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D.L. Serventy Medal Print E-mail
The D.L. Serventy Medal may be awarded annually for outstanding published work on birds in the Australasian region. It has been awarded for the last 15 years and is the highest award offered to professional ornithologists by Birds Australia.

Nominations

Nominations for the medal for 2008 should be sent to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , Department of Zoology, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351. Please send a one page citation, a copy of a recent curriculum vitae listing all publications and the names of two referees.

Dominic Louis Serventy (1904-1988)

Dom Serventy was born in Kalgoorlie in 1904, and died in Perth in 1988. He was educated at the Universities of Western Australia (BSc) and Cambridge (PhD 1933). Serventy was a lecturer in zoology at the University of Western Australia from 1934 to 1937, a research officer at the CSIRO Fisheries Division from 1937 to 1951 and officer-in-charge, at CSIRO Wildlife Survey Division, Perth, from 1951 to 1969. He was interested in all aspects of ornithology, from biogeography and speciation to breeding seasons and general biology, and had a long-term influence on conservation. He was President of the RAOU from 1947 to 1949, and a fellow from 1952. He won the Australian Natural History Medallion in 1956, was a member of the Western Australian Wildlife Authority 1943-74, editor of Western Australian Naturalist 1947-80, member of the Permanent Executive Committee of the International Ornithological Congress 1966-78, and fellow of the Western Australian Museum from 1974. With his brother Vincent and sister Lucy, he revived the Western Australian Naturalists’ Club after World War Two. He produced extensive sets of bird distribution maps and wrote The Handbook of Australian Seabirds (1971) with Vincent Serventy and John Warham and Birds of Western Australia (five editions between 1948 and 1976) with H.M. Whittell.

(Text adapted from The Flight of the Emu: A Hundred Years of Australian Ornithology 1901-2001 (2001), by Libby Robin.)

The Serventy Medal Committee

The Serventy Medal Committee is a subcommittee of the Research and Conservation Committee (RACC), which assesses nominations for the award and recommends medal winners for consideration by RACC. Currently, the chair of the committee is This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The award follows a set of  guidelines (68kb), and the committee also has Terms of Reference (9kb).
 Dominic Louis Serventy
D.L. Serventy

Serventy Medallists

2007 Dr Michael Clarke

2006 Dr Denis Saunders

2005  Lesley & Michael Brooker

2004 Professor Andrew Cockburn

2003 Dr Richard Holdaway

2003 Trevor Worthy

2001 Dr John Woinarski

1999 Professor Jiro Kikkawa

1998 Dr Richard Zann

1997 Dr Penny Olsen

1996 Drs Cliff & Dawn Frith

1995 Professor Allen Keast

1994 Dr Harry Recher

1993 Dr Hugh Ford

1992 Dr John Warham

1991 Dr Ian Rowley