Alfred William Howitt (1830 - 1908)

Biography

Alfred Howitt is Notable.

Alfred William Howitt was the son of William and Mary Howitt [nee Botham] of Nottingham, born on 17 April 1830, in the Parish called St Peter, his father's occupation being a Druggist.

He was educated in England, at home by his mother with his sibling, while they were living in Esher, Surrey from 1836, then in Heidelberg, Germany where they moved in 1840 for a few years for the children's education. They returned to London in the 1850s, where Alfred went to the University College School^[1][2].

Alfred Howitt was on the 1851 England Census with his father (56) and mother (51), aged 20 as a Merchants Clark with 2 siblings and 2 servants, residing at 28 Avenue Road, St Marylebone, Middlesex.

In 1852, under the press of family needs, he went with his father William and brother Charlton to Melbourne where they had been preceded in 1840 by William's youngest brother Godfrey. A reunion was one purpose of the visit but William and his sons also intended to try their fortunes on the new goldfields. They did so with modest success at intervals in the next two years (ref.2). They had sailed on the ship Kent in September 1852 and a lively account of the trip is given by William, "an extraordinary literary entrepreneur and social reformer who, with his wife Mary, published some 180 works"^[3]. Alfred is described in the introduction as "among the greatest Australians and is the subject of Mary Howitt Walker's Come Wind, Come Weather (Melbourne University Press, 1971)".

When his father and brother Charlton returned to England in 1854, Alfred decided to remain in Australia having become familiar with the natural environment and keen to study it scientifically. He would become an explorer, natural scientist and pioneer authority on Aboriginal culture and social organization.

When his father returned to England in 1854 Howitt farmed land in Caulfield, Melbourne belonging to his uncle, Dr Godfrey Howitt, which did not appeal to him. In 1859 he became leader of an expedition sent out to look for pastoral country near Lake Eyre, South Australia, but found drought conditions wherever he went. On his return he took a position as manager of a station near Hamilton, Victoria, but almost at once was asked to take charge of a party organised by the government to prospect for gold in Gippsland. The magnificent timber he passed through aroused his interest in the eucalypts, and he afterwards acquired an extraordinary knowledge of them both from the scientific and practical points of view. His expedition followed up the Mitchell river and its tributaries, and gold was discovered on the Crooked, Dargo, and Wentworth rivers, all in eastern Victoria^[4].

Wikipedia has that "Howitt was a geologist in Victoria; later, he worked as a gold warden in North Gippsland. Howitt went on to be appointed Police magistrate & Warden Crown Lands Commissioner"^[5] but without a source or dates. Reference 4 has that the appointment was in 1863.

On returning to Melbourne, Howitt was chosen as leader of a relief expedition that started on 4 July 1861 to locate the Burke and Wills expedition that had set out a year earlier. They soon found King, who told them he was the only survivor and had been living with the natives. A fortnight later Howitt again left for the interior to bring back the remains of the lost explorers, which he buried in the Cooper’s Creek area in December 1861. The opportunity was taken to do some exploring near Cooper's Creek, where there had been recent rains and the country was in a quite different condition from when he had seen it 2 years before. He began to take an interest in the Aborigines, and though he had no difficulty in finding a way of living with the Dieri or Diyari tribe, with more experience later on he was better able to understand the animosity of the people of the Coopers Creek/Lake Eyre region towards the invaders. Arriving back at Melbourne again, the Exploration Committee decided that he should return to the Cooper, exhume Burke and Wills' remains and bring them down to Melbourne for burial. ... Howitt took the bodies first to Adelaide, and then by ship to Melbourne, arriving on 29 December 1862^[6].

As mentioned above, in 1863, Howitt was appointed police magistrate and warden of the goldfields in Gippsland. He held that position for more than a quarter of a century. He was at first stationed at Omeo then completely in the wilds (ref.4). He was a public official for 38 years and a magistrate for 26 (ref.2).

On 18 August 1864 he married Maria Robinson Boothby at Mitcham, South Australia, who was the daughter of Judge Benjamin Boothby, Chief Justice of the Colony of South Australia^[7]. According to the Wikipedia article her nickname was 'Liney' but it has the year date of marriage incorrectly as 1863. (See sources for the newspaper report.)

Alfred and Maria had five children:

• William Charlton Howitt born 1865;
• Mary Edith B Howitt born 1866;
• Annie Elizabeth (Howitt) Whittakers born 1868;
• Margaret Maud Howitt born 1870; and
• Alfred Gilbert Howitt born 1872.

It should be noted that Lucknow, Eastwood (see below) and Bairnsdale are 3 immediately adjacent areas with the first 2 separated from the 3rd by the Mitchell River.

