Cade Lucas
Retired marine scientist and Seaholme resident, Dr Hugh Kirkman, has been named an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in this year’s Australia Day honours.
Dr Kirkman, who spent 25 years at the CSIRO, received his AO for distinguished service to conservation and the protection, management and sustainability of seagrasses and marine ecosystems.
It’s appropriate recognition given it was Dr Kirkman who discovered that Australia had seagrasses to protect and manage in the first place.
“It was luck,” recalled Dr Kirkman of the moment he made the discovery in Moreton Bay off the coast of Brisbane in 1975.
“I’d just gotten a job as a technician with the CSIRO and where we were supposed to be looking for juvenile commercial prawns.”
They found prawns alright, hundreds, even thousands of them, living in seagrass beds that were thought not to exist in Australia.
“I was the first person in Australia to really make it evident that we have seagrass here and that we have more of it than anywhere in the world and it’s a very important nursery for many commercial fish.”
Dr Kirkman was already a principal research scientist with the CSIRO by this point, but following his discovery, became laser focused on seagrass.
But to learn more he needed to travel overseas, which luckily, he was already planning on doing.
“I’d wanted to run in the Boston Marathon,” said Dr Kirkman who was also an elite runner at that time, having won the Queensland marathon title and finished second in Victoria.
“So I forked out money to pay to go to Boston and then used it as a work trip. I went all around the states on buses speaking to seagrass experts and they invited me to stay in their houses.”
Fortunately, Dr Kirkman’s 1976 research trip across the US was much more successful than his tilt at the Boston Marathon.
“Terrible, really terrible,” he recalled of his performance in the big race.
“It was 104 degrees (farenheit) on the day and I’m quite a big person and it was too hot for me.”
Dr Kirkland then transferred the stamina he showed as a runner to his scientific career which would last for another 45 years.
He would remain at the CSIRO until 1998, finishing with a three year project mapping the underwater features of southern Australia.
“One of the most spectacular things I did” said Dr Kirkland of the project which took him from Exmouth in Western Australia all the way to Tasmania, hiring small fishing boats along the way.
He then worked in South East Asia with the United Nations’ environment program before freelancing with various state governments and the private sector and finishing with another spell at the UN in its division for ocean affairs and law of the sea from 2016-21.
These days, Dr Kirkham still occasionally dips his toe in the world of seagrass by writing and reviewing journal papers and recently contributed a chapter to a book on the subject.
He does this from his home in Seaholme, where he and his wife moved after his retirement, despite neither having any connection to Hobsons Bay or Melbourne’s west.
When asked why, Dr Kirkham’s answer made perfect sense.
“I wanted to be near the coast.”