Allan Cunningham: Letters of a Botanist / Exlplorer 1791 - 1839. Publ. 2015. illus. VIII, 591 p. Paper bd.

Allan Cunningham is rightly celebrated as the leading botanist in Australia in the first half of the 19th century. He was also an accomplished explorer, and a pioneer physical geographer, plant geographer and ecologist at a time when those sciences were in their infancy. Cunningham was a very enthusiastic correspondent, both in the numbers and (often) length of his letters, and this book brings together over 490 letters, to him, from him, and (between third parties) about him. The correspondence includes communications with the world’s leading botanists, several New South Wales Governors, an ambassador, government officials, friends, family, colleagues, missionaries, and the proponents of the South Australian Land Co. and the Australian Agricultural Co. Together for the first time, they provide a new perspective on this humble but talented man, and on his life in Australia, London and Brazil in the early 1800s.