Joseph Banks (1743-1820) was an English naturalist, botanist and patron of the natural sciences. From his many adventures on natural history voyages around the world he is credited for bringing 30,000 plant specimens home with him and was the first European to document 1,400 of them.
Members learnt a great deal from this biography of his life. However, they found it a bit of a stretch to finish reading this lengthy biography in one month at this busy time of year.
Nevertheless, for those of us who didn't, we are determined to finish it because of the level of interest it provoked in the parts we had read.
The book is clearly well researched and engagingly written. However, we disagreed with the author's need to start off the book with Banks' forefathers in Chapter 1 since we thought there were too many details and too many names. It was a bit tedious. The fact that Banks inherited millions from inherited estates and extracted a salary more than 200 times the average wage at that time every year, is probably all we needed to know.
From the chapters on his schooling we learnt that he was lucky (sorry, wealthy enough) to have survived it without being assaulted and severely traumatised, either by his boarding school classmates or his teachers. He was clearly an outdoors adventurer type who loved fishing and exploring the family estates. He didn't like hitting the books unless it was botany.
Despite going to Oxford, he never did learn to spell or write grammatically (some of the spellings from his journal like 'antescorbutick' are amusing). However, from an early age he threw off conventional beliefs such as 'toads will give you warts' (he proved they didn't by kissing them) because of his mother's strong naturalist influence which he inherited.
The fact that Banks was concerned with natural science and particularly botany above all else - above early marriage and children, above dubious friendships with rakes like John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, and above a life of drunkenness and religious parodies as a member of the Hellfire Club - was a huge boon for scientific progress around the world.
For east coast Australian and New Zealand readers the best bits in this book are his three-year scientific voyage with Captain James Cook to observe the Transit of Venus at Tahiti, which was followed with the circumnavigation of the whole of New Zealand and the European discovery of New Holland's east coast. On this voyage, Banks took with him a huge entourage of illustrators and servants crammed in with the crew - 90 blokes in total for three years on the tiny, converted coal barge that was the Endeavour. Fortunately for them, Cook had by this time discovered remedies for scurvy, but there were plenty of other ways of dying during the trip.
From a modern-day perspective, the whole idea of claiming a country in the name of one's government by setting up a flag, when it was clearly already populated with cranky people who well knew their local plants and fauna and didn't need them discovered and named something else, seems incredible. There are also the uncomfortable details of how many locals were killed or wounded in the bid to open friendly relationships with the inhabitants to enable the pursuit of science and obtain necessary food and water supplies for the ship.
But the book is fascinating for the details of the places they visited and the animals and fauna first seen by Europeans and documented so painstakingly for a world fast growing its love of science and of learning.
And how all on board, including Banks, mustered up the courage, the ingenuity and the physical work to escape death after the Endeavour hit a coral reef in north Queensland is reason enough to read this book.
Who is Grantlee Kieza?
Grantlee Kieza OAM held senior editorial positions at The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Courier-Mail for many years and was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to journalism in 2019.
He is a Walkley Award finalist and the author of 23 histories, including bestsellers Hudson Fysh, The Kelly
Hunters, Lawson, Macquarie, Banjo, Mrs Kelly, Monash, Sons of the Southern Cross and Bert Hinkler.
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