Osborn, Theodore George Bentley   (1887 - 1973)

Born on 2 October 1887 at Great Clacton, Essex, UK; died on 3 June 1973 in Adelaide, SA.
(As he wished, his ashes were buried on the T.G.B. Osborn Vegetation Reserve at Koonamore, SA).

After the family settled in Lancashire, Osborn attended Burnley Grammar School. In 1905 he went to the Victoria University of Manchester on a scholarship, and won first-class honours in botany (B.Sc., 1908).

He became a lecturer in economic botany at Manchester (M.Sc., 1911; later D.Sc., in 1920).

In 1912 Osborn was appointed first professor of botany, vegetable pathology and parasitology at the University of Adelaide, South Australia.

On 17 July 1912 he married Edith May Kershaw, also a Manchester M.Sc. (awarded in 1908). With his wife's collaboration, he established a department in Adelaide with a high reputation. He was also botanical consultant to the South Australian government.

Though Osborn's early papers had been on fungi, he worked on a variety of botanical problems. He saw that the developing discipline of plant ecology should be applied to Australian vegetation, and began work on the forests of the Adelaide hills.

The dangers of over-grazing in arid regions were not then understood; saltbush and bluebush plains were in danger of becoming plantless deserts. Osborn applied his ecological ideas to these questions and in 1926, with the help of the CSIR and some pastoralists, he established the Koonamore Vegetation Reserve about 240 miles (386 km) north-east of Adelaide, where the average, but very unreliable, annual rainfall is only eight inches (203 mm). Research and teaching at that station still continues.

In 1928 Osborn accepted the chair of botany at the University of Sydney. He became increasingly interested in the coastal vegetation of New South Wales and his new ideas enhanced the school's reputation. Osborn was dean of the faculty of science in 1930-33 and a fellow of the university senate from 1931.

In 1937 he became Sherardian professor of botany at the University of Oxford, UK, where he was elected fellow of Magdalen College.

On retiring in 1953 as emeritus professor, Osborn returned to Australia and, except for a short period in Melbourne, lived in Adelaide.

In 1958 his wife died and, in England on 8 October 1960 he married Marjorie Hope Sabine.

He lectured and continued his research in Adelaide until about 1960, visiting the department almost daily.

A devout Anglican, he helped to found St Mark's College at the University of Adelaide and, while living there after his first wife's death, was acting master in 1959.

Source: Extracted from: https://connect.adelaide.edu.au/nodes/view/25461
Portrait Photo: https://connect.adelaide.edu.au/nodes/view/6999 UA-00006802

Collecting localities for 'Osborn, T.G.B.' from AVH (2024)

Data from 1,395 specimens