New Zealand schoolteacher and phycologist. Victor Lindauer was born in Auckland and grew up in the inland town of Woodville. His father was a well-known portrait painter, Gottfried Lindauer. Victor enjoyed a boyhood in bucolic surroundings full of native bush plants and was encouraged in his interest in botany by the printer and botanist William Colenso, a family friend.

Lindauer trained as a primary school teacher and spent most of his career working in rural locations on the North Island, especially Northland and Taranaki. (His early career was interrupted by service in the United States in the First World War.) Marrying Elsie Lovell in 1927, Lindauer fathered four children and the family settled at Russell in the Bay of Islands in 1931. His interest in marine algae began a few years later after a meeting with a team of visiting phycologists from the University of Minnesota, led by Prof. Josephine Tilden. Lindauer allowed them to use his school as a base camp, and joined them in their expedition. He went on to make large collections of algae and published papers on the taxonomy and morphology of New Zealand Phaeophyta and Rhodophyta, encouraged in his work by Prof. W.A. Setchell of the University of California. He enlisted the help of his family and pupils in collecting and mounting, and of Eileen Willa of Half Moon Bay, Stewart Island, to obtain specimens from the South Island. R. Gilpin, a headmaster resident on the Chatham Islands, also sent material to Lindauer. Between 1939 and 1953 Lindauer distributed about 60 sets of the Algae Nova-Zelandicae Exsiccatae, in 14 fascicles of 25 sheets. The sets, including Cyanobacteria, Chlorophyta, Phaeophyta and Rhodophyta, have served as reference material for many subsequent taxonomic studies of New Zealand algae.

With the help of V.J. Chapman, Lindauer spent 1949 as a senior research fellow at the Botany Department of Auckland University College, working on taxonomic problems of brown algae. He discovered and named many new species of algae, publishing several papers in the Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand. After suffering a stroke aged 65, his phycological work ceased.

Sources:
V. Cassie, 1971, "Contributions of Victor Lindauer (1888-1964) to New Zealand", Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand Phycology, 1: 89-98
V. Cassie-Cooper, 1995, "Victor Wilhelm Lindauer 1888-1964: His life and works", Tuhinga: Records of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 1, 1: 1-14
W.A. Nelson and L. Phillips, 1996, "The Lindauer Legacy - current names for the Algae Nova-Zelandicae Exsiccatae", New Zealand Journal of Botany, 34: 553-582.