The Flower Chain the Early Discovery of Australian Plants
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The Flower Chain The early discovery of Australian plants Hamilton and Brandon, Jill Douglas Hamilton Duchess of University of Sydney Library Sydney, Australia 2002 http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit © University of Sydney Library. The texts and images are not to be used for commercial purposes without permission Source Text: Prepared with the author's permission from the print edition published by Kangaroo Press Sydney 1998 All quotation marks are retained as data. First Published: 1990 580.994 1 Australian Etext Collections at botany prose nonfiction 1940- women writers The flower chain the early discovery of Australian plants Sydney Kangaroo Press 1998 Preface Viewing Australia through the early European discovery, naming and appreciation of its flora, gives a fresh perspective on the first white people who went to the continent. There have been books on the battle to transform the wilderness into an agriculturally ordered land, on the convicts, on the goldrush, on the discovery of the wealth of the continent, on most aspects of settlement, but this is the first to link the story of the discovery of the continent with the slow awareness of its unique trees, shrubs and flowers of Australia. The Flower Chain Chapter 1 The Flower Chain Begins Convict chains are associated with early British settlement of Australia, but there were also lighter chains in those grim days. Chains of flowers and seeds to be grown and classified stretched across the oceans from Botany Bay to Europe, looping back again with plants and seeds of the old world that were to Europeanise the landscape and transform it forever. The following chapters look at the links in that chain, the discovery, identification, appreciation and cultivation of Australia's plants, together with the sea captains, botanists, artists, gardeners, laymen, books and drawings, which all contributed to the slow introduction of the Australian flora to Europe and the rest of the world. And slow it was indeed. Also examined are the reasons for the delays in the dissemination of knowledge about Australia's unique floral heritage. [1.1 Illustration: Mimosa decurrens Colour]: Acacia decurrens, described here under its old name of Mimosa and painted by Pierre-Etienne Redoute. Acacia is a typically Australian genus. (Linean Society collections.) Australia has an exceedingly rich and diverse flora. Eucalyptus, Acacia, Correa, kangaroo paw, Prosanthera, Chamelaucium (Geraldton wax), Brachyscome (Swan River daisies) and everlasting daisies are all Australian and are now grown everywhere from California to the south of France. The top selling house plants in Europe are two Queensland rainforest trees: stunted versions of Ficus benjamina and the long-suffering umbrella plant Schlefflera actinophylla churned out by propagation factories in southern Spain and elsewhere. The number of native vascular species alone in Australia—ignoring the lower plants such as algae and lichens—is estimated at 25,000, and 90 per cent of these genera are endemic to the continent. Only a small number, though, provide sustenance for a stranger on foreign soil. It was patient foraging, day after day, mainly by women and children that provided the non-flesh portion of Aboriginal diets. For the white sailors who did not know the secrets of the native plants, parts of Australia has been described as the ‘Scurvy Coast’. Despite its novelty and potential, the flora of Australia was disregarded for 150 years after European discovery. From the time of the first documented European landfall in Australia—by the Dutch in 1606—until the early nineteenth century the collection of plants was intermittent and uncoordinated. The earliest known botanical specimens from Australia, probably collected in 1697 by the Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh, were misidentified for over two hundred years. Picked in the Swan River area near Perth, they are fragments of Synaphea spinulosa, a faded, grey, flowerless twig, and Acacia truncata. Now only the Synaphea is still known to be extant. Preserved in the herbarium of the Conservatoire et Jardin Botanique, Geneva it is the sole botanical souvenir from more than a century of Dutch exploration of the coasts of Australia. A few cycad seeds were also bought back to Holland but they were not filed in any herbarium. Although the Dutch made over twenty voyages to Australia they left scant records of its flora and no collections. The Flower Chain really begins with Somerset-born William Dampier, buccaneer and author, picking Swainsona formosus—Sturt's desert pea—in the west Australian bush in 1699. Despite shipwreck in the Atlantic and subsequent court- martial, Dampier got this flower, dried and pressed along with over twenty other specimens of Australian plants, salvaged from his sinking ship, back to England and into the hands of one Dr Woodward. These plants are now preserved in the herbarium at the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford. Nine