Geoscience Australia Testimonial
It is with great sadness that I note the passing of Mike Sexton, a colleague and member of the GA family for many years, a friend to many. Mike joined the Bureau of Mineral Resources (BMR) in 1976 and retired from Geoscience Australia (GA) 38 years later in 2014. He started his career after seeing an advertisement for a geophysicist position for the Australian Antarctic Division in the paper, thinking at the time ‘I am built for this job’. He first went to Macquarie Island in 1977, which was the beginning of a long career of going on survey. While on Macquarie he was profiled in an article in The Weekend Australian, being described as a ‘pawn on a political chessboard’ against the backdrop of the Cold War.
The next year he took part in the First Order Regional Magnetic survey in 1978, criss-crossing Australia in one of the old BMR Land Rovers, then returning to Mawson Base in Antarctica for 1979, which was one of the highlights of his career.
On return to Australia in 1980, he joined the Land Seismic section, his first seismic survey in the Eromanga basin, based in Quilpie and Longreach. In 1985, he worked on the Central Australia survey, and then in 1988 was the party leader for the Canning Basin survey, on which he took his young family.
In 1990 he joined the Petroleum and Marine Division, working in seismic acquisition and processing, and in the early 90s he was treasurer for the ACT branch of ASEG. In 1996, he went on his first marine survey since doing his masters at the University of Hawaii. This survey was for the Law of the Sea project, in the seas around New Caledonia and New Zealand. Despite being very prone to seasickness, he loved going to sea. In 1998, he visited the seas to the east and west of North Korea. Four years later, in 2002, he again returned to Antarctica on marine survey, traversing the Southern Ocean from Hobart to Durban. He went on further smaller marine surveys after this, his last being the multichannel sub-bottom profile survey of the Petrel Sub-Basin in 2012, before retiring in 2014.
Mike was passionate about geophysics, forging a career which introduced him to people from all walks of life. From indigenous leaders and pastoralists to scientists from around the world, he enjoyed meeting and talking to people no matter who they were. Of particular note was his time working with North Korean scientists aboard the Rig Seismic, where despite language, cultural and political barriers, he spoke highly of GA staff setting the standard for diplomacy and friendship.
Mike very much saw GA as not only an organisation that could produce great science, but as one that could do good for other people. He was always invested in the next generation and taught so much to all those in his team and beyond. He was more focused on the job to be done and the needs of his colleagues rather than self-advancement. Mike was an inexhaustible source of geophysical knowledge and could discuss meaningfully many other areas of science, and he was a wizard of the most obscure techniques for the extraction of data from the most recalcitrant data sources. He was knowledgeable, warm and empathetic, and will be sorely missed by all those who knew and worked with him at GA.
A funeral will be held on Wednesday 4 November at 10:00am in the Woden Cemetery Mausoleum on Justinian St Phillip. Due to Covid restrictions there are occupancy limits inside the mausoleum, but for those wishing to pay their respects virtually, a livestream link is available here: https://www.gatecrashermedia.com.au/077.html