Extract from ABC News
Indigenous readers are advised that this article contains some disturbing historical information.
On the fringes of Sydney, just as the suburbs taper out into farmland and bush, there's a shiny new building that holds countless secrets about this country.
The building contains an archive. But this isn't a place of stacked written records or ageing audiovisual materials.
This is a place of plants.
"When you go into the space … it has that mysterious intrigue all archives have," Prudence Gibson, plant and art researcher at the University of NSW, tells ABC RN's The Drawing Room.
"[But] in this case — there's 1.4 million [plant] specimens hidden away, in all of these drawers, inside folders pressed on a page."
The National Herbarium of NSW is considered one of the most significant botanical collections in the Southern Hemisphere.
As part of an Australian Research Council grant, Dr Gibson visited it dozens of times over two years and spent many more hours sifting through the digital archives.
She found that each specimen told a story about Australia's past.
What exactly is a herbarium?
The National Herbarium of NSW is "a place to protect plants, to conserve, restore and memorialise them", Dr Gibson writes in her new book, The Plant Thieves: Secrets of the Herbarium.
This particular herbarium has been on a long journey — from celebrating what Dr Gibson calls the "colonialist fervour to collect and dominate nature" to something very different.
It was established in 1853 and for much of its history was located in the Royal Botanic Garden on Sydney Harbour, but last year moved to the Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan.
Endless compartments and drawers hold plants collected from around Australia over the past 250 years, with major items including more than 800 plants taken on Captain Cook's 1770 voyage.
"Most of the specimens are [plants] pressed on a page. Then there's information, like labels, that say where the plant was found … and who found [it]," Dr Gibson says.
For older items, "often there's really quite poetic language by the botanists, explaining what happened when they found it or a little bit of detail about that location," she says.
'Got by Dan'
Sifting through the collection with the herbarium's staff, Dr Gibson says "there was one really incredible specimen sheet which I saw, that had a strange phrase on it".
The phrase read: "Got by Dan".
These words were written by English botanist George Caley, who worked with an Indigenous guide named Daniel Moowattin in the early 1800s.
"Daniel took George to all these places that he would never have gone to, to find all these specimens to collect and send back to [botanist Joseph] Banks in London," Dr Gibson says.
"Daniel was key to all of that knowledge … that's now in Kew Gardens as well as [in] Australian collections."
Caley later took Moowattin to London, immersing him in English life, before he returned to Australia.
But the story ended in tragedy.
"Daniel … went back to his people for a short while, but then was accused of raping a young squatter's daughter and was sentenced to death," Dr Gibson says.
"So there's a lot of sadness, actually, in going through these archives."
'Lingering horror'
During her time at the herbarium, Dr Gibson had a number of guides, including director Hannah McPherson.
Dr McPherson imparted many stories from her research, like that of little-known German botanical collector Amalie Dietrich.
In the mid-1800s, Dietrich was commissioned to travel to Australia to collect flora and fauna specimens for a new German museum.
But Dietrich's legacy is complex — and deeply problematic.
She was a trailblazing female collector who spent several years in remote Australia, amassing 20,000 plant specimens, which remain important to the scientific community.
But she also collected the skeletons of Indigenous Australians. According to a letter Dr Gibson references in her book, Dietrich asked a local family to shoot an Indigenous person so he or she could become another "specimen".
"As I walked away that day, I felt the lingering horror of Amalie's story … [And] it still hasn't left me," Dr Gibson recalls in her book.
An Australian 'zombie fungus'
Botanical collections can also include "spirit jars" — jars in which a specimen is floating in a fluid, like formaldehyde.
"When I first visited, there was one which had a witchetty grub that had been taken over by a fungus," Dr Gibson says.
It was an ophiocordyceps fungus or so-called "zombie fungus", which, at least on a fungus-versus-insect level, isn't wildly different from what's depicted in the post-apocalyptic video game and series The Last of Us.
"[This fungus] works its way through the earth until it finds a bug … then [the fungus] takes over its central nervous system and forces it — like a zombie — to go to the surface of the earth where it releases its spores and reproduces," Dr Gibson says.
"Then the insect is killed by the fungus."
And while this may sound macabre, Dr Gibson sees it differently.
"I love that story because it just shows how incredibly capable some of this life is."
A rapidly-evolving daisy
Another of Dr Gibson's more intriguing encounters at the herbarium involved a humble daisy.
Arctotheca populifolia is a beach daisy native to South Africa, which, as Dr Gibson puts it, "has done something a bit special" here in Australia.
There are 22 of these daisies in the collection, dating from 1937 to 2013.
The herbarium's Dr Claire Brandenburger shared with Dr Gibson information about the daisy, which was brought to Australia in the 1930s as a sand dune stabiliser and appeared at many beaches.
But the odd thing was, the daisy started to change.
Dr Gibson writes in her book that the daisy "has evolved so fast that it is no longer comparable to its parent population".
In very unscientific terms, this introduced species has become more Australian.
Dr Gibson says this evolution poses all sorts of questions, like should this daisy have a new name as it's become so different? And what does this say about the ability of plants to adapt and change?
Guarding secrets
While mountains of information are available to the public at the herbarium, it occasionally withholds information.
"[Certain] longitude and latitudes on the specimen sheets — the locations of where they were found — are not accessible," Dr Gibson says.
Sometimes this is because the plants are rare and potentially expensive, like native orchids. Other times it's because the plants are psychoactive — or mind-altering.
For example, mushrooms that have psilocybin.
"During mushroom season, quite a lot of people go out and pick mushrooms for potential mind-altering experiences," Dr Gibson says.
But she says the herbarium is being "really careful about protecting those plants … we really don't want them to be overharvested or overused. Because what's left is so precious".
This is one of Dr Gibson's central points: while the herbarium may have a history of theft, it's also now a place of protection.
Humans and plants
Dr Gibson's biggest aim with her research and writing is to change our relationship with plants.
"Over the last 20 years, we've seen scientific evidence … that plants can remember and learn and make decisions and communicate with one another," she says.
"How do we make sense of ourselves as humans if we ... think we [are] really superior to plant life?
"Now that we know that plants can do things that humans can do — and so much more — what does that mean for us? And what does that mean about our relationship to plants?"
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