Return To Australia
In April 1831, Dunlop was appointed superintendent of the Government observatory at Parramatta. He was selected mainly from his good knowledge of Colony and the observatory site, but the real reason for his selection was more because even though such an astronomical position was formally advertised, nobody applied for the astronomical tenure. Here he was to succeed Rümker with the reasonable good salary of £300 a year. He arrived at Sydney on 6 November 1831 and found the observatory in a deplorable condition; rain had entered the building, roofing plaster had fallen down, and many important records were destroyed. Dunlop succeeded in getting the building repaired and started on his work with energy, but around 1835 his health began to fail; he had no assistant, and the building, having been attacked by white ants, fell gradually into decay. In August 1847, he resigned his position, and went to live on his farm on Brisbane Waters, an arm of Broken Bay. He died on 22 September 1848. In 1816 Dunlop married his cousin Jean Service, who survived him. In addition to the medal of the Royal Astronomical Society Dunlop was awarded medals for his work by the King of Denmark in 1833, and the Institut Royal de France in 1835. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1832. Papers on, and references to, the work of Dunlop will be found in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and in the Transactions of the Royal Society between the years 1823 and 1839.
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—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“In my walks I would fain return to my senses.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—D.H. (David Herbert)