2 February 2024
Our speaker was a well-known Perth botanist, Alex George, who has been a Club member since 1956. Some of Alex’s main interests have been the Orchids, the Verticordias, the Banksias, Dryandras and Synapheas, and the history of botanists in Western Australia. He has worked at the WA Herbarium and the Royal Botanic Gardens in London and as Executive Editor of the Flora of Australia series in Canberra.
The meeting started interestingly because something had gone wrong with the lecture theatre’s booking system. But luckily, a UWA staff member in the audience kindly organised us into a nearby room. Unfortunately, it was difficult to hear the speaker from the back with no microphone. However, Alex’s talk and Kevin Coate’s focus on the early Kimberley excursions perfectly started our Centenary year.
Alex covered 80 years of his wanderings through various patches of bush in and around Perth. He talked about what he had learnt and how it influenced his decision to become a botanist. And his slides showed the enormous changes over the years.
As a child, he could go through the back gate of his house and wander into the bush at Wireless Hill when Canning Highway was a single-lane road. There were also walks along the tramline near Blackwall Reach and the barren hills at Rocky Bay. He has observed how, since 2000, the vegetation on Point Walter spit has grown from nothing to about 15 species.
They later moved to several other places in Perth and the Darling Range. The family would take trips to such places as Swanbourne, Jandakot, and the hills, where his father would paint wildflowers, and they would all search for orchids. They learnt about wildflowers by referring to a book by Emily Pelloe and Edgar Dell’s paintings and the labelled specimens at the WA Naturalists’ Club’s famous wildlife shows at the Perth Town Hall.
Alex has many happy memories, such as a field of pink Verticordia densiflora at Crystal Brook and the family going on Lands Department picnics to Garden Island on the Zephyr. But he has witnessed some distressing changes, such as the increasing weediness of a favourite place – the zigzag at Gooseberry Hill, the spread of Arum Lily on Garden Island, and weed infestation at Kings Park.
Alex also referred to some of the people who collected around Perth. Synaphea spinulosa and Acacia truncata (collected without flowers before 1768) were thought to be ferns! Unfortunately, the early collector James Drummond was not always specific about where his plants were found. But around 1920, Emily Pelloe recorded the locality and date on her 400 paintings.
Alex stressed the importance of local conservation groups to conserve as much of the remaining bush as possible. And he would like us to consider how we relate to the bush around us. He finished with a quotation from Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.
Mike Gregson