Wildflower season: the development of native flora protection legislation in Western Australia (original) (raw)

Botanical Knowledges Settling Australia

Between 1896 and 1924, the collections of the herbarium, library, museum and gardens at the Sydney Botanic Gardens became a substantial archive of botanical knowledges. This thesis examines the production and movement of these botanical knowledges within transnational networks associated with the Sydney Botanic Gardens. Each of the collections gathered specimens of plants, plant material and plant information. Some of these botanical knowledges came from Australian landscapes and Australian people, but others came from countries, institutions and individuals located all over the world. In addition to gathering this material, the Sydney Botanic Gardens also sent botanical knowledges out into the transnational network of botanical knowledges. This mobilisation enabled the institution to support the intensification of colonial settlement. By examining the scientific practices produced from plants, plant material and plant information I clarify the connection between transnational botanical knowledges and emergent environments of settlement. The collections accumulated during the directorship of Joseph Maiden provide the primary sources for this thesis and include herbarium specimens and illustrations, books, reports, bulletins, scientific publications and remnant plantings in gardens. The first part of the thesis examines the production of botanical knowledges; in particular collecting, naming, and corresponding.

A Changed Landscape: Horticulture and Gardening in the Adelaide Hills Face Zone, South Australia, 1836-1890

Historical Archaeology, 2009

The Adelaide Hills Face Zone Cultural Heritage Project examined landscape use in an area of the Adelaide Hills of South Australia following European colonization. Protected by legislation that controlled development and agriculture in the area, the Hills Face Zone preserved a relict colonial landscape where a diversity of archaeological sites remained. A range of activities that had transformed the natural environment and created this new landscape were identified, including the creation of home and market gardens, experimental horticultural activities, and the establishment of plant nurseries. Because the knowledge and experiences brought by the colonists from England were of limited use in this new environment, cultural adaptation and innovation played an important part in the transformation of the landscape.

Campaigning for Street Trees, Sydney Botanic Gardens, 1890s-1920s

Environment and History, 2009

Between the 1890s and 1920s street trees became a more prominent feature in streetscapes across New South Wales, Australia. The Sydney Botanic Gardens, with their extensive nursery system, were responsible for supplying seedlings to councils and municipalities for use as street trees. As such, this institution was a primary mover of what a street tree should be, how they should be used and what plants were best suited to this particular use in urban environments. This paper analyses the nurturing of this use of street trees by the Sydney Botanic Gardens and the Director Joseph Maiden. This institution was a place that moved not just stock and seedlings, but ideas about how nature's inclusion into urban environments had the capacity to influence and enhance the cultivation of civilised citizens. This was affected through access to transnational resources available to the Sydney Botanic Gardens.

Botanists, Aborigines and native plants on the Queensland frontier

Land and Language in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country , 2016

By the 1920s, it was well understood by missionaries, scientists and botanists that the spread of grazing and agriculture into the interior posed the final threat to the remaining Aboriginal populations. Botanists were also aware that Aboriginal economies were collapsing with the increasing competition for the plants which formed the staples of Aboriginal diet, and that the cattle herds were in large part responsible for this economic disaster. This paper examines the work of these botanists for an ethnohistorical understanding of the demise of Aboriginal economic activities. Their records represents a rich record of the nature of the Aboriginal plant food economy and a window on the competition of the most educated colonists for the resources that would support ever-expanding herds of cattle and food for the colonists and the English market.

The Flowers Are Not Optional: Conceptual Transformations of Place in the Victorian Garden

The transition of women from hobbyists to paid professional gardeners was challenging. In the late Victorian period, attitudes about women in the workforce were beginning to change, but they were still primarily limited to their domestic roles as wives and mothers. Moreover, since professional gardening remained the work of men, they could not be apprenticed. However, new avenues for education opened in 1891, when Swanley College in Kent began to train female horticulturalists. The first graduates of that program found employment in the Botanic Gardens, Kew, in 1896 (Ikin 2014). I would argue that these women benefitted from the heterotopia of the Victorian garden. It was a site where the mythological relationship of their hobbyist predecessors to the natural world was enacted, which made their forays into agency non-transgressive in the eyes of early-to-middle Victorian society. As women took up gardening tools and took part in shaping the physical place and social surround of the garden, the heterotopia itself began to change until it was possible for them to inhabit it not just as ornamental mother-gardeners but also as paid professionals. This paper is concerned with the lives and work of two such women, who interacted with and shaped the physical and psychological heterotopias of the Victorian garden in ways that facilitated their entrepreneurial and intellectual endeavors. In the case of Mrs. Theodosia B. Hall, it is possible to see this as a deliberate effort to negotiate a cultural and mythological view of the garden as a site of women's native attunement with nature alongside a personal and progressive view of the garden as a site of women's emancipation. In the case of Mrs. Fanny D. Bergen, it is possible to see her marriage to botanist William Wells Newall and her botanical writing as a perhaps unintentional positioning of her self and work in the psychological heterotopia of the Victorian garden, which helped to emancipate and facilitate her life of the mind.

On the Nature of Botanical Gardens

On the Nature of Botanical Gardens Catalogue, 2020

'On the Nature of Botanical Gardens' at Framer Framed in Amsterdam features nine contemporary Indonesian artists who look critically at botanical gardens, colonial power, knowledge building and the economics of nature, its legacies and current consequences of approaching nature and plants. The exhibition seeks to decolonise the concept of botanical gardens and their role in building a Dutch colonial empire in Indonesia.

Revisiting Tony Price’s (1979) account of the native vegetation of Duck River and Rookwood Cemetery, western Sydney

Cunninghamia, 2013

The Duck River Reserve and Rookwood Cemetery in the highly urbanised Auburn district of western Sydney hold small but botanically valuable stands of remnant native vegetation. In the late 1970s, local resident G.A. (Tony) Price, recognised the value of these remnants, both for the species they held and the clues they could give us to the past, and spent three years surveying and collecting plants at these sites. Price recorded the species present and their abundance, and described the habitats in which they were found. He observed the ecology of plant interactions, moisture, shading and fire response, interpolating them into a picture of the landscape and vegetation of the district prior to European settlement. At a time when field botany was inaccessible to many, and the focus of conservation was largely on the broader scale, Price's local scale work at these sites was unusual and important. Though never formally published, Price's 1979 account 'The Vegetation of Duck River and Rookwood Cemetery, Auburn' has been cited in all subsequent work of consequence for the area. This paper presents and reviews Price's work and discusses his observations in relation to the current vegetation of these areas. Tony Price's contributions also highlight the value and role that ordinary citizens can play alongside professional botanists and plant ecologists in long term data collection, considered observation and environmental management. A copy of Price's original unpublished account has been included as an appendix to this paper.