Obituary: Helen Horton OAM

Helen Horton was born in Sydney in 1925. She went to school at Fort St Girls High School in The Rocks, Sydney. During World War 2 she worked as a clerk and relief telephonist, while going to university as an evening Arts student. She worked as a typist and then atthe NSW State Library. She lived in central Sydney but loved bushwalking, joining the Sydney Bushwalkers Club. She met Bill Horton on a joint bushwalk with the Melbourne bushwalkers club. She spent some years working in London doing shorthand and typing while visiting Europe with a friend and also meeting up with Bill Horton who was in Bath with the navy. They would locate a brown spot on maps (brown indicating elevation, and therefore, good walking country), meet up at a train station nearby and go off on bushwalks, all over England. They married after returning to Melbourne and began a family with three children. After moving to Mount Isa they had a fourth child. Mount Isa was a world where Helen started in Botany by trying to establish a native garden. Bill became interested in bird banding that involved Helen and the family, giving her the chance to further investigate both birds and botany. Eventually they transitioned from bird banders to bird watchers and were often off on bird spotting expeditions. Being the main bird watchers in town, they often had visits from travelling bird watchers who wanted to see the inland birds. Many of these became long term friends. Helen was the first to discover a new subspecies of Dusky Grasswren, endemic to the Mt Isa region, initially called the Horton form. It has since been recognised as a separate species and renamed as the Kalkadoon Grasswren.

In 1974 the family transferred to Brisbane and Helen’s focus changed as the family duties reduced. Her first project was to put together all the information she had on the Mount Isa flora and fauna and she published her first book “Around Mount Isa. Up until then there was no similar reference book for inland flora and fauna to draw from. Bill and Helen also joined the QNC and Qld Ornithological Society loving the excursions and learning from its members. For QNC Helen did stints as President and Excursion Secretary but was quickly elected as Editor for the QNC newsletter, a role she held for 29 years. Helen went back to university, doing a couple of first year courses in botany. Another contribution that Helen made to QNC was leading a trip to Moreton Island in 1986 which sparked her interest and after many investigative trips she published “Islands of Moreton Bay”.

Then she did the same for “Brisbane’s Back Door” , the story of the D’Aguilar Range in 1988. At the same time Helen made a few bird recordings and in 1976 the ABC requested she publish a few one-minute talks about bird calls to play on air. This went well and the ABC wanted more, so they gave her a tape recorder and told her to go and get some more. Eventually several tape and CD sets of bird calls were published. This transitioned into a long term hobby. She was often out pre-dawn on camps to get clearer copies of specific bird calls. Helen was also an author of short stories and poetry which at times were published. She joined the Fellowship of Australian Writers and ended up being President for three years, during which time she was instrumental in setting up the Qld Writers Centre. In 1989 she was part of a group that set up Imago, a Brisbane-based literary magazine and she was co-editor of it for over 15 years. She won the Grenfell Henry Lawson Award for Verse in 1980 and the Warana Poetry Prize in 1985. She stopped entering poetry competitions after that, but published a collection of her poems in 1998, “All the days of the world”.

In 2001 Helen was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list for service to literature through the Queensland Writers Centre and as editor of Imago, and to the environment through the Queensland Naturalists Club. Helen edited the QNC publication “A Brisbane Bushland” – the history and natural history of Enoggera Reservoir and its environs in 2002. She was awarded the QNC’s Qld Natural History Award in 2011.

She was awarded QNC Honorary Life membership in 1995. Helen was a volunteer guide at the Brisbane Botanical Gardens for many years. She helped produce the newsletter Brisbane Botanics and used her plant classification skills to map out some sections of the gardens, as detailed records of what was planted there had been misplaced. Helen lived independently until she was over 97, when her macular degeneration made moving into a higher care facility necessary. She passed in April 2025 at the age of 99.5. She lived a life well lived and did it to her choosing. She had no regrets and she has set a great example to all who knew her. She has touched us all and we will miss her.