Decolonising Victoria's National Herbarium

While you might not realise it, every time you use a plant’s scientific name you’re referencing the work of herbaria – the birth places of botanical names.

The world’s herbaria are rich storehouses of biodiversity; between them they house an estimated 350 million preserved specimens of plants, algae and fungi. Each one of those specimens is a botanical time capsule – a carefully documented record of the existence of an organism at a particular place and time.

The uses of herbarium specimens are many and varied, from documenting species distributions through time, to cataloguing the diversity within each species, to providing plant tissue for DNA analysis that can help us better understand plant evolution and adaptation. But, at their most fundamental, herbarium specimens are the working tools of botanical taxonomists – scientists who describe, name and classify plants.

The names coined by botanists give us a shared language through which to talk about the plants that feed, clothe, house and delight us. But for those names to be useful – and to be used unambiguously – they need anchors. Every time a species is described and named by botanical taxonomists, its name is linked to a specimen in one of the world’s herbaria. These ‘type’ specimens provide a permanent reference point for how that name should be applied.

A global collection

The National Herbarium of Victoria at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria is a cornerstone of Australian plant taxonomy. Over 2,000 Australian plants were described and named by its founder, Ferdinand von Mueller, and thousands more specimens from the herbarium’s collection have formed the basis of species descriptions since Mueller’s time. The final tally is not yet in, but we estimate the herbarium houses over 45,000 type specimens.

The herbarium is among the world’s richest botanical collection in terms of its geographic and temporal breadth, with plant specimens collected on all continents and dating back 500 years. It is a repository of not only Victoria’s and Australia’s, but much of the world’s, biodiversity. The surprising temporal and geographic richness of the National Herbarium of Victoria’s collection comes largely from 19th century colonial explorations of southern Africa, South America and Australia.

Redressing colonial legacy

Like many herbaria and botanic gardens around the world, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria is reflecting on the colonial history of its plant collections and the ways in which Indigenous peoples’ contributions to the herbarium’s collection, and to botanical knowledge more broadly, have been obscured.

While the tens of thousands of specimens from early exploring expeditions that are held at the herbarium are all attributed to European naturalists, the success of those expeditions frequently relied on Indigenous people, who acted as guides and interpreters for European explorers. Indigenous guides also frequently shared their knowledge of local plants with expedition naturalists, who were often later credited with ‘discovering’ those same plants.

Although the names of Indigenous people who aided the collection of these specimens are not recorded, several hundred Australian specimens in the herbarium collection contain tangible traces of Indigenous Cultural Knowledge, with their labels recording plant names in Aboriginal languages or information on how plants are used by Aboriginal Peoples for food, medicine, fibre or medicinal purposes.

While we make all other collecting information associated with herbarium specimens freely available for research, any Indigenous Cultural Knowledge in the collection is purposefully withheld – for now at least – to prevent it being used without permission from its rightful owners. Instead, we are committed to establishing relationships with the Aboriginal communities whose cultural knowledge is recorded in the herbarium collection, so each community can decide if, how, and with whom that knowledge is shared.

With botanical specimens from all over the continent, it’s a process that will take time. But it’s a valuable one, not only in terms of redressing colonial control of First Peoples’ knowledge, but in opening the way to a richer understanding of plants. Most fundamentally, it’s a reminder that the botanical knowledge developed in herbaria exists alongside far older – and equally valid – ways of knowing, understanding and naming the plants that support life on Earth.

Written by Alison Vaughan, Manager Collections, Royal Botanic Gardens Australia.