Ernest Clayton Andrews Ernest Clayton Andrews was Government Geologist of New South Wales between 1920 and 1930 during which time he published two of his most important works, The Geology of the Broken Hill District and The Mineral Industry of New South Wales. Andrews was born on 18 October 1870 at Balmain, Sydney, second child of Fearleigh Leonard Montague, artist, and his wife Alice Maud, née Smith. At 3 he and his sister were unofficially adopted by John Andrews and his wife Mary Ann. His dour and puritanical stepfather kept a Wesleyan denominational school. At 16 he became a pupil-teacher at Hurstville, qualified to enter the Teachers' College, Sydney, and graduated from the University of Sydney (B.A., 1894) with second-class honours in mathematics. He then taught for four years at Bathurst, where he developed an interest in natural history. Influenced by Edgeworth David while studying for his BA, Andrews abandoned school teaching in 1898, and after presenting his first paper on the geology of the Bathurst region went to Fiji (unpaid!) to collect data on the coral reefs for Alexander Agassiz of Harvard. He joined the NSW Department of Mines and Agriculture in 1899, and while undertaking a variety of mapping projects within the state was also able to work on the Barrier Reef and in New Zealand. His publications on glaciation attracted considerable attention. In 1908 Andrews was invited to the USA by G. K. Gilbert spending time with Gilbert in the Californian Sierras, and later meeting other prominent geologists and geomorphologists such as A. Penck, T.C. Chamberlain and Professor W.M. Davis of Harvard University. This visit had a profound influence on Andrews, and he adopted many of the ideas of Davis and Gilbert in studying the geomorphology of eastern Australia, introducing the concept of a rapid uplift in the late Pliocene (-the Kosciusko Uplift), which remained a piece of fixed dogma for Australian geologists well into the 1980s. Andrews's emphasis on the significance of structural geology in the study of ore bodies was also profoundly stimulating and he presented a number of papers on such matters, particularly at international meetings. Between 1910 and 1920 Andrews also developed some important ideas on erosion and on the relation between geology and botany, and he wrote The Geologic History of the Australian Flowering Plants (1916) and Origin of Pacific Insular Floras (1939). He had a close friendship with J. H. Maiden and R. H. Cambage, which increased his intense interest in Australian plant ecology and the geographical distribution of the native flora. His memory, mental energy and powers of concentration were remarkable. He had indifferent health for much of his life and kept to a rigid and frugal diet, yet his physical energy was exceptional, and almost all his fieldwork, including the Broken Hill project was carried out on foot. Even after six solid days in the field there each week he usually tried to cajole his junior staff to join him for “geological picnics" on Sundays! The late Alan Voisey recalled that in Sydney Andrews liked to invite younger members of staff for a good (but abstemious) dinner, play classical records at maximum volume, and beat them all at table tennis! Despite such diversions Andrews played a major part in many scientific organisations including the Royal and Linnaean Societies of NSW, ANZAAS, AusIMM, Australian Museum, Australian National Research Council, International Oceanographic Committee and Pacific Science Congress. His international reputation was important in spreading the word about Australian ore deposits and landscapes. He received many honours and distinctions including the David Syme prize and medal of the University of Melbourne for scientific research (1915); the (W. B.) Clarke medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales (1928); the Lyell medal of the Geological Society, London (1931), and
the Mueller medal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (1946). Andrews was an honorary member of the Washington Academy of Sciences, honorary fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and of the Geological societies of London and America. He was Australian associate-editor of Economic Geology and a corresponding member of the American Museum of Natural History. In 1927 he gave the Silliman lectures at Yale University and in 1942 the Clarke Memorial Lecture to the Royal Society of New South Wales. Andrews died of arteriosclerosis on 1 July 1948 at his residence at Bondi and was cremated with Methodist rites. Childless, he was survived by his second wife Mabel Agnes, née Smith, whom he had married on 16 July 1929. Reference: G. P. Walsh, 'Andrews, Ernest Clayton (1870–1948)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/andrewsernest-clayton-5027/text8365, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 21 June 2019.