The coastal area from the Victorian border right up to Ulladulla is like a ready-made teaching laboratory

In the front room of his coastal house in Eden, Dr Keith Crook sits among piles of identical and meticulously labelled field diaries. Apparently this is only a fraction of his collection: “There's a huge pile upstairs; I keep all my notes in these field diaries.”

“Keith has kept some pretty amazing records of his research - his photographs and notebooks are all identified and labelled,” says his wife, Dr Anne Felton, a geologist who also has long connections with the ANU.

Keith originally completed his PhD at the University of New England and spent several years at the University of Alberta before joining the ANU Geology Department two years after its formation.

“These field diaries date from when I was appointed as a lecturer at ANU in 1961 and, if you read through this list of places – all through Australia, North America, Russia, Papua New Guinea – it goes from book to book right through to today.”

One of the more detailed sections of Keith’s notebooks spans the late sixties and early seventies, when he spent a significant amount of time down on the NSW south coast. After being introduced to the geological wonders of the area by PhD student Hans Steiner, Keith began taking third-year geology students to the area around Eden on mapping exercises.

“The first third-year field trip was in 1969,” remembers Anne. “It was my honours year and I was chaperoning a female student. In the early seventies field camps of a week or more were set up in order to help students with rock and mineral recognition and to gain the skills they needed in the field.”

“The coastal area from the Victorian border right up to Ulladulla is like a ready-made teaching laboratory,” says Keith. “The rocks are easily accessible and very diverse. The third-years had enough basic training to be to be given some quite challenging projects - not only mapping but actual research questions to answer while they were in the field.”

The maps Keith and his students created over those years were incorporated into the Geological Survey of New South Wales’ geological maps, which are still aiding researchers to this day. Dr Gavin Young, one of Keith’s students who went on these field trips, recently used the maps to locate the fossil of a lobe-finned Devonian aged fish over 2.5 metres long, which Gavin named Edenopteron keithcrooki in honour of Keith.

“There wasn't much difference to how students would do fieldwork today,” Keith says of how things have changed over the years. “The main difference was we used to camp in the department tents back in those days, whereas students who do fieldwork in this area now enjoy the relative luxury of a caravan park.”

The benefits of being part of such a close knit group of students and staff went far beyond the knowledge gained in the field, says Anne. “For me the advantage was not just the training, but the working relationships that developed between the students and staff. There was a great camaraderie fostered by the field trips, particularly when they were being done under canvas because you were putting up your tents, cooking and eating together, then exploring the field together.”

“The most significant part of it all was the scope,” Keith says. ”We covered a lot of ground that had not been looked at before and saw a variety of features we hadn't expected. It was stimulating the whole time.”

Seeing the field diaries stacked around Keith and knowing the stories contained in this fraction of his records, one can only guess at the stories contained in the piles of diaries upstairs.