John Staer (1850–1933): the patronym behind Eucalyptus staeri, the Albany Blackbutt
Alexandra Ludewig
A *
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A School of Humanities, The University of Western Australia, Crawley Campus, Perth, WA 6009, Australia.
* Correspondence to: alexandra.ludewig@uwa.edu.au
Historical Records of Australian Science 34(2) 123-135 https://doi.org/10.1071/HR23003
Published: 17 July 2023
© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the Australian Academy of Science. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
Millennia of evolutionary ecology have seen Australia become one of the driest and flattest continents on Earth—and in the process, home to more than 700 species of Eucalyptus. Colonial scientists named them using a binomial system, thereby overwriting local vernaculars that had persisted for tens of thousands of years. This paper traces the man commemorated in the Albany Blackbutt, Eucalyptus staeri, a tree unique to the Great Southern region of Western Australia, traditionally the land of the Menang Noongar people. Using a biographical lens, the paper examines the intersection of Western science and commerce in plant collection and naming, and the ways in which these processes exclude or discount Indigenous knowledge. The paper argues that a more holistic and inclusive historical interpretation of herbarium specimens of E. staeri is achieved by correcting and re-analysing information about the German settler after whom it is named, John Staer, while at the same time acknowledging the Noongar people’s deep knowledge (kartijin) of plants that has been passed down over many thousands of years.
Keywords: botany, colonial Australia, Eucalyptus, Great Southern, Indigenous history, Menang, Noongar.
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