Frederick William Whitehouse (20 December 1900 – 22 March 1973) was a noted geologist, born in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia.
Raised in Ipswich to Frederick William Whitehouse senior and Florence Amelia Terrey, he was the oldest of five children.
[3][4] As a party of three, he succeeded in climbing the entire ten of the Glass House Mountains peaks in one day.
[10][11] Dismissed from the university in the same year, after repeated efforts, the charges were struck out in March 1957.
[12] Whitehouse was later subject to a chapter in Matthew Condon's Little fish are sweet, although these contents have been debated.
He graduated with a BSc, with first-class Honours in geology and mineralogy from the University of Queensland in 1922, and a government gold medal for outstanding merit.
[1] Dorothy Hill in her obituary for Whitehouse, would note that of his graduating class at Ipswich Grammar School, three students would become Rhodes scholars at Oxford, while he himself won his scholarship to Cambridge.
He and fellow student Dorothy Hill, had collected many fossils during their studies at UQ, which had advanced their individual and shared research in the field.
He was awarded a DSc in 1939 for the outstanding pioneer work on Cambrian period trilobites of the Georgina Basin which gained him international recognition.
He helped to map the geology of western Queensland while studying the region's fossil fauna.
In 1941 he was awarded the Royal Society of New South Wales's Walter Burfitt prize and medal for his work on the stratigraphy of the Great Artesian Basin.
In 1946-47, Whitehouse was seconded to the Department of the Co-ordinator-General of Public Works; he was a member of the committee on post-war reconstruction and was involved with the northern Australia development project.
Continuing his studies on the stratigraphy of the artesian basin, he described the natural leakage from the system, particularly the mound springs.
He gave a long (1934-1953) series of nationally broadcast lectures and news reviews over the ABC on a wide range of geological topics.
[16] Whitehouse served as the president of the Geological section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science.
He continued to work as a geological consultant for many oil companies from 1955, and was president of the Anthropological Society of Queensland from 1972 to 1973.
He was also instrumental (as is detailed in The Mayne Inheritance) of gaining the major bequest of land, which enabled relocation of the university to its St Lucia site.
Commissioned a lieutenant, Royal Australian Engineers, in January 1942, he applied his geological knowledge to road-building in Queensland and New Guinea in 1942-43, and to formulating procedures for amphibious assaults across coral reefs in 1944-45.
He travelled extensively in the South-West Pacific Area and in September 1945 rose to temporary lieutenant colonel.
Department of the Co-Ordinator of General Public Works, Queensland, Parliamentary Papers A: 56-1955.