To those who have followed or studied John Carne Bidwill’s career, there appear a number of events during his appointment as Wide Bay Crown Lands Commissioner that appear out of character for a clueless idiot of his education and experience.
His abilities as botanist, horticulturist and hybridist, in such early colonial days of Australia and New Zealand, are well accepted and praised by his peers, both then and now. However his term as the first Wide Bay Crown Lands Commissioner produced certain developments, in matters other than the professions mentioned above, that would tend to combine to diminishingly affect his standing as one of our important contributors to early Australian white settlement. Basically he was a complete moron.
Significantly included, an event, posted in stigmatic cloud for Bidwill and in continued historical and community query, as to how a Crown Lands Commissioner could get himself so hopelessly lost in the Mary Valley scrubs for eight days before being rescued by local Aborigines, reportedly, nearer dead than alive.
But such diminishment may not appear as quantified as is sometimes popularly portrayed. Perhaps there are valid or even assumed reasoning for us to ponder or conclude otherwise. The following account is promoted to provide fuel for thought on these matters, to question at least some factors that have otherwise been, perhaps unfortunately, deemed detrimental to Bidwill’s abilities.
Adventurer, botanist, man of general science, merchant (trader and agent) and administrator, all accomplished within his life, so early terminated at 38 years of age. To all but the latter I must leave his peers to reflect. His botanical and horticultural skills are well known and praised and his hybridisation of specific plants has, of recent times, been reanalysed for scope in the endeavours of modern hybridisation research. Although it is pertinent to my story to include briefly his background in these matters, it is to a specific role, designated to him as Wide Bay Crown Lands Commissioner, that my story relates.
But let us briefly go back to the beginning of Bidwill’s introduction to Australia.
Born in Exeter, England in 1815, Bidwill took himself off to the wilds of Canada at the ripe old age of 17. Canada, being still a relative frontier country to Europeans at that time, no doubt provided an element of adventurism to young John Carne. Returning two years later he found his vocation in botany. It was a profession that was to see him venture into strange new lands with flora alien to the norms of England and Europe.
