BROWNE, WILLIAM ROWAN

(b. Lislea. County Derry, Ireland. 11 December 1884; d. Sydney. Australia, 1 September 1975)

geology.

Browne was the sixth of eight children of National School teachers James Browne and Henrietta Rowan Browne, on both sides descended from loyalist, Anglican families. His paternal grandfather, presumed to have been a farmer, fought as a volunteer against the uprising in 1798: his mother’s father was an architect and contractor. In October 1903 Browne entered Trinity College, Dublin, having taken first place at matriculation for all Ireland, He began a classical arts course but soon had to withdraw, suffering from tuberculosis.

Advised to seek a congenial climate, he set out in February 1904 for Sydney, Australia, where by late 1906 he was able to resume studies. But his plan to go on with classics changed after he heard about a remarkable professor of geology in Sydney, T. W. Edgeworth David. In 1910 Browne graduated B.Sc. from the University of Sydney with first-class honors in both geology and mathematics. After a year as assistant at the Adelaide Observatory, he gained a junior teaching post in geology at the University of Sydney, which thereafter became his main base. He retired as university reader in geology in 1949. In 1915 Browne married Olga M. Pauss; they had two daughters. She died in 1948. and in 1950 Browne married Ida A. Brown, a paleontologist, who died in 1976.

As Edgeworth David brought Browne to geology, so he remained Browne’s inspiration. Loyalty to David shaped his career, a major part of it being devoted to realizing the synthesis of Australian geology that David had hoped to achieve. But Browne was no tame follower. He earned his place as David’s true successor, as the leading Australian geologist of his day.

Browne shared David’s broad geological interests, handling with equal command problems of petrology, stratigraphy, tectonics, and geomorphology; but at first he had a particular rapport with petrology. His study of carboniferous volcanism in the Hunter River region of New South Wales, begun in 1911, led to detailed and, for Australia, innovative research on secondary alteration phenomena and to concern with late Paleozoic environments and stratigraphy of the region. By 1914, at Cooma, New South Wales, he had pioneered study of regional metamorphism in that state. Later, during university vacations from 1919 to 1921, Browne joined a group led by E. C. Andrews of the Geological Survey of New South Wales that was examining the Broken Hill area. Browne’s regional reconnaissance established the main pertrological style of the metamorphosed Willyama Complex there. His report appended to Andrews’ memoir of 1922 was also a dissertation for which he gained the D. Sc. from the University of Sydney in the same year.

During the 1920’s Browne served on various research committees of the Australasian I now Australian and New Zealand) Association for the Advancement of Science set up to coordinate geological information. The experience helped focus his attention on issues beyond the local and observational—for instance, on relations between tectonic events and igneous action and metamorphism. In a presidential address of 1929 he reviewed these themes for New South Wales to the end of Paleozoic time. Another such address in 1933 took igneous action through the Mesozoic and Tertiary and for the first time showed evidence from Australia of contrasted basalt magma types. Meanwhile, in 1931 Browne had published a work, still cited. on batholiths and their time relations with tectonism. Plutonic rocks also had been his concern since working at Encounter Bay, South Australia, in 1912.

It was as if, unaware, he had been serving an apprenticeship. Without warning, in March 1934 David asked Browne to finish the book that for so long had been his last ambition. After David’s death that year, the supposed manuscript was bought by the government of New South Wales, which formally repeated the author’s request to Browne. He accepted but found, to his dismay, that David had left little more than a mass of jottings and some reviews written years before. He had no choice but to start afresh. Given leave by the university, he worked at the task; but at the outbreak of war in 1939, the job far from done, he returned to academic duty, with work on the book relegated to his spare time. He had already retired when The Geology of the Commonwealth of Australia appeared in 1950. Though credited to his mentor, it was Browne’s masterly synthesis, now a classic in the literature of geology.

On the many topics he embraced while preparing the book, none became more absorbing to Browne in his active retirement than Quaternary history, in particular the consequences of Pleistocene glacial action on mainland Australia. He wrote extensively on the subject, which—as he saw it, and to his regret—was being left by geologists to geographers with inadequate geological training. He became also an ardent and effective advocate for conservation of rare natural environments. Yet he did not oppose developmental works, if sensitively handled; indeed, he served as geological consultant to various major engineering projects in New South Wales with notable success.

Disciplined, erudite, and articulate, Browne was a scholar among Australian geologists. With most he communicated by publishing his work locally, a course that matched his staunch support of Australian scientific societies. If as a teacher Browne lacked Edgeworth David’s gift for fine rhetoric, his skill in orderly presentation and informed argument made an effective substitute, Of the many students set by him on distinguished careers, the list begins with C. E. Tilley. who remained his lifelong friend.

The many awards and honors, mostly Australian, received by Browne are on record in the printed memorials. Only a few are noted here. He became a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1954, at the inaugural election of that body. In 1966 the Royal Society of New South Wales issued volume 99 of its Journal and Proceedings consisting of papers offered in his honor, as the W. R. Browne volume. Thesenior award of the Geological Society of Australia, the Browne Medal, was instituted as a memorial. He died of a heart attack.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Among Browne’s writings are “The Geology of the Cooma District, Part I.” in Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 48 (1914), 172–222: “The Igneous Rocks of Encounter Bay, South Australia.” in Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, 44 (1920), 1–57; “Report on the Petrology of the Broken Hill Region…,” in Memoirs of the Geological Survey of New South Wales, 8 (1922), appendix, 295–353: “Presidential Address. An Outline of the History of Igneous Action in New South Wales till the Close of the Palaeozoic Era,” in Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, 54 (1929) ix-xxxix: “Notes on Bathyliths and Some of Their Implications,” in Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. 65 (1931) 112–144; “Presidential Address. An Account of Post-Palaeozoic Igneous Activity in New South Wales.” ibid., 67 (1933), 9–95; and The Geology of the Commonwealth of Australia, by T. W. Edgeworth David, edited and supplemented In Browne, 3 vols. (London, 1950).

II. Secondary Literature. A biography is T. G. Vallance, “William Rowan Browne, 1884–1975,” in Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, 102 , pt. 2 (1977), 76–84. A bibliography is appended to T. G. Vallance and E. S. Hills, “William Rowan Browne,” in Records of the Australian Academy of Science, 4 , no. 1 (1978). 65–81.

T. G. Vallance