Cunningham, Allan ___ 1791-1839 ___ British ___ naturalist explorer

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Cunningham was born in Wimbledon, near London, and studied at Putney. He tried training for the law but preferred to take a position as clerk at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He was chosen by Joseph Banks to travel abroad to collect plants for the Kew. He was in Brazil between 1814 and 1816, and then went to Australia. He joined John Oxley's 1817 expedition to the Lachlan and Macquarie rivers; and he travelled on HMS Mermaid between 1817 and 1820, as the ship's botanist. He also undertook an expedition to what is now Canberra in 1824, and visited New Zealand in 1826. In subsequent years, he set out from the upper Hunter River to explore inside the Dividing Range (he is credited with discovering Darling Downs and Cunningham's Gap) and the Brisbane River. Cunningham returned to England in 1831, but went back to Australia as a government botanist in 1837. Soon after he resigned to become superintendent of the Sydney Botanical Gardens. His name was given to a species of pine tree (Araucaria Cunninghamii).
A biography link
Wikipedia bio
The Diary Review - In search of water

DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1817-1818 ___ travel nature exploration Australia

WEB TEXT LINKS
etext
a bit about
many extracts

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
Natural History Museum

SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
Early Explorers in Australia
 

November 2005, September 2008, March 2013
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IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS: 1) The first line of basic information may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown, or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British' a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies. 4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges, and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising. I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries.