The adventurous life of Albany scientist and anti-plastic crusader Harriet Paterson

When you picture a scientist, you might have a mental image of a man in a white coat, hunched over samples in a sterile lab that he never leaves. Albany scientist Dr Harriet Paterson’s adventurous career shows that stereotype is far from the truth. The South Regional TAFE Albany lecturer’s career in science has taken her across the world, from sailing the Atlantic and working in academic positions in London and Perth, to spending a whole year working in the most isolated place in the world — Antarctica. Dr Paterson was born in England and emigrated with her family to Albany as a “ten-pound Pom” before she had turned one. She studied at Yakamia and Flinders Park Primary Schools before completing high school at St Joseph’s College, going on to study a science degree in Perth. After graduating from Curtin University, Dr Paterson decided to travel for a year, taking her childhood passion for sailing to a 46-foot yacht that she crewed on across the Atlantic Ocean. “One of the maddest things was we would stop and go for a swim, and I duck-dived down one time and just saw inky black,” she said. “I looked back up and the boat was sort of hanging there on the surface of the ocean, and I thought ‘Wow, we’re a long way from anywhere’.” Dr Paterson spent the year travelling to exotic locations — visiting Florida, Bermuda and Rhode Island — before she settled in England, working at Southampton Institute where she completed a master’s degree. When she eventually decided to return to WA, Dr Paterson took the long way home, flying to St Petersburg in Russia and completing most of the Trans-Siberian Railway, crossing through Russia, Mongolia, China and going to Vietnam, before she headed to Perth. There, Dr Paterson took up a position with the Conservation Council of WA where she had the opportunity to complete a PhD through the Strategic Research Fund for the Marine Environment program. She researched plankton in the Leeuwin Current, spending a lot of time collecting samples on boats in the waters off Two Rocks, and said the research involved “a lot of microscopes”. “What I studied, in simple terms, was the animal plankton — what was there, and how much of the plant plankton it was eating...and it was things smaller than a fifth of a millimetre,” Dr Paterson said. “I actually counted 141,000 plankton individuals.” Despite being able to complete a PhD and supervise students creating their own in her position as a tutor at UWA Albany, her academic career hasn’t always been smooth sailing. When she was 35, Dr Paterson came to the realisation that she had dyslexia, a learning disorder which has meant she has had to come up with strategies to overcome her struggles with reading and writing. She said that her dyslexia meant she instead had a focus on more tangible things, sparking her passion for science. “I was put in the not very bright basket, but actually I was observing things and watching what was going on,” Dr Paterson said. “I just have a different intelligence to the reading and writing.” After completing her PhD, in 2008 Dr Paterson had her biggest adventure yet, taking on a postdoctoral position with the University of Tasmania that saw her spend a year researching in Antarctica. It was the realisation of a lifelong dream for Dr Paterson, and said she was the only person interviewed for the job, because she had “a very specific set of skills” that suited her to living and researching in the icy continent. “I went down at the end of January, I spent a whole year down there studying viruses and bacteria,” she said. Antarctic stations are busy in the summer months, but only a select few stay over the winter and Dr Paterson was one of only 18 living on Davis Station. Her research meant she spent a lot of time on the ice, drilling holes to remove long ice cores she would take back to her lab to melt and use a microscope to count the number of bacteria and viruses thriving in salt channels present in the ice. As her year on the ice wrapped up in November, the station’s only chef was in an accident that left him with serious injuries requiring him to be airlifted to Tasmania. “Basically, anybody who could drive a machine was out building a runway for the aeroplane’s landing,” Dr Paterson said. “I was actually in the lab, and I was doing my stuff, and I thought ‘This isn’t really helping anybody’.” She decided to help out by taking over the kitchen, at one point cooking “14 chickens in one go” and baking 10 to 20 loaves of bread every day to build up stock for the upcoming arrival of the summer crew. After her return to Albany, Dr Paterson unlocked a new scientific passion — preventing plastic pollution in the ocean. In her position as a tutor at UWA Albany, she oversaw a student’s research on ocean plastic on Albany’s beaches, which opened her eyes to how pervasive the issue is, sparking more research into the topic. “You know, the sardines down here, there’s a piece of plastic in every fish,” Dr Paterson said. The issue of plastics in the ocean is now her primary scientific interest and has inspired her to lead a campaign against unnecessary plastics hiding in every day products. “For me, it’s about choosing the non-plastic alternative,” she said. “If you have to buy plastic, buy the best quality that’s going to last you a long time, because the item, in whatever broken form, is still going to last, and last, and last.”