Person

Lempriere, Thomas James (1796 - 1852)

Born
11 January 1796
Hamburg, Germany
Died
6 January 1852
at sea
Occupation
Natural history collector and Artist

Summary

Thomas Lempriere emigrated to Van Diemen's Land in 1822 where he became a merchant and later a public official. He was a regular diarist, published on natural history subjects and was a keen collector of specimens of Tasmanian animals and plants for study in England. Lempriere set up a tide gauge, cut into rock, near Port Arthur in Tasmania. The gauge is still in existence and is believed to be the oldest in the southern hemisphere. The discovery of records of his measurements from the 1840s has shown that the sea has risen about 13.5cm since that time.

Skip to

Related Corporate Bodies

Archival resources

Archives Office of Tasmania

  • Thomas James Lempriere - Records, 1826 - 1852, CSO 1; Archives Office of Tasmania. Details

Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales

  • Thomas James Lempriere - Records, 1834 - 1849, A3343; Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales. Details
  • Thomas James Lempriere - Records, 1837 - 1838, A577; Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales. Details

Published resources

Book Sections

  • Ellis, W. F., 'Lempriere, Thomas James (1796-1852), public official, author and artist' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 2: 1788 - 1850 I-Z, Douglas Pike, ed. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), pp. 105-106. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020092b.htm. Details

Journal Articles

  • Whitley, G. P., 'T. J. Lempriere, an Early Tasmanian Naturalist', Australian Zoologist, 13 (4) (1966), 350-355. Details
  • Whitley, Gilbert P., 'Some Early Naturalists and Collectors in Australia', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, xix (1933), 291-304. Details

Newspaper Articles

  • 'Rise in sea of truths', MX (2003), 2. Details

Resources

McCarthy, G.J.

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 5 March 2018

EOAS ID: biogs/P002137b.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/P002137b.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