William Woolls was an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n botanist, clergyman and schoolmaster.

Woolls, the nineteenth child of merchant Edward Woolls, was born at Winchester

Winchester

Winchester is a historic cathedral city and former capital city of England. It is the county town of Hampshire, in South East England. The city lies at the heart of the wider City of Winchester, a local government district, and is located at the western end of the South Downs, along the course of...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 and educated at the grammar school, Bishop's Waltham

Bishop's Waltham

Bishop's Waltham is a small town in Hampshire, England situated at the head of the River Hamble. It is home to the ruins of Bishop's Waltham Palace, an English Heritage monument.-History:...

, and at 16 years of age endeavoured unsuccessfully to obtain a cadetship in the British East India Company

British East India Company

The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...

's service. A year later he emigrated to Australia, landing in Sydney

Sydney

Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...

 on 16 April 1832, and was soon appointed an assistant-master at The King's School, Parramatta

The King's School, Sydney

The King's School is an independent Anglican, day and boarding school for boys in North Parramatta in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1831, it is Australia's oldest school and forms one of the nine "Great Public Schools" of New South Wales. Situated within a site, Gowan Brae,...

, having met William Grant Broughton

William Grant Broughton

William Grant Broughton was the first Bishop of Australia of the Church of England....

—then Church of England

Church of England

The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...

 Archdeacon of New South Wales—on the way out. About four years later he went to Sydney and maintained himself by journalism and giving private tuition. He was then for a period classical master at Sydney College, but resigned this to open a private school at Parramatta which he conducted for many years. He married Dinah Catherine Hall in 1838 and she bore a son and a daughter before dying in childbirth in 1844. In 1845, he married Ann Boag.

He published two boyish productions in verse, The Voyage: A Moral Poem, in 1832, and Australia: A Moral and Descriptive Poem in 1833. In 1838 he brought out Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, mainly prose essays. He also published in 1841 A Short Account of the Character and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden

Samuel Marsden

Samuel Marsden was an English born Anglican cleric and a prominent member of the Church Missionary Society, believed to have introduced Christianity to New Zealand...

. His friendship with the Rev. James Walker, headmaster of The King's School between 1843 and 1848, led to Woolls becoming interested in botany, and he subsequently did much work on the flora of Australia

Flora of Australia

The flora of Australia comprises a vast assemblage of plant species estimated to over 20,000 vascular and 14,000 non-vascular plants, 250,000 species of fungi and over 3,000 lichens...

. A paper on "Introduced Plants" sent to the Linnean Society at London led to his being elected a fellow of the society and other work of his brought the degree of Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. In 1862 he married his third wife, Sarah Elizabeth Lowe. He gave up his school in 1865 and in 1867 published A Contribution to the Flora of Australia, a collection of his botanical papers.

In 1873 Woolls took holy orders in the Church of England

Church of England

The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...

, became incumbent of Richmond, and later rural dean. Another collection of his papers, Lectures on the Vegetable Kingdom with special reference to the Flora of Australia, appeared in 1879. According to K. J. Cable, "... Woolls was best known for his promotion of Australian botany and his assistance to other scholars rather than for large-scale systematic work."

Woolls retired from the ministry in 1883 and lived at Sydney for the rest of his life. He was much in touch with Ferdinand von Mueller

Ferdinand von Mueller

Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller, KCMG was a German-Australian physician, geographer, and most notably, a botanist.-Early life:...

 and assisted him in his botanical work. Woolls's next volume, Plants of New South Wales, was published in 1885, and his Plants Indigenous and Naturalized in the Neighbourhood of Sydney, a revised and enlarged edition of a paper prepared in 1880, came out in 1891. He died of paraplegia in the Sydney suburb of Burwood

Burwood, New South Wales

Burwood is a suburb in the inner-west of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Burwood is located 12 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district and is the administrative centre for the local government area of Burwood Council....

survived by his third wife.