Otto Tepper a prolific collector of plants (with love of orchids), insects for South Australian museum, 1883-1911
Otto Tepper, with his friend Ralph Tate, was partly responsible for reserving Flinders Chase on Kangaroo Island as a national park.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
(Johann Gottlieb) Otto Tepper was a prolific natural history collector at the South Australian Institute Museum from 1883. In 1888. he was promoted to entomologist, numismatist and librarian.
Born in 1841 at Neutomischel (Nowy Tomysl), Posen, Prussia, Tepper migrated with his family for religious reasons, reaching Port Adelaide on the Gellert in 1847. Schooled at Hoffnungsthal in the Barossa Valley, Tepper left at 14 to farm in nearby Lyndoch valley and spent four years as a shearer in Mount Bryan district. He was described as a storeman when he was naturalised in 1865 at Tanunda.
After completing examinations to become a public school teacher, Tepper was appointed to New Mecklenburg (Gomersal) in the Barossa Valley in 1867. He taught at Two Wells (1869), Monarto (1872-73), Nuriootpa (1873-78), Ardrossan (1878-81) and Clarendon (1881-83).
Between 1873 and 1883 he wrote natural history papers about Nuriootpa, “Notable native plants about Ardrossan” and “Die flora von Clarendon” for German scientific magazine, Botanisches Centralblatt. Many of Tepper’s entomological papers were later to appear in the Garden and Field and in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia that he joined in 1878. He was an honorary fellow from 1912 and was sometime chairman of the society’s field naturalists' section.
In 1879, Tepper became a fellow of the Linnean Society of London and a life member of the Society of Science Letters and Art (London), receiving their medal in 1898. A capable artist, Tepper sketched South Australian countryside scenes and the orchids of the colony.
With his friend Ralph Tate, he was partly responsible for reserving Flinders Chase on Kangaroo Island as a national park. In 1880, he suggested that native plants “deserve a place in our gardens and parks'”. Tepper's efforts to secure a plot of trees, marking the site of a settlement near Lyndoch in 1839, led to it being bought by the Barossa district council. He was an associate, later committee member, of the society for the protection of birds (Adelaide branch), formed in 1894, and a member of the South Australian gardeners' society for more than 30 years.
Tepper retired from the museum in 1911.
Several plants and fungi have been named after him, including Dodonaea tepperi, Helichrysum tepperi and Stylidium tepperianum (endemic to Kangaroo Island). He described 164 insect species and some were named after him. Tepper's sketchbook was donated by his grandson to the South Australian Museum. The State Library of South Australia and the field naturalists' society hold copies of his orchid drawings.