Queensland Government geologist and photographer Richard Daintree (1832-1878) was a Huntingdonshire farmer's son. He started a geology degree at Christ's College, Cambridge in 1851. After a year there, a pulmonary attack forced him to suspend his academic pursuits and head for a warmer climate. Ill health remained an issue for the rest of his life.
So Daintree arrived in Melbourne, spent a year prospecting on the Victorian goldfields and joined the Victorian Geological Survey as an assistant geologist to Alfred Selwyn in February 1854.
He returned to England in 1855 to study assaying and metallurgy at London's Royal School of Mines Laboratory. During his studies there, Daintree became interested in photography. On his return to Victoria, he collaborated with French photographer and writer Antoine Fauchery before rejoining the Geological Survey in January 1859. Over the next five years, Daintree pioneered the use of photography in fieldwork that focused on finding and mapping coal seams.
His photographs of the Victorian goldfields appeared at the 1862 London International Exhibition. He may have collaborated with Fauchery in a volume of photographs called Australia (1857).
His decision to head north to Queensland seems related to a palaeontological controversy concerning coal seam ages between Melbourne University Professor Frederick McCoy and William Branwhite Clarke.
Whatever the reason, Daintree left the Geological Survey in 1864 to become a resident partner in pastoral properties on the Burdekin River. His partnership with William Hann allowed Daintree to combine his interests in photography and prospecting.
Between 1865 and 1867, his discoveries included several indications of gold and the first systematic examination of the Collinsville coal seams on the Bowen River.
Daintree and Hann briefly operated a copper mine at Einasleigh. When the pastoral boom collapsed, Daintree turned his attention to geology.
His discoveries of goldfields at Cape River (1867), the Gilbert i(1869) and the Etheridge in (1869-70) played a significant part in carrying North Queensland through the pastoral slump. While the Etheridge deposit proved to be the only long-term prospect, his work helped attract prospectors to the area. That, in turn, led to other, more significant discoveries on the Palmer and Hodgkinson.
Still, without Daintree's pioneering work in attracting prospectors to the region, North Queensland's gold resources would probably not have been developed so early.
In the meantime, he had lobbied for a Queensland Geological Survey. When it was established in 1868, he became the Government geologist for North Queensland and held the position until 1870.
During that time, he carried out a geological survey of North Queensland. His photographs of the Cape River goldfields provide a valuable record of life on North Queensland's goldfields.
Daintree also collected botanical specimens in his travels. Queensland herbarium records show that he collected botanical specimens, including an Acacia excelsa once named Acacia daintreeana by Ferdinand von Mueller.
When Daintree left to take up an appointment as commissioner in charge of Queensland's display at the 1871 London Exhibition of Art and Industry, Robert Logan Jack took over the government geologist's position.
Daintree's photographs and geological samples were intended to form the basis of Queensland's contribution to the Exhibition. However, much of it was lost when his ship sank off South Africa. Still, Daintree saved enough photographs to impress potential investors and prospective migrants.
Success there saw him appointed as Queensland's London Agent-General when Archibald Archer resigned unexpectedly in 1872,
As Agent-General, Daintree organised the colony's participation in another six exhibitions, travelled widely to promote immigration and produced attractive handbooks illustrated by his photographs. However, the workload resulted in a recurrence of his lung problems.
While Daintree proved to be a successful and effective propagandist for the colony, after 1874 his administration drew increasing criticism from premier Arthur Macalister. The premier's concerns about the quality of new migrants and growing evidence of inefficiency in the agent-general's staff prompted him to go to London to investigate matters.
Macalister's investigation revealed that Daintree was honest and hard-working but entrusted the office's routine business to clerks who used their expertise to feather their own nests.
Between those pressures and his respiratory issues, Daintree's health deteriorated to the point where he was forced to resign in 1876.
Although he spent the next two winters in the south of France, hoping to devote himself to petrology, his condition continued to deteriorate. Daintree succumbed to tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses in Beckenham, Kent, on 20 June 1878, soon after he was appointed C.M.G.
Daintree's importance as a pioneer geologist lies more in his work as a prospector than in the controversies in which he was involved. His photographs, taken under difficult conditions by the cumbersome wet-plate process, are superb specimens of the art and present a vivid picture of early settlement in Queensland. His enthusiasm, skill and capacity for friendship distinguished him in his profession, although these qualities were not enough to make him a success in the agent-general's office or to avoid the tragedy of his last years. (G. C. Bolton, Richard Daintree (1832–1878)).
Ten glass plates, Daintree's surviving photographs of early settler life in the north are now in the National Museum of Australia in Canberra (link: http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/highlights/richard-daintrees-glass-plates).
He is remembered through several northern locations around the town of Daintree, including the National Park, which became a part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area in 2007.
Sources:
G. C. Bolton, Richard Daintree (1832–1878), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 4, 1972 (https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/daintree-richard-3350).
Michael Cannon, The Exploration of Australia: From First Voyages to Satellite Discoveries Sydney, Readers Digest Services, 1987
H. J. Taylor, The History of Townsville Harbour 1864-1979, Brisbane, Booralong Publications for the vTownsville Harbour Board, 1980.