Biography

German plant collector in Queensland, Australia, during the 1860s and early 1870s. Amalie Dietrich (née Nelle) was brought up in Saxony, where she was born in the village of Siebenlehn. Her mother taught her about medicinal herbs, but it was Dietrich's husband, Wilhelm A.S. Dietrich, who trained her in natural history. Married in 1846, the couple had a child, Charitas, in 1848. Wilhelm Dietrich, a chemist, also collected plant and zoological specimens for sale. Amalie accompanied her husband travelling around Germany on collecting trips, the fruits of which they sold to institutions and apothecaries across Europe. The marriage broke down, however, and Amalie Dietrich left her husband in 1861, taking Charitas with her.

Mother and daughter settled in Hamburg, where Dietrich was determined to continue her work in natural history, hoping to support herself and her daughter by selling collections. Her hopes were realised when she met Johann Caesar VI Godeffroy of the trading firm J.C. Godeffroy & Sohn. As well as running his shipping business, Godeffroy had built up a private museum from his own collections of natural history specimens and ethnic artefacts. Despite Dietrich's lack of formal qualifications and her gender, he employed her to make collections for him in Australia (predominantly botanical). She left on one of Godeffroy's ships in May 1863, bound for Moreton Bay, Queensland. Her daughter later wrote of how distraught she was to be left behind.

Dietrich arrived at the Brisbane River on 7 August that year, and would spend the next decade collecting plants and other natural history specimens in Queensland. Her first explorations were made around Brisbane, then at about the end of 1864 she went north to Gladstone, going on to Rockhampton and Port Mackay in 1866-1867. She stayed at Lake Elphinstone in 1868, about 320km inland from Mackay, where she collected the type specimen for Acacia dietrichiana F.Muell. She returned to the coast before travelling northwards once more, to Bowen (Port Denison) in 1870, where she lived for two years. As well as the huge consignments of plants she sent to Godeffroy (and a few given to Ferdinand von Mueller in Melbourne), she also began to concentrate on gathering bird specimens in the latter part of her sojourn, and amassed collections of insects, spiders, reptiles, marsupials, fish and corals, too. She was the first person to collect a taipan snake, and also gratified her employer controversially by shipping home 13 Aboriginal skeletons.

Both her flora and fauna collections contained many species new to science, determined by specialists in Germany and elsewhere such as H.G. Reichenbach (1824-1889). She never published any names herself. Duplicates were distributed to herbaria in Berlin, Kew and Prague, though she achieved little recognition outside Germany and Australia. The Hamburg Herbarium, which acquired the Godeffroy collections in 1886, sent duplicates back to Australia in the 1970s.

Dietrich's ten-year contract was cut short by nearly a year when Godeffroy decided to cease his trade route to Australia due to a decline in German immigration to the country during the Franco-Prussian War. She therefore travelled back to her homeland in November 1872 via Sydney and the Tonga islands, where she also collected a few specimens. Her reunion with her daughter was bittersweet, for Charitas was soon married to a pastor by the name of Bischoff and moved to the far north of the country. Amalie Dietrich remained in Hamburg, where she worked for Godeffroy and lived above his museum until his firm went bankrupt. The eccentric, weatherbeaten Dietrich then lived in a home for the elderly, while most of the museum's contents were transferred to Hamburg Museum in 1886. Visiting her daughter at Rendsburg in 1891, Dietrich contracted pneumonia and died. Hamburg Museum later sent some of her specimens to herbaria in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra.

Charitas Bischoff wrote a biography of her mother some 15 years after Amalie Dietrich's death. It appears to contain many inaccuracies, including fabricated letters, according to Dietrich's later biographer, Ray Sumner. Bischoff was in financial difficulty at the time she completed the book, Amalie Dietrich: Ein Leben; in order to make it a success it seems she may have filled in the gaps in her knowledge about her mother, caused by their lengthy separations. Among the plant taxa named in honour of Dietrich are Hibiscus amaliae Domin, Pagetia dietrichiae Domin and Eleocharis dietrichiae Boeck. Amalie-Dietrich-Platz in Dresden is also named for her.

Sources:
C. Bischoff, 1909, Amalie Dietrich: Ein Leben
C. Bischoff, trans. A. Liddell Geddie, 1931, The Hard Road: the life story of Amalie Dietrich, naturalist 1821-1891
D.J. Carr and S.G.M. Carr, 1981, People and Plants in Australia: 338-342
R. Sumner, 1993, A Woman in the Wilderness: The Story of Amalie Dietrich in Australia
J.B. Webb, 2003, The Botanical Endeavour: Journey Towards a Flora of Australia: 204-215.