Nancy Tyson Burbidge - Infinite Women

Born: 5 August 1912, United Kingdom
Died: 4 March 1977
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: NA

Nancy Tyson Burbidge AM was an Australian systemic botanist, conservationist and curator of the CSIRO herbarium. From 1946 to 1973, she worked at CSIRO, the Australian government agency for scientific research, where she worked on organising and extending the herbarium, first as a research scientist and then as curator; she was responsible for laying the foundations of the Herbarium Australiense, later the National Australian Herbarium. From 1973 to 1977 she was the scientific leader of the Flora of Australia project. Burbidge also published several books on Australian plants, wrote more than 50 papers on phytogeography, ecology, botanical history and Australian plant genera, and edited the publication Australasian Herbarium News until 1953, when she went to the UK to be the Australian Botanical Liaison Officer at the Kew Gardens herbarium for a year. There, she photographed and indexed specimens of Australian plants and made microfilm copies of botanist Robert Brown’s notebooks for Australian herbaria. Returning to Australia in 1954, she wrote extensive academic works and earned her doctorate from the University of Western Australia in 1961.
A conservationist, Burbidge was a founding member of the National Parks Association of the Australian Capital Territory in 1960 and served as its president twice. She was a major advocate for establishing national parks in the ACT, including Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and Namadgi National Park (both were established after her death).
She was awarded the 1971 Clarke Medal for her achievements in taxonomic botany and ecology by the Royal Society of New South Wales and was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1976. The Nancy T. Burbidge Memorial, an amphitheatre in the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra, is named in her honour, as is Mount Burbidge, a peak in Namadgi National Park, and the Acacia burbidgeae, also known as Burbidge’s wattle. The Australian Plant Name Index is dedicated to her memory and the Nancy T. Burbidge medal is presented annually by the Australian Systematic Botanists Society for outstanding contribution to taxonomic and systematic botanical work in Australia.