Past President

Marnie Leybourne

Marnie Leybourne is currently director of the Western Australian Land Information System (WALIS), an alliance of diverse public and private sector organisations, as well as community groups. The mission of WALIS is to build networks of people and technology to share spatial information and to continually improve its usefulness and accessibility. WALIS has been in operation since 1981. Since Marnie joined WALIS in 2004, a key activity of WALIS has been increased engagement between the public and private sectors and this has led to a coalition in WA between SSI, ASIBA, WALIS and the CRC for Spatial Information.
 
Prior to WALIS, Marnie worked for the WA Government for eight years, first with the Department of Agriculture and then with then Water and Rivers Commission, in the area of natural resource management. She was involved in the development of the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality and the extension to the Natural Heritage Trust and assisted with policy development in natural resource management at both the state and the federal level.
 
Marnie has a PhD in Geography from the University of Lyon II, France and a diploma and research diploma in development studies from Geneva University, Switzerland. For both her research diploma and PhD, she did three years of research with the Bedouin society in Syria, analysing their migratory patterns and production systems and the changes that had taken place to these over time. She has also undertaken research on agricultural and pastoral societies in Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland.
 
The spatial information industry is fairly new for Marnie. Although she used a GPS in Syria (smuggled into the country) and found that the Bedouin were excellent at ground-truthing in the featureless desert landscapes, her exposure to the real surveying and spatial world only occurred once she joined WALIS.
 
In May 2005, Marnie, Val MacDuff and three other women were horrified to discover they were alone in a sea of 117 male participants at the ASIBA SIDP roadshow in Perth so they formed the Women in Geographic Information Technology (WinGIT) group and Marnie became inaugural chair, a position she held for two years. SSSI WA Region invited WinGIT to become a special interest group and Marnie joined the SSSI Regional Committee as the WinGIT representative. In October 2005 she became deputy chair of the SSSI Region and in 2006 Regional Chair.
 
In her spare time, Marnie is a keen bridge player and plays at State level. She and her partner, Nick Cantatore, run supervised sessions for beginning bridge players at their local club each week. She is also a quilter and several of her recent pieces have had spatial themes.