Main Club March Meeting Our speaker was geologist Mike Freeman. Mike graduated from Adelaide University and has 50 years’ experience in geology, including teaching the public about geology and landforms, and being involved in the Geological Survey of WA and land-use planning on the Swan Coastal Plain. Mike talked to ...

Our speaker, following the AGM, was Ryan Glowacki, Bushland Manager for the Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority. Ryan began by talking about Quendas, which were until recently considered to be a subspecies of the Southern Brown Bandicoot, Isoodon obesulus. Now they have been assigned their own species: Isoodon fusciventer. Before ...

Main Club November Meeting Our speaker, Mikael Siversson, is the head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the WA Museum. He manages the Palaeontology collection of 1.5 million specimens at the museum, which contains for example: stromatolites from the Pilbara, fish from Gogo in the Kimberley and ...

Main Club September 2018 Meeting Dr Kenny Travouillon, Curator of Mammalogy at the WA Museum, originally worked on Riversleigh marsupial fossils for his PhD. When he first started as the Mammalian Curator at the museum he went through a box of specimens of the Western Barred Bandicoot (Perameles bougainville) and ...

Main Club October 2018 Meeting Long-term Club member Kevin Coate spoke to us about his visits to Christmas Island dating back to 1990. The island lies 2600km north-west of Perth and is formed by an extinct volcano which rises more than 4000m from the ocean floor, reaching a height of ...

Main Club August Excursion On Friday 17th August, a group of 12 naturalists from three of our branches arrived at Mt Gibson Sanctuary around midday, planning to go on our first excursion at 2pm. We decided to walk up to the quartz-stone ridge not far from our camp site, which has ...

Main Branch August Meeting Report. We welcomed back to the Club, Robert Powell, who is well-known to many of us and who’s back in Perth for a few weeks, having been living in England since 2010. Robert is known for his excellent books Leaf and Branch and Growing Locals. He ...

MAIN BRANCH JULY MEETING REPORT.  Our speaker was Renae Boyd, who is the Community Organiser with Partnership for the Outback. Renae has a BSc (Hons) in Conservation Biology from UWA and is currently completing a Masters in Environmental Management through Charles Darwin University. About twenty years ago, the West Australian ...

The WA Naturalists’ Club has been successful in an application to Lotterywest for a two-year fungal project ‘Improving local knowledge of Amanita mushrooms in Western Australia’. The total amount of the grant is $20 000, with $15 000 coming from Lotterywest and the remaining $5 000 from the WA Naturalists’ ...

Dr Laurton McGurk, Chemical Safety Officer at University of Western Australia and enthusiastic mycophile, took us on a rollicking romp around the UWA campus to look for mushrooms and other fungi. This was the subject of the Main Branch’s June talk. Her inspiration was the general, often voiced opinion that ...