Charles Walter de Vis

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Charles Walter’s Society for Innovation & Research

Charles Walter de Vis - Patron, CWSIR

Charles Walter de Vis (1829-1915), clergyman, zoologist and museum director, was born on 9 May 1829 at Birmingham, England, son of James Devis and Mary, née Chambers. The family was related to portrait painters of the same name. From Edward VI Grammar School, Birmingham, Charles went to Magdalene College, Cambridge (B. A., 1851; M. A., 1884). He was made deacon in 1851 and in 1853 was appointed rector of St John's, Brecon, Wales, but a keen interest in natural history led him to become curator of the Queen's Park Museum, Rochdale, Manchester. There he wrote his earliest scientific papers and joined the Anthropological Society.

De Vis left England in June 1870 for Queensland. He settled first at Black Gin Creek, near Rockhampton, and then at Clermont. After a visit to England he became librarian of the Rockhampton School of Arts. In 1880-81, under the pseudonym of 'Thickthorn', he contributed articles on geology and ornithology to the Queenslander. Their quality induced the trustees of the Queensland Museum in January 1882 to offer him the post of curator. He began work in February and in 1901 became director, holding office until he retired in 1905. He then filled the post of consulting specialist to the museum until 1912.

About

De Vis was an indefatigable writer and worker for natural science, especially in the fields of palaeontology and systematic vertebrate zoology. As Alexander Hamilton put it, de Vis 'tried to do for the Queensland fauna, what Mr. Bailey did for the flora, but under more unmanageable and difficult conditions'. Despite a small staff and limited budget, de Vis added much to the extent of the collections, their classification and display. He also built up a fine reference library and supervised the moving of the museum from the Public Library to the Exhibition Building, Bowen Park. The Annals of the Queensland Museum were commenced and attention was paid to the ethnological and biological products of New Guinea, whence his friend, Sir William MacGregor, sent great quantities of material.

Articles on birds, fish, reptiles, batrachians and marsupials, and accounts of his palaeontological explorations poured from his pen. In the half century after 1865, he published some 130 papers in various journals including the Zoologist, the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, Memoirs of the Anthropological Society of London, the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales and those of the Royal Society of Queensland, the Annals of the Queensland Museum and the Annual Reports of the Administrator of H.M. Government in New Guinea.

He had associations with the British and Australian Ornithologists Unions, the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia and exhibitions held in London in 1886 and Melbourne in 1888. He was working to the end on a comparative vocabulary of Aboriginal languages. His first wife died in 1897; at Wellington, New Zealand, on 9 September 1898 he married a widow, Katherine Elizabeth Luckle, née Coulson. He died on 30 April 1915 and was buried in the Church of England section of the Toowong cemetery.

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The Charles Walter’s Society for Innovation & Research(CWSIR) was established as an independent Research & Innovation Society