NEW GEOGRAPHY LECTURERS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27225, 17 December 1953, Page 10

NEW GEOGRAPHY LECTURERS

MOVES FROM ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES HONOURS GRADUATES OF CANTERBURY Two graduates of Canterbury University College who gained-master of arts degrees with first-class honours in geography will return next year as lecturers in geography. They are Mr W. P. Packard, and Mr W. B. Johnston. Mr Packard is now lecturer in geography at University College, London.

In 1944 he was awarded the Watkins Memorial Prize as the most outstanding student of the Christchurch Teachers’ College, and in the next two years completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geography. He was appointed a junior lecturer in geography at the university. In 1946 he was selected as a New Zealand Rhodes scholar, and in 1948 took up residence at University College, Oxford, and began work for a doctorate in philosophy. He was accepted as an advanced student in the School of’Geography, and was preparing work on land utilisation and soil erosion in the Canterbury province based on surveys he made in 1944-45. Early in 1950 Mr Packard was invited to join Mr H. W. Tilman’s exploratory and scientific expedition to Nepal as mountaineer-geographer under the Himalayan Committee. Towards the end of that expedition he contracted poliomyelitis. More than a year’s illness followed, interrupting work for the doctorate. He «vas sent back to New Zealand to recuperate. On returning to London Mr Packard took up an appointment as assistant lecturer in geography at University College which he was given just after he left for the Himalayas, and last year he was promoted to lecturer. When he returns to Canterbury Mr Packard intends to complete his field studies for the doctorate. Mr Packard is married and has an infant son. He expects to arrive in April. Mr Johnston is at present assistant lecturer in geography at the University of Nottingham. He took his master of arts degree at Canterbury College in

1949 with a thesis on the problem of communications in the settlement and development of Taranaki. In 1950-51 he was an assistant lecturer in geography at Auckland University College. During this time he made detailed investigations of land use and related problems in the south-west Pacific, visiting the Cook islands. Samoa, and Fiji. Tonga, and Norfolk Island. Later he received, a grant from the University of New Zealand to revisit the island groups, but cancelled the trip on appointment to the University of Nottingham. This move also caused him to decline participation as geographer in an ethnological expedition to Polynesia arranged by the Peabody Museum, Salem. Massachusetts, the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, and the American Museum of National History Since he has been in England. Mr Johnston has visited Jugoslavia in 1952 as a member of a British research party known as the Geographical Field Group. He led a detailed survey of agricultural geography. In England he Jias been doing research on the effect of the Government’s distribution-of-industry policy on the locational pattern of post-war manufacturing in the north Midlands.

Mr Johnston is single, and expects to arrive in May.