Enid Robertson adds to Ashby family gifts to South Australia with work in botany and for Watiparinga Reserve
South Australian environment hall of fame botanist Enid Roberston recognised with her aunt Alison Ashby for her work on the Watiparinga conservation reserve in the Eden Hills area of the Adelaide Hills. The National Trust South Australian reserve was placed on the national estate in 1995 by the Australian Heritage Commission. Robertson's honoured contribution to botany included helping revise the fourth volume of the second edition of J.M. Black's The Flora of South Australia.
Botanist Enid Robertson (nee Ashby), in South Australia’s environment hall of fame from 2023, added to her family’s gifts to South Australia by making a lasting contribution in conserving and managing its native vegetation.
Born at Adelaide’s Unley in 1925, Robertson was the granddaughter of Edwin Ashby who developed a large garden at his Wittunga property near Blackwood in the Adelaide Hills. In 1973, Robertson’s father Keith and his family gave the Adelaide Botanic Garden 14 hectares of the property that became Wittunga Botanic Garden. From 1973, Robertson worked on rejuvenating Watiparinga Reserve, another section of Wittunga that her aunt Alison Ashby, a naturalist and botanic artist, had inherited and donated to the National Trust of South Australia.
Robertson and her extended Ashby family were members of the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers. She grew up in a house called Allambee over the road from her grandparents and recalled, from her childhood, the family’s women, as members of the Women’s Non-Party Political Association of South Australia, gathering yearly under a prunus pissardii tree in the Wittunga gardens. After Robertson’s grandparents died, her family moved into the Wittunga home.
Robertson studied for her bachelor of science at Adelaide University (1944-46) where she was awarded the 1944 John Bagot scholarship for Botany 1. She was appointed in 1947 as a systematic botanist at Adelaide University’s Waite Institute, replacing Constance Eardley as curator of its agricultural research institute herbarium, and as a lecturer in the medical school on microscopic anatomy and human histology.
During her time at Waite Institute, Robertson became acquainted with John McConnell Black, then 90. She took plant specimens to Black's house at Brougham Place, North Adelaide, and he helped her identify them. When Black died in 1951, she completed his revised fourth volume of the second edition of Flora of South Australia. From 1953-1955, Robertson was a senior research fellow at Adelaide University’s botany department.
In 1966, after her husband Thorburn Robertson, a doctor and son of noted physiologist and biochemistBrailsford (Thorburn) Robertson, died aged 40, Enid Robertson moved into the renovated Allambee house she grew up in and renovated by her father for her and her children to live there.
In 1967, Robertson took up a key role supporting Bryan Womersley’s world-leading phycological studies at Adelaide University’s botany department. She managed the research infrastructure including a major herbarium and an algal culture area. Robertson focussed on seagrasses, writing them up as a chapte in Womersley’s exemplar The marine benthic flora of southern Australia.
Besides significant research, planning and administrating in government and private spheres, Robertson was committed to community education and hands-on work in the bush. In 1973, she trialled innovative ways of managing the 32-hectare Watiparinga National Trust reserve in Eden Hills-Belair region donated by her aunt Alison Ashby. Robertson’s widely influential Watiparinga Reserve Management Plan in 1984 became a prototype for managing other small- to medium-sized nature reserves in urban areas. With Maud McBriar as members of the National Trust’s nature preservation committee, Robertson encouraged the trust to apply for voluntary agreements over its reserves.
In her later years, Robertson focused on protecting native flora and identifying invasive plants in the Mount Lofty Ranges, eventually lodging more than 1,200 specimens in the State Herbarium. Honoured with a 1992 Australian natural history medallion for botany, Robertson also was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1997 for her contributions to botany.
