Alexander Collie: Colonial Surgeon, Naturalist and Explorer by Gwen Chessell

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Pages have sunned.

The biography of Alexander Collie, a remarkable Scottish pioneer who made a pivotal contribution to Western Australia’s early colonisation. Drawing on Collie’s lively correspondence with his brother, Chessell’s meticulous research vividly recreates the harsh conditions endured by Collie and his fellow Swan River colonists.

As a surgeon aboard the HMS Sulphur, Collie accompanied Lieutenant-Governor James Stirling to Western Australia’s fledgling Swan River Colony in 1829. With the assistance of his Aboriginal guide, Collie’s expeditions across the state’s southwest yielded many botanical, geographical and meteorological discoveries essential to the colony’s expansion and development over subsequent decades.

Containing maps and archival images, this book also offers new insights into the mind of a nineteenth-century world traveller and humanist who was innately inquisitive, seeking to bridge the divide between European and Indigenous communities. (back cover).