Vale Tony Kerr

With sadness the Club announces the passing of Dr Tony Kerr on 14 April 2026.

Station	Year	Season
Mawson	1967	Winter

Tony was a long-standing member of the Melbourne University Mountaineering Club (MUMC) from the 1960s right through until recently. He served in the MUMC as a leader in many ways: for Club bushwalks in Victoria and beyond, as a patient mentor to new members often experiencing close-up the Australian bush for the first time, as an A-Class Search and Rescue leader in the Federation of Victorian Walking Clubs specialist search team, that assisted Victoria Police in searches in the 1960s, as a very active Club committee member, as a stalwart of the team that built the memorial aluminium spherical MUMC hut over the mid-1960s on a spur on Mt Feathertop in the Victorian alps. At university, his science (physics) studies led him to enrol for a PhD in upper atmospheric physics with the UniMelb RAAF Academy. As part of those studies he became part of a joint programme between the RAAF Academy with the Australian Antarctic Division to study, in his case, magnetic micropulsations that were associated with the passage of aurorae where charged particles were ducted through the earth’s magnetic fields from the Sun into the upper atmosphere.

While at Mawson in 1967 his other tasks, using his field experience, was to look after the field equipment store at Mawson.

As part of his studies at Mawson, in late 1967 Tony and the carpenter Peter Lockhart spent seven weeks in a small fibreglass caravan at Depot A 80 Km South of Mawson, being well away from any other electrical interference, to set up his micropulsation measuring equipment so that they could correlate them with the measurements at Mawson at the same time. He gained a PhD for contributions to these studies in 1975. Following this he joined IBM and then the Bureau of Meteorology. Outside of these interests he and his wife Cath participated in many time and navigation bushwalking events and extensive ski touring forays in Australia and Canada – where a branch of their family lives – all right up to the present.

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– Notified by email from John Gillies, 25 September 2026