White Beech: The Rainforest Years (37 page)

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.