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Botanical Revelation: European encounters with Australian plants before Darwin by David J. Mabberley

by
March 2020, no. 419

Botanical Revelation: European encounters with Australian plants before Darwin by David J. Mabberley

NewSouth, $89.99 hb, 372 pp

Botanical Revelation: European encounters with Australian plants before Darwin by David J. Mabberley

by
March 2020, no. 419

Plants are one of the first things you notice when you arrive in Australia: the swathes of olive-green trees and a crisp eucalypt scent on the air. It was the first thing many explorers noted, too, whether in Abel Tasman’s 1642 description of an ‘abundance of timber’ or in Willem de Vlamingh’s 1694 descriptions of trees ‘dripping with gum’ and the ‘whole land filled with the fine pleasant smell’ of native Callitris pines. It did not take long for accounts and samples of Australian vegetation to make their way back to Europe, although it took significantly longer for any systematic scientific work to be completed on our distinctive flora.

Danielle Clode reviews 'Botanical Revelation: European encounters with Australian plants before Darwin' by David J. Mabberley

Botanical Revelation: European encounters with Australian plants before Darwin

by David J. Mabberley

NewSouth, $89.99 hb, 372 pp

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