Person

Geissmann, Hilda Gladys (1890 - 1988)

Born
1890
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Died
1988
Occupation
Naturalist and Photographer

Summary

Hilda Gladys Geissmann was a self-taught naturalist and nature photographer. She became an expert on the flora and fauna of the Mount Tamborine region in Queensland. She is said to have known the more about the flora and fauna there than any other person. Many of her specimens were greatly prized because of their rarity, beauty or quality and are housed in museums and herbariums throughout Australia and in the USA. Although Geissmann had a love of all natural things her true passion was birds and orchids. She developed a high standing in the native orchard world especially for her exquisite photographs which she developed and printed herself. She left such a positive impression on the people of Tamborine that local residents erected a monument after her death. It was inscribed with "A true pioneer of natural history. We remember her on the mountain she loved."

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

  • McCarthy, Gavan; Morgan, Helen; Smith, Ailie; van den Bosch, Alan, Where are the Women in Australian Science?, Exhibition of the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, First published 2003 with lists updated regulary edn, Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, 2003, https://eoas.info/exhibitions/wisa/wisa.html. Details

Edited Books

  • McKay, Judith ed., Brilliant Careers: Women Collectors and Illustrators in Queensland (Brisbane: Queensland Museum, 1997), 80 pp. Details

Resources

Annette Alafaci

EOAS ID: biogs/P004763b.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/P004763b.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