Person

Swinbourne, Robert Frederick George (1936 - 2015)

FLS

Born
31 July 1936
Hurstville, New South Wales, Australia
Died
2015
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Occupation
Horticultural botanist

Summary

Robert Swinbourne was a horticultural botanist whose interests included the family Geraniaceae and the history of horticulture in South Australia. He described and registered many Pelargonium hybrids. In the early 1960s he was on the staff of the herbarium in Alice Springs. Specimens collected during this time are now in the Northern Territory Herbarium. Between 1966 and the mid-1980s he worked at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. Swinbourne served as President of the Australian Geranium Council and was a leading member of other plant societies reflecting his interests in carnivorous plants, begonias and ferns. Under the pseudonym 'Ptilotus" he made regular contributions to the magazine Your Garden. His history of the nursery trade in South Australia, Years of endeavour, was published in 1982.

Details

Chronology

1962 - 2015
Career position - Member, Royal Society of South Australia
1962 - 2015
Career position - Fellow, Linnean Society of New South Wales
1966 - 1980
Career position - Botanist, Adelaide Botanic Gardens
1970 - 2015
Career position - Fellow, The Linnean Society of London (FLS)

Related Corporate Bodies

Published resources

Books

  • Swinbourne, Robert F. G., Years of Endeavour: An historical record of the Nurseries, Nurserymen, Seedsmen, and Horticultural retail outlets of South Australia (Adelaide: South Australian Association of Nurserymen, 1982), 200 pp. Details

Journal Articles

  • Barker, Robyn, 'R. F. G. Swinbourne (1936 - 2015)', Australasian Systematic Botany Society Newsletter, 166 (2016), 34-6. Details

Helen Cohn

EOAS ID: biogs/P005699b.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/P005699b.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