Books
The school of rock
by Rebecca Priestley
On Friday afternoons in the late 1980s Harold Wellman would often turn up at the geology seminar room at Victoria University, with woolly jumper and battered briefcase, and brows furrowed ready for a fight. Over a few drinks in the nearby staff club, the retired professor would argue about geology with the younger academics – and the students if they were game – until it was time to catch the bus home.
As a student there at the time, I didn’t know that this likeable curmudgeon was one of New Zealand’s most distinguished geologists, responsible for discovering the Alpine Fault, and for the controversial revelation that fault movement had displaced rocks either side of it by 480km. He had also pioneered palaeoseismology – using geological evidence of past earthquakes to predict the likelihood of future earthquake activity.
Simon Nathan, a geologist for 35 years and now science editor for the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, has written an enjoyable and illuminating biography of Wellman, heralding his achievements and providing an insight into the rugged life of a 20th-century geologist.
Harold Wellman was born and educated in the UK, and came to New Zealand with his family at the age of 18. He might have been British, but in many ways he was an early exemplar of the Good Keen Man. He trained and worked as a surveyor, but, because of the Depression, tried his luck on the goldfields of South Westland. After nine months working the black sands of Gillespies Beach and Haast, living in leaky shacks and eating flour paste fried in mutton fat, Wellman and his mate Jock had each earned the then princely sum of £100. For a much-needed reprieve from gold mining, they travelled to Ross, where Jock “started drinking and shouting the boys, and got through all his £100 in a week”. From Ross, Wellman walked over the Heaphy Track to Collingwood – where “trees stood out from the cliffs like the whiskers from a cat’s face” – and into a career in geology.
Wellman’s new career saw him work as a field geologist with the DSIR’s Geological Survey, a petroleum geologist with BP and a geology lecturer at Victoria University. With his keen eye for unusual geological features, his perfection of the three-course meal made from lima beans and bacon ends, and his ability to out-tramp much younger colleagues, Wellman was most at home in the field. Even a year in Papua New Guinea – where he fought crocodiles, braved tropical ulcers and suffered malaria – didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for adventure; he described his first attack of malaria as “quite exciting”.
The liberal use of Wellman’s own voice adds colour to Harold Wellman: A man who moved New Zealand. The first section of the book, an edited version of a memoir written by Wellman in his eighties, segues neatly into Nathan’s biography, which is peppered throughout with photographs, maps, snippets from the original memoir and diaries, and accounts from family members.
There is a lot of geology in this book and a basic interest in things like turbidites and trilobites, faulting and foraminifera is an advantage to the reader. But interested as I am in geology, I would have liked to know more about Wellman’s personal life, and what drove this man who “loved to argue, to dominate the conversation, and to challenge accepted ideas”. The book tells little about his family life and some seemingly significant personal events – like stress-induced stomach ulcers in the 1950s – are mentioned but not investigated. Still, Nathan has written from evidence, not hearsay, and should be credited for not delving into amateur psychology in an attempt to explain what made Wellman “brusque”, “argumentative” and “a bit of a larrikin at heart”.
There are few biographies of 20th-century New Zealand scientists and Nathan does an admirable job, telling not only the story of Wellman, but also the story of the evolution of geological thinking in New Zealand. Look out soon for Mary McEwen’s biography of her father, geologist and naturalist Charles Fleming (Craig Potton), and Christine Cole Catley’s biography of astronomer Beatrice Hill Tinsley (Cape Catley) as additions to this fledgling genre.
HAROLD WELLMAN: A MAN WHO MOVED NEW ZEALAND, by Simon Nathan (VUP, $49.95).
