Charles Coxen & Elizabeth Frances CoxenPrint Page

A plaque commemorates Charles Coxen and his wife Elizabeth Frances Coxen. 

Charles Coxen (20 April 1809 – 17 May 1876) was an Australian naturalist and politician. He emigrated to New South Wales, Australia, in 1834, to join his elder brother Stephen who had emigrated there seven years previously. During 1834-1835 he travelled through the sparsely settled country between the Hunter and Namoi Rivers, including the Liverpool Plains, collecting specimens of birds and mammals.

In 1851 he married Elizabeth Frances Isaac, a woman who, unusually for the times, became known for her studies in meteorology and conchology, later becoming the first woman member of the Royal Society of Queensland. In 1855 he helped found the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, became its first honorary curator and secretary, as well as being a trustee, in association with the explorer Sir Augustus Gregory. He was also a founder of the Queensland Philosophical Society in 1859, the predecessor of the Royal Society of Queensland.

From 1855 to 1860 Coxen served as a member of a standing jury appointed to try civil cases in Brisbane. In 1860 he was elected the representative of the Northern Downs to Queensland’s first parliament. In 1874 he was appointed to a commission inquiring into conditions of Aboriginals in Queensland. Coxen died at Bulimba in Brisbane in 1876.

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