Mary E. White

Mary Elizabeth White

She began writing large format, well illustrated science books after her husband died in 1981, highlights including "The Greening of Gondwana" (1986); "The Nature of Hidden Worlds" (1990), "Time in Our Hands" (1991), and "After the Greening: The Browning of Australia" (1994), the last of which received one of the 1994 Eureka Prizes.

In 2003, White purchased a large forested property, Falls Forest Retreat, approximately halfway between Taree and Port Macquarie in New South Wales; she established a covenant to protect the land and preserve its biodiversity.^[2] In 2013 she sold the property but with the covenant it can never be disturbed.

Illness and death

In her later years White suffered from vascular dementia and a stroke and went to live with her daughter and her daughter's husband in Bundanoon, New South Wales between 2014 and 2016. In 2016, following another stroke she moved to a nearby aged-care centre. On 5 August 2018, White was found dead in her room at the Warrigal aged care complex, apparently as a result of drugs administered without authorization by her daughter, Dr Barbara Eckersley. Eckersley was charged with her mother's murder; at her bail hearing, her barrister maintained that his client had the "belief that the aged-care centre weren't able to deal with Dr White's agitation and pain".^[6][7][8] After more than two years' delay, Eckersley was eventually found guilty, not of murder but of the lesser charge of manslaughter and was spared jail time, instead being sentenced to a two year community corrections order on account of what the judge termed her "low moral culpability" due to a "diagnosis of severe depression".^[9]

Awards and honours

White received honorary doctorates from four Australian universities,

• Australia's Prehistoric Plants & Their Environment (Methuen, 1985)
• The Greening of Gondwana – The 400 Million Year Story of Australia's Plants (Reed Books, 1986)
• The Nature of Hidden Worlds – Animals and Plants in Prehistoric Australia and New Zealand (Reed Books, 1990)
• Muttaburrasaurus: An Australian Dinosaur in Its Time and Space (Houghton Mifflin, 1990) – with Robyn Muche (Illustrator)
• Amphibians of the Triassic : Tadpole Hunting 220 Million Years Ago (Houghton Mifflin, 1990) – with Robyn Muche (Illustrator)
• Time in Our Hands – Semi-precious Gemstones: Keys to the Geological Past (Reed Books, 1991)
• After the Greening: The Browning of Australia (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), received a
  Eureka Prize
• Listen... Our Land is Crying (Kangaroo Press, 1997)
• Reading the Rocks (Kangaroo Press, 1999)
• Running Down: Water in a Changing Land (Kangaroo Press, 2000), which was shortlisted for a Eureka Prize[12]
• Earth Alive! From Microbes to a Living Planet (Rosenberg Publishing, 2003)^[10]

Scientific papers

refer text.

References