Oswald Sargent: York's famous pharmacist and pioneering botanist

York is WA's earliest inland town, having been established in 1830, and was once one of the most prosperous. The town, surrounded by rich farmland, became a staging point for the rush to the eastern goldfields in the 1890s, and then later was uniquely placed to provide both the goldfields and Perth with wheat (for flour), oats (for horse-feed) and barley (for beer).

One of the enduring legacies of those times are many fine historic buildings. These include Sargent's Pharmacy, long considered one of York's prettiest buildings.

Oswald Sargent was born in England in 1880. At the age of six he moved with his family to Western Australian and his father opened a pharmacy in York. Oswald also became a pharmacist but his true love was botany. After he took over his father's pharmacy (in 1934), he devoted every spare minute to botanical surveys and collections. In those days, the bushland near York was a botanical paradise, and Sargent took full advantage. His special interest was native orchids, but he also discovered many new species of wildflowers, including the beautiful wattle Acacia celastrifolia.

But he is most famously remembered in the name of the Salt River gum, Eucalyptus sargentii, which he was the first to identify. This beautiful tree is native to the margins of salt lakes in the central wheatbelt and, as you would expect, is highly salt-tolerant, indeed one of the most salt-tolerant trees in the world. This has made Salt River gum highly prized by farmers and foresters for the rehabilitation of farmlands affected by salinity. It is now planted all over the world.

Oswald Sargent's greatest ambition was to produce a handbook of Western Australian wildflowers for use by schoolchildren, but the project collapsed because of lack of financial backing. Regrettably the old pharmacy (long vacant, as I write in 2020) appears likely to suffer the same fate.

 By Roger Underwood

Roger Underwood's new book on Western Australian trees is soon to be published. It contains a more detailed story about pharmacist Sargent and his iconic tree.