Walter Hill
Although Scots-born botanist and horticulturalist Walter Hill (1819–1904) was the first curator of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens and spent much of his time in Brisbane, his role as Queensland's Colonial Botanist meant he participated in several significant expeditions along the North Queensland coast.
Hill began his botanical career as an apprentice, working under his brother, David, who was the head gardener at Balloch Castle in Dumbarton and subsequently moved on to Dickson's Nursery, Edinburgh, Minto House, Roxburghshire, the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, and, in 1843, to the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, where he became foreman of the propagation and new plant departments. He married Jane Smith on September 16, 1849.
After Hill arrived in Sydney on the Maitland with his wife and daughter in February 1852, he tried his luck on various Victorian goldfields, then joined an expedition that set out from Sydney to explore the Northern coast from Keppel Bay to Cape York. An encounter with Guwinmal people when the six-man party separated to collect specimens on Middle Percy Island saw four of them — leader Frederick Strange, his assistant Richard Spinks, ship's mate William Spurling and cook Andrew Gittings — killed. Hill and the other surviving member of the group, an Aboriginal, managed to sail the expedition's boat back to Moreton Bay, where he accepted the position of superintendent of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens in February 1855.
Hill started with nine acres (3.64 ha) at Gardens :Point and a £500 budget to purchase rare plants, and when Queensland became a separate colony in 1859, he became the new colony's government botanist, living in a house within the Gardens reserve until his retirement in 1881. Although his interests focused on productive plants — he is credited with introducing sugar cane, cotton, the mango, pawpaw, ginger and arrowroot to Queensland, and producing the first commercially grown macadamias — he was also interested in more decorative plants. He exhibited a native water lily at the Australian Horticultural and Agricultural Show held in Sydney in 1857 and introduced the jacaranda and poinciana to Queensland. All of Australia's jacarandas are reputedly descended from the tree Hill grew from an imported seed Hill imported in 1864. He also introduced tamarind and mahogany trees into the colony.
In his role as the colonial botanist, Hill accompanied several expeditions to northern Queensland to collect native plants, including trips to Cape York Peninsula in 1862 and George Dalrymple's Northeast Coast expedition (1873), on which he climbed Mount Bellenden Ker. After the expedition, Hill reported: 'Half-a-million acres of good land, 300,000 of that fit for sugar' and considered the area they explored, around the Johnstone River 'the most valuable discovery in Australia'.
Still, his most significant achievement probably came in the dead of night on 25 April 1862, when he and John Buchot — a Barbados planter — granulated the first sugar in Australia, proving that Queensland-grown sugar cane was a viable crop and laying the groundwork for the colony's sugar industry.
During his time at the Gardens, Hill sent Queensland's flora and fauna to international exhibitions worldwide and received numerous rare specimens in return. Still, his official career ended on a sour note. After an adverse comment in parliament about his maintenance of the Gardens, the Department of Public Lands asked him to retire. Hill, incensed, claimed a full pension, twelve months' full paid leave of absence — he had not taken his annual leave for twenty-six years — and a gratuity for the upkeep of five horses. He retired on 28 February 1881 and established a new home — Canobie Lea, named after a Scots village near his birthplace — at Eight Mile Plains, where he died on 4 February 1904. He shares a grave in Toowong Cemetery with his wife, Jane (d. 1888), and their daughter, Ann (d. 1871).
