Lange, Robert Terence (Bob) (1934 - )
Born on 5 May 1934 in Williams, WA.
Williams, where he was born, is 150 km SE of Perth, in the sheep & wheatbelt country of WA.
He attended Narrogin Junior High School, WA, 1946 - 1947.
He was sent as a high-school boarding student to Concordia Lutheran College in Adelaide, SA (1948-1951). These were not happy days and he hated the school.
He returned to WA in 1953 after undertaking his matriculation and first-year Science at Adelaide University.
He attended the University of Western Australia 1953-1956 and graduated with a BSc degree in natural science in 1956. He was awarded several prizes and awards as a student.
He got a PhD scholarship in 1956 and was awarded a PhD in 1960 for his thesis:
Lange R.T. 1960 'The occurrence, characteristics and classification of Rhizobium associated with indigenous Leguminoseae in South-Western Australia'. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Western Australia, 203 pp.
The major part of his herbarium collections 1957-1960 were collected as part of this PhD work with identification assistance from Charles Gardner (reluctantly) and a young Alex George (who was very helpful).
He then got a CSIRO Scholarship to do a post-doc at Cornell Univerisity in the USA.
In hindsight he regarded this as a poor decision as facilities for rhizobial research there were more primitive than in WA at the time. In frustration he became interested in the new areas of numerical analysis of vegetation while he desperately started applying for other jobs back in Australia.
He returned to Adelaide, got married, and was appointed as a Lecturer at the Botany Department of the University of Adelaide in 1961, a Senior Lecturer in 1967, and a Reader in 1970.
In Adelaide he formed a close friendship with the head of the State Herbarium, Hansjoerg Eichler, and concentrated on vegetation analysis, especially in arid and low fertility heath systems.
He was keen to give students field experience and started taking them on annual camp-outs to the Mount Rescue Conservation Park near Keith, a vast expanse of native heath vegetation in the SE of the State. He eventually established a semi-permanent shed there with space for about 50 student campsites.
Later he established the Middleback dryland reasearch facility, SW of Whyalla, hosting an international drylands conference there.
He was a Humbolt Fellow for a year at the University of Tübingen in Germany with his family in 1968 while on sabatical leave from Adelaide University.
His research areas varied widely, including the Maslin plant fossil deposits south of Adelaide, and he supervised post-graduate students on research topics from paleobotany to lichen ecology.
By the late 1980s he was becoming overwhelmed by university bureacracy and sufferd a bout of depression. His Readership at the Universty ended in 1990, he undertook some consultancies but soon escaped to become an apple orchardist at Kalangadoo in the SE of SA for about four years. This was followed by a period of casual farm work while living alone on a friend's farm cottage in that area.
In late retirement he returned to Adelaide, residing in residential care at Campbelltown.
Source: Extracted from:
Pers.Comm, phone, R.T.Lange - M.Fagg 18/6/2026
Pers.Comm, email C.Catcourt - M.Fagg 17/6/2026
https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/micro/10.1099/00221287-26-2-351#R24
https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/bitstream/2440/104003/1/1980%20Calendar%20-Volume%20I%20-%20General%20Information.pdf
National Archives of Australia (NAA) files: A12372, 053275
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rescue_Conservation_Park
Portrait Photos:
1) 1987, https://connect.adelaide.edu.au/nodes/view/4932
2) 2026, Photographer: Catherine Catcourt, his daughter.
Collecting localities for 'Lange, R.T.' from AVH (2026)
Data from 336 specimens
