J. T. Jutson's contributions to geomorphological thought

Abstract

The geomorphological career of J. T. Jutson falls into two distinct, though not quite temporally separate, parts. For about eight years during the second decade of this century, he was a full‐time professional with the West Australian Geological Survey. During this period he was mainly concerned with landform evolution in arid and semiarid regions, and after only three years with the Survey produced what was to be his magmum opus: An Outline of the Physiographical Geology (Physiography) of Western Australia. Though¦ essentially a synthesis based on the observations and experience of such colleagues as Talbot, Woodward and Maitland, Jutson's was a seminal work, for in it he anticipated many landscape interpretations concerning planation surfaces, hillslope behaviour (and particularly the conditions conducive to scarp retreat), etch planation and the antiquity of landscapes. After his retirement from professional geology, forced partly by financial stringencies in the Survey, partly by Jutson's congenital deafness, he returned to Melbourne and to the law. For about 30 years until his retirement in 1952 he earned his living as a solicitor, and was only a weekend geomorphologist who used his leisure time mainly on coastal studies in the Port Phillip Bay area, but occasionally extending his interests interstate and notably to the Sydney region. It is for this part‐time work, concerned with shore platforms, that Jutson is best known today, for he realised that the sea is capable of producing not one but several platforms simultaneously and moreover that they may extend well beyond the tidal range, with all that that implies for the interpretation of the chronological development of shorelines, for studies concerned with recent relative movements of land and sea. Important as is Jutson's coastal work, his earlier contributions concerning major questions of landscape evolution will, we suggest, in the long term be seen to be more significant, for he anticipated many concepts that are regarded as of more recent derivation and moreover arrived at his conclusions in as rational a manner as is possible in the art of scientific research.

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