Frederick William Whitehouse

Frederick William Whitehouse
F.W. Whitehouse, Morotai, 1945
Born	(1900-12-20)December 20, 1900 Ipswich, Queensland, Australia
Died	March 22, 1973(1973-03-22) (aged 72)
Nationality	Australian
Alma mater	Ipswich Grammar School, University of Queensland, St John's College, University of Cambridge
Awards	Walter Burfitt prize and medal
Scientific career
Fields	Geologist, Naturalist

Frederick William Whitehouse (20 December 1900 – 22 March 1973) was a noted geologist, born in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. His parents owned a successful cake and catering business in Ipswich.

Frederick Whitehouse attended Ipswich Grammar School, and went on to study at the University of Queensland. He graduated with a B.Sc., with first-class Honours in geology and mineralogy from the University of Queensland in 1922, and a government gold medal for outstanding merit.

In 1922, he won a University Foundation Travelling scholarship to St John's College, University of Cambridge, where he took his Ph.D in 1925, the first person from Queensland to take a Ph.D from Cambridge.[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. His thesis was on marine Cretaceous sequences of Australia. 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 D.Sc. in 1939 (UQ) for the outstanding pioneer work on Cambrian trilobites of the Georgina Basin which gained him international recognition.

On his return to Queensland, Whitehouse was appointed government geologist. In 1926, he began lecturing in geology at the University of Queensland; over three decades he was to alternate between working for the State government and the university. He helped to map the geology of western Queensland while studying the region's fossil fauna. In 1940, he was president of the Royal Society of Queensland. 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.