"The past is never fully gone. It is absorbed into the present and the future. It stays to shape what we are and what we do."
Sir William Deane, Governor-General of Australia, Inaugural Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture, August 1996.

Leon Bren

Leon grew up in Mirboo North and entered VSF in 1965. After graduation he worked in assessment and then completed a degree in Forestry at Melbourne University. 

After a period of district work he was recruited to the FCV Research Branch with the idea of specialising in hydrology. He did a doctorate in the groundwater hydrology of the Croppers Creek catchments in 1975-1978. After leaving the FCV in 1981 he worked as a consultant for some years (mainly on mining matters) until he was out of work. Pleasantly for him the University of Melbourne offered him a job as lecturer at the Creswick Campus, which he greatly enjoyed for the next thirty-odd years. He is now mostly retired but has the occasional research or consultancy fling, and is heavily involved in Rotary in Ballarat and a philanthropic group. He wishes he was young and was doing it all again. He has produced an Australian text book on forest hydrology and is co-author of an international reference book on the same subject.