His grandfather, Sir Henry Edmund Austen (1785–1871), was a High Sheriff and Deputy Lieutenant for Surrey and a gentleman of the Privy Chamber to King William IV.

In early 1853 he arrived in Burma at the end of the Second Anglo-Burmese war, serving as aide-de-camp to his maternal grandfather, General Sir Henry Godwin.

[2] While in Burma, he surveyed the Irrawaddy Delta, and this work came to the favourable notice of Sir Andrew Scott Waugh, Surveyor General of India.

In June 1858 he married Kudidje in a ceremony near Budrawar; from the British point of view the marriage was legal as it satisfied Muslim conditions.

In November 1858, Godwin-Austen was seriously injured in an attack near Udhampur which left him unconscious, and in April 1859 he took a year's home leave, joining the Second Battalion of his regiment in England.

He was given a permanent post in the Trigonometrical Survey and in 1860 mapped Shigar and the lower Saltoro Valley of Baltistan as far as the south face of K1, Masherbrum.

In 1861, he traversed the Skoro La, beyond Skardu and Shigar, where he surveyed the Karakoram glaciers: Baltoro, Punmah, Biafo, Chiring, almost as far as the Old Mustagh Pass and Hispar.

However, after September 1860 she disappears from the record, and Godwin-Austen arranged the adoption of their son by a couple named Milner, so it is likely that Kudidje had died by late 1860.

[7][15] Although he gave great attention to geology and topography, his greatest interest lay in collecting non-marine molluscs and in identifying birds.

[16][17] In 1877, Godwin-Austen retired from the Trigonometrical Survey of India with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, as his health was beginning to deteriorate, but back in England he recovered.

Unlike most contemporary malacologists, he described not just the shells but also the internal anatomy and radula teeth, which often better distinguish species and more reliably assign them to families.

He took over the authorship of the first volume of the Fauna of British India devoted to terrestrial molluscs, but he was subsequently replaced by G.K. Gude, who could work faster because his descriptions were more superficial.

[20] Family tradition holds that Haversham Godwin-Austen was a convert to the Buddhist faith (following a self-attested period as an at least nominal Muslim in the middle to late 1850s), and as such he may be the first known British adherent to Buddhism.

His small Burmese-style Buddhist shrine at Nore, Hascombe, Surrey, is likely to have been erected there around 1901 (although a later date of c. 1920 is possible), perhaps after being situated at each of Godwin-Austen's successive main residences from 1877 onwards, following his return to England after 25 years in Asia.

It was forgotten and lost to view under brambles after Godwin-Austen's time, prior to rediscovery in 1962 by a new owner of Nore, actor Dirk Bogarde.

[28] His son R.A. Godwin-Austen was also a career army officer[29] and was later a supporter of the "saintly mafia" called Ferguson's Gang, dedicated to saving historically important buildings.