About the Curator

Jenny Bevan has been a keen geologist since 1967, when she began her Honours degree in geology at the University of Exeter, doing her fieldwork in the dramatic Scottish Highlands.  She studied geochemistry as a postgraduate at the University of Oxford, before becoming a scientist at the Natural History Museum in London. There she worked in the electron microprobe unit and carried out research on minerals and igneous rocks, including those of the magnificent volcanic centres of the Isle of Skye. In 1985 she came to Australia with her family and took ten years out to raise her three children, before returning to geology and museum life. Jenny has been working as the Curator of the E. de C. Clarke Earth Science Museum since 1997.

Her current research is on the magnificent orbicular rocks which are found near Mt Magnet, and which are in demand as ornamental stone. There is a large sphere of this rock in Forrest Place in the City, set up to rotate on a thin layer of water pumped from within its mounting. Rocks like these are uncommon, because they require special circumstances for their formation, but they are found in many places throughout the world, including the UK, France, Finland, Pakistan, Chile, New Zealand, Antarctica and the USA.

These particular examples are over two and a half billion years old. They are igneous rocks which have crystallised from molten material pooled in the Earth's crust. Normally as the melt cools, many crystals would start to form, but here the sites for crystallisation were few, and radiating/concentric crystal frameworks developed, with the different layers reflecting the conditions at the time of formation.

 The Curator takes a break from field work near Mt Magnet.