Person

White, Cyril Tenison (1890 - 1950)

Born
17 August 1890
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Died
16 August 1950
Kangaroo Point, Queensland, Australia
Occupation
Botanical collector and Botanist

Summary

Cyril Tenison White was Queensland Government Botanist from 1917 to 1950. He was a grandson of F.M. Bailey, who also held the position of Queensland Government Botanist, and started as his pupil-assistant in 1905. White's interests were taxonomy botany, particularly of woody plants, and economic botany. He made significant contributions to knowledge of the flora of Queensland and northern New South Wales, and was regarded as an authority on tropical plants. His collecting trips took him throughout north eastern Australia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia. The Queensland Herbarium holds thousands of his collections. White's advice was sought frequently on weeds, poisonous plants and horticultural questions. He published extensively in the Queensland journal of agriculture, and his major books included An elementary textbook of Australian forest botany (1922) and Principles of botany for Queensland farmers (1938). White was an active member of the Royal Society of Queensland and served three terms as President of the Queensland Naturalists' Club. The plant genus Cyrilwhitea (Chenopodiaceae) was named in his honour.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1917 - 1950
Career position - Government Botanist, Queensland Herbarium
1923
Career event - Elected Member (Botany), Australian National Research Council
1923
Career position - President, Queensland Naturalists' Club
1925
Taxonomy event - Eucalyptus whitei Maiden & Blakely was named in his honour. White also collected syntype material
1928
Taxonomy event - Eucalyptus orgadophila Maiden & Blakely. White collected the type
1928
Taxonomy event - Eucalyptus microneura Maiden & Blakely. White collected the type
1930
Career position - President, Queensland Naturalists' Club
1931
Taxonomy event - Co-author of Eucalyptus tenuipes (Maiden & Blakely) Blakely & C.T.White
1931
Taxonomy event - Co-author of Eucalyptus curtisii Blakely & C.T.White
1939
Career position - Australian Botanical liaison Officer to Kew Gardens, London
1943
Career position - President, Queensland Naturalists' Club
1947
Award - Mueller Medal, Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science
1953
Taxonomy event - Eucalyptus gilbertensis (Maiden & Blakely) S.T. Blake. White collected the type

Related Corporate Bodies

Related People

Archival resources

Queensland Herbarium

  • Cyril Tenison White - Records, 1920 - 1951; Queensland Herbarium. Details

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

Book Sections

Journal Articles

  • 'Obituary: Cyril Tenison White', Australian Journal of Science, 13 (2) (1950), 43. Details
  • Bean, A. R., 'C. T. White's botanical survey and collections from Papua in 1918', Austrobaileya, 9 (2) (2014), 244-62. Details
  • Blake, S. T., 'Cyril Tenison White, 1890-1950', Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, 62 (1952), 35-48. Details
  • Chisholm, A. H.; and White, C. T., 'The late Dr Shirley', Queensland naturalist, 3 (1922), 87. Details
  • Herbert, D. A., 'Cyril Tenison White', Queensland naturalist, 14 (3) (1951), 43-7. Details
  • White, C. T., 'A brief history of the naturalists' club movement in Queensland', Queensland naturalist, 5 (1926), 73-5. Details
  • White, C. T., 'The Bailey Family and its Place in the Botanical History of Australia', The Journal of the Historical Society of Queensland, 3 (5) (1945), 362-368. Details
  • White, C.T., 'Henry Tryon, First Honorary Secretary, Royal Society of Queensland, and His Place in Queensland Science', Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, lvi (8) (1945), 44-80. Details
  • White, C.T., 'F. M. Bailey: His Life and Work', Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, lxi (1950), 105-114. Details

Resources

See also

  • Hall, Norman, Botanists of the Eucalypts: short biographies of people who have named eucalypts, whose names have been given to species or who have collected type material (Melbourne: CSIRO, 1978), 101 pp. Details

McCarthy, G.J., Moje, C. & Walsh, N.

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 9 November 2021

EOAS ID: biogs/P000887b.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: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
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/P000887b.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