Collection RS22 - Leonard Rodway Collection

Leonard Rodway (1853-1936), botanist and dentist, was born on 5 October 1853 at Torquay, Devon, England, thirteenth child of Henry Barron Rodway, dentist and inventor of the Rodway life buoy, and his wife Elizabeth, née Allin. Educated at Birmingham and in the Thames Marine Officers' Training Ship, Worcester, he spent three years in the mercantile marine before turning, after illness, to a family tradition in dentistry. Training at Middlesex Hospital, London, he gained the licentiateship in dental surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1878 and migrated to Queensland. In Brisbane on 19 May 1879, with Presbyterian forms, he married Louisa Susan Phillips, a dentist's daughter. They settled in Hobart Town next year.

Rodway was registered under the first Tasmanian Dental Act 1884, and practised in Hobart until 1923, acting as honorary dental surgeon at the Hobart General Hospital in 1890-1922. He is, however, chiefly remembered for his interest in botany, another family tradition. He devoted his spare time, energy and financial resources to preparing an exhaustive catalogue of Tasmania's native and naturalized plants: he made many field trips, described many new species and built up a comprehensive collection of specimens. Between 1892 and 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). For more information see http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rodway-leonard-8252