Elliot L. Grant Watson

Who was Elliot L. Grant Watson?

Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson was a writer and biologist whose works combine the scrutiny of a scientist with the insight of the poet. Among some 40 books and many essays and short stories he wrote six 'Australian' novels and several scientific-philosophical works that challenge Darwinism, or the mechanism of evolutionary theory, as an entire explanation for the development of life on earth.

Born at Staines, Middlesex in England, the son of a successful London barrister, Reginald Grant Watson, and Lucy, née Fuller, a strong-minded woman with an interest in natural history and literature, 'Peter' visited Australia first as a child in 1890, soon after the death of his younger brother. During this visit, to relatives in Tasmania, his father also died. In rather more impoverished circumstances, Grant Watson was educated at Bedales School and Trinity College, Cambridge after which, at 24, he joined social anthropologist Alfred Brown and Daisy Bates on an ethnological expedition in Western Australia. His experiences in the desert country at Southern Cross and at Sandstone in the Murchison region, and later at the Aboriginal lock hospitals of Shark Bay, determined him to become a writer.