Fanny Anne Charsley

Fanny Anne Charsley (23 July 1828 – 21 December 1915) was a botanical artist and collector. She collected plants for the Victorian government botanist, Baron Ferdinand von Mueller who named the Australian flower Helipterum charsleyae in her honour. The flower has since been reclassified as Rhodanthe charsleyae and is a species of paper daisy. Her publication Wild Flowers Around Melbourne was one of the first books on Victorian flora aimed at the general public.

Biography

Charsley was born on 23 July 1828 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. She was the youngest daughter of the eleven children of solicitor John Charsley and his wife Catherine. In 1856 she travelled to Australia with her family and they settled in Melbourne. She stayed in Melbourne for ten years before returning to England. During her time in Australia she painted the local flora and became a student of Ferdinand Von Mueller. Mueller was appointed as a foundation government botanist of Victoria and later became the director of the botanical gardens at Melbourne, where he had built what is now the national herbarium. He thought Charsley was a talented artist and was impressed by the veracity and intricacy of her work. These were then hand coloured and were published in London in 1867 in a book titled The Wild Flowers around Melbourne. The title page is decorated with flowers and leaves and the work is dedicated to Baron Ferdinand von Mueller. Great interest was shown in the very different and distinctive colonial flora, and Fanny's volume proved popular. This book is only one of a handful of botanical books published by women working in Australia in the later half of the 19th Century. The National Library of Australia holds her original watercolours and lithographs in an album bound in gold tooled calf and covered front and back with fretwork wooden panels.