A Greater Prize Than Gold: Augustus Oldfield, 19th Century Botanical Collector and Ethnographer in Australia by M Helen Henderson and William G (Bill) Henderson

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges, with one corner bent back.

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 continent's west, 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. (back cover)