Barnard, George (jnr)   (1831 - 1894)

George Barnard jnr: born at Lea, Chiselhurst, Kent, England, on 30 March, 1831; emigrated to Australia from Downs, England on 1 February 1845 with his parents and siblings on the Kinnear, arriving at Port Dalrymple, Tas, on 26 May 1845; died at George Street, Launceston, Tas, on 11 March 1894.

George jnr completed his education in Launceston and assisted his family on their farm 'Landfall'. When he was 26 he went to the mainland to manage 'Caramut' c. 50 km SE of Hamilton, Victoria.

In 1861 he was attracted to the Rockhampton region of Queensland where he became patriarch to a notable pioneering grasing and naturalist family. With his brother, in 1873, they purchased 'Coomooboolaroo' a property of about 440 sq km, about 119 km to the west of Rockhampton. The property was converted from sheep to cattle and grew in prosperity.

George jnr, with the help of his children amassed an impressive natural history collection housed in a purpose-built museum and considered by experts to be one of the finest in the southern hemisphere.

Unfortunately, for financial reasons the collection was said to have been sold (via Gregory Mathews) to Lord Lionel W. Rothschild who established a private natural history museum on the family estate at Tring in Hertfordshire, England. In 1932, before his death in 1937, Rothschild sold his entire bird study-skin collection to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, but the remainder of the Tring Museum, including his considerable bird-egg collection, was presented to the Natural History Museum, London (BMNH).

At the present time there is no record of the fate of his botanical collection, only a couple of his Rockhampton district specimens show up in AVH.

Source: Extracted from book: 'Passions in Ornithology: A century of Australian Egg Collectors' (2020), Mason & Pfitzner, Canberra. [consult for source references]
Portrait Photo: Extracted from: above.