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Augustus Oldfield trekked throughout southern Australia from 1845 to 1862 amassing plant specimens that would be used to describe over 700 species new to science, including twenty-one that would ultimately bear his name.
On the lower Murchison River, Western Australia he encountered and travelled extensively with an indigenous group, the Watchandie and his paper on these Australian Aborigines is the only ethnographic record of them at the onset of European settlement.
Not confined to the west of the continent, he also undertook botanical expeditions in Tasmania, New South Wales, South Australia, and Victoria. Yet, despite these achievements, the published historiography is virtually devoid of information about him, mainly due to him being an outsider to the ranks of the era’s ‘Gentlemen naturalists’.
Never appropriately recognised in either Australia or his native Britain, this comprehensive biographical work, twenty years in the making, fills that gap and places Oldfield’s career within the context of his immediate family and the scientific, environmental and broader socio-cultural contexts of the time. Starting with his childhood, raised in the gambling dens of London, through his amazing journeys on the far-flung shores of Britain’s Australian colonies, to his untimely death, this book finally tells the story of a man who, driven by his love of nature, turned his life over to the pursuit of a greater prize than gold.
A propos de l'auteur
Dr. Helen Henderson AM, PhD (Anthropology), FRWAHS, was born in Bridgetown, Western Australia in 1934. She had a distinguished professional career with the WA Museum before joining the WA Health Department where she was the State Co-ordinator of Aboriginal Health Promotion, then a Project Officer for Aboriginal Policy and finally Senior Research Officer of Epidemiology at the Health Department of WA. She eventually retired in 1997 and immediately began work on the autobiography of Augustus Oldfield.She has been a Councillor for the Royal Western Australian Historical Society since 1996 and was Vice-Chairperson from 2001 to 2017. She represents the Society on the Federation of Australian Historical Societies of which she was President from 2004 through to 2008.
