Trevor CliffordOAM (18 April 1927 – 4 May 2019) was an Australian botanist and taxonomist, distinguished for his work on the hybridisation of species and palaeobotany.
Harold Trevor Clifford was born inMelbourne, Australia on 18 April 1927. His father owned a furniture shop and later worked as a green grocer in Perth and Melbourne during theGreat Depression.[1] After the completion of school, he took employment with the Victorian Department of Education which offered a scholarship to obtain a teaching degree. He was awarded a Dafydd Lewis scholarship and began his study at theUniversity of Melbourne in 1945. Part of his school studies had been in geology and Clifford considered becoming a geology teacher. He graduated with a science degree in 1948, having majored in geology and botany.
Clifford took up employment as a part time tutor in the Department of Botany after graduation and commenced research toward a master's degree on the distribution ofeucalypts in theDandenong Ranges.[2] He also worked in the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens.[3] After meeting withR. A. Fisher from theUniversity of Cambridge to discuss his research, he was encouraged to prepare a paper for publication which led to him being awarded a scholarship to travel toDurham, England in 1952 to undertake studies toward a PhD for 2 years.[4] Professor David Valentine was his supervisor atDurham University.
Clifford was offered the position of lecturer in agricultural botany at theUniversity College in Ibadan, Nigeria. In 1958, he and his family returned to Australia to take up a position at theUniversity of Queensland. He was awarded a fellowship of theLinnean Society in 1965. He and ProfessorWilliam Stephenson collaborated on the bookAn Introduction to numerical classification, an early textbook onmultivariate analysis. Clifford was steadily promoted within the department and retired in the early 1990s as an Emeritus Professor.
He published over 200 articles and books. Boxes of his papers are held in the Fryer Library of the University of Queensland.[5]
Clifford took up work at theQueensland Museum in his retirement, collaborating on a project with Mary Dettmann.
The standardauthor abbreviationClifford is used to indicate this person as the author whenciting abotanical name.[6]
Clifford married Gillian Farley in Melbourne in 1953.[7] They had three children. He died in Brisbane on 4 May 2019.[8]
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