Vale Sophie Charlotte Ducker, distinguished botanist, 19092004
[ UniNews Vol. 13, No. 11
28 June - 12 July 2004 ]
Sophie Ducker AM BSc MSc DSc LLB (Hons) was a devoted, distinguished and loyal member of the University of Melbourne. Her remarkable and outstanding career in the Botany School started in 1944 when, after fleeing Germany in 1938, she and her husband Fritz and son Klaus were freed from the Enemy Aliens Detention Centre at Tatura.
Brought up in Dresden, Sophie (right) was sent to the Cheltenham Ladies College for a year to finish her school education and then to the equivalent of universities in Geneva and Stuttgart where her childhood interests in botany were reawakened.
Her first appointment here was as a Research Assistant in the Botany School, working with Dr Ethel McLennan (who became her mentor) on soil micro-organisms in the fungal antibiotic search-frenzy, which followed the discovery of penicillin.
After studying part-time for a BSc, her ambition to study the algae became a reality in 1953 with her appointment to the staff as Senior Demonstrator. Her academic career proceeded majestically to Reader in Botany.
Underneath a personality which was generous, amusing, stylish, capricious, with a capacity to gather round her a host of loyal friends, was an indomitable and steely resolve to achieve her goals. Many are the friends, librarians and others that Sophie enlisted to help her in the projects on which her mind was set.
Sophies first paper on Australian algae also the subject of her MSc thesis was published in 1958. Meanwhile, she enthusiastically introduced Marine and Freshwater Biology into the Botany curriculum and gathered around her an influential research group many of whom became professors and established schools of Marine Biology and Phycology in universities around Australia.
Retirement in 1974 did not dim Sophies intellectual activity or enthusiasm. Her research interests expanded to embrace seagrasses and as well she had an abiding interest in those who first described Australian flora.
Sophie privately helped many students the Botany School Foundation has a Sophie Ducker Research Scholarship. She was also a bibliophile of repute, a longstanding Friend of the Baillieu Library, member of the Baillieu Library Committee, and a major benefactor to the Library its oldest 15th century book is part of the Ducker Collection.
Undoubtedly, Sophies magnum opus was her book The Contented Botanist, Miegunyah Press (1988), in which she edited the letters of one of her heroes William Harvey (18111866).
She was a member of the Universitys Committee of Convocation, and in 1986 was awarded the ANZAAS Mueller Medal.
Tom Neales, School of Botany
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