Person

Blackall, William Edward (1876 - 1941)

Born
8 July 1876
Folkestone, Kent, England
Died
7 October 1941
Western Australia, Australia
Occupation
Botanist and Physician

Summary

William Blackall was a physician who came to Western Australia in 1904 to take the post of Medical Officer at the Fremantle Asylum. He established his own private practice in the Perth suburb of Cottesloe in 1910, while his wider medical positions included surgeon to the orthopaedic ward, Lady Lawley Cottage by the Sea; and consultant to the Mosman Park school for deaf children. During WWI he served in several theatres, ending with the 1st Australian Field Ambulance. For 18 years after the end of the war he was assistant director of hygiene for base headquarters, 5th Military District, Australian Army Medical Corps reserve. Blackall was a keen botanist and visited the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1935. He worked to produce a key to the Western Australian flora. This was uncompleted at his death, but prepared for publication by Brian Grieve. How to know Western Australian wildflowers (generally known as Blackall and Grieve) was produced in multiple volumes and editions, and has become one of the standards texts on the Western Australian flora. The Blackall Prize in the University of Western Australia is awarded annually to the most promising student of botany. Blackall's collection of over 5,000 plant specimens was deposited after his death in the Western Australian Herbarium. The plant genus Blackallia (Rhamnaceae) was named in his honour.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1900
Education - BA, University of Oxford
1904
Education - BM, BCh, University of Oxford
1904
Education - MA, University of Oxford
1904 - 1910
Career position - Medical officer, Fremantle Asylum, Western Australia
1910
Career event - Established general practice, Cottesloe, Western Australia
1914 - 1916
Military service - Volunteer gunner, Australian Field Artillery
1916 - 1917
Military service - Honorary captain, Australian Imperial Force
1917 - 1918
Military service - 1st Australian Field General Hospital and 1st Australian Field Ambulance
1919 - 1936
Military service - Assistant director of hygiene for base headquarters, 5th Military District, Australian Army Medical Corps Reserve

Related Corporate Bodies

Related People

Archival resources

Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science

  • Australian Botanists - Biographies, MS 064; Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science. Details

State Records Office of Western Australia

  • William Edward Blackall - Records, 1904 - 1941; State Records Office of Western Australia. Details

Western Australia Herbarium

  • William Edward Blackall - Records, 1931 - 1940, 58(047) Bla; Western Australia Herbarium. Details

Published resources

Books

  • Blackall, William E. and Grieve, Brian J., How to know Western Australian wildflowers: a key to the flora of the temperate regions of Western Australia, 3 vols (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1954-1963). Details

Book Sections

  • Grieve, B. J., 'Blackall, William Edward (1876-1941), medical practitioner and botanist' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 7: 1891 - 1939 A-Ch, Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle, eds (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979), p. 307. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A070314b.htm. Details

Conference Proceedings

  • History of Systematic Botany in Australasia: Proceedings of a symposium held at the University of Melbourne, 25-27 May 1988 edited by Short, Philip S. (South Yarra, Vic.: Australian Systematic Botany Society Inc., 1990), 326 pp. Details

Edited Books

  • Flora of Australia, vol. 1 of 44 (Canberra: Australian Biological Resources Study, 1999). Details

Resources

See also

  • Grieve, Brian J., 'Botany in Western Australia: a survey of progress: 1900 - 1971: Presidential address 1971', Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia 33-53, 58 (2) (1975), 33-53. Details
  • Hall, Norman, Botanists of Australian Acacias: Short Biographies of People Who Have Named Australian Species, Whose Names Have Been Given to Species or Who Have Collected Type Material, But Excluding Any Who Are Included in 'Botanists of the Eucalypts' (Melbourne: CSIRO, 1984), 64 pp. Details

McCarthy, G.J. and Helen Cohn

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 8 April 2025

EOAS ID: biogs/P000234b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2025 February (Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar - late summer - season of eels)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#kooyang
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P000234b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260