Wyatt was born in
Plymouth, Devon, England, the son of Richard Wyatt. He was educated
Shrewsbury School and apprenticed at 16 years of age to a Plymouth surgeon, Thomas Stewart.[1] Wyatt continued to study medicine and obtained the qualification of
M.R.C.S. in February 1828. For some time he was honorary surgeon to the Plymouth dispensary and was curator of the museum of the Literary and Scientific Institution.
Early life
Wyatt was born in 1804. He obtained the qualification of
M.R.C.S. (Membership of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland) in February 1828. He was honorary surgeon to the
Plymouth dispensary for some time before leaving England.[1]
Career in Australia
Wyatt emigrated to South Australia as surgeon of the ship John Renwick. He arrived at
Adelaide 14 February 1837, and practised there for a short time, in August being appointed city
coroner. He served as the third interim part-time
Protector of Aborigines from 1837 until 1839, replacing Captain
Walter Bromley, who had been dismissed after being criticised by The Register[2] and was afterwards found drowned in the
River Torrens.[3]
"Unlike his successor and the German Missionaries, Wyatt did not live at
Piltawodli. According to Foster (1990b: 39) he was "criticised for not 'going among' the Aborigines and for failing to provide information to the public about their culture." Nonetheless, Wyatt does provide valuable, though sometimes unreliable, information on the language of the
Kaurna people. After the German mission sources, it remains the next most important source and includes a sizable number of terms not recorded elsewhere.
A manuscript copy of Wyatt's wordlist, Vocabulary of the Adelaide Dialect (Wyatt, 1840)14 in the Library of Sir
George Grey in the
South African Public Library,
Cape Town, contains only 67 words, though this is unlikely to represent the extent of Wyatt's knowledge of Kaurna at that time. A more comprehensive paper published later lists approximately 900 Kaurna and
Ramindjeri words. The cover page notes that the material was "principally extracted from his official reports" most of which would have been written when Wyatt served as Protector from 1837 to 1839. Assuming Wyatt's (1840) wordlist in the Grey collection is complete, presumably Wyatt went through his papers and extracted words he had recorded in the early days of the colony. The
University of Adelaide Library copy, donated by the author, contains three corrections in Wyatt's own hand, where n has been typed instead of u. This wordlist was also published in
J. D. Woods ed. (1879) without correction of the three typographical errors. Wyatt identifies certain vocabulary items with a subscript e or r as
Encounter Bay or
Rapid Bay words respectively. In 1923, Parkhouse republished Wyatt's paper in three separate wordlists designating them 'Adelaide', 'Encounter Bay', and 'Rapid Bay' with changed spellings, substituting u for Wyatt's oo."[4]
In May 1838 he was on the committee of the South Australian School Society, and was also on various other committees. On 28 February 1843 he was chairman of a meeting called to discuss the best means of civilising the
Aboriginal Australians, in 1847 he was appointed coroner for the Province of South Australia, and in 1849 he was a member of the provisional committee of the South Australian Colonial Railway Company,[5] one of three public companies contending to build a railway between Adelaide and
Port Adelaide; the others being the
South Australian Railway Company and Adelaide City and Port Railway Company.[6][7]
Wyatt was appointed Inspector of Schools for South Australia in 1851 (retiring in 1874)[8] and for the remainder of his life was in every movement that touched the educational or welfare of the colony. He was a governor of the
Collegiate School of St Peter, one of the original governors of the
State Library of South Australia, a founder and vice-president of the Acclimatization Society, on the board of the
Adelaide Botanic Garden, and was chairman of the
Adelaide Hospital 1870–1886. He was a member of the
Agricultural and Horticultural Society and its president from 1849 to 1850. He was also secretary of the medical board for over 40 years.[citation needed]
Later life, death and legacy
After retiring, Wyatt published Monograph of Certain Crustacea Entomostraca (1883), and he contributed the chapter on the Adelaide and
Encounter Bay Aboriginal peoples to the volume on the Native Tribes of South Australia (1879), by
J. D. Woods and others.[9][1][10]
In his final years though growing infirm, Wyatt still attended to his many duties, and passed some hospital accounts for payment just a week before his death in his eighty-second year on 10 June 1886.[9][1]
Wyatt had bought some town lots at the first land sale held at Adelaide on 27 May 1837, which laid the foundation of a considerable fortune. He performed many acts of philanthropy in a quiet way and showed much interest in the social life of Adelaide, but never entered politics. He was married and left a widow, his only child to have survived past infancy was murdered by a drunken workman.[9]
^"The Aborigines". Southern Australian. Vol. II, no. 39. South Australia. 27 February 1839. p. 2. Retrieved 4 October 2017 – via National Library of Australia.
^Fort, Carol Susan; Eldon and Anne Foote Trust Philanthropy Collection (2008), Keeping a trust: South Australia's Wyatt Benevolent Institution and its founder, Wakefield Press,
ISBN978-1-86254-782-7
^"Our Story". Wyatt Trust. Retrieved 5 January 2021.