Sir Joseph Banks And His Florilegium

It has been 250 years since naturalist Joseph Banks sailed to the Pacific with James Cook aboard HMB Endeavour. During the voyage, Banks and his team made the first scientific collections of Australian flora. Their specimens were sketched by Sydney Parkinson, whose pioneering illustrations were published last year.

- David Mabberley

Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, first published in 1918, is the most famous book by English-born Australian illustrator and author Gibbs, who died in 1969. It is the first of her much-loved series featuring characters based on Australian plants, with the gumnut babies Snugglepot and Cuddlepie inspired by Eucalyptus species. The fruiting heads of the Banksia species became the “big bad” Banksia Men. So it was through Gibbs’ book that generations of children first heard of Banksia, a plant genus found throughout Australia. Today some 171 species are known, 150 from Western Australia, Gibbs’ home for many years.

The name Banksia was coined in 1782 to commemorate English landowner and naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, who travelled on Cook’s first Pacific voyage. Among the plant specimens he collected were the first Banksia specimens seen in Europe. Indeed, his rich botanical haul led the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus to suggest New Holland, today’s Australia, should also be called Banksia.

BANKS WAS the only son of a wealthy landowner. He had such a passion for botany that, as a University of Oxford undergraduate, he brought in his own botany tutor from rival university Cambridge. In January 1767, Banks returned from a Canadian expedition and spent the year as a dilettante naturalist and antiquarian.

During this year, he made many connections with people who were soon to play crucial roles in the very beginnings of scientific classification of plants in Australia.

Banks set up a house in London, the furnishings for which included work by upholsterer Stanfield Parkinson, whose brother Sydney was employed by Banks to draw animal specimens he had brought from Newfoundland. It is thought Sydney had been trained in natural-history illustration in his home town of Edinburgh.