[1835 - 1890]

Brownrigg was born in Mauritius, and was educated at Stroud and at Cambridge in England. He and his parents and siblings migrated to Australia (arriving in Sydney) in 1856, where he became one of the three foundation students of Moore Theological College. He first worked in the Lachlan district and then at Albury in New South Wales. In 1867 he was appointed to St John’s at Ross in Tasmania. In 1868 he became rector of St John’s Church, Launceston, but travelled widely in Northern Tasmania.

In 1869 he was elected president of the Mechanics’ Institute and he gave outspoken lectures on the temperance movement.

It has been recorded that he studied homœopathy so that he could treat his poorer parishioners, and that in the 1870s he used homœopathy to treat his own family and the aboriginal people whom he met on his many journeys to the Furneaux group of islands. It is possible, however, that he used homœopathy prior to that time, in the 1860s.

Brownrigg was highly talented in a number of areas: he published records of his trips, built a boat for the mission, built his own canoe to sail among the islands, was his own navigator, studied astronomy and built a small observatory at the rectory, and was an artist.

In 1878 he was made canon of St David’s Cathedral in Hobart, but resigned in 1887. On medical advice he and his family moved to Queensland, and worked at Gladstone followed by North Rockhampton.

He died at Redfern, NSW in 1890.

One of his sons, Charles Leaver Brownrigg, was on the Board of Management of the Launceston Homœopathic Hospital from 1923 to 1928.

© Barbara Armstrong

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