Nigel Morritt Wace, 1929-2005

摘要

Nigel Morritt Wace died in Canberra on the 4 February 2005, four courageous years after diagnosis of his multiple myeloma; he was 76 years old. From 1962 to 1971 he was a Lecturer in the Department of Geography, University of Adelaide and subsequently, until retirement in 1989, a Senior Fellow in the Department of Biogeography and Geomorphology, Australian National University. He is survived by his wife and their three children. Nigel was born in 1929 into a family committed to the service of the Crown; in the cases of his father and grandfather in senior posts in the Indian Civil Service. He became a boarder at an English Preparatory School when he was seven years old but in 1940, as Britain's future seemed bleak, he took ship to join his family in India. Later that year he was among the first intake of boys into a Preparatory School in Kashmir where he distinguished himself as a youthful mountaineer and leader of the Scout Troup. When the tide of war had turned, Nigel was dispatched back to Britain by ship in December 1943, survived an appendectomy in the naval hospital in Suez, and entered an English 'Public' School in 1944. By that time, Nigel had become enthused by all things nautical so, in 1947, he joined the Royal Marines, was commissioned a year later and posted to the Mediterranean Fleet. Early in 1949, however, on suspicion of having contracted tuberculosis, he was invalided out of the Marines and spent a year in a sanatorium. Emerging fit and well, he entered Oxford University (Brasenose College) initially to study Agricultural Economics but soon became enthralled by botany, graduating in that subject in 1955. He then embarked on an adventure which proved to be the bridge between his multiplicity of experiences and his career as an academic biogeographer.