Noel Benson

William Noel Benson

In 1909 he returned to the University of Sydney and became a demonstrator in the Geology Department. After winning an 1851 Exhibition Science Scholarship in 1910 he left Sydney in 1911 to work at the University of Cambridge, where he worked with John Edward Marr, Alfred Harker and Thomas George Bonney at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences.^[1][2] In 1913 he was granted the BA (Research) degree by Cambridge and left, spending most of the year travelling Europe with his parents and sisters. He returned to the University of Sydney in 1914 to take up the Macleay Fellowship in Geology. In 1915 he became a lecturer at the Geology Department,^[1] and in 1917 he became Chair of Geology and Mineralogy at the University of Otago,^[2] where he stayed until 1951.^[3]

Despite spending the first nine years at Otago as the only lecturer in the Department of Geology,

After retiring from the University of Otago in 1951 he continued to write papers, and at his death on 20 August 1957 was working on a revision to his paper on the Cenozoic Petrographic part of East Otago.[1] The detailed geological map of the Dunedin area he produced was a significant work, his broader influence, however, was in expanding the study of geology in Australasia.^[1][4]

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