1956 - 1960 International
On Monday 19 November 1956, Mary boarded the Rangitoto at the Royal Albert Docks. She had just left her teaching post at the University of Exeter and had secured an exchange lectureship at Massey College (now Massey University) in New Zealand. The journey took over a month and traveled westward around the globe, sailing through the Caribbean, the Panama Canal and past Henderson and Pitcairn Islands before reaching Auckland on Saturday 22 December.
Mary was to spend a year in New Zealand before spending three years in Australia where she would become one of the first four women scientists to join an Antarctic expedition, as well as managing to travel widely through west, east, south (Tasmania) and Central Australia (plus a short trip to the Great Barrier Reef). Mary worked firstly at Melbourne University, for a year, before starting work researching muttonbird populations for CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation).
Finally, on 14 April 1960, Mary left Australia, by boat, on her journey home. Mary's return trip was not a direct ticket however! She spent a month in South Africa where she studied the birds and wildlife of Saldanha Bay (Western Cape) and Dassen and Robben Islands off the Cape Peninsula, before traveling through Zimbabwe, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana and finally Nigeria, where she worked at an agricultural college with a friend from her Aberystwyth University days, Jeanne Keene.
Mary finally returned to the UK on 26 September 1960.
