PublishedBook Reality Experience, August 2018 |
ISBN9780648222231 |
FormatSoftcover, 552 pages |
Dimensions29.7cm × 21cm × 3.8cm |
Augustus Oldfield trekked throughout 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. With major expeditions in Western Australia and Tasmania, he also conducted smaller, yet still significant, journeys through New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.
In WA he trekked from the Great Bight to Shark Bay and from Albany to the north of Geraldton. On the lower Murchison River, 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. His collections were eventually deposited in the National Herbarium of Victoria and the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. Despite these achievements and being a contemporary of and known to Darwin and Hooker, the published historiography is virtually devoid of information about him, mainly due to him being an outsider to the ranks of the eras 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 Oldfields 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 Britains 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. This major addition to the academic catalogue has been meticulously researched and written by a Perth-based couple, Helen and Bill Henderson.
