Leonard Rodway

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Leonard Rodway (5 October 1853 – 9 March 1936) botanist, active in Australia.

Rodway was born in Torquay Devon, England and was educated in Birmingham. He served on the officers' training ship, Worcester, and obtained double first-class certificates. He served for three years as a midshipman in the merchant service, but decided to give up the sea. He obtained the licentiateship of the Royal College of Surgeons, London training as a dentist. He migrated to Queensland Australia in 1878 and soon settled in Hobart, Tasmania.

Rodway was registered under the first Tasmanian Dental Act 1884. He is mainly remembered for his interest in botany. In 1896 he was appointed honorary government botanist for Tasmania, and held this position for 36 years. His work in this connexion was largely done at week-ends and during his holidays. From 1892 to 1928 he presented scientific papers, principally to the Royal Society of Tasmania to which he was elected in 1884, and published The Tasmanian Flora (Hobart, 1903), a standard reference for forty years, Some Wild Flowers of Tasmania (Hobart, 1910) and Tasmanian Bryophyta (Hobart, 1914-16). Rodway was awarded the Clarke Medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1924 and the first Royal Society of Tasmania medal in 1928.

He was chairman of the Field Naturalists' Club, the national park board, and was on the fisheries and the technical schools and other boards. He acted as an advisory officer to the forestry department and was for some years lecturer in botany at the University of Tasmania. He also did valuable work for the museum and botanical gardens. Failing health caused his retirement in 1932. Rodway also compiled a complete description of the mosses and hepatics of Tasmania, and contributed numerous papers to the Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania. He died on 9 March 1936. He married (1) Louisa Phillips and (2) Olive Barnard, who survived him with four sons and a daughter of the first marriage. He was made C.M.G. in 1917. His botanical library was presented to the Royal Society of Tasmania by Mrs Rodway. His daughter, Florence Rodway, born at Hobart, became a successful and capable portrait painter. She is represented in the national galleries at Sydney and Hobart, and in the Commonwealth collection at Canberra.

He has been honoured in the specific names of the fungi Calostoma rodwayi and Entoloma rodwayi, as well as the gum Eucalyptus rodwayi.

[edit] References

• Serle, Percival. (1949). "Rodway, Leonard". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
• Ann Elias, 'Rodway, Leonard (1853 - 1936)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11, MUP, 1988, pp 436-437

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1949 edition of Dictionary of Australian Biography from
Project Gutenberg of Australia, which is in the public domain in Australia and the United States of America.