of them were illustrated in Dampier's best- selling account of his adventures, A Voyage to New Holland, which went into several editions even in his lifetime. These plants at Oxford form the earliest extant collection of Australian plants yet, in contemporary botanical literature, they only merited an appendix and a few inadequate descriptions. [1.2 Illustration: Dampier specimens B+W]: William Dampier made observations and collections of its natural history on his second voyage to New Holland and illustrated his findings. These are the first published illustrations of Australia's flora. (Linnean Society collections.) Sixty years after Dampier's dried specimens were deposited at Oxford Joseph Banks arrived there from Eton to spend three years studying botany. We do not know whether he saw Dampier's plants, but he certainly had Dampier's books on board Cook's Endeavour in 1770 when, with Linnaeus's pupil Daniel Solander, he made the first extensive botanical collection in Australia. This groundbreaking voyage produced a massive haul of plant specimens. Banks initially planned a splendid publication illustrated with life-sized engravings of the highest quality—a florilegium of the plants of the places visited. But despite many years' work, and the expenditure of a small fortune preparing the illustrations, the book was never finished. Even the exquisite illustrations were destined not to be published for over a century. The consequences of this non-publication were far-reaching. When the British Government sent the First Fleet to establish a penal colony in New South Wales, the convicts, marines and officers sailed knowing nothing about the vegetation of Botany Bay. In the seventeen years between Banks's brief visit in 1770 and the departure of the First Fleet, the British made no inspection of the site. Not only was there no reconnaissance, but information that might have helped settlers was still awaiting completion in the London home of Joseph Banks. Over three thousand precious specimens collected on his first landfall—the reason for its being christened Botany Bay, languished unpublished in Banks's herbarium cabinets. The First Fleet arrived in 1788 magnificently equipped, but lacking in four essentials—a trained botanist, a gardener, a farmer and information on the soils and flora of this new and alien land that they were supposed to farm. Settlers found that the soils that Banks had described as fertile were in fact, marshy, thin or sandy. Without any expert to assess it, they found Australia's uniquely different flora nutritionally and economically worthless. One of the many consequences of this disregard by eighteenth-century settlers was the perception of the land as terra nullius—belonging to no-one. The repercussions of this perception reverberate today in the issue of native land rights. Initially plans included for two ships of the First Fleet after dropping convicts at Botany Bay would, on the return trip, detour north to Tahiti. Here they would collect hundreds of breadfruit tree seedlings and take them to the West Indies to be grown as food for slaves on sugar plantations in the West Indies. Shortly before departure from England Banks, who had been intimately involved in the preparations, altered the plans: there would be a separate and independent expedition to Tahiti and the Caribbean led by William Bligh. Both the Kew-trained gardener—who had briefly visited Tasmania on Cook's last voyage—and his assistant, who were to have sailed with the First Fleet, were diverted on to the newly acquired Bounty and sail direct to Tahiti. Little did they realise that within a year one would be a willing mutineer with Fletcher Christian and end up laying the foundations for the settlement on Pitcairn Island—instead of New South Wales—and the other, staying loyal to Bligh, would die in Timor. [1.3 : Breadfruit section Colour]: The starchy fruit of the breadfruit tree, Artocarpus altilis, was a dietary staple throughout the islands of the Pacific. This illustration is from Curtis' Botanical Magazine. (Linnean Society collections.) In the crucial early days of the colony, the vital task of studying and using indigenous plants of New South Wales was left to amateurs, busy surgeons—and the Spanish and the French. Nobody qualified to study the newly discovered plants resided in the colony. Australian vegetation would have seemed very different to the first settlers, full of diversity and contradiction. The greatest number of characteristic Australian species live in the poorest soil, indeed, the poorer the soil, the more varied the vegetation. In contrast to the water-retaining cactus and cactus-like perennials of the dry regions of America and Africa, Australian dry areas have few perennial succulents. Instead, woody plants, such as the Banksias, Hakeas, mulga and Acacias predominate. No British expert systematically assessed the flora on-site; nor studied or fitted it into the developing world system of families, genera and species, until Robert Brown arrived with Matthew Flinders on the Investigator in 1801.