Person

D'Albertis, Luigi Maria (1841 - 1901)

Born
21 November 1841
Voltri, Sardinia, Italy
Died
2 September 1901
Sassari, Italy
Occupation
Anthropological collector, Explorer and Zoological collector

Summary

Luigi D'Albertis was an explorer, and natural history and ethnographic collector, who made a number of visits to New Guinea. In the early 1870s he travelled widely through Southeast Asia and New Guinea with Odoardo Beccari, making significant ethnographic and zoological collections. For much of 1873 D'Albertis was in New South Wales. He made further expeditions to New Guinea and the Torres Strait, including three visits to the region of the Fly River. His companions on these visits included Samuel MacFarlane (1875) and Lawrence Hargrave (1876). As an ethnographic collector, D'Albertis was considered by his contemporaries (and later) to be unscrupulous. His last expedition ended in desertion by his crew and a charge of murder (of which he was acquitted). He returned to Europe in 1878. D'Albertis's ornithological collections were lodged in the museum in Genoa, Italy. His botanical specimens were partly incorporated with those of Beccari, and partly sent to Ferdinand von Mueller, the Victorian Government Botanist. The plant genus Albertisia (Menispermiaceae) was named in his honour, as were a number of reptiles.

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Details

Chronology

1872
Life event - Travelling in New Guinea with Odoardo Beccari
1875
Life event - Exploring the Fly River, New Guinea, with Samuel MacFarlane
May 1876 - October 1876
Life event - Second exploration of the Fly River, New Guinea, with Lawrence Hargrave
May 1877 - January 1878
Life event - Third exploration of the Fly River

Related People

Archival resources

National Library of Australia Manuscript Collection

  • Lawrence Hargrave - Records, 1908 - 1915, MS 352; National Library of Australia Manuscript Collection. Details

Powerhouse Museum

  • D'Albertis, Luigi Maria (1841-1901), 1876, 94/23/1; Powerhouse Museum. Details

Queensland State Archives

  • Luigi Maria D'Albertis - Records, 1876 - 1878, CS1876/268 and others; Queensland State Archives. Details

State Records New South Wales, Sydney Reading Room

  • Luigi Maria D'Albertis - Records, 1876 - 1877, 5,887; State Records New South Wales, Sydney Reading Room. Details

Published resources

Books

  • D'Albertis, L. M., Journal of the expedition for the exploration of the Fly River (Sydney: Frederick White, 1877), 43 pp. Details
  • D'Albertis, L. M., New Guinea: what I did and what I saw, 2 vols (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1880). Details
  • D'Albertis, L. M.; and Salvadori, E., Catalogo degli uccelli raccolti da L.M. D'Albertis durante la seconda e terza esplorazione del Fiume Fly negli anni 1876 e 1877 (Genova: Regio Istituto Sordo-muti, 1897), 131 pp. Details

Book Sections

Journal Articles

  • D'Albertis, L. M., 'Remarks on the natives and products of the Fly River, New Guinea', Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 20 (4) (1876), 343-53. Details
  • D'Albertis, L. M., 'Journeys up the Fly River and in other parts of New Guinea', Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and monthly record of geography, 1 (1) (1879), 4-16. Details
  • Gnecchi-Ruscone, Elisabetta, 'From New Guinea 1872-78 to Genova 2004: recovering Luigi Maria D'Albertis' private collection', Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 132 (2011), 165-82. Details

Resources

See also

  • Ballard, Chris, 'Explorers & Co. in interior New Guinea, 1872 - 1928' in Brokers and boundaries: colonial exploration in Indigenous territory, Shellam, Tiffany; Nugent, Maria; Konishi, Shino; and Cadzow, Allison, eds (Canberra: ANU Press, 2016), pp. 185-2112. Details
  • Van Steenis-Kruseman, M. J., Malaysian plant collectors and collections: being a cyclopaedia of botanical exploration in Malaysia and a guide to the concerned literature up to the year 1950 (Djakarta: Noordhoff-Kolff NV, 1950), clii, 639 pp. Details

Gavan McCarthy [P004098] and Helen Cohn

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 6 October 2023

EOAS ID: biogs/P001488b.htm

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"... 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