Robert Gillies was a wealthy Dunedin businessman who entered Parliament in his forties, describing his occupation then as ‘naturalist’.  He observed the habits of Nemesia gilliesii – the trapdoor spiders that were named after him – in the early 1870s, and the planet Venus in the early 1880s.

Gillies first accidentally spied an underground burrow of the trapdoor spiders on his North Otago property during a solitary horseback ride.  He was part of a planned network of New Zealand observers of the Transit of Venus under Colonel Tupman in 1882, using a telescope that he had installed in his private residence in Park Street, Dunedin.

Gillies said that by patient research and observation a field naturalist “finds out what [an animal] does, how it does it, when it does it, and why it does it”. But scale was no bar to the subjects that caught his interest.

An account of his adult life is necessarily biographical and local. Through happenstance and the associations of Victorian science and society, however, his story is also part of the story of the structure of his city, of New Zealand’s natural history, and of international astronomical study.