You said your PhD was the first in Professor Carey's department. How did the year in Cambridge contribute to you getting a PhD from the University of Tasmania?

That year was allowed to be counted towards my PhD, which probably wasn't quite as usual then as it would be now. People used to have to go overseas to get a PhD, anyway. I ended up, in 1952, getting the first Australian PhD in geology.

What did you work on?

I worked on the Cambrian volcanic rocks of Tasmania. This meant having to first of all find out where they were – I had to go out into the field and map them if they hadn't already been mapped – and then collect them, bring them back into the laboratory, look at them under the microscope, and do chemical analyses and X-ray crystallography. Fortunately, in Cambridge I did a course in X-ray crystallography. (I ended up demonstrating in it. It was fairly new to me, but it's amazing how quickly you learn.)

Professor Carey loved to be first in bringing new equipment and ideas into the department, so he asked me to buy an X-ray camera for the department, one that you could use for powder photography. He had acquired an old medical generator from a friend, and this was supposed to have been changed a bit to produce suitable X-rays for the powder camera. Well, when I started to use it I got funny results, very foggy. I couldn't find out what went wrong, so I sent a copy and a letter to the company that I bought the camera from.

I can still remember to this day that one Sunday morning the police came to where I was staying in Hobart. They said, 'Are you Beryl Scott?' and one of them told me, 'You must stop using that camera immediately.' I looked at him, wondering why. He said, 'The X-rays are going right round the room and they're terribly dangerous.' I said I knew they were not very healthy things, but he insisted, 'You've just got to stop.' I found out later that the generator was the culprit. It was producing the long, soft X-rays that are used for medical purposes, whereas the X-rays that we use in crystallography are very short and very hard. That generator got short shrift!

Admired mentors

Did you have any mentors at university?

All the staff in the Sydney University department were wonderful. I went through during the war years, when the numbers were down. We were all friendly, and spending hours in the laboratory we got to know each other fairly well. But in particular I greatly admired Dr Germaine Joplin, who was a very, very able petrologist. In spite of only having sight in one eye, she did absolutely fantastic drawings of the rocks under the microscope. (There was no such thing as microphotography in those days.) She had gone to Cambridge as a Linnaean Macleay Fellow and studied there for her PhD in the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology. Professor Tilley, a former Australian, was head of department, and I later became one of many Australians who studied there under him.

Would you say Professor Carey, at the University of Tasmania, was a mentor to you?

I would. In supervising my PhD, he encouraged me to publish as I went along, as the work progressed. I wrote four papers, and he said, 'Right, they're going to be part of your thesis. No examiner will fail you if your work has been reviewed and accepted for publication in international journals.' And so at the start of my thesis I explain, 'You read them in this order,' to cover those four papers.

Also, this being his first PhD – the first higher degree, actually – in the department, he was very conscious that it had to be a high standard. He made sure I had three external examiners from throughout the world: England, the USA and South Africa.

After you completed your PhD did you ever have another mentor?

No – I became the mentor!

Lecturing at a fledgling university college

In about 1955, I think, you were offered a lectureship in what was then Newcastle University College.

That's right. It was an interesting story. I applied for a job I saw in the paper and three different lots of people wanted me. I took the one in the University College, which was a fledgling college, as only the second member of the geology staff.

My goodness, it was small. So how was geology taught by the two of you?

Geology was taught in the School of Mining Engineering and Applied Geology, and the students used to get a degree called Bachelor of Engineering – Applied Geology. The course was designed and examined in Sydney, because Newcastle University College was a college of the New South Wales University of Technology (which in 1957 became the University of New South Wales). It wasn't until about 1960, when Newcastle set up its academic board of studies, that we were allowed to design our own course and examine it. The only stipulation was it had to be of the correct standard, but we had no troubles there.

What research were you doing there?

It was an extension of the work I did for my Honours degree. I was always very interested in the andesitic rocks of the Hunter Valley, and what I had done in Stanhope became part of a bigger study in eastern Australia of the mineralogy of the rocks, their geochemistry, the genetic relationships of one to the other. I was also very interested in the secondary minerals that were associated with these rocks – how did they form, where did the solutions come from?

Focus questions

• Nashar refers to doing scientific work to a high standard. How do you think scientific standards are defined and maintained?

• If you were going to describe the geology of a previously unknown area, what information would you try to obtain to make your description useful to other scientists?