PHOTO
For more than half a century, Anthony Clifford “Tony” Harris was part of the fabric of Otago Museum: an entomologist of international standing, a patient interpreter of the natural world, a fierce defender of creatures most people scarcely noticed.
To generations of Dunedin readers, though, he was simply the man who wrote Nature File in the Otago Daily Times — the weekly presence who knew what lived beneath a stone, inside a rotting log, or in the glass jar someone had carried to the museum’s front desk.
Tony died on August 7, aged 83, ending a scientific career remarkable not only for its length and productivity but for the constancy of the curiosity behind it. He never lost the childhood impulse to lift a board, look underneath and wonder what was there.
He was born in Hāwera on July 2 1943, the firstborn son of Esther Constance and Clifford William Harris; his brothers Philip and Marty followed.
His fascination with insects began almost at once: he recalled the first beetles he saw at the age of one, when his father lifted boards on the family section to reveal shining black and iridescent green ground beetles.
By five he had made a small book about Hāwera beetles; by 10, a handwritten and beautifully illustrated book on the beetles of New Zealand.
His interest was not always understood. At primary school he carried a beetle larva into class and was scolded as a “naughty boy” for supposedly pulling the wings off a bee.
Around the same age, an aunt took him to a museum, where he spotted a misidentified insect and fell into deep conversation with the entomologist. Already he was doing what he would do all his life: looking closely, correcting the record, refusing to dismiss a small creature.
At 11, feeling his mother a little overprotective, Tony set off from Hāwera for Wellington on his bicycle to visit family, spending the night with his grandmother in Whanganui and puzzled by why everyone else was in such a panic.
It was an early show of his resourcefulness and independence — and of an occasional tendency to underestimate the effect of his plans on other people.
Before university, Tony was already less a schoolboy collector than a field ecologist. He ranged alone through the Mokai Patea country and retraced William Colenso’s 1847 route across the Ruahine Range.
In the dunes near Kaitoke Beach he recorded not merely which beetles were present but how they lived with heat, dryness, wind, salt and predators — two papers, 42 pages in all, published in a 1970 Victoria University student journal. He had not yet learned that young scientists were supposed to begin with something modest.
Formal university life was not an easy fit. He reached Victoria University of Wellington already knowing an extraordinary amount about insects, and chafed at being returned to the rank of novice; he had little patience with hierarchy, or with people incurious about the living world.
But under the wise supervision of Dr George Gibbs his attention shifted from beetles to New Zealand’s spider-hunting wasps. For his thesis he spent three field seasons travelling from Cape Reinga to Port Pegasus, on Stewart Island, on a 180cc motor scooter with a tent, watching insects in their habitats.
The work earned first-class honours. Dr Ray Forster — then director of Otago Museum and the country’s leading spider expert — had identified the spiders from Tony’s research, and, impressed by its thoroughness, appointed him to the museum’s new entomologist position in 1974.
He had found his institutional home. He first reorganised and identified the museum’s insect collection, then spent decades enlarging it through painstaking fieldwork; the records credit him with more than 38,000 specimens.
Each label was a place, a date and an observation, and together they form an enduring record of Otago’s natural history and of environmental change.
His thesis was distilled into volume 12 of the Fauna of New Zealand series (1987), illustrated with 202 of his own line drawings; a second monograph followed in 1994.
In all he published about 150 scientific papers — collaborating with researchers including the Japanese wasp specialist Akira Shimizu — and kept publishing until 2016.
In 1995 the Royal Society of New Zealand awarded him its Science and Technology Medal, and a butterfly, a stiletto fly and a solitary wasp were named in his honour. For a taxonomist, there are few more fitting memorials.
Yet publications and medals do not explain his importance. He believed a museum should be a place where anyone could bring an unfamiliar animal or plant and have their curiosity taken seriously.
At weekends a visitor might reach the front desk with a mystery insect in a jar or an ice-cream container; called down, Tony would appear from the collections in his customary khaki, delighted by the interruption.
Colleagues cannot remember him being stumped — or, more tellingly, ever making the person asking feel foolish.
Nature File carried the same spirit. For nearly 40 years Tony wrote more than 2000 columns for the Otago Daily Times, many beginning with a specimen someone had brought him.
Week by week he opened a small window onto insects, birds, habitats and the relationships that hold the living world together. At a time when expertise can seem remote, his was local, practical and freely given.
His concern was never sentimental. He knew how much had already been lost and how fast the pressures were growing, and worried about it daily.
He supported efforts to save the Cromwell chafer beetle and Caversham peripatus, and in 1982 helped found the Otago branch of the Entomological Society of New Zealand, hosting its monthly meetings at the Museum. To Tony, insects were not scenery, nuisances or lesser forms of life; they were beautiful, essential and worthy of study in their own right.
Restructuring ended Tony’s paid museum career in 1999, a change that hurt him — yet it made surprisingly little difference to his habits.
As unpaid honorary curator of entomology he kept coming in, most days, for another quarter-century, until only weeks before his death.
His small room deep in the building was lined with books and boxes, its desks crowded with papers and cases of beetles and wasps; when he was not there, he could usually be found at the photocopier.
He regarded much modern technology with measured suspicion. For years he hand-delivered his Nature File copy in a large A4 envelope, sometimes returning with an entirely new version to be sure a correction was made — not ignorance, but reverence for accuracy.
His home held more than 7000 natural-history books, stacked high, and he knew what each contained and exactly where to find it. Knowledge, for him, was gathered slowly, through attention.
Brian Patrick, who met Tony in 1982 and later became his manager at Otago Museum, remembers him bustling in rubbing his hands, a glint in his eye, ready with another funny story. He loved Baroque and classical music, played the piano and painted in watercolour; his cartoons could be sharp, especially at complacency about the environment.
He was, in the words of former honorary curator Professor Robert Hannah, “a kind and generous person” — words that recurred in almost every reminiscence after his death.
Much of his work is still visible at Tūhura Otago Museum, where he gave some 15 years to the natural-history dioramas, assembling the right plants, insects and animals to recreate local habitats.
Visitors who never knew his name will go on seeing the world through his eyes; his collections, monographs, drawings and columns preserve an even larger inheritance.
But perhaps Tony’s greatest legacy is a way of looking. Look closely. Do not dismiss the small. Do not assume that what is unnamed is unimportant. Understand that human beings stand within nature, not apart from it. Share what you know, and take seriously the curiosity of the person standing in front of you.
Dunedin has lost a remarkable scientist, and Tūhura Otago Museum has lost one of its own.
The room deep in the building is quiet now, and staff will have to learn to pass the photocopier without expecting to find Tony there. That will take some getting used to.
His work — and the attention he taught us to pay to small lives — will remain.
- By Ian Griffin, Director, Tūhura Otago Museum, with thanks to Sandy Bartle and Lynne Greer for their generous assistance.