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AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL BOTANIC GARDENS
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Ian Telford
TAPE NO. 3387/2 - IAN TELFORD
INTERVIEWED BY MATHEW HIGGINS
4 OCTOBER 1995, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL HERBARIUM
HIGGINS: Ian thank you very much for agreeing to participate in the project and I know the Friends are very grateful for your time this evening as am I and I’m looking forward to hearing some of your memories and experiences with the Australian National Botanic Gardens.
If I can start off by asking you how it was that you came to the Gardens in 1966?
TELFORD: I came to Canberra in 1963 to do the final two years of my forestry course which I never finished. I went back to Queensland for a year and worked with the Forestry Department there, came back to Canberra to repeat the final year which I had failed, didn’t get through that and then looked for a job in Canberra. With my botanical background which I had done well in in the course - it was forestry aspects that were the death of me I’m afraid - I thought working for Parks and Gardens would be a good idea so I approached them and got a position as gardener in the Botanic Gardens in November 1966 I started there.
HIGGINS: And of course it seems to me that most of the staff were ‘gardeners’ at that time in terms of classification.
TELFORD: This is Herbarium staff, of course there were the routine gardeners. At this stage I wasn’t at the Herbarium I was working as a gardening team doing the weeding, the planting and the watering and all that sort of thing. There were Herbarium staff and they were classified as gardeners too but ...
HIGGINS: So you were all on the same level in an industrial sense?
TELFORD: Yes, yes. The Herbarium technicians classification didn’t come in until much later, that’s later on in the story. So I spent several months of the summer of 66/67 working out with a gardening gang in the Gardens.
HIGGINS: Can you tell me what your first impressions were at that time because that was fairly early relatively in the Gardens history. They weren’t yet open to the public at that time.
TELFORD: No the early plantings of Lindsay Pryor of course were mature trees at that stage and there were lots of shrubs in the lower gardens, the lower terraces that were first planted but it was still pretty raw.
HIGGINS: For example, the Rainforest Gully, what was there? Was there much at all?
TELFORD: It didn’t look anything like a rainforest, there was still open woodland with a few small shrubs and trees in it. Even the tree ferns hadn’t arrived at that stage.
HIGGINS: But there had been some rainforest plantings?
TELFORD: The gully was designated as an area where rainforest plants would be planted but the concept of the transect from south to north that is represented there now wasn’t in progress then.
HIGGINS: What about another area that people would recognise fairly readily today, the Eucalypt Lawn. What state was that in in 1966?
TELFORD: Well again there were early plantings there.
HIGGINS: And was there lawn established as well?
TELFORD: No luxurious lawn. Luxuriant I suppose the word is. There was no lawn there, the irrigation wasn’t in to maintain a green lawn right up to the trunks of the trees like is present now. It was a pretty bare sort of area under the eucs.
HIGGINS: So what sort of watering system was there at stage. I mean when the Gardens were first going in the 50s there’s the famous single pipeline with three taps and lots of watering cans so it had progressed a bit beyond that by the time you started I presume.
TELFORD: Yes, lots of hose work still. The irrigation system as we have it now was to come later on.
HIGGINS: So it was still fairly manual or all manual and fairly intensive?
TELFORD: To a large extent, yes.
HIGGINS: How many gardeners were there at that time, just roughly, a couple of dozen?
TELFORD: Well the staff wasn’t that large, about I suppose fifteen or sixteen I should think.
HIGGINS: Now you had that first summer as hands on, or dirty hands on with each person actually making things grow and then you joined the Herbarium So Betty Phillips who was the Botanist, did she become aware that you had botanical interests and qualifications?
TELFORD: Well I made it known that I did so I visited them inside and chatted to the botanical staff and then was offered a position there which I started, it must have been about March or April 1967 I started in the Herbarium.
HIGGINS: And what did your work consist of?
TELFORD: Well I was still classified as a gardener as were the other Herbarium technicians. It was routine identification of specimens and in May 1967 I went on my first field trip collecting plant specimens and propagation material for the living collection. So identification and general herbarium duties like putting away of specimens that sort of thing. The mounting of specimens was done by a team of women, or two of them, who worked there doing the preparation of specimens.
