Gordon Binns
amateur ornithologist
Gordon Binns (1 March 1899 – 24 September 1976) was an Australian bank manager and amateur ornithologist, notable for his involvement with the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union. He was Secretary of the organisation during the periods 1953–56 and 1959–63, and President from 1965–66.
Early life and career
Binns was born on 1 March 1899 in Yarraville, Victoria, and spent his boyhood years in the Victorian townships of Great Western and Victoria. In 1914, after leaving school, he began working at the State Savings Bank of Victoria. At age 17, during the First World War, he enlisted in the First Australian Imperial Force, as a member of the 2nd Australian Machine Gun Company. He was wounded in northern France on 10 August 1918, during the Australian attack on Lihons, and spent more than a month in hospital recovering from his injuries. After the war, he remained in England for two years, before returning to Australia and his employment at the State Savings Bank.
Natural history
After 1938, Binns served at several bank branches in rural Victoria, including Cobram (1938–144), Ouyen (1945–47) and Terang (1948–50). During this period, he began writing about natural history, publishing "Notes for Birdland" in Savings Weekly, the journal of the State Savings Bank. For 20 years, he published "The Out of Doors", a weekly column in the Terang Express, using the pen name Neophema.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gordon Binns” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.