On 26 January 1853, aged only twenty-three, the German-born Ferdinand Mueller was appointed to the new position of Victorian Government Botanist by the colony’s Lieutenant-Governor Charles Joseph La Trobe. Within days of assuming office, Mueller set out on the first of three major botanising expeditions to then-remote parts of Victoria. Many other journeys would follow, not only in Victoria but in vast reaches of the Australian continent. Those first Victorian tours to Mount Buffalo, the Ovens River and Mount Buller, and soon to Port Albert and Wilson’s Promontory, marked his style: vigorous, alert, observant, enthusiastic and meticulous. Travelling through rugged country previously untrodden by Europeans, Mueller was apparently indifferent to physical hardship as he concentrated on his botanical discoveries. From those pioneering journeys came his first reports of new species and of speculations about their possible applications in medicine and in commerce. La Trobe was delighted: ‘My clever little Botanist has returned having done quite as much as I expected & more than any but a German, drunk with the love of his Science.’