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AUSTRALIAN NATIVE PLANTS SOCIETY NATIONAL CONFERENCE SPEECH BY HER EXCELLENCY PROFESSOR AC GOVERNOR OF WREST POINT, SANDY BAY, MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2018

Good morning delegates, and thank you for inviting me to open the Australian Native Plants Society national conference.

I begin today by paying my respects to the Mouheneener people, the traditional and original owners of this land ̶ those who have passed before us; and in acknowledgement of today’s Tasmanian Aboriginal community, being the custodians of this land.

I am informed that your conference is a biennial event that brings you together from all around and that there a few delegates from overseas too.1 I wish to warmly welcome all of you to Tasmania and I do hope you get a chance to explore our beautiful island while you are here. I know that there are excursions during the conference and also pre- and post conference excursions for delegates.

There is so much to see. I am a keen bushwalker and like many Tasmanians have walked the overland track, including climbing Pelion West and Mt Oakleigh and marvelled at the wonderful flora which provided a welcome distraction during those, for me, quite challenging climbs.

And I have also enjoyed the four-day Freycinet Experience walk in Spring with Sib Corbett as a guide explaining the flora and finding and identifying native orchids for us. I understand that Sib designed the Tasmanian section of the Botanical Gardens here in . And I can see from your program that Dr Keith Corbett is presenting about the Tasmanian Bushland Garden near Buckland, NE of Hobart, which I can strongly recommend.

1 From the Convener Margaret Killen 2

I also see from the programme that Sib Corbett is presenting on Friday, ‘In our backyard – Mt Wellington’ which could be about the flora of Mt Wellington or equally about her garden at Fern Tree where an enchanting use of native plants mixed with exotics is an inspiration to include native plants into garden schemes.

As part of the Governor’s community role, the Governor is invited to visit each of the 29 Municipalities and where possible we include a bushwalk in the itinerary. So when visiting the Tasman Municipality, which is on the Tasman Peninsula in the South East, we had the opportunity to walk along part of the Three Capes track from The Blade on Cape Pillar to the top of Mt Fortescue.

And when visiting the Break O’Day Municipality in the North East of the State, we visited the Winifred Curtis Reserve at Scamander. This 80- hectare reserve adjacent to Henderson Lagoon incorporates dry sclerophyll bushland, heathland, marshland, wetland and duneland. This remnant of coastal vegetation has remained largely untouched since European settlement. It is named after Dr Winifred Curtis, often said to be Tasmania’s most distinguished professional botanist.

She is best known for her five-volume series, The Students’ Flora of Tasmania, which still serves as the fundamental text on Tasmania’s flowering plants and conifers. This was a project she started in the 1940s as a newly appointed lecturer in Botany at the . The first volume was published in 1956 and the last in 1994. Dr Curtis taught botany to an entire generation of Tasmanian university students. Although I did not study botany at university, I did study biology at school, and for my generation, Curtis’s Biology for Australian Students, was our bible.

Finally, I would like to tell you a little about the Government House native garden. It has an interesting story associated with it.

Planting a native garden on the Estate was the brainchild of Sir , who was from October 1982 until his death while in office from a heart attack in October 1987.

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Sir James had earlier accepted an extension to his original five-year term, and he had intended the native garden to be a Bicentennial project for the celebrations to be held throughout 1988.

He had also considered that the area could become a fitting planting location for visiting royals to conduct ceremonial plantings, trees having been planted there by Her Majesty, Prince Phillip, and other Royals.

When General Sir then took up the Governorship in October 1987, he recognised the significance of the native garden project and directed that it be proceeded with, and on completion it was formally named "The Sir James Plimsoll Native Memorial Garden".

Interestingly, the native garden did not impress the authors of a conservation report produced in 1991 which gave the Plimsoll Garden an I rating.2 which stands for

“intrusive or an alteration which has seriously jeopardised the cultural significance of an area or component.”

The report states:

The incursion of the recently established native garden and [adjacent cattle agistment] facilities are unfortunate, as they interfere with the hard boundary between the traditional garden area and the open paddocks.

It seems that when the Government House Buildings and Estate were first completed in 1858, the inner gardens and outer paddocks had been designed to represent, and I quote:3

… an almost complete transplantation of British landscaping ideals of the mid nineteenth century … with formal terraces to provide transition between residence and grounds.

2 Government House, Hobart: Garden and Grounds Conservation Analysis and Conservation Policies, 1991, page 35, left column paragraph 5. 3 Ibid., page 30, right column, paragraph 5. 4

Viewed as an outstanding example of British mid nineteenth century landscaping, any alterations to that landscape that diminish its historical integrity were deemed to be unacceptable. Without disputing the formal validity of that criticism in built heritage terms, there are no plans to remove the native garden; in fact one of our gardeners has taken a keen interest in it and made improvements to it and we plan to place an interpretation board there, as a way of inviting guests to go in and explore its paths. I hope you will have an opportunity to see it this evening.

I now have great pleasure in declaring your conference open. Please enjoy the conference and the next five days here in Hobart.