UQ - Fryer Library
Family links to the collection
The collection comprises EN (Pat) Marks’s scientific papers covering most of her career, from the 1930s through to the 1990s. It therefore in general does not document the family so much as the public and professional life of one of its members.
Image courtesy of the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland
Dates of donation
The material was donated to the Fryer Library on behalf of Pat Marks’s executors by her cousin, Margaret Ward, shortly after Pat’s death.
Themes
The collection is archival and relates to most of the themes of Pat Marks’s professional life. These include her field trips ( notebooks and reports); mosquito research (dissections, identifications, illustrations, notes on specimens, loans and permits for sending specimens overseas); research on other themes (including biographical and historical research); obituaries; her professional relationships with individuals (through correspondence, inward and outward); publications, talks and notes; grant applications; her relationships with a number of organisations, including the Queensland Naturalists’s Club, the Noosa Parks Development Association, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Queensland Conservation Council, the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales, the Philosophical Society of Queensland, the Royal Society of Queensland, the Aboriginal Ceremonial Grounds Committee, the Entomological Society of Queensland, the Australian Entomological Society, the Natural History Society of Queensland, the Field Naturalists’ Club, the Samford Museum, the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, the Mosquito Control Committee, and the Queensland Government Tourist Bureau.
Numbers and types of items
The collection is extensive and comprises some 70 boxes and two parcels, including correspondence, diaries, subject files, photographs, drawings, notebooks, typescripts, minutes, reprints and scientific records related to entomology and environmental issues. There is also a small quantity of personal material (Box 6, folder 1; Box 30, folder 10; Box 31, and elsewhere); and newsletters (Queensland Naturalists’ Club).
Significance of the collection in documenting the family
The collection does include a small amount of material relevant to the Marks family, but most of it is concerned with Pat Marks’s public and scientific life, which it documents in considerable detail over a long period of time, from the 1950s until the 1990s. It gives a good indication of the range of her interests (which were historical and anthropological as well entomological) and of her professional relationships with individuals and organisations.
Broader significance
Apart from documenting Pat Marks’s professional and public career, the collection offers the basis for an important case study in the history of entomological research in Queensland from the 1930s and 1940s through to the 1990s.
Marks Family Collections
Fryer Library example items
Full listing of collection with contense descriptions (PDF, 480KB)
Contact details
Fryer Library
Building Number 2
The University of Queensland
St Lucia, QLD 4072
Email:
Link: http://www.library.uq.edu.au/fryer