Kathleen Rishbeth


Kathleen Haddon Rishbeth was a British zoologist, photographer and collector of string figures. She was the wife of Australian geographer Oswald Rishbeth.

Early life and education

Kathleen Haddon was born in Kingstown, County Dublin, Ireland, the daughter of anthropologist A. C. Haddon. She was educated at the Perse School for Girls and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she began studying zoology in 1907. She and her sister Mary accompanied their parents to the United States in 1909, where the sisters helped collect string games from coastal communities in Alaska. As a woman, Haddon was ineligible to receive a degree from Cambridge University in 1911, but she was appointed to work as a University Demonstrator in Zoology from 1911 to 1914.

Career

In 1914, she travelled with her father as photographer for a three-month survey of the southern coast of Papua, taking covert photographs with a portable folding Vest Pocket Kodak camera, as well as more elaborately prepared photographs with a stand camera. She did not publish her typed manuscript account of the voyage.
She died in Cambridge in 1961.

Family

In September 1917 Kathleen Haddon married Oswald Rishbeth, an Australian geographer and classicist who served in the British military in World War I. They had three children, including the biologist John Rishbeth, and physicist Henry Rishbeth.

Works

Books