White Beech: The Rainforest Years

by Greer, Germaine

  In 1855 Bentham had all but decided to retire from botanical work when the elder Hooker and other members of the botanical establishment persuaded him to move to London and work on the preparation of the floras of the British colonies using the collections at Kew. In 1862 or so he began work on the Flora Australiensis; it was to take him fifteen years. Bentham is honoured in the naming of the Red Carabeen, Geissois benthamii and a native gardenia, Atractocarpus benthamianus. (The genus Atractocarpus has been through an extraordinary succession of names: Sukunia, Trukia, Porterandia, Sulitia, Neofranciella, Franciella and Randia; as it has been Atractocarpus only since 1999, the name might not have jelled yet.)

  Though they had established a formidable presence elsewhere, German naturalists were late arrivals in Australia. In 1842 the naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt arrived in Sydney from Germany and began collecting botanical specimens in north-eastern New South Wales. In November 1843 ‘in silvis ad amnem Myall Creek Australiae orientalis subtropicae’, Leichhardt collected, amongst much else, the first recorded specimen of White Beech. In October 1844 he led an expedition from Jimbour on the Darling Downs to Port Essington near Darwin, and got there fifteen months later. On this trip he collected thousands of specimens but, as his horses and oxen perished one by one, he had no way of transporting the material back to civilisation and had to dump it. In December 1846 he set out to travel from Dalby on the Darling Downs across to the west coast, but was driven back by heavy rain, malaria and shortage of food (Bailey, J., 267–323).

  Ferdinand Mueller first heard of Leichhardt when he was a pharmacology student at the University of Rostock. When he arrived in Adelaide in 1847 to take up a position as a pharmacist for the German firm of Büttner and Heuzenroeder, his real intention was to make of himself the same kind of heroic naturalist explorer as Leichhardt, who was about to set out on a second attempt to cross the continent from east to west. This time, after leaving McPherson’s sheep station at Coogoon, Leichhardt and his party vanished. Mueller, who could hardly believe that his hero would never return, was by then botanising around Adelaide, moving ever further afield, until he penetrated as far as the Flinders Ranges and Lake Torrens. From every excursion he brought back masses of specimens to be sent to every learned society in Europe. He was not content to allow European experts to identify and describe the materials he brought back from these forays, but struggled to do it himself, without the necessary resources of a large herbarium and the full phytological record. Just how foolhardy this was had been illustrated by the humiliation of the natural scientist William Swainson, who tried to sort out the genus Eucalyptus, and ended up in a morass of ‘reckless species-making’ (Maiden). Mueller knew the risks he was running, but his arrogance and recklessness were even greater than Swainson’s; fortunately for him so was his expertise. Governor La Trobe of Victoria was so impressed with the indefatigable Mueller that in 1853 he appointed him government botanist. Mueller was then at leisure to organise his herbarium; within five years it contained 45,000 specimens representing 15,000 species; ultimately Mueller would claim to have amassed between 750,000 and a million specimens. He cultivated a close relationship with Kew in the hope that he would be allowed to write the official flora of Australia, but the job fell to George Bentham, which in my view was just as well.

  My sister Jane, as a good alumna of the University of Melbourne Botany Department, is an admirer of Mueller.

  ‘You have to appreciate his incredible achievement in penetrating so far into the inland with no support whatsoever. This is the man who explored alpine Victoria on his own, and made his way back to Melbourne with nothing but a pocketful of Bogong Moths to eat.’

  ‘Ambition, girl. Blind ambition.’

  ‘Hooker and Bentham white-anted him. They wouldn’t support him.’

  ‘That really isn’t fair. Bentham acknowledged Mueller as a co-author of the Flora Australiensis which, considering what a nuisance the man was, was incredibly gracious. Mueller drove them both crazy. He drives me crazy.’

  ‘Mueller wanted Australians to name Australian plant species, and he wanted the types to be held in Australian herbaria. He was resisting imperial control. Bentham was on the other side of the world and had never even visited Australia.’

  ‘Yes, but he had access to the huge collections of Kew, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, as Mueller did not. You and I both know that Gondwanan genera are distributed all round the southern hemisphere. Mueller was like a blind man with only one foot of the elephant.’

  Jane’s jaw was set. I shut up.

