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Who would have thought a life-long career in geology would include a bushranger and a wrongly-identified spy?

John Glover's illustrious career has brought him into contact with both. It was nearly 70 years ago that he enrolled at UWA to study geology and he is still here, doing research in that same discipline, at the age of 87.

The Senior Honorary Research Fellow was honoured earlier this month when the School of Earth and Environment named its meeting room after him.

Apart from two years in the RAAF during WWII, three years doing his PhD at the University of California Berkley, and a few years working with the Bureau of Mineral Resources and an oil company, Dr Glover has spent his entire adult life at UWA , in the discipline of geology.

He was first appointed as a lecturer in petrology in 1955. His time on the campus is matched by Winthrop Professor John Melville-Jones in Classics and Ancient History, who joined UWA in 1957 and has not yet retired.

Dr Glover retired 20 years ago but was made an honorary research fellow and has been coming in every day to continue researching and writing on the history of geology, and mentoring postgraduate students.

"My position has been recently renewed and I have another two-and-a-half years to go, which should see me out I should think!" he laughed.

Professor Matthew Tonts, Head of the School of Earth and Environment, said Dr Glover had made an outstanding contribution to the University and to science generally. "The naming of this room is an important recognition of his achievements," he said.

But there was a time when Dr Glover was not so readily recognised on the campus.

At the dedication of the room, one of his former students, UWA Chancellor Dr Michael Chaney, recalled an incident when a political activist was addressing a crowd of students and Dr Glover walked by.

"I was wearing a suit," Dr Glover said. "It must have been in the late 1960s or early 70s and we all wore suits in those days when we were lecturing. I was just walking by and suddenly they all started shouting ‘Government spy!' I was approaching a group of geology students who knew very well who I was, but they joined in, shouting ‘Go back to Canberra!'"

While he was amused at being mistaken for a spy, Dr Glover was delighted at another case of mistaken identity, or rather hidden identity that happened in the geological world in Perth more than 100 years ago.

"About 1896, the Geological Survey of WA employed a bushranger from Queensland, known as Captain Starlight.

"He had been sentenced to hang in Queensland, but had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment and somehow managed to get out of gaol after a while and made his way to WA. He wrote to the Premier, Sir John Forrest, passing himself off as a man from a good family who had fallen on hard times and asked Sir John to find him a job.

"Sir John did - as an administrator at the Geological Survey, where he was actually a very efficient clerk. He had been wounded during a shoot-out in Queensland and walked with a limp but told everybody his gait was a result of war wounds sustained in the Balkans."

Captain Starlight is one of the characters Dr Glover included in his most recent book (written with former E de C Clark museum curator Jenny Bevan), The Forgotten Explorers: Pioneer Geologists of Western Australia 1826 - 1926, published last year.

Some of Dr Glover's most fascinating work has been a mix of petrology, archaeology and anthropology, discovering information about Aboriginal people from thousands of years ago. (Petrology is a branch of geology that is concerned with rocks rather than earth.)

"I became interested in the petrology of Aboriginal artefacts. Sylvia Hallam and I worked on this together. If you look at the petrology of artefacts you can form a fair idea of where they come from. If they come from A and are found at B, you can work out the travel habit of the people who used them."

Dr Hallam is another Honorary Research fellow in the School, who is also in her 80s.

"We found some strange flint chips up and down the coastal plain between Geraldton and Bunbury, but we couldn't find the parent rock. They increased closer to the coast so it seemed the rock must have come from west of the coastline.

"I talked to oil company people who were drilling off-shore and sure enough, they found some of the rock we were looking for. During the last ice age, about 19,000 years ago, the coast was west of Rottnest, and the Aboriginal people would move from there through to the Darling Scarp on an annual migration, leaving traces behind them."

Now his colleagues have asked Dr Glover to write the history of geology at UWA .

"The Geology department here lasted around 90 years," he said. "It was one of the first departments to be established when UWA was founded."

While the discipline is still going strong, geology is no longer a department or school in its own right. Dr Glover said the fact that it was a contained history, that had an end date, would make it a little easier to write. "I think it would take me about a year to research. I already have a bit of it written, up until 1926, thanks to my latest book."

Dr Glover has been very much a part of that history and is probably the only person on campus who remembers when the big rock on the lawn outside the geology building arrived.

It came from a quarry outside Armadale, where geology Professor Rex Prider used to take his students on field trips. "The rock is an agmatite, a complex patchwork of various granitic and other rocks which were combined, deep in the Earth's crust. Components of the rock range from three billion to 550 million years in age," Dr Glover said.

An errant student played a prank in the late 1950s and covered the rock with whitewash, making it useless as a subject for demonstration. The culprit was identified and cleaned the rock but Professor Prider was always anxious that it might happen again, so, in 1963, he had the rock brought to the Crawley campus where he could keep an eye on it from his office window.

"The rock was dropped on the Causeway, on its way to UWA , splitting it in two," Dr Glover recalled. "Thus two large rocks were delivered to the department. One was banished to the back of the building where it remains, the other was mounted out the front."

Dr Glover was involved in the foundation of the Edward de Courcy Clark Museum of Earth Science and one of the jobs of the curator became the cleaning of the rock, as it was discoloured by the iron from the sprinklers.

Now it is up to Dr Glover to keep an eye on the rock. From his office he can also keep an eye on the new John Glover Meeting Room, which is just across the corridor.

Published in UWA News , 30 May 2011