Editors: Kristin Weidenbach

East St Publications

You may ask: What has Reg Sprigg got to do with AMSA‘ In fact, quite a lot. In the early 1960s Reg Sprigg set up the South Australian Oceanographic Research Institute, and built the SAORI, the acronym for the Institute, for marine exploration. Although primarily a geologist, Reg had a long interest in the sea and its life, especially ancient marine forms. In 1946 he discovered the Ediacara fossils, recognised them as pre-Cambrian jellyfishes, and enthusiastically sent a paper off to Nature describing the spectacular find. It was rejected. Non-plussed, Reg then wrote two papers on the find, and published them in the Transactions of the Royal Soc. of SA in 1948 and 1949, where, in the writer’s words they were met with resounding silence. It was to be decades before their significance was recognised, and eventually in 2004 the Ediacaran Period was named for the late pre-Cambrian 635-542 million years ago.

In 1947 Reg discovered the Murray canyons, one of which was eventually named Sprigg Canyon, as large as the Grand Canyon, in USA. These discoveries were not mere chance, as Reg had a hunch about them and went looking for the evidence. Again they passed unnoticed.

Reg also mapped carefully the many parallel rows of coastal dunes in the SE of SA, and attributed them to former sea levels, related to Milankovitch cycles. The idea was pooh-poohed by the establishment, but Reg was right. In these and many other instances Reg was far ahead of his time.

In 1964 Reg undertook probably the first large-scale benthic Australian survey – that of Gulf St Vincent and Investigator Strait with typical enthusiasm, and that is where I came into the picture. Over 4 years we did some 560 dives together, up to 10 a day at depths to 50 m. This work was published in 1976, and also forgotten, that is until 2002 when Jason Tanner repeated it with video, and discovered massive changes over many 100s of square kilometres of seagrass loss, and loss of benthic epifaunal communities, due to prawn trawling.

In the late 1960s Reg was on AMSA Council, and was President of AMSA from 1968-70. I recall an example of his typical generosity, when he personally advanced funds for the publication by AMSA of Albani’s Handbook on Australian Forams. Later Reg devoted his time to oil exploration and then to the development of Arkaroola as an eco-tourist Mecca.

All this, and much more, is beautifully recounted by the author. The book is a delight to read, as she writes in a lucid and most engaging way. The book works through Reg’s life chronologically, and this endows it with a powerful narrative thrust, and an intriguing glimpse of a past age. The book is full of splendid anecdotes, and fascinating quotations, such as excerpts from the long correspondence between Reg and Sit Mark Oliphant, who much admired Reg for his great enthusiasm for science.

The author rightly says that Reg was Australia’s last explorer. This book will wrench you, the reader, out of your modern perspective, and transport you back a half century and astonish you with one person’s amazing achievements. It is compulsive reading!

Reviewed by: Scoresby Shepherd