Oswald Rishbeth

Oswald Henry Theodore Rishbeth[1] (né Rischbieth) 1886 – 1946) was an Australian geographer who was Professor and Chair of Geography at the University of Southampton, England.

[11] He obtained a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he studied classics and geography at Merton College.

[13]: 1  Having studied Greek at Adelaide,[15] during the war he was "a member of the British delegation which went to Athens to endeavor to induce King Constantine to join with the allies".

After the war, despite his background in classics, Rishbeth was attracted to geography "because of the opportunity it afforded ... to construct a synthesis of the different fields of knowledge concerned with man/environment relationships".

In 1919, Rishbeth presented research on the Dodecanese islands, where he had served in the war, to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

In March 1920 he was invited by the Royal Geographical Society to respond to a lecture on the Dodecanese by John Myres, together with Eleftherios Venizelos, then Prime Minister of Greece.

He was hardly a good teacher but had an excellent style as a lecturer and performed well with the carefully preepared topics which he handled... [he] did well in re-establishing his Department as a new force in the quest for geography.

[19][20] In 1926, he led a geographic survey of the Hampshire district,[21] and later contributed a study of land utilization in Southampton.

[26] Oswald's uncle was Charles Rischbieth, a leading businessman in the early days of the colony of South Australia.