  In his private correspondence Joseph Hooker described Mueller as ‘devoured of vanity and jealousy of Colonial notoriety’. For years Mueller had bombarded Kew with specimens, together with his own descriptions, many of which were wrong. At length, on 10 October 1857, Hooker wrote to him from Kew:

  The verifying of your new genera is a work of much greater labor than you suppose; & you must not be surprized to hear that some of them are common & well-known Indian genera & even species. Thus [it is] not I assure you from want of will on my Father’s & my parts, that we do not publish more of your MSS; but from want of time &[,] on my own part at any rate who am engaged on the Tasmanian Flora & the Indian[,] much averseness to committing both yourself & myself by publishing old plants as new. (Home et al., 1, 329)

  Mueller didn’t heed the advice. In December 1858 Hooker wrote again:

  I have studiously abstained from publishing any of your Victorian plants, though I have a great majority of them from Cunningham, Robertson & others, because I knew you were at work on that Flora & like to have the credit of naming your plants. You again go on naming & describing Tasmanian plants though you know I am engaged on that Flora! . . . pray describe the Chatham & Tasmanian & Indian plants too if you wish – you must not expect however that when I have occasion to work at unpublished plants to which you have given mss names I am to take your names wherever the species are good only!

  (In other words, Hooker worked on all Mueller’s descriptions, including those he did not credit because they were wrong.)

  Hitherto I have done so & have not quoted your MSS names when I have considered them as synonymous, both because I thought that it would be unfair to point out your mistakes when there was no occasion to do so, & it would only encumber Botany with MSS synonyms to no purpose. (Home et al., 1, 434)

  Despite Hooker’s common sense, Australian botany is heavily encumbered with synonyms, and not a few of them are attributed to ‘F. v. M.’ or ‘F. Muell.’.

  It was only at the end of his life that George Bentham permitted himself to write as sharply to Mueller as the occasion warranted. Cockily, Mueller had sent Bentham in April 1883 a copy of his rival publication, Systematic Census of Australian Plants. Bentham replied heavily:

  I have to thank you for your Systematic Census of Australian Plants received yesterday. The work is beautifully printed and shows a great deal of laborious philological research into the dates of plant names (rather than of genera) which will be appreciated by those who occupy themselves in that subject . . . but all that is not botany. With regard to that science, it grieves me to think that you should have devoted so much of your valuable time to a work which, botanically speaking, is not only absolutely useless but worse than useless.

  . . . let me entreat you to give up the vain endeavour to attach the intials ‘F. v. M.’ to so many specific names, good or bad, as possible . . . (Home et al., 111, 311–12)

  Mueller obtained rather more gratifying responses from the continental institutions to which he sent all kinds of Australiana. He sent Aboriginal cadavers to museums in France, Germany and Russia, live thylacines, already on the verge of extinction, to Stuttgart and Paris, and black swans anywhere and everywhere. He sent away thousands of tree ferns for the conservatories of Europe, including specimens of the King Fern, Todea barbara, weighing more than a ton apiece (Daley). In 1867 he was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, and from Württemberg, in exchange for
scientific materials plus £600 in cash for the establishment of a Ferdinand von Mueller Stiftung, he received the title of Freiherr or Baron. Such toadying was not likely to appease British chauvinism. The most bizarre of the tributes paid to Mueller must be the attempt by the maverick German botanist Otto Kuntze to rename the genus Banksia after him, Sirmuellera.

  Even though he was doing so well out of exploiting the uniqueness of Australian species, Mueller had no interest in maintaining the integrity of Australian flora and fauna. As fast as he was sending Australian creatures to the other side of the world, he was importing exotics. In his report of 1858, among trees of practical value imported for the Botanic Garden, he mentions ‘the Camphor Tree’ Cinnamomum camphora, now the most serious tree weed in the rainforest. He imported quantities of European songbirds with the aim of naturalising them, including the now ubiquitous blackbird. Each year the Botanic Garden grew thousands of plants for public distribution, nearly all of them exotics. If you want to know why the sidewalks of most Australian country towns and the leafier suburbs are being torn apart by the proliferating roots of avenues of gigantic poplars, planes and beeches, why every cemetery is overhung with cypresses and pines, Mueller is your man. So enthusiastic was he in his dissemination of exotics that horticulturists accused him of ruining their trade.

  ‘Have you got Heritiera here?’ Jane was changing the subject.

  ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘I was reading this article about complex notophyll vine forest and it talked about Heritiera trifoliolata as a key species.’

