William Blandowski: A frustrated life

Thomas A. Darragh

10 citations0/0 files storedProceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

History of Science and Natural History Biographical and Historical Analysis History of Science and Medicine

Abstract

When Johann Wilhelm Theodor Ludwig von Blandowski (1822-1878), was appointed Government Zoologist on 1 March 1854, Victoria gained a scientist, who had attended Tarnowitz Mining School and science lectures at Berlin University. He had been an assistant manager in part of the Koenigsgrube coal mine at Koenigshütte, but as a consequence of some kind of misdemeanour, resigned from the Prussian Mining Service and joined the Schleswig-Holstein Army in March 1848. After resigning his Lieutenant’s commission and trying unsuccessfully to obtain another appointment in the Prussian Mining Service, he left for Adelaide in May 1849 as a collector of natural history specimens. After some collecting expeditions and earning a living as a surveyor he moved to the Victorian goldfields. He undertook official expeditions in Central Victoria, Mornington Peninsula and Western Port and in December 1856 he was leader of the Murray-Darling Expedition, but control of the Museum passed to Frederick McCoy with Blandowski relegated to the position of Museum Collector. Feted on his return from the Expedition, he fell out with some members of the Royal Society of Victoria over somewhat puerile descriptions of new species of fishes and he also refused to recognise McCoy’s jurisdiction over him. After acrimonious arguments about collections and ownership of drawings made whilst he was a government officer, Blandowski resigned and left for Germany, where he set up as a photographer in Gleiwitz in 1861, but some kind of mental instability saw him committed to the mental asylum at Bunzlau (now Boleslawiec, Poland) in September 1873, where he died on 18 December 1878. Assessments of Blandowki’s scientific and artistic career in Australia have been mixed. The biographical details presented provide the opportunity to judge assessments of Blandowski in Australia against his actions both before and after his arrival there.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

References

2011Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound, in the Years 1840–1 2011Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, in Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria 2011Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, during the Years 1828, 1829, 1830, and 1831 1998Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand Von Mueller 1849Narrative of an expedition into Central Australia : performed under the authority of Her Majesty's Government, during the years 1844, 5, and 6, together with a notice of the Province of South Australia, in 1847 2009Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly 1954Collections of a century : the history of the first hundred years of the National Museum of Victoria

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.