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

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Ex library copy with external stickers removed. Covered in protective plastic. Pages have sunned. Partial date due slip on half-title page. Book is clean and binding is very good.

The biography of this 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 provides new insights into the mind of an innately inquisitive nineteenth-century world traveller and humanist, who sought to bridge the divide between European and Indigenous communities. (back cover).