  The species name gave the game away. ‘Argyrodendron must’ve had a name change. Damn.’

  The name Argyrodendron is thoroughly Greek and sweetly descriptive: ‘argyro’ – silver, ‘dendron’ – tree. The distinguishing characteristic of the Argyrodendron is that the underside of the leaf is clad in microscopic scales that are visible to the naked eye as a silver sheen. One of the Cave Creek Argyrodendrons is surnamed trifoliolatum, which is Latin for ‘three-leafleted’ and typical of the way Latin gets yoked onto the Greek. The other is surnamed actinophyllum, which is an adaptation of the Greek ‘aktis’, meaning ray, and ‘phyllon’, meaning leaf, because its leaflets radiate from the tip of the leafstalk. The revered Queensland dendrologist Bill McDonald had dubbed our subtropical rainforest type the ‘Argyrodendron Alliance’.

  ‘ “Heritiera Alliance” won’t sound the same,’ I moaned. ‘ “Heritiera” is no language at all, and carries no information about the thing it refers to. It makes more sense to call the damn’ things Booyongs; at least the Aboriginal name doesn’t change every five minutes.’ (Gresty records the name ‘booyong’ in his Numinbah word list (71); it is not recorded by Sharpe or any of the Yugambeh word-collectors.)

  After L’Héritier de Brutelle was assassinated in 1800, his herbarium of 8,000 species was acquired by Bentham’s friend and colleague De Candolle, but it was not he who named the principally Asian genus in L’Héritier’s honour but William Aiton, director of the Royal Botanic Garden, in 1789 (Aiton, 3:546). In 1858 Mueller did not recognise his specimen as a member of an older genus but created the new name Argyrodendron for it; the type for the new name was a specimen of A. trifoliolatum collected by Walter Hill on the Brisbane and Pine Rivers (Fragmenta, 1 (1):2). In the first volume of his Flora Australiensis, published in 1863, Bentham preferred C. L. von Blume’s older (1825) name for the genus, and called it Tarrietia argyrodendron (1:230), but Mueller’s name clung on until 1959, when A. J. G. H. Kostermans included the Booyongs in the genus Heritiera. The Australian Plant Name Index still includes both names, so we shall have to treat them as synonyms after all, which is what usually happens in practice.

  Amid all this botanical brouhaha the common name of the Booyongs remained the same. Mueller had no time for common names. In a lecture at the Melbourne Industrial and Technological Museum on 3 November 1870 he demanded how botanical knowledge could be:

  fixed without exact phytological information, or how is the knowledge to be applied, if we are to trust to vernacular names, perplexing even within the area of a small colony, and useless as a rule, beyond it? Colonial Box trees by dozens, yet all distinct, and utterly unlike Turkey Box; colonial Myrtle without the slightest resemblance to the poet’s myrtle; colonial Oaks, analogous to those Indian trees, which as Casuarinae were distinguished so graphically by Rumpf already 200 years ago, but without any trace of similarity to real oak–– afford instances of our confused and ludricrous vernacular appellations.

  He demanded a total change:

  resting on the rational observations and deductions which science already has gained for us. Assuredly, with any claims to ordinary intelligence, we ought to banish such designations, not only from museum collections, but also from the dictionary of the artisan. How are these thousands of species of Ficus, all distinct in appearance, in character, and in uses–– how are they to be recognised, unless a diagnosis of each becomes carefully elaborated and recorded, headed by a specific name? (Mueller, 1872, 81)

  How indeed? The genus Ficus was a bad example to have chosen, because its taxonomy is fluid to say the least. And Mueller was the wrong person to have mounted the attack on common names, given his own propensity for generating synonyms.

  The Bible tells us that God created the world, and then Adam, and then bade Adam name his creation, before he created Eve. Feminists have argued persuasively that naming and classification are mechanisms of male control. Nowhere is this more evident than in the practice of botany. Once Linnaeus had published his binomial system the animal and vegetable kingdoms were up for grabs. European plants and animals were protected because the genera already had Latin names in the scientific literature. Australia lay helpless under the onslaught of scientists determined to inscribe their own names and the names of their forerunners, patrons, collaborators and friends across its length and breadth. The naturalists who came haring to Australia from all over the world knew that by collecting samples of flora and fauna, and either contriving their preservation by drying them or bottling them in spirits, or keeping them alive for dispatch to European museums, herbariums, zoological and botanical gardens, and to private collectors, they would secure for themselves both reputation and reward. Even more seductive than a title for oneself was the opportunity to name animals and plants after oneself, or the people with whom one was currying favour. No other continent has as bizarre a collection of botanical names as Australia, and no Australian vegetation is worse served when it comes to nomenclature than the rainforest.

