50 years in Zoology

This issue of the Australian Zoologist is published 50 years after I went to the University of Queensland in 1960 to become a zoologist. Dan Lunney invited me to put together a ‘photo essay’. I agreed because it gives me an opportunity to salute colleagues and friends who made so many things possible. Obviously there is not room to include all of the colleagues and friends with whom it has been my great pleasure and privilege to work. Nevertheless, please consider this a salute to all of you. The order of the photos is project based, which conveys a loose chronology as well. Uncredited photos were taken by me. I cannot recall who took some of them, and these are identified as ‘photographer not recorded’. Subject matter rather than photographic merit has dictated choice and many of the photos have suffered over the years. Warning to would-be zoologists: These photos convey a rather biased impression of the life of an academic zoologist, as if I did nothing but go on field trips. The photos also fail to convey the hard work that field trips usually involve. Certainly I have always believed that a study of vertebrate biology must be grounded in knowledge about how the critters live and many of the physiological questions I have always been interested in could be answered only by field work. However, for every day in the field there have been many days preparing and delivering lectures, talking with students, writing grant proposals, going to meetings, reviewing draft theses and papers, writing up results for publication, dealing with administrators and all of the other things that, in reality, dominate the life of a university-based zoologist. Most of the publications arising from the work depicted in this essay can be found on the University of Queensland digital repository at http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/ Gordon Grigg, December 2009.