Fitzgerald, Robert David (1830–92), surveyor, botanical artist, and naturalist, was born 30 November 1830 at Tralee, Co. Kerry, the son of Robert David Fitzgerald, a banker, and his wife, Mary Ann, née Bell. After studying civil engineering at QCC, he travelled in 1856 to Sydney, New South Wales, and was appointed to the Department of Lands as a draughtsman in August that year. He was given charge of the roads branch in 1868, also serving as deputy surveyor-general (1873–87), chief mining surveyor (1874–82), and controller of church and school lands. Fitzgerald was an ornithologist and a taxidermist – an early interest that demonstrated itself in his contribution to the Kerry Magazine (1855–6) and inspired his first drawings of Australian wildlife.
Fitzgerald's interest in botany, and the Orchidaceae in particular, led to collecting trips to Wallis Lake, north of Newcastle, New South Wales, in 1864 and Lord Howe Island in 1869, 1871 and 1876. He was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society, London, in 1874, and a member of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1876. An exhibition of a hundred of his drawings of indigenous orchids was held during the Agricultural Society of New South Wales exhibition of 1871. Together with Arthur James Stoops (1833–1931) he published Australian Orchids (1875–94). The first volume was dedicated to Charles Darwin, with whom he corresponded, and the work excited the admiration of J. D. Hooker and George Bentham and placed Australia at the forefront of the study of the Orchidaceae. Fitzgerald's botanical drawings for the work, with macroscopic studies and dissections of each specimen, demonstrated his superb proficiency and competence. He was one of the first to study pollination mechanisms in Australian orchids, and contributed a number of papers to the Journal of Botany from 1883 to 1891.
Fitzgerald recognised the importance of preserving land in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, and had several tracts set aside for public ownership. He described several species of orchid for the first time, and four species are named for him. He eschewed a scientific journal in favour of the Sydney Morning Herald in which to publish his description of Dendrobium falcorostrum (18 November 1876). This, as well as his failure to collect herbarium specimens, points to an unconventional approach to botany. He was known to throw away specimens once he had studied or painted them, rather than attempting to preserve them. He died 12 August 1892 at Hunter's Hill, New South Wales, and was buried in the presbyterian section of the Old Balmain cemetery. At Balmain in 1860 he had married Emily Blackwell Hunt (1835–76), daughter of a well-off cabinet-maker, Edward Hunt, and they had four sons and three daughters. A grandson who also bore the name Robert David Fitzgerald (1902–87) became a well-known poet in Australia.