HIGGINS: What were their names?
TELFORD: There was Beryl Reid and Nancy Carriage.
HIGGINS: Carriage?
TELFORD: Nancy Carriage yes.
HIGGINS: OK we’ll talk about those field trips in more detail shortly. Now the Herbarium had just moved to what I might call the 1966 building, the building where Murray Fagg’s office is today. Now prior to that it had originally been at Acton and then Downer. Do you know where it was in Downer? Where that building was?
TELFORD: I was shown the suburban house where it was housed for a few years. It had to move from Acton of course because the lake was filling and site was going to be under water and they moved it to a suburban house in Downer where it stayed until it moved to the new Herbarium in early 1966.
HIGGINS: Did it move to the famous Green Hut from the Downer ...
TELFORD: No the Green Hut was just a work station for the botanists who would come over from Downer and use that as a base for routine work in the Gardens like collecting specimens for identification and so forth.
HIGGINS: OK so the collection was never stored there?
TELFORD: The collection wasn’t stored there, no.
HIGGINS: It must have been a fairly exciting time then to have this new building built on the site and to see those new resources coming along. Was there that sort of sense about the Gardens at that time that it was really starting to get somewhere?
TELFORD: I think so. The collection was still reasonably small. I think in 1966 when I joined there must have been only about sixteen or seventeen thousand specimens. Today of course with the combined Plant Industry and Botanic Gardens collections, there’s a million or so. So it has come a long way since then.
HIGGINS: And how many of that million would be from the Botanic Gardens?
TELFORD: That million also represents the Atherton Herbarium of Plant Industry. Our lot, about 250 to 300,000 rough estimate. We didn’t know exactly because the whole collection hadn’t been data based, we didn’t actually have a real figure.
HIGGINS: Well that’s close enough just to give an indication as to how much it has grown in say thirty years. OK now I’m interested in the other people who were working with you during this early period and there were quite a few Asian students there in the Herbarium?
TELFORD: In the vacation, in the summer vacation particularly part-timers were put on and these were usually students who were majoring in botany and a lot of them were Asians from New England. We used to always have a group of New England students come down for the summer vacation. And they would do plant identifications.
HIGGINS: It’s interesting that they were interested in botany perhaps more than Australian-born students or were they just distinctive as a group and really they weren’t that numerous?
TELFORD: Oh there were Australian students too in the vacations. It wasn’t just Asian students except that because New England had a reasonable botany school in those days and has a better one now, it was just that they provided summer work for the students.
HIGGINS: One of the students, Randy Auber I believe, actually used to sleep in the building that housed the Herbarium at Downer.
TELFORD: He wasn’t a student, he was actually a employee. He wasn’t a part-timer in the summer vacation. He was part of the Herbarium Collection management I suppose you could call them. There was Peggy Craig and Randy Auber who would do the general Herbarium management. Not the identifications of the specimens but the running of the show.
HIGGINS: It just strikes me as odd that he lived in the building where the collection was housed. Was that done from a security point of view or did he just have nowhere else to live at that time?
TELFORD: This was before my time. Of course the collection had moved into the new Herbarium in 1966 but I suspect it was a suburban house and there was a kitchen and a bathroom there and for security why not have someone live on site. It probably worked out quite well.
HIGGINS: Certainly dedicated to his work. Now there were others working there at that time too. Elizabeth Carroll was another name you mentioned the other day.
TELFORD: Yes well she started a year before. She majored in botany and geology I believe at Melbourne University and she had started as the second botanist at the Herbarium. So there was Betty Phillips, the Botanist in charge and then Elizabeth Carroll as the second Botanist, yes.
HIGGINS: Yes well of course I’m very interested in learning about Betty because she played a seminal role in the development of the Gardens and you would have got to know her quite well I imagine. Could you tell me a little bit about her, firstly her role and then a little bit about her personality.
TELFORD: She had done a PhD at Manchester University. She was an ecologist because her PhD was in ecology of bog plants.
HIGGINS: Was she Australian born?
