OFFICER TO RETIRE

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 105, 28 January 1931, Page 8

OFFICER TO RETIRE

Director of Forestry

SERVICE ENDS IN MARCH The Director of Forestry, Mr. E. Phillips Turner, will retire from the State Forest Service on March 31 next. When addressing the National Horticultural Conference yesterday afternoon, Mr. Turner intimated that that would be the last such conference that he would attend m his capacity as Director .of Forestry. Mr. Turner was born in England, and came to New Zealand with his parents m 1870. Later, owing to the depressed state of the country, they went to Tasmania, where he received his education at the Hutchins School, and by private tuition. At the age of 16 he went to sea, but

twelve months of that life was sufficient to satisfy him. The year 1882 was spent mainly in private study in England, but toward the end of that year he returned to Tasmania.

After a period of further private study, and a short experience of farming in Tasmania, Mr. Turner came to New Zealand in 1884. He took up surveying, and passed his examinations for that profession in 1887. During the next few years Mr. Turner was surveying in different parts of New Zealand and in New South Wales, and in 1891 he accepted a Government appointment to carry out mining surveys on the West Coast silver field of Tasmania.

Mr. Turner returned to New Zealand in 1894, and joined the Government Survey Department in Auckland. In 1908 he was appointed to the head office of the Lands Department as Inspector of Scenic Reserves for the Dominion. In 1913 he was appointed secretary of the Royal Commission on Forestry, and in the following year was a member of the Royal Commission on the reservation of scenery along the Wanganui River. When forestry was made a distinct branch of the Lands Department in 1918. Mr. Turner was put in charge. In 1919 an independent Forestry Department was created, with Mr. Turner as head, with the title of Secretary of Forestry, and the following year the department was reorganised as the State Forest Service, with Mr. L. M. Ellis as director, and Mr. Turner in charge of the administrative side as Secretary of Forestry. When Mr. Ellis resigned in 1928 Mr. Turner was appointed his successor. Mr. Turner is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of England, and a member of the council of the Wellington Philosophical Institute, the council -of the New Zealand Forestry League, the New Zealand Institute of Surveyors, the Tonga-; riro National Park Board, and the Kapiti Island Scenery Preservation Adivsory Board. He has written a report on the botany of the Higher Waimarino. and “An Account of the Vegetation of Tarawera Mountain,” and has made numerous official reports on forestry and scenery matters.