HENRY NIX, AO
1937-2022
Henry Nix was an environmentalist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Australian landscape and an abiding passion for the conservation of Australia's unique flora and fauna. After a distinguished career at the CSIRO he served as director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES) at the Australian National University (now the Fenner School of Environment and Society), from 1986 to 1999. His contributions to both the CSIRO and ANU leave an indelible record as a pioneer of computer-based methods of land resource evaluation and as an inspiring academic leader. He directly enabled the development of world leading researchers and contributed mightily to the awareness of environmental issues across the ANU and the wider community.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Henry grew up in the industrial city of Ipswich in Queensland and developed a keen interest in Australian birds, watching the changes in their occurrence and abundance as the seasons changed. Indeed, in 1951 at the age of 13, he became a member of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, a predecessor of Birds Australia. He attended the Queensland Agricultural College at Gatton before completing a degree in Agricultural Science at the University of Queensland in 1960.
Henry joined the CSIRO Division of Land Research and Regional Survey in Canberra in 1964. He thrived in the practical, down to earth atmosphere of this division and rapidly progressed. He came to the realisation that climate was a key factor in the agricultural landscape and built on this realisation in ways that set him apart from his peers. He became a leading participant in the International Benchmark Sites for Agrotechnology Transfer project that aimed to address problems faced by resource-poor farmers in the tropics and sub-tropics. This no doubt built the foundations for his advocacy for interdisciplinary approaches to addressing complex environmental issues during his later years as director of CRES.
The realisation of the fundamental importance of climate inspired the development by his CSIRO colleagues of new quantitative methods for accurately describing climate across the Australian continent. These methods were world leading at the time and Henry saw the potential to apply them to map the distributions of plant and animal species based on their dependence on monthly mean climate. Thus was born BIOCLIM in the early 1980s, a bioclimatic prediction system that revolutionised species distribution mapping worldwide. The new paradigm delivered unprecedented spatial accuracy from minimally sampled species data. The bioclimatic prediction method, and its key underpinning bioclimatic parameters, are still widely used.
Henry maintained a wide range of interests, not least his interest in Australian plants and birds. He maintained an impressive garden of Australian plants and was an active contributor to both the Canberra branch of the Society for Growing Australian Plants and the Canberra Ornithological Group. He served as president to both organisations in the 1970s and made ongoing contributions to both well into his retirement. He was elected as president of Birds Australia Council in 2001. He is remembered for being able to rise above the details and minutiae to look at the big picture, believing that "A continental perspective on our birds and their habitats is a necessary condition for effective conservation".
Henry also devoted his annual leave, in full partnership with wife Katharine, and aided by various colleagues, to conducting an annual survey of fish and riparian birds and their habitats across Northern Australia. This annual survey continued for over a decade from 1985. It generated a unique set of Australian biological and habitat data and gave his colleagues and friends insights into outback life and the environment of Northern Australia.
Henry brought a new energy to CRES when he moved to the directorship in 1986. His wide-ranging knowledge enabled him to meet each of his new academic colleagues on their own terms and to offer valuable insights to each. It was often the case that Henry was more keenly aware of the wider implications of a person's work than the person themselves. This was a source of great encouragement for colleagues and students alike and PhD numbers at CRES grew substantially.
By the mid-1990s CRES regularly outperformed its fellow research schools in the Institute of Advanced Studies in terms of per capita academic output. CRES was plainly having academic and public policy impact, particularly in relation to the natural environment and biodiversity assessment. This was reflected in Henry's chairmanship of wide-ranging committees, including the UN Expert Committee on Climatic and Potential Physical Effects of Global Nuclear War and the National Greenhouse Advisory Committee.
As in his time at CSIRO, Henry led CRES with much good humour and sensitivity to the wider needs of staff and students. His strong patronage of the "CREStaurant" as a venue for daily free-ranging interactions across the whole of CRES contributed to the multidisciplinary ethos of CRES and helped it to become one of the happier schools across the ANU. Henry and departmental heads also promoted collaborations in teaching and research across CRES and the departments of geography, forestry and geology in the mid-1990s. These predated the eventual merger of CRES with its faculties counterpart to form the Fenner School of Environment and Society in 2007 and contributed to the early success of the new school.
Henry continued as a professor at CRES until his retirement in 2002. During this time he chaired the management committee of the Kioloa property on the south coast of NSW which was donated to the ANU in perpetuity by Edith and Joy London in 1975. The "Kioloa Campus" provided an ecologically diverse landscape to support the university's teaching and field research programs. Henry led a successful campaign to maintain university support in the face of rising budgetary constraints. This led to a renewed appreciation of the potential of the Kioloa property and patronage of the property increased over the subsequent decade.
Henry was Emeritus Professor at the ANU until 2010, when Henry and Katharine moved to Ninderry in Queensland. Henry received several prestigious awards over the years. These included the Urrbrae Memorial Award for outstanding contributions to Australian agriculture in 1988 and a gold medal from Ecological Society of Australia in 1994. He is the only person to have been awarded both. He became an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2000, for service to the environment, particularly the conservation of natural resources, and to land management through the development and application of simulation models for ecologically sustainable land utilization.
Henry died peacefully on February 2, 2022. He maintained daily bird counts in his garden to the last. His many colleagues and friends count ourselves fortunate for the time, the humour, the ideas and the dreams for a better future that we shared. He is sorely missed by his wife of 60 years Katharine Nix, his sons Simon, Garth and Jonathan and his wider family.
- Michael Hutchinson, ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society