Dr Lynne Milne
I don't think people understand that that yellow stuff that's in the centre of flowers and that bees collect is just so pretty and diverse. Everybody thinks of it as just, it's yellow dust. But in actual fact, they're beautiful - lots of different shapes and sizes.

I started studying old pollen, about forty-five million years old pollen. But you know, you can get pollen that's over a hundred million years old. Palynology is really important in the petroleum industry and also in mining and water exploration. It helps to date the rocks, when they're drilling a well. This will help them to know where, where to stop and where to keep going.

Years ago, when I was very pregnant with my second daughter, I got a phone call at three in the morning from the Chief Geologist asking me if I had got my dates right. And I was fairly certain I did have it right. And he said, 'Well if you're wrong, it's going to cost us another couple of million dollars.' And so I went back to bed, and my husband said, 'Baby, if you want to play with the big boys, you've got to take the heat.'

It was really surprising to end up doing forensic work. My kids were worried that what I was working on was not going to be useful to mankind, that it was just something airy-fairy. And so this, this came up and I was involved in a murder case. They asked me to help out. And suddenly I was useful.

There was one case in 1999 in Perth that I worked on, and a young woman went missing. And the police had a car that they thought may have been involved in her disappearance. And so they found her handbag with her belongings scattered in the banksia woodland just on the outskirts of the city.

And so from the car, they took the air cleaner, and they took tape lifts from under the wheel arches of this car. So then I took control samples from the site where the bag was found, and then was able to match up the soil from there, the pollen assemblage in the soil with some of the stuff that I found in the air cleaner.

Well it told me that the car had been driving over dirt that was in a banksia woodland. The other thing that was strange, particularly on the tape lifts from the wheel arch, there was lots of pine pollen. And so I said to the police, 'I think it's a bit strange, all this pine pollen, because I wouldn't expect that much there.' And two years later, a young woman's body was actually found in bushland opposite a pine forest.

What you have in a soil sample is pollen from the trees that are surrounding that site. Also stuff that's blown in and also from weeds and things that have been growing there over the years. So you get a profile of pollen. The profile is all the pollen types that are in there, and their relative abundance. We can even tell if somebody's been in a particular part of a garden.

My masters student Louise did a project on pollen retention on clothing. And what we wanted to see was how, if you treated the clothing in different ways after a rape, then how much of the pollen remained there. Some of the clothing that we used was worn for three days around the city. Others were washed after they'd been in the garden, and we still found the same pollen profile as the garden. Thousands of pollen grains still in the clothing.

It's very difficult to get across to people how pollen can tell a story, can tell where somebody has been. I love solving puzzles and that's really what it's about. And yes, I'm passionate about pollen, it can tell us so many different stories and tell where people have been. It can tell us when the climate changed. It can tell what people ate a thousand years ago, from the artefacts that the archaeologists find. And aside from that it's just really beautiful, and it's fascinating.

Story Contacts

Dr Lynne Milne
Palynologist, Curtin University

Related Info

Pollen images

Lynne Milne University profile

^ top