Dr Ann Moyal ‘Robert Brown in Australia’

The visit to this country of evolutionist Charles Darwin aboard HMS Beagle in 1836 with his brief excursions to the Blue Mountains, Tasmania and his departure from King George’s Sound is a well- known piece of Australian history. By contrast, how little in general is known of that other great British naturalist, Robert Brown, who reached Australia over thirty years before Darwin as botanist to HMS Investigator on Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of the continent.  Yet Brown was to spend nearly four years in ‘New Holland’ from 1801-04 encompassing the country, botanizing in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, and gathering an immense collection of plants that laid the foundation of Australian botanical knowledge, revitalized botanical science internationally, and inaugurated the science of plant geography.

Dr Ann Moyal, AM, FAHA, is a historian of Australian science whose many publications include: A Bright & Savage Land; Scientists in Nineteenth Century Australia; Platypus; Koala. A Historical Biography; and Portraits in Science