One of the world's great discoveries for scientists was the flora of Australia, starting with Joseph Banks's collection of 1770, which spurred study and established the culture and standing of prominent botanists in Australia. Ilma Brewer was part of this tradition.

Brewer was fascinated from an early age with Australian plants, particularly the bushland of Sydney's North Shore. She began her botanical degree at Sydney University in 1932, when few women studied science. She completed her Master's degree by 1936, and with such success that she was awarded the Linnaean Macleay Fellowship from 1937 to 1941.

Eric Ashby (later Lord Ashby and Master of Clare College and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University), who was appointed Professor of Botany at the University of Sydney when only 33, exerted a great influence on Ilma Pidgeon’s academic career.

With his encouragement, she researched plant succession on Sydney sandstone and the coastal dunes and her thesis, Ecological Studies in New South Wales, brought her a doctor of science degree, rare among women. It was not until the early 1930s that descriptive ecology was even considered a serious subject for university studies.

The Ashby and Pidgeon ecological studies were invaluable to an understanding of disturbed plant associations, particularly with mined sand dunes and overgrazed areas around Broken Hill. Pidgeon's mapping work was so respected that she worked with army intelligence during World War II.

Thirty years later, the environment movement's new champions of the Australian bush, landscape architects and planners, cited her 1938-42 papers on sandstone and coastal vegetation as definitive references.

By the end of 1942 Pidgeon’s career could have been seen as a shining beacon for feminism, but marriage and children took precedence when she met Dick Brewer, a US Army lieutenant. The stylish Pidgeon and the handsome Brewer married in 1943 after a whirlwind romance and were living in Connecticut by 1945.

She returned to the University of Sydney’s botany school in 1956 after concentrating her focus on family, and was appointed lecturer in charge of first-year studies a few years later.

With student numbers escalating, Brewer initiated televised lectures in the new Carslaw building, equipped with state-of-the-art audio-visual facilities. The innovative lectures met with a mixed reception. Paper airplanes often obscured the suspended television monitors while the lectures droned on. Brewer, although single-minded and sometimes intolerant, realised quickly that mass teaching was not the answer.

After touring overseas universities, in 1972-73 she set up the first teaching laboratory based on self-paced instruction and reflexive small group learning. Brewer's teaching laboratory, now affectionately known as "the Brewery", continues to be highly valued, as is a similar laboratory in the School of Anatomy that she helped set up.

Brewer's teaching career was not flawless. She was very direct and did not tolerate fools. Dr Peter Valder, the botanist of garden books and Chinese garden tours fame, remembers when "she was in charge of Biology 1 she required all former botany and zoology demonstrators to do a test to assess their competence, a wonderful ruse to get rid of various school-marmish professors' wives and ex-headmistresses, who were so affronted they refused and left".

After retiring in 1978 she outlined her teaching in a book, Learning More, Teaching Less: A decade of innovation in self-instruction and small group learning. Her dedication to learning is marked by the annual Ilma Brewer Prize, awarded to a first-class Honours student in botany.

In 1991 Brewer returned to her early ecological work by undertaking with Robert Whelan, of the University of Wollongong, a comparison of coastal sand dunes over 60 years. This work was published in 2003, 71 years after she started studying botany at Sydney.

In 1999, she was awarded honorary life membership of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia.


This is an edited version of the obituary that was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 24 January 2007.