When I was recently - and rather desperately - looking for information on the three big National Parks in East Gippsland, I came across the name of Norman Wakefield. It rang a loud bell.
I then remembered that Norman Wakefield was the "voice of nature study" on 3LO. Many of us will not remember that "774" was once 3LO. For that matter, not too many of us will remember nature study as a primary-school subject.

Wakefield also was a lover of Gippsland flora and fauna and he spent much of his teaching career in a small Gippsland school "in the bush".
He was born in 1918 at Romsey, then a very small township and not much more than that now. The township was in a triangle marked by Woodend in the west, Gisborne to the south and Kilmore eastward.
How he got to be such a well-known and well-liked figure is quite a story.
His father was a saddler and worked in the Orbost area while Norman was in primary school. He spent a great deal of time in the Gippsland bush. I'm not sure why, but young Norman went with his dad whenever he could get away from Orbost Primary School and then Orbost Higher Elementary School. That was not possible when he was at Scotch College for two years.
Wakefield kept his love of the Gippsland bush and, when he decided to become a teacher, came back to Orbost Primary School as a student-teacher. In those days, teacher training began with the would-be teacher doing a year-long internship in a school, finding how to teach and whether he or she really wanted to be a teacher. If that year was halfway alright, it would be followed by a year at Melbourne Teachers' College and then, on graduation, the real work would start.
Wakefield began with two years at Combienbar State School, and was the head teacher there when it closed in 1939. It had never been a big school, opened in 1911, closed in 1939 and reopened in 1945.
After Combienbar, Wakefield was sent to Bindi, about 12 miles east of Omeo. That school closed in 1943 but Wakefield had moved on.
In 1940 and 1941 he was at Genoa State School. In all three of these schools he'd spent as much time as possible studying the flora and fauna of East Gippsland's wilder places.
Genoa had the distinction of having its first school delivered by schooner. The white ants cleaned up that building in quick time and school was then held in the local hall. A new school was opened in 1953 but Wakefield had moved on, into the army.
The Second World War got in the way at this point. Wakefield joined the army in October 1941 and became a Bombardier, which is what the artillery calls its corporals. He was in the militia at this point, serving with 2 Field Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery, until November 1942. He then transferred to the AIF and was sent to Papua-New Guinea in 1943 and into 1944.
At some time in 1944, he was sent to Bougainville and was there until the war ended. By this point he had developed something of a reputation as a botanist. When he came back to Australia for discharge, his kitbag was stuffed with dried specimens of ferns from New Guinea and Bougainville.
I'm not sure what his brothers in arms would have thought of a bloke who spent his spare time in the ever-dangerous areas outside the wire, collecting plants. He used the army's cookhouse ovens to dry his precious specimens. Many of those specimens finished up in the British Museum and in the National Herbarium in Melbourne.
By the end of 1957, he'd identified and described 39 new species, an amazing achievement. And, not a bad one for a teacher in small and mostly one-teacher schools.
He was discharged on September 7, 1945 and returned to the Education Department.
Wakefield was posted to Cann River with his new wife Eileen Holdsworth, whom he married in November 1951. She was a divorcee and in due course became a double-divorcee.
He stayed at Cann River until 1950 and then moved into the Big Smoke at Prahran, possibly a request of his wife.
In 1955, he published "Ferns of Victoria and Tasmania" and became a lecturer - in nature study, of course - at Melbourne Teachers' College.
In 1960, at the age of 42, he graduated from Melbourne University with a Bachelor of Science degree and in 1969, aged 51, he took a Master of Science Degree at Monash University. He had already identified living Mountain Pygmy Possums, thought to have become extinct and only known as fossil specimens. With all this going on, he was still interested in the life and times of Gippsland's wild places, except that those "times" could go back 350 million years.
His master's thesis was on "late Pleistocene and recent cave-deposits in south-eastern Australia". That interest led to Wakefield discovering tetrapod tracks preserved in the sedimentary stone of the Genoa Gorge in 1971. This excited scientists from a number of disciplines because it was one of the earliest sites in Australia, dated from 350 million to 400 million years ago.
James Warren, a palaeontologist, verified Wakefield's find and identification of the tracks in 1971, the year they were found.
This was from the Devonian period - no, don't ask me just yet - and the site is known to palaeontologists as the Upper Devonian Combyingbar Formation. It is a not great leap between the names Combyingbar and Combienbar.
It might help make sense if I said a tetrapod is simply an animal that can walk on four legs, one dry land, and the first ones were amphibious. They were closely related to and descended from the bony fishes, or osteichthians. There is a word you can bring up at dinner one night. It is said that these first creatures out of the water would have looked like large salamanders, which is not a good look.
The good people of Genoa, or at least of the Genoa Town Committee, built a memorial to Wakefield and his find. It is a large rock with a salamander-looking creature on top, a plaque on the front, and flat concrete impressions of the fossilised footmarks at ground level.
Wakefield's Gippsland find is known around the scientific world, but not well known right here. His greater work was in the knowledge and enthusiasm of children interested in the natural world.
His adventurous and valuable life came to a sudden, sad end in 1972. He was 54-years-old and he still had much to offer.