William John Swainson - Botanical Studies in Australia

Botanical Studies in Australia

In 1851 Swainson sailed to Sydney and he took the post of Botanical Surveyor in 1852 with the Victoria Government, after being invited by the Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe to study local trees. He finished his report in 1853 in which he claimed a grand total of 1520 species and varieties of Eucalyptidae. He identified so many species of Casuarina that he ran out of names for them.

While having quite some expertise in zoology, his untrained foray into botany was not well received. William Jackson Hooker wrote to Ferdinand von Mueller:

In my life I think I never read such a series of trash and nonsense. There is a man who left this country with the character of a first rate naturalist (though with many eccentricities) and of a very first-rate Natural History artist and he goes to Australia and takes up the subject of Botany, of which he is as ignorant as a goose.

Joseph Maiden described Swainson's efforts as

an exhibition of reckless species-making that, as far as I know stands unparalleled in the annals of botanical literature.

He had studied the flora of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania before his return to New Zealand in 1854 to live at Fern Grove in the Hutt, where he died the following year.

In 1856, a poem was written by the New Zealand poet William Golder in his memory. His standard botanical abbreviation is .