. He was supposed to be back. It was only a couple of hours of run. And he didn't come back that night. So I was left out in the bush on my own.

12:14 Julie

Oh God.

12:15 Kath

And he didn't turn up till 4 o'clock the next day. And he'd actually gone at such a speed that he’d flattened the exhaust completely the full length of the vehicle and cracked the manifold in the process. So we had to hobble into Exmouth to get it fixed.

And it turned out many years later, I met a geologist and we were talking about Bangemall stuff. He was a company geologist and he said, “Oh, you know, I had this weird experience one time. This guy, who first of all I thought he was a survey geologist and then I think he was a field assistant, but he breezed into my camp at the side of the track and drank half my half my beer supplies and fell asleep, and then set off the next morning like a bat out of hell. And I've often wondered if he got through or not”. And I realized this is my field assistant he was describing.

13:07 Julie

Oh boy, wow.

13:08 Kath

And when I got back to Perth, quite a few of the people who he’d worked with before said, “Oh we hear you had trouble with your fieldy. We're not surprised because when he was out with me, he did this, this, and this.” You know, I think there was a certain element of expectation that I would fail and I didn't.

13:27 Julie

Mmm. So perhaps there was some degree of testing you in the process.

13:31 Kath

Oh, definitely. But the geology was great. I really enjoyed the geology. But I couldn't make any sense of the stromatolites.

13:40 Julie

Right.

13:40 Kath

And I’d more or less convinced myself that you couldn't use them for stratigraphy. And it turned out later that the stratigraphy was actually not right in places. They didn't work because of the incorrect stratigraphy.

13:57 Julie

From that point, did you start focusing on stromatolites?

14:00 Kath

Yes. I had done a lot of little bitty projects before that. Nothing very substantial. So it was really the first thing I could get my teeth into. As I say, I didn't really believe them because of the Bangemall trip. But then John Bunting, who was working in what was the Nabberu Basin and is now the Yerrida and the Eraheedy and several others, started bringing me stuff in from there and that really painted a good picture of how they were arranged stratigraphically. And other people started bringing them in so there was a definite need for somebody to work on them. And of course the more I did, the more interested I got.

They weren't going to send me to IGC in Sydney because I was so low down the pecking order. But I paid for myself to go to the conference and a field trip around the Amadeus Basin where I met my, subsequently my PhD supervisor, Malcolm Walter. And he’d just finished doing his PhD on stromatolites in the Amadeus Basin. So he sort of took me around and showed me the ropes and I suddenly realized how interesting they were.

There was so much work going on at the time on Precambrian stuff in particular, and I suddenly realized I wanted to be a part of that. And for heaven's sake look at how much Precambrian there is in the state, you know, it's endless. I’ve nowhere near done much but scrape the top of it.

15:29 Julie

You’ve been listening to The Rocks Beneath Our Feet. You can discover more about GSWA by visiting dmp.wa.gov.au/gswa or find GSWA on LinkedIn and Facebook. If you like what you’ve heard, give them a follow.