By JOHN VAN KLAVEREN
Identifying 100 new species was enough to garner Newtown’s Robert Burn a citation in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours – but not enough for due recognition in media reports.
Mr Burn said he was philosophical about his omission from this week’s reports on the awards but his wider family was disappointed.
The 79-year-old received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to marine science, particularly in the field of malacology.
“I’m sure that’s the first time malacology has appeared in a Queen’s Birthday Honours list,” he said.
Mr Burn makes most of his discoveries, many new to science, on the coastline around Torquay.
His book, Nudibranchs and Related Molluscs, is a Museum Victoria field guide and he’s co-authored about 100 papers in scientific journals and contributed chapters to books on marine life.
“Right from a kid I was always interested in shells off the beach,” Mr Burn said.
“My grandparents lived at Apollo Bay and my brother and I used to go down there for school holidays.
“My grandfather loved fishing and we would tag along and as a little kid you go along and pick up shells and it just grew from that.”
Mr Burn said he specialised in nudibranchs, pronounced nudybranks, a group of soft-bodied molluscs that shed their shells after their larval stage.
“In the garden you have snails with a shell and slugs without one. It’s the same in the sea.
“I was interested in the naked ones because no one knew anything about them.
“In the early days there were only half a dozen people around the world interested in that area.
“For number of years I was the only one in Australia interested in this area of natural history.”
Mr Burn’s hobby has taken him from north to south and east to west across Australia but he still finds that local waters carry an abundance of specimens.
“I could go down to Point Lonsdale and come back with something no one has ever seen,” he said.
Other local award winners were Mark Stone for service to commerce and industry, Janice McGowan for service to the community, Robert Logie-Smith for service to the performing arts, Royce Kronborg for service to medical administration, Beryl McMillan for service to women, Albert Brown for service to the community of Queenscliff, Dr David Brumley for service to medicine and palliative care, Joseph Diffen for service to the community and Gregory Paterson who was awarded an Australian Fire Service Medal.
