APPOINTMENT IN AMERICA

Press, Volume LXXXIIi, Issue 25214, 19 June 1947, Page 3

APPOINTMENT IN AMERICA

UNIVERSITY POST FOR MR G. H. LAWTON Mr G. H. Lawton, senior lecturer in geography at Canterbury University College, has been appointed assistant professor of geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. He will leave about the middle of October. Mr Lawton is an Australian. He took the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Education at the University of Melbourne, and at the end of 1937 left for England. Studying under Mr W. G. Kendrew, the noted climatologist and university reader, he completed his Master of Arts degree with honours in geography at Oxford. On his way back to Australia in 1941, Mr Lawton was delayed in Canada by Japan’s entry into the war; but about the same time he was offered a fellowship by the Carnegie Corporation of

New York to enable him to visit the geography departments of universities throughout the United States. When this expired, transport across the Pacific was still difficult, and Mr Lawton was able to secure a teaching post at Eau Claire State Teachers’ College, Wisconsin. There he was instructor in geography, a position between lecturer and professor. After 18 months there he was invited by the University of California, at Berkeley, to give a summer school course on Australia and the Pacific. This led to a training programme of the United States Army. At first 'Mr Lawton was engaged in instruction in meteorology, and then he was assigned to the Army special training programme in “language and area of the Far East.” The scheme was to give specially-selected men information for infiltration activities in SouthEast Asia. When the war ended, Mr Lawton was appointed lecturer in the department of geography of the University of California, where he also did postgraduate work under Dr. Carl Sauer, chairman of the department. In 1946 he left to come to Canterbury College.