Title: Washed up on a foreign shore: a twentieth century woman’s life of plenty, loss and seaweeds.

Subject: The life and work of Sophie Charlotte Anna Maria Henriette Dücker née von Klemperer (1909–2004).

Born in Berlin in 1909, Sophie was raised in a privileged and cultured German-Jewish family in Dresden, where she dreamed of becoming a scientific explorer. This was an unlikely prospect, not just because of her Jewish ancestry, but because she was a woman, and because of world events. As a young wife and mother, she was chased half-way around the world by the Nazis, ending up interned as an enemy alien in Australia. At thirty-five, she finally gained a foothold at the University of Melbourne as a technical assistant, and worked steadily to become a pioneering seaweed scientist, as well as a historian, bibliophile and advocate for the recovery of her family’s precious art collections lost to the Nazis and Soviets.

photograph, Michelle Leber