BIDWILL, John Carne (1815-1853)

botanist

eldest son of James G. Bidwill, a merchant of Exeter, England, was born at Exeter in 1815. He was educated for a commercial life but developed an interest in science, and in particular, botany. He arrived at Sydney in September 1838, intending to take up land, though he had also some connexion with a firm of Sydney merchants. Finding there would be delay in obtaining land, he went in a schooner to New Zealand, arrived at the Bay of Islands on 5 February 1839, and during the next two months made a long journey into the interior of the north island collecting botanical and other scientific specimens. An account of this journey, Rambles in New Zealand, was published in London in 1841. He tells us that "these rambles were abruptly put an end to by the increasing business of the mercantile firm at Sydney with which I am connected" (Rambles, p. 88), but he returned to New Zealand in 1840 and spent some time at Port Nicholson and its neighbourhood. About the year 1842 he met Joseph Dalton Hooker who, in his Introductory Essay to the Flora of Tasmania, mentions that Bidwill accompanied him "in my excursions round Port Jackson and impressed me deeply with the extent of his knowledge and fertile talents". On 1 September 1847 he became temporary government botanist and director of the botanic gardens, Sydney, until the newly-appointed director, Charles Moore, arrived in Australia and took up his duties in January 1848. Bidwill was then appointed commissioner of crown lands and chairman of the bench of magistrates for the district of Wide Bay in what is now Queensland. In 1851, while marking out a new road to the Moreton Bay district, he became separated from his companions and was lost without food for eight days. He eventually succeeded in cutting a way through the scrub with a pocket hook, but never properly recovered from his privations, and died on 16 March 1853 at Tinana, Wide Bay, at the early age of 38. He discovered the Bunya Bunya tree (Araucaria Bidwilli), of which he took a young living plant to England in 1843, the Dammara or Queensland kauri pine (Dammara robusta), and the Nymphae gigantea.

J. H. Maiden, The Sydney Botanic Gardens Biographical Notes, No. VIII; The Gentleman's Magazine, 1853, II, p. 209.