Charles Alexander Fleming

Charles Alexander Fleming

We have lived at the best time, with modern medicine and transport, able to enjoy New Zealand before it loses the flavour we love. The world, man’s environment, is being altered by human manipulation, and to form balanced judgements about our future environment we must cease being technologists and economists and become philosophers, not afraid to look at the total picture.

Excerpt from ‘Mammon on the Mamaku’, an editorial Charles Fleming was invited to write for the New Zealand Listener, following his address to the Australia and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, 14 November 1969

Sir Charles Fleming was one of New Zealand’s last naturalists, combining scientific interests in several disciplines, all of which he pursued with an undying sense of wonder about the natural world.

Born in Auckland as the eldest of three children, his interests were nourished early in life, either in the family’s terraced gardens or his father’s well-stocked library. As a young child, Fleming would browse the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute or Walter Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand, fascinated by the uniqueness of New Zealand’s plants and birds. While still at primary school, Fleming was using the nom de plume Riroriro to correspond with the ornithologist AT Pycroft, who was writing about birds in the New Zealand Herald.

Fleming met his future wife, Peg Chambers, at the University of Auckland when they were both still in their teens. They had a five-year courtship, waiting for him to secure a steady job so they could afford to marry. Chambers had a science degree herself and shared Fleming’s passion for the natural world. She soon became his assistant and they began a lifelong collaboration, which would later include their entire family. On one occasion, the couple’s three daughters and their boyfriends were all roped in to help with a nationwide survey of cicadas. When a radio producer added the sound of cicadas to give a summer atmosphere to a radio play, it was Fleming who rang to say that the cicada song was from the wrong region.

He was highly regarded in the fields of palaeontology, geology and zoology but perhaps his most important scientific contribution was as a biogeographer. As the chief palaeontologist at the New Zealand Geological Survey, Fleming was the first to pull together an overall view of New Zealand’s biogeography – the sequence of invasions from various faunas and the development of indigenous flora and fauna going back more than 100 million years.

He became president of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand, the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Australia and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science. His love of music also led to his presidency of the New Zealand Federation of Recorded Music.

The late 1960s saw Fleming become increasingly concerned about native forest conservation, sparked by a proposal to log an area in the Mamaku Plateau near Rotorua, where he had heard his first kōkako song as a boy. He became actively involved in the Save Manapouri Campaign in the early 1970s, and later as a forthright spokesman for the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society and the Native Forests Action Council.

By Veronika Meduna

Medal and awards

Hamilton Prize 1943, FRSNZ 1952, OBE 1964, FRS 1967, KBE 1977

Further reading

Charles Fleming biography – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website

21 articles written by Fleming, published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, are available online:

Articles by Charles Fleming – Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand website

Four articles by Fleming, published in Tuatara in 1949, 1962, 1972 and 1976, have been digitised and are available online:

Articles by Charles Fleming – New Zealand Electronic Text Centre website

Mary McEwen, Charles Fleming: environmental patriot, Craig Potton, 2005

CA Fleming, The Geological History of New Zealand and Its Life, Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1979

Image from a private collection.

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