User:MargaretRDonald/sandbox/Mueller's female collectors

Mueller's female collectors

Ferdinand von Mueller, as the government botanist for Victoria, the only colony in Australia (at the time) with a purpose-built, government-built herbarium, managed to recruit many women (many of whom were native born) to collect, press, write down the collecting data, and send the resulting material to him in Melbourne.

In 1986, Willis and others reported the names of some 108 female collectors, found from herbaria records (based on titles and a given female name). Later work, on the Mueller project, to produce a selected Mueller correspondence ("Regardfully yours..."),  together with detailed searches of Australian "birth, deaths and marriages" registers and of the National Library of Australia's digitised resources ("Trove") has further clarified details of those who collected for him.

Many of the specimens collected by these women were type specimens (a number of which now reside in English herbaria), having been sent to England by Mueller to help George Bentham in the grand project of Flora Australiensis. Maroske lists type specimens for a number of women.

In her "biogeographical register", Maroske lists 208 women, of whom 103 were native-born Australians, 47 were born elsewhere (mostly the British Isles), with the remainder (58) having insufficent details about their lives to allow the determination of country of birth, that is, of those whose country of birth is known, 69% were native born, and 31% were immigrants. These women collected from outback Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia, that is, from every colony in Australia. (At the time the Northern Territory was part of South Australia). This extraordinary collaboration was carried out by post.

The West Australian (24 July 1883) having been requested to appeal to "our settlers in outlying districts" to aid Mueller in his botanical research writes: ...he begs us to "urge inland and northern and far eastern settlers to induce the natives to bring, in baskets, specimens of all sorts of plants, to be dried at the stations and forwarded to me by post." The Baron adds: - "The small expenditure required for barter articles I would gladly refund. The minutest annuals should not be overlooked on such occasions. Perhaps I may not live many years to carry on my investigations and I should like so much to give the finishing stroke for the elaboration of the rich and varied flora of Western Australia before I pass away." There are already many ladies living in these far distant parts of the colony, bereft, to a great extent, of those intellectual resources to which many of them have bee accustomed. And upon these ladies, in particular, we would impress the interest they might derive from actively aiding our great Australian botanist in his valuable scientific researches. Much has been done in this way by the ladies in our settled districts and a still larger field for similar work is opened for those who have followed husbands and brothers into the remote and less known portions of this vast territory.

A circular in the Northern Star, Lismore (1876) invites people to collect, and gives details on how to prepare specimens, with the Star indicating that the paper will forward specimens to Mueller: We gladly give insertion to the following circular. "For the completion of an universal work on Australian indigenous plants, it is desirable to obtain additional collections of plants in a pressed and dried state, particularly from districts far inland or recently settled. It is an important aim by these means to trace out the exact geographic limits of the many thousand species, which constitute the original Vegetation of Australia, in order also that all observations on their respective utilitarian value, whether for pastoral culture, medical or industrial purposes, may become recognized and applicable to the widest extent.Moreover it is necessary to study still further the degrees of variability, to which all kinds of plants are more or less subject, with a final view of circumscribing the exact characteristics of each species. It is to be impressed on those who may feel interested in the promotion of such researches, not to exclude from local collections any plants, merely because they appear frequent or insignificant. The process of drying plants for permanent collections is simple and easy in the extreme, it needs hardly any explanation, beyond perhaps the remark, that the parcels of paper, containing any recently gathered plants, after a few hours pressure, should be diviided into thin sets, and be spread out on a dry or warm place, to facilitate and to speed the exsiccation, and to lessen also the requirements of shifting plants from paper, which became moist, into dry paper. Small plants should be gathered with their roots, and all not merely in flower but in fruit also, as indeed from the latter generally the main characteristics are derived. Water weeds, rushes, sedges, mosses, lichens, fungi (and on the seacoast also algae), even if ever so small, should not be passed in collecting. Transits are best effected early after the preparation of the specimens, in small parcels closely packed, by successive mails. Whoever wishes to become scientifically acquainted with the native plants of his vicinity or of localities otherwise accessible to him, can obtain the specific names if a duplicate set is retained, in which the specimens are numbered correspondingly to those of the transmitted set. An intimate knowledge of the indigenous vegetation, while it rarely indicates climatic and geologic circumstances, tends also to afford an insight not only into the natural vegetative resources of any tract or a country but also into much of the pastoral or cultural capabilities of the respective localities. Researches of these kinds becomes furthermore the sources of educational works, and unfold to well-trained and intelligent minds pure recreative and healthful pleasures, inexpensively everywhere within reach" The names of finders of new or rare plants are always recorded in Baron Von Mueller's volumes. FERD. VON MUELLER, M. & PH.D., F.R.S.

The same circular appears in the Western Australian in 1880, but without the newspaper's promise to forward specimens, and in the Western Star and Roma Advertiser (1879), The Geraldton Observer (1880.