Lifelong interest in insects
— a tiny brown beetle that makes holes in the leaves of many kinds of trees and shrubs in the North Island) as a monograph, when working at the Cawthron Institute in Nelson.
During World War 2 she lectured at the universities of Hull and Nottingham, while she also worked at the celebrated Rothamsted Experimental Station, obtaining there a PhD on nematode worms parasitic in thrips. She then became assistant editor of the zoological section of Chambers’s [sic] Encyclopaedia.
On a return visit to New Zealand, she discovered an unpublished transcription of a diary kept by Joseph Banks during Cook’s first visit to New Zealand. This inspired her interest in Captain Cook’s naturalists.
She edited zoological material for the Hakluyt Society’s edition of the journals of Cook’s first two voyages (the Hakluyt Society takes its name from the famous Elizabethan geographer Richard Hakluyt), and catalogued the bird paintings produced on all of the voyages.
Her great book Joseph Banks in New Foundland and Labrador (1971) earned her a doctorate in literature. Her next major publication was The book of birds: Five centuries of bird illustration (1975). It contains a notable selection of the best bird portraits to have appeared up to that time.
Averil Lysaght was lively and enthusiastic and clearly had a sense of humour. During the 1970s she occupied an apartment in London near Kings Cross station, and took her many famous visitors there for meals — sometimes ordering them a railway pie.
Averil Lysaght died in 1981, aged 76, with a worldwide reputation, but is little known in her own country.