In his long service of magistracy for the whole of Gippsland he covered thousands of kilometres on horseback, combining the trips with scientific studies - botanical, geological, including petrography, which he introduced for the first time in 1873, and anthropological. "His greatest eminence came from his work in anthropology, which was his main interest and relaxation after 1872" but "he [n]ever agreed with the condemnation of Europeans for their treatment of native peoples expressed in his father's polemical Colonization and Christianity (1838)" (ref.2). Even as a local guardian of Aboriginals in Gippsland his attitude appears always to have been that of the dispassionate scientist (ref.2). Whether Tulaba, a Bribalung man of the Kurnai Nation, sensed this or not, he was an "incessant talker" ... "spoke English" ... "and important informant" for Alfred's studies from the time they first met in 1866, when the Howitts "settled at Eastwood on the Mitchell River near Bairnsdale, successfully growing hops"^[8]. The same source has that it was about 1870 when Alfred turned his "burgeoning anthropological interests concentrated upon Tulaba", and that he had encouraged the "continuation of Aboriginal ritual life".

Stanner (1972) shows how Alfred's studies on Aboriginal anthropology, evolved from the early 1860s to a last phase from 1891 to 1907 that included the publication of his book The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904). In the second phase he published with Reverend Lorimer Fison, in 1880, the book Kamilaroi and Kurnai that focused on the social organisation of those Aboriginal tribes.

He was to publish many geological papers in learned journals after 1874.

In 1889, he was appointed Acting Secretary of mines and water supply (ref.2): Ref.4 has 'Secretary' of mines, and adds that he returned to Melbourne. The former has that he was commissioner of audit and a member of the Public Service Board in 1895, retiring in 1902 on a pension. Ref.4 has those dates as 1896 and 1901 respectively?

Alfred William Howitt was a fellow of the Geological Society of London and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, and a councillor of the Royal Society of Victoria. He received many honours including The Royal Society of New South Wales who awarded him the Clarke memorial medal in 1903 and the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science with the first Mueller medal in 1904. He also visited England in 1904 and the University of Cambridge awarded him an honorary doctorate in science, and he was made C.M.G. for services to the State and to science.

In 1907 he was president of the Adelaide meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science.

Alfred William Howitt died on 7 March 1908, aged 77, at Eastwood^[9] and was buried in the Presbyterian section of the Bairnsdale Cemetery in Bairnsdale, Victoria, on 9 March 1908 after the only illness of his life. His occupation was given in the burial record as Audit Commander. His wife Maria had passed on in 1903 but all their children survived both of them.

Sources

1. ↑ http://www.thorotonsociety.org.uk/publications/articles/howitts.htm
2. ↑ http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/howitt-alfred-william-510
3. ↑ http://www3.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-12/t1-g-t2.html
4. ↑ http://www.burkeandwills.net.au/Explorers/Relief_Parties/howitt.htm
5. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_William_Howitt
6. ↑ http://burkeandwills.slv.vic.gov.au/ask-an-expert/where-were-burke-and-wills-buried
7. ↑ http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article109908045
8. ↑ http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/tulaba-13226
9. ↑ https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/10669179

• W. E. H. Stanner, 'Howitt, Alfred William (1830–1908)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/howitt-alfred-william-510/text6037, published first in hardcopy 1972.
• Birth: Ancestry.com. England & Wales, Quaker Birth, Marriage, and Death Registers, 1578-1837 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2013. Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire: Piece 0390: Monthly Meeting of Nottingham, Dolby, and Castle Donnington (1807-1837).
• Residence and Occupation: Ancestry.com. 1851 England Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005. Original data: Census Returns of England and Wales, 1851. Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives of the UK (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), 1851. Class: HO107; Piece: 1491; Folio: 772; Page: 58; GSU roll: 87819-87820.
• Marriage report:

• • Howitt — Boothby. — On the 18th inst., at St. Michael's, Mitcham, by the Rev. William Buckton Andrews, incumbent, Alfred William Howitt, Esq; of Omeo, Victoria, eldest son of William Howitt, Esq., of West hill, Highgate, to Maria Robinson, third daughter of the Hon. Mr. Justice Boothby, one of the Justices of Her Majesty's Supreme Court of the Province of South Australia

• Marriage: Ancestry.com. Australia, Marriage Index, 1788-1950 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Page Number: 182, Volume Number: 59.
• Death: Ancestry.com. Australia, Death Index, 1787-1985 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Registration Number: 132.
• Burial: Ancestry.com. Australia Cemetery Index, 1808-2007 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2010. Register Number: 52.
• Link - https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LHG3-MCN