Person

Becker, Lothar (1825 - 1901?)

Born
4 April 1825
Nieder Leschen, Silesia
Died
1901?
Breslau, Germany
Occupation
Naturalist

Summary

Lothar Becker was a Silesian naturalist who spent two periods in Victoria travelling and making observations and collections on the local natural history. On his first visit, from later 1849 to January 1852 he spent most of his time around Melbourne and in Gippsland. During his visits Becker made some observations on the indigenous people he encountered. He returned to Europe via southeast Asia, India and the Middle East. Becker's second visit to Victoria was from November 1855 to April 1865, with a brief visit to New Zealand in 1861. From the late 1860s Becker was a teacher of English in Breslau and published prolifically on his Australian travels and natural history observations. His papers on Gippsland are among the earliest descriptions of the area and give an account of the after-effects of the devastating Black Thursday bushfire. Becker was particularly interested in fungi, sending his collections to Elias Fries in Sweden for identification. Some of his specimens have survived in several European herbaria.

Published resources

Journal Articles

  • Darragh, Thomas A., 'Lothar Becker: a German naturalist in Victoria, 1849-52, 1855-65', Historical Records of Australian Science, 30 (2) (2019), 119-29, https://doi.org/10.1071/HR18020. Details
  • Howes, Hilary, 'Lothar Becker's contributions to anthropology', Historical Records of Australian Science, 30 (2) (2019), 138-45, https://doi.org/10.1071/HR19004. Details
  • May, Tom W.; and Darragh, Thomas A., 'The significance of mycological contributions by Lothar Becker', Historical Records of Australian Science, 30 (2) (2019), 130-7, https://doi.org/10.1071/HR19005. Details

Helen Cohn

EOAS ID: biogs/P006567b.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/P006567b.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