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Telopea Vol. 6(4): 1996 
herbarium specimens from which are preserved at Kew) offered in exchange for 
desiderata at Camden Park. He remarked, 'We have lately met with a great 
disappointment in the removal of Mr Bidwill from the situation of 'Director' of the 
Sydney Botanic Garden ... in his removal 1 assure you we feel as if we had our right 
hand lopped off'. No doubt wishing to ingratiate himself with the apparently influential 
Lindley, he did not blame Moore or Lindley, suspecting that Grey seeing vacillation in 
the Colony had set about filling the position with a person recruited in the British Isles. 
However, Bidwill^ eventually conceded that Moore was getting on 'tolerably well' but 
was wasting 'his time in making useless alterations in the layout of the Gardens'. 
Although Moore received the £300 salary in 1848 (but he had to pay his passage out), 
it was reduced to £200 thereafter’’, 'so much for Downing Street meddling'. 
According to Norton (1901) the trustees of the Museum retired from the management 
of the Gardens and Bidwill's friends were out for revenge. Sir Stuart Alexander 
Donaldson mooted the reduction of the annual parliamentary vote for the Gardens' 
running expenses to £150. He failed in not only this but his attempt to get them cut 
up and sold off as allotments. Even so, Moore was to have a trying time for the next 
few years. In May 1848 Bidwill was back in Sydney'* complaining that the support 
he had solicited in England for the Wide Bay post had seemed not to be forthcoming 
but that if he got it he would send Hooker plants from there. His pained remarks on 
the state of the Gardens are telling, 'The Sydney Gardens will always remain what 
they have been hitherto — a very good place for the Sydney people to walk in of a 
Sunday & for the nurserymaids during the rest of the week'. 
Wide Bay 
Before moving to Wide Bay, Bidwill went to Bathurst to buy, with others, Thomas 
Icely's mining property which allegedly had a mile of lode"”. In November he left 
by steamer for Newcastle on his way to the Brisbane River and thence to the Mary 
River, Wide Bay'"^ (Lennon 1924). At first there was only salt beef and bread to eat 
but he had one sweet potato plant and seven yams planted by January 1849 (Bidwill 
& Woodhouse 1927: 116). The land was flat but he wrote that 18 miles up the river 
a 'lagoon is covered with water lilies [Nympltaea gigantea], the flowers of which of a 
most beautiful blue colour, are a foot in diameter!'. 
The first settlement at Maryborough is now the suburb of Baddow and Bidwill 
established at Tinana Creek what he hoped would become a botanic garden, though 
there were difficulties particularly with drunkenness and other problems with the 
men sent to help establish the settlement (Bidwill & Woodhouse 1927:116). Professor 
Clough tells me that the first sentence imposed in the Circuit Court was a horse¬ 
whipping for one j.D. MacTaggart who had assaulted Bidwill himself. Moreover, in 
1849 the settlement was attacked by more than 200 Aborigines Bidwill almost lost 
his life"” but his botanical keenness was undimmed. He had sent material to Kew in 
the Camden cases, which included two more living bunya-bunya pines in 1848 
the case being returned in May 1849"“; his request for fruit trees (Bidwill & 
Woodhouse l.c.) and later a case of succulents was granted when such was sent out 
in October 1849'®^. He sent material including seeds and orchids to the Sydney 
Gardens (Gilbert 1986: 82) as well as to Macarthur, whose catalogue of plants grown 
at Camden in 1850 includes orchids and ‘Dammara sp.' (probably Agathis robusta; see 
below) from Wide Bay, though he would not let T.W. Shepherd's nursery have seed 
(but see below), it all going to his patron Macarthur. He may have been the first to 
plant sugar-cane in Queensland (Hewitt et al. 1964) and his salary rose with time, to 
£500 per annum in 1849 for work he considered merely pleasure (Maiden 1908); he 
eventually had an '800 acre paddock' there with two gardens, one near his house 
