George Malcolm Thomson

George Malcolm Thomson

Nature study is one of the most satisfying things you will meet with in your life. It is a subject which never palls, it is absolutely inexhaustible, it can be prosecuted in one way or another at all seasons and in all weathers, and it furnishes, what few other subjects can furnish, the opportunity of finding out some new facts which have never been recorded before.

GM Thomson, from his address to the Dunedin Naturalists’ Field Club, 1929. Quoted by Ross Galbreath in Scholars & Gentlemen Both, Royal Society of New Zealand, 2002, p278

GM Thomson began in the tradition of the gentlemen naturalists of the 19th century and became a leader in the development of the professional science of the 20th.

As a young man in Edinburgh he studied botany and chemistry before going into his father’s trading business. But the business failed and, in 1868, the family emigrated to Otago to try to recover their fortunes. There Thomson found a position as science master at Otago Boys’ High School. Over the next 30 years, he taught a generation of future New Zealand professional scientists, including his own son Allan.

In his spare time, Thomson became involved in a multitude of activities and organisations, but his special passion was natural history. He joined the local scientific societies, the Otago Institute and the Dunedin Field Naturalists’ Club, and quickly became a leader in both. He became an authority on ferns, introduced species, and especially on crustaceans, describing many new species and even a new order.

Despite the sorrows of his private life (both his wives and four of his six children, including Allan, died young), Thomson always maintained an extraordinarily busy schedule of public activities. But he still found time for his natural history studies, and campaigned tirelessly on a range of scientific issues. In the 1880s, Thomson published his own New Zealand Journal of Science and used it to advocate the reform of the organisation of science in New Zealand. He worked for years to establish a marine research station at Portobello, and went on to organise its experimental work and chair its board of management.

From the 1890s, Thomson sought to become a professional scientist himself. After applying unsuccessfully for university and museum positions, in 1903 he left teaching and set up in Dunedin as a public analyst and scientific specialist, offering services in chemical and bacteriological analysis. But the business never flourished. He was financially relieved when in 1908 he won another campaign and was elected to parliament, with an honorarium he could live on.

For the next 20 years in the House and then in the upper Legislative Council, Thomson became a spokesman for science. He and his son Allan, who had won a Rhodes Scholarship and risen to director of the Dominion Museum, became such influential advocates that this has been called the Thomson Period in the history of New Zealand science. And through it all, right to his death, GM Thomson continued to find solace and satisfaction in his own studies of nature.  

By Ross Galbreath

Medals and awards

FNZI 1919, Hector Medal 1930

Further reading

George Malcolm Thomson biography – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website

30 articles written by Thomson and one abstract, published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, are available online:

Articles by George Thomson – Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand website

Ross Galbreath, Scholars & Gentlemen Both: GM & Allan Thomson in New Zealand science & education, Royal Society of New Zealand, 2002

Permission of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga O Aotearoa, must be obtained before any reuse of this image

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