Historical information

George Knight was born in London in 1831. He qualified as an architect and practised as a civil engineer before coming to Australia with a younger brother in 1854. He was appointed Government Engineer shortly after arriving in Victoria, and supervised the construction of a railway line to Williamstown and the Sunbury section of the main railway line to Bendigo. Subsequently, he established a vineyard at Sunbury but soon sold it and moved to Bendigo, where he held the position of City Surveyor until retiring in 1886. During that period, he established nurseries, vineyards and orchards on four different sites in and around Bendigo, trading as the Knight Brothers. The Rosenberg nursery at Back Creek was established on former gold diggings - only after turning over the whole site to unearth the fertile soil and bury the clay and gravel that the miners had brought to the surface. One of the noteworthy plants at the nursery was a rose 'bush' measuring 19 metres long, 13 metres wide and 4 metres high. Another was the 'Grand Centennial' grape vine, bred from a Waltham cross, that yielded grapes measuring 35 mm long and 28 mm in diameter. It won a silver medal for the 'newest and finest grape variety raised in the colony' at the Melbourne Centennial Exhibition in 1895.

Physical description

Four page photocopied document, includes letter from Australian Orchid Foundation (16/10/2003) addressed to the Bendigo Historical Society re George William Knight, seeking a copy of a portrait of Knight; one page article on Knight and his role as a pioneer of orchid growing in Australia (by Gerald McCraith, AM) and a two page article titled 'George W. Knight, one of Victoria's earliest orchid growers, by Greg Campbell, Gerald McCraith AM and Brian Milligan.