Obituary: Oskar Hermann Khristian Spate (1911–2000) A great geographer of the twentieth century, and one of the founders of the discipline in Australia, Oskar Spate, died in Canberra on 29 May 2000. Born in London, he lived with his parents in Bloomsbury (including in Dickens’ Doughty Street house) and on the Weald’s northern edge. During World War I his German father was interned and he and his mother lived in Iowa. At Cambridge he gained a first in Geography and English and was attracted by Marxism. To the southeast of Cambridge was a favourite place where the Anglo-Saxon Fleam Dyke intersects the Neolithic Icknield Way, a Roman road, and an abandoned 1840’s railway embankment. Here he found a time depth in landscape that intrigued him. Such blending of geography and history in the landscape nurtured and became fundamental to his sense of place and time, and his understanding of it lay at the core of many of his works. After completing his PhD thesis, London 1801–1851: a geographical study, and serving as temporary lecturer at Reading, he went to the University of Rangoon, where his Cambridge mentor, Professor Frank Debenham hoped he ‘might mellow into a Tory’. He did not. He published papers on Burma before being conscripted into the Burma Volunteer Force as a subaltern in anti-aircraft artillery. Severely wounded in the first air raid on Rangoon, he was evacuated to India and served in the unlikely role of censor. Later, in the Inter-Service Topographical Department, he gained deep knowledge of India, and learned Portuguese from a Goanese teacher. Portuguese literature and poetry became a lifelong interest and field of publication. After the war, Spate held posts at Bedford College, London, and the London School of Economics where he became Reader and, with W.G. East, edited The Changing Map of Asia. Before the partition of India he advised the Punjab Boundary Commission. India and Pakistan: a General and Regional Geography (1954) cemented his reputation as a leading scholar of the subcontinent, and author of one of the best regional geographies in English. India’s government banned the book, and Pakistan considered doing so, giving Spate wry pleasure as it suggested his treatment was evenhanded. An Indian reprint finally appeared in 1985. His 253 Australian Geographical Studies • July 2001 • 39(2):253-255