Fairall, Pauline (née Bond)   (1917 - 2010)

Pauline Bond was born in King William Town, South Africa on the 28th of October 1917. died in Atherton, QLD, on the 19th June 2010.

She obtained her Bachelour of Science from Rhodes University in 1937, and was the Solly Scholar at Kirstenbosch Herbarium in 1939, under the then Curator Robert Compton. Pauline was an athlete of international quality but an injury and the Second World War curtailed this career.

Pauline was a Herbarium Assistant at Kirstenbosch from 1940 to 1945. During this time she married Arthur Fairall and they had three children. In 1946 she gained her Honours degree form the University of South Africa. From 1950 to 1960 to she worked part-time as Herbarium Assistant at Kirstenbosch.

In 1962 the family came to Western Australia when Arthur Fairall became the founding Superintendent of the Western Australian Botanic Gardens at Kings Park. Pauline became both a paid and voluntary curator of Kings Park and Botanic Garden Herbarium (KPBG), from 1962 until 1973.

While at Kings Park, Arthur and Pauline collected extensively in Western Australian, especially the Western deserts in 1966. These collections are mainly in PERTH under AR Fairall (1240 collections) and in KPBG.

Pauline also provided the botanical descriptions for Arthur's landmark book on Western Australian Plants in Cultivation (Fairall 1970). This was the first book on this subject and was published after Arthur's sudden death in the same year. She also identified many plants for John Beard when he was undertaking his mapping of the State, material for a catalogue of native plants of Kings Park Bushland and prepared the second edition of the Descriptive Catalogue of Western Australian Plants (Beard 1970).

Pauline returned to South Africa and from 1973 to 1984 she worked as a Botanist at the Compton Herbarium at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens and helped care for an elderly aunt. During this period she co-authored under her maiden name (Bond) the descriptive catalogue of the Cape Flora (Bond and Goldblatt, 1984). She also revised the emblematic Asteraceae genus Oldenburgia (Bond, 1987). Pauline has approximately 1670 collections in NBG, from her working career in South Africa.

Pauline returned to Perth in 1984 and continued working part time and in a voluntary capacity at KPBG until 2001.

Pauline was a very active member of the Western Australian Wildflower Society and participated in many field trips and the Bushland Plant Survey Program from its inception both in the field and herbarium.

When her prodigious memory began to fail her in the early 2000s she moved to Atherton to be closer to her daughter Patricia. In Atherton she continued with some volunteering with a local plants group and her church. Over these years her memory declined and she became increasingly frail and died there on the 19th June 2010.

Pauline had 2 species from South Africa, named after her by her botanical mentor Robert Compton: Erica bondiae and Thoracosperma bondiae. For those of us who knew Pauline she was noted for her boundless energy, modesty, commitment to work, quiet but deep religious convictions and meticulous thorough approach to her botanical work.

Source: Extracted from Obituary by Greg and Bronwen Keighery: 'A Botanist of Two Continents'
Australian Systematic Botany Society Newsletter 144–5 (September–December 2010) p.28-29
Portrait Photo: Extracted from: above obituary.