Charles Anderson

Australian Museum Archives
Photographer Anthony Musgrave c 1930s

Charles Anderson(1876-1944) became Director of the Australian Museum in 1921. Born at Moa in Stenness, he graduated from Edinburgh University in 1900 having won six medals in science subjects.

After leaving Edinburgh, he became superintendent of the Ben Nevis Observatory and then, in July 1901, became Mineralogist for the Australian Museum in Sydney. He married Elsie Helen Robertson in 1902.

Anderson was awarded a doctorate by Edinburgh University in 1908 for research into morphological crystallography and the chemistry of minerals in Australia.

After twenty years as Mineralogist, he was appointed director of the museum in 1921. He inaugurated, and frequently contributed to, the Australian Museum Magazine, which later became Australian Natural History.

Anderson changed his area of research to vertebrate palaeontology and published papers on that subject.

The On-line Australian Dictionary of Biography says that he gave 'abundantly of his rare gifts of scholarship and versatile scientific knowledge' and gives a long list of societies he presided over, including the Royal Society of New South Wales.

The Dictionary gives this attractive description:- 'Widely read and a good linguist, he had a whimsical sense of humour, great personal charm and simple tastes: he enjoyed golf, trout-fishing, and singing Scottish songs such as 'Fhairshon swore a feud/Against ta clan MacTavish'. With an abiding love for his native Orkneys, he firmly maintained that Orcadians were of Scandinavian rather than of Scottish ancestry. He used dog German as a lingua franca with his assistant Marcel Aurousseau, who recalled that when measuring crystals on the goniometer, an intricate piece of apparatus, his favourite song was 'There was a wee cooper who lived in Fife,Nicketty, nacketty, noo, noo, noo'.'

Charles Anderson retired from the museum in 1940. During the war he was on the staff of Communications Censorship and died in October 1944, leaving a son and two daughters.