  Nobody was less likely to give up the pernicious habit of calling plants after colleagues and friends than the egregious Mueller. Mueller surnamed one of our Sloaneas ‘woollsii’ after William Woolls (1814–93), an Anglican minister and schoolmaster who collected for him. No one would jib at calling a genus Flindersia after Matthew Flinders, especially when the first example of the genus was collected by Robert Brown on his expedition, but our dominant species was named by Mueller F. schottiana for Heinrich Schott of the Austrian Botanic Gardens. An important tree for us is the unspellable Guioa, named for J. Guio, a botanical illustrator of the eighteenth century. Mueller got himself into a fearful tangle with this, identifying our Guioa, which is G. semiglauca, so-called because the underside of the leaf is bluish-white, as an Arytera and then as a Nephelium; even Bentham got it wrong, and decided it was a Cupania, and it was not until 1879 that L. A. T. Radlkofer correctly understood our tree to be a member of the genus Guioa. Our Foambarks are named Jagera, for Dr Herbert de Jager, who collected for the Dutch botanist Rumphius in Indonesia in the mid-nineteenth century.

  For years we have been referring to one of our best performers as Caldcluvia paniculata. The genus is named for Scottish botanist Alexander Caldcleugh who collected the first specimens in South America in the early nineteenth century. Interestingly, Cunningham, who had botanised in New Zealand, correctly recognised the Australian tree as a member of the genus Ackama, of which the type was first collected
in New Zealand, hence the version of the Maori name ‘makamaka’, but he was overruled by Mueller, who first misidentified it as a member of the genus Weinmannia (named for eighteenth-century German pharmacist J. W. Weinmann), to which inadvertently he gave two species names paniculosa and paniculata, before deciding that it was a Caldcluvia after all. Bentham accepted Cunningham and called the species, with admirable forbearance, ‘Ackama muelleri’, but Mueller’s name prevailed. Justice has finally been done, and we must get used to calling our trees Ackama paniculata.

  A similar tree, the Rose Marara, like Ackama in the Cunoniaceae, has the appalling systematic name of Pseudoweinmannia lachnocarpa. The specific name is useful, for it means ‘woolly fruit’, but the generic name identifies it as a pretend Weinmannia, as if it deliberately misled people (Engler, 249). As the genus Pseudoweinmannia consists of this species only, it seems likely that it will one day be revised. Our Bosistoas have no accepted common name, so whenever we refer to them we have no choice but to do homage to the Melbourne chemist J. Bosisto, who collaborated with Mueller in the preparation of eucalyptus oil. Another of our genera carries the hideous name Baloghia, after Dr Joseph Balogh, author of a book on Transylvanian plants; this is the more galling because the Baloghia blossom has perhaps the loveliest scent of any in the forest. It’s bad enough to have to call a beautiful big tree a Grey Walnut, when it is neither grey nor a walnut, but when its scientific name is Beilschmiedia, in honour of C. T. Beilschmied, a botanist and chemist from Ohlau, it is ill-served indeed. As annoying is the name Mueller gave to the Queensland Nut, which eternises John Macadam, Secretary of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria; not content with this, Mueller named another genus Wilkiea for the vice-president of the society, Dr D. E. Wilkie. Worst of all is the ridiculously clumsy name Mueller gave the adorable Bopple Nut, which he named after the Secretary of State for New South Wales, Hicksbeachia. Such mad coinages can have no uniform pronunciation; what has grown up instead is a culture of sanctioned mispronunciation. Botanists demonstrate their membership of the inner circle by using agreed or ‘correct’ mispronunciations. ‘Sloanea’ was named by Linnaeus for Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum; people who know who he was tend to call the trees ‘Slow-nia’; people who don’t render it ‘Slow-aynia’. I pronounce the genus ‘Olearia’ ‘Oll-ee-arr-ee-ah’, my sister ‘O’Leary-ah’. Actually, the genus is not called after O’Leary but after the olive tree or Olea. People like me who have not mastered the sanctioned mispronunciations can be instantly identified as outsiders and their expertise ignored, which is fine with me.