Community & Business
18 April, 2025
Dawn Frith – a woman of substance
ONE of the best-known scientists from the Atherton Tablelands passed away recently. In the world of ornithology – the study of birds – Dawn Frith is extremely well known, especially for her work on bowerbirds and the definitive volume she wrote with husband Dr Cliff Frith, published by the Oxford University Press.
Dawn Whyatt Frith PhD. OAM
(1943-2025)
But Dawn’s work was much more wide-ranging. She began an amazing field career on remote Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean where she spent a year studying its insects.
Dawn had completed a PhD in England on marine organisms and had worked at a university college before her time on Aldabra for the Royal Society of London. It was while Dawn was working on Aldabra that she met her future husband Cliff Frith.
After their respective return to the UK and writing up their separate field work, they both travelled to Thailand where Dawn had been appointed the Senior Marine Biologist at the Phuket Marine Biological Centre.
This period studying, both separately (Dawn on mangrove ecology and fiddler crabs, and Cliff on snakes) and together (on Hornbills) was highly successful and Dawn’s appointment was extended during which time the couple married in Bangkok.
The agreement they reached to jointly study the birds of paradise and bowerbirds of New Guinea seemed best achieved by establishing a base in northern Queensland and so they moved to Paluma.
Here Dawn not only contributed to the study of birds of paradise and bowerbirds with Cliff, but also developed her own project that contributed to an understanding of their ecology, using detailed field studies of insects and leaf-litter invertebrates.
In New Guinea, as a courageous field scientist in challenging remote environments, Dawn made significant observations and measurements of the feeding ecology, nesting biology and courtship behaviour of birds of paradise, bowerbirds and other species; work published in international journals in a string of scientific papers.
Dawn always loved animals including her own horse while growing up in England. In Thailand, Dawn rescued and fell in love with Hornbills that lived in their home while they reared them and then refused to leave.
But it was her passionate love for our tropical rainforests that motivated her to spend thousands of hours in the forests at Paluma, observing and recording the lives of many species and building a wonderful knowledge base about our forest birds and their lives.
As photo-journalists, Dawn and Cliff crossed the world and lived and worked in many countries, always focussed on nature. They counted as friends and colleagues many outstanding people including David Attenborough and Jared Diamond.
In January 1984, the Friths became Australian citizens and also expanded their publishing work as a means of self-funding their research activities. This was a novel approach and Dawn was a key partner in the business which also led to many valuable books and booklets about the environment of northern Australia.
They purchased a rainforest property near Topaz (now a nature refuge) and continued their remarkable work. Apart from joint efforts, Dawn took a leading role in publishing a magnificent book on the natural history of Cape York Peninsula.
In 1996, Cliff and Dawn were jointly awarded the most esteemed recognition for ornithology in Australia, the Dominic Seventy Medal from the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union. This was the first time two people had been jointly recognised.
They also received the Cassowary Award from the Wet Tropics Management Authority for helping the community appreciate the beauty and diversity of the World Heritage Area through books, photography and film.
Together they published a hardback book on “Bowerbirds: Nature, Art and History” that won the Whitley Award in 2008. They followed this with another magnificent book on “Birds of Paradise: Nature, Art and History” that earned them another Whitley Award in 2011.
Dawn leaves a legacy of very many scientific papers and books on natural history and she continued to work with Cliff on many projects.
They were each awarded the Order of Australia Medal in 2021 for services to conservation and the environment.
Dawn had a beautiful nature, a very caring person who never put herself forward but was always there with kindness and affection.
Her many friends admired her pluck and character, much of which is beautifully revealed in the story of Cliff and Dawn’s life in their marvellous biography: “A Wild Romance”. Sadly, Dawn was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and eventually had to go into full time residential care in Malanda, where Cliff tended her every day and played his guitar and sang her favourite songs.
Their 53 years together is a modern love story. Dawn’s life is a wonderful model of being a scientist and an outstanding human.
A woman of substance, Dawn lived an amazing life. She is greatly missed.
- Peter Valentine, Malanda.
