Widespread fame for botanist Ferdinand von Mueller

Frederick and Louise Mueller had a son born on June 30, 1825. Looking at the little bloke they could not even have begun to imagine where his life would take him.

His fame was to lie halfway around the world, sometimes in the arid zones of South Australia, sometimes high in the Australian Alps and sometimes deep in Gippsland's forests and even down on Wilsons Promontory.

His parents died while he was still young, and he was apprenticed to a pharmacist in Shleswig-Holstein, the part of Germany that reaches up between the North Sea and the Baltic to join Denmark to Europe.

He studied in Kiel University from 1845 and was awarded his Doctorate for a thesis on the botany of the south end of that province. Though he qualified as a pharmacist, botany was his consuming interest.

Two years after he graduated, Ferdinand and his two sisters sailed for Australia, seeking a warmer, healthier climate.

The came to South Australia and von Mueller worked part-time as a pharmacist while he explored and recorded much of the flora of South Australia, as far south as Mount Gambier and as far north at the Flinders Ranges.

He also tried his hand as a farmer, but in 1852 he moved to Melbourne.

He was well-known before he got to Victoria, for papers he'd submitted to scientific societies on SA's plants and within a year Lieutenant Governor Charles La Trobe appointed him Victoria's first Government Botanist.

In November 1853 he made his first 'botanical exploration' one of several journeys that were exploration the real sense. Much of eastern Victoria was still little-known.

This first journey took him into the Ovens Valley (where he reported finding gold) and up to Mount Buffalo. He was accompanied by

John Dallachy, a man who should be better remembered and to whom we will return one day.

He then went on alone up onto Mount Buller, and from there he somehow got to Port Albert, which had been a settlement for 12 years or so by then, and on to Wilsons Promontory, collecting, drawing and writing up many, many plants for the first time.

I don't know how he got to Port Albert from Mount Buller, or how many people he had with him, but the country he'd have crossed was becoming known as the squatters divided up the land.

His next great journey was almost a circumnavigation of Victoria. He went to the Grampians and north to the Murray/Darling junction, then to the Albury, Omeo and Buchan areas before getting to the mouth of the Snowy.

He was not a man to let the grass grow under his feet – if it had he'd got down with a magnifying glass to identify it.

In 1854 he was one the group that set up the first Melbourne Exposition but by November he was off again into Gippsland, following the La Trobe and then the Avon, climbing Mount Wellington and following the Dargo River north to Mount Bogong and thence to Mt Kosciusko on 1 January 1855.

It is important to note that Mueller was always interested in the commercial possibilities of the plants he studied.

He was largely responsible for the first distilling of eucalyptus oil in Victoria (Bosisto's) and he saw many other possibilities. He saw the value of the wattles for gum and for tanning. He also said acacia wood had commercial value but that is hard to understand.

What made him unique at the time, apart from his huge energy and his encyclopedic knowledge, was his realisation that Victoria's timber resources were extremely valuable and should be cared for.

Most importantly he realized that indiscriminate clearing of the forests, usually involving fire, and he urged the government to establish Forests Boards, like the District Roads Boards, to preserve and develop the forests as a sustainably harvested resource.

It seems that no-one much listened and we are still having that discussion though quite a few of the horses have bolted, so to speak.

Exploration was as great an interest to him as botany, or so it seems. He went with Augustus Charles Gregory on an exploration in northern Australia where he followed the Victoria River to its source, found and named Lake Gregory, went into the Great Sandy Desert and then back to Moreton Bay. He was the expedition botanist and collected a staggering eight hundred new species.

In 1857 he was made Director of the new Botanic Gardens, and this was to lead to one of his two great sorrows. His time as Director was marked by bitter disagreements about the nature and purpose of the gardens.

What many people wanted was a pleasant place to stroll, with statues and grottoes, and plants that were entertaining and colourful. Von Mueller had a much more scientific approach. Still, he held the position for sixteen years, until W.R. Guilfoyle replaces him in 1873.

In 1876 he was asked by the Western Australian government to survey its coastal plants between Perth and Shark Bay.

He did so and his 1879 report again said that our trees were a valuable resource, to be preserved and developed. He advocated what was a essentially a ministry of Forests for WA.

I believe he also did some exploratory work in Papua-New Guinea, but, more importantly, he maintained a huge correspondence with botanists all over the world, contributed countless papers and published some of the most definitive work of Australian flora ever written.

We know little about his personal life – other than that he barely had a private life at all.

He was engaged twice but never married. There are suggestions that he was socially inept and had the one great passion – botany – and to me that seems likely. He was naturalizsd as a British citizen, we know, and he was very proud of that.

We know that he was made a Baron in 1871 by the King of Wurttemberg.

He became a 'Sir' when he was made a Knight of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) in 1879, and those were among countless scientific awards and medals.

He died in South Yarra in 1896, survived by one of his sisters – about whom we also know very little.

Strangely, he has been little honoured here, even in Victoria where he did so much valuable work.

In 1948 the Postmaster-General issued a twopence ha'penny red stamp with his face, a sprig of eucalypt over his shoulder with his name the years of his birth and death. In 1996 another stamp was issued to mark his work.

This one was worth $1.20, effectively much the same as the two and a half pennies of the 1948 issue.

I think we still owe the man's memory a little more than just that.