Mount Townsend was named after the eminent surveyor
Thomas Scott Townsend, so named in 1885 by Austrian alpinist
Robert von Lendenfeld. There was some confusion on the historical identification of the summits named as
Mount Kosciuszko and Mount Townsend for some time, which was clarified in 1940 by B. T. Dowd, a
cartographer and historian of the NSW Lands Department. His study reaffirmed that the mountain named by
Strzelecki as Mount Kosciuszko was indeed, as the NSW maps had always shown, Australia's highest summit. When
James Macarthur's field book of the historical journey was published in 1941 by C. Daley it further confirmed Dowd's clarification. This means that "Targangil", mentioned in Spencer's 1885 letter to
The Sydney Morning Herald, was the
Aboriginal Australian name of Mount Townsend, not of Mount Kosciuszko. ==Geography==