Neville Parsons

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Neville Ronsley Parsons PM (2 September 1926 – 30 December 2017) was an Australian physicist and Antarctic researcher. He was born in Tasmania and studied at Scotch College in Launceston, and at the Universities of Tasmania and Melbourne. From 1949 he worked for fourteen years with the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE), spending 1950 on Macquarie Island and 1955 at Mawson Station in Antarctica as a cosmic-ray and auroral physicist, where he helped set up cosmic-ray observatories. He also spent summers in 1961-62 and 1963-64 on Macquarie Island, taking part in joint high-altitude balloon studies of X-rays related to auroras with the University of California.

While at Mawson Station, he was part of a five-man team led by John Béchervaise that in early January 1956 visited the Masson, David and Casey ranges southwest of the station. Mount Parsons, a peak in the David Range, is named after him and appears on an Australia Post stamp featuring Antarctic mountains issued in 2013. Parsons was awarded the Polar Medal in 1956 and helped found the ANARE Club in 1951.

In 1964 he moved to the University of Calgary in Canada, where he continued auroral research, becoming Professor of Physics and later head of the Faculty of Science. He returned to Brisbane in 1978 and retired in 1988 as Director of the Brisbane College of Advanced Education, moving back to Tasmania. His first wife, Jean (McKechnie), died in 1983; their children are Targ in Hong Kong and Alessandra (Sasha) in Brisbane. He remarried in 1986 to Jennifer (Clifford) and lived in Hobart, Tasmania.