Daniel Carl SolanderPrint Page

The monument commemorates Dr Daniel Carl Solander who accompanied Joseph Banks on James Cook`s first voyage in the Endeavour. The memorial was officially handed over to the Captain Cook's Landing Place Trust on the 18th February 1938. 

Dr. Daniel Carl Solander was the first Swede to land in Australia. Solander`s work and social activities led him to meet Joseph Banks who in 1768 invited him to join the scientific staff of the Endeavour. Engaged at £400 a year, Solander assisted Banks to make a large collection of natural history specimens, including many from the east coast of Australia. After his return to England in July 1771 Solander became Banks`s secretary and librarian. He was presented to George III in August, and in November he received the honorary degree of doctor of civil law from the University of Oxford.

After the lapse of nearly a century and a half, another of the first Australian pioneers is to have his memory perpetuated on Australian soil, and this is to he fittingly carried out by his countrymen, who have every reason to be proud of him. A monument to commemorate his visit to this country, in company with Captain Cook and Mr. (afterwards Sir Joseph) Banks, is to be unveiled this month during the visit of the Science Congress to Sydney. The site for the memorial is aptly chosen, being on the grassy slope at Kurnell, just opposite the anchorage chosen by Cook for the old Endeavour, when he brought that historic ship through the heads into the still waters of Botany Bay. Little did the enthusiastic scientists who conferred that name upon the locality dream of the notoriety with which it was destined to be connected, or the possibility of its being used for many years on the other side of the world as descriptive of the whole continent of Australia.

Dr. Solander, who took his degree as a doctor of medicine at the university of Upsal, Sweden, was, in addition, an ardent naturalist, as became a favorite pupil of the great Linnaeus, and joined Cook in the Endeavour at the urgent request of his friend Banks, to assist in investigating the flora and fauna of the little known lands in the Pacific. That he did his share of the work well and thoroughly is evidenced by his various publications, as well as by the valuable manuscripts left by him to the British Museum, of which institution he was at one time the librarian. The great value of his contributions to science is keenly recognised today, but he appears to have been a man of most retiring disposition, which possibly accounts for the largest share of the limelight having fallen to Banks.
The World's News (Sydney),  8 August 1914.

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