TELFORD: Oh yes, from Sydney. And then she was appointed in 1960 as the Botanist at the Gardens and as that she ran the show there was no horticulturalist. There was a Head Gardener and the gardening team but she actually ran the plant house so she would go on the field trips, collect and identify or have the specimens identified and then she would organise the planting out of the living material that had been raised from her field collections into the Gardens. She had a stocktake team who would go through and assess which ones were living and then arrange the labelling of those living plants.
In fact we owe it to Betty Phillips for the wonderful voucher system the living collection has. Many of the living plants are backed up by a voucher specimen in the Herbarium and this makes them of untold value scientifically particularly today with the work being done on sequencing to actually have this resource of material that is certified, correctly named, the voucher in the Herbarium. To have that available for modern research is wonderful. I mean we owe that to Betty Phillips, the setting up of this vouchering system.
HIGGINS: Just for the sake of lay persons, you used the expression ‘sequencing’ there. Could you describe that for me?
TELFORD: Um ...
HIGGINS: If you can, in just a few words.
TELFORD: Well everyone is familiar with DNA sequencing.
HIGGINS: So that’s what you’re referring to?
TELFORD: Yes, to show relationships between plants. This is a modern technique that is used now to work out the phylogeny of plants. The relationships, how they fit into the classifications.
HIGGINS: And of course each plant and its corresponding voucher specimen, they were identified by the same number so there was a numbering system achieved.
TELFORD: Yes, so the specimen would be collected in the bush. It would be given a number by the collector so it had the collector’s name and number attached to that. When the material came back to the Gardens it was given an accession number which stayed with the specimen and, what we called, a propagation number which went with the living material. Both of these numbers were sited on the specimen that referred to this living material, the voucher of that in the Herbarium. This was modified later on and there was a single number, a single accession number which referred to the living plant and the voucher specimen had one and the same number but that didn’t come until 1977 when we modified the system somewhat.
HIGGINS: Now you talk there about a significance in the history of the Gardens. What about personally, as a person what was Betty like? Most people have pretty strong memories of her.
TELFORD: Yes. Well she had been running the show since 1960 and when a Curator was appointed I suppose she felt that this was an invasion of her territory and may have resented it and so there always has been this aspect of animosity she had towards the horticultural staff. Probably true to some extent.
HIGGINS: So it was both apparent and real.
TELFORD: I think so, yes.
HIGGINS: Do you think that situation handicapped the Gardens development at all?
TELFORD: I can’t see how it did, no.
HIGGINS: So although there might have been personal problems between staff, it wasn’t to such a degree that it actually handicapped the work going ahead?
TELFORD: In the early stages there was David Shoobridge to smooth it over I think.
HIGGINS: And was he good at that?
TELFORD: I think so, yes.
HIGGINS: Did you have much contact with David yourself?
TELFORD: No, not very much.
HIGGINS: Did you see him on site very often?
TELFORD: He visited occasionally yes but ...
HIGGINS: Would that be weekly or monthly that he would be on site?
TELFORD: Oh Mathew, I can’t remember that.
HIGGINS: I just want to get an idea of the frequency.
TELFORD: Yes, that’s pushing my memory too far.
HIGGINS: Well it’s hard for one person to be aware of how often another person is there anyway. Now the first curator to be appointed was Ross Robbins?
TELFORD: Ross Robbins, yes.
HIGGINS: Who didn’t stay very long. What sort of a chap was Ross? I believe he was from New Zealand?
TELFORD: Um ..
HIGGINS: Well it comes across to me that John Wrigley, for example, was very much a hands on sort of person who was out there getting things growing, not a purely academic sort of person.
TELFORD: No John was an industrial chemist and growing native plants was really a hobby of his.
HIGGINS: So for example, was Ross in a similar mould?
TELFORD: No not really. Again I had very little contact with him. I was in the Herbarium and he was at the other end of the building, so really I can’t say. He was only there a few months.
HIGGINS: I get the impression from reading the files that David at least was a bit disappointed that Ross was going off to Papua New Guinea. I guess they had been hoping he might stay longer. All right, now he didn’t stay long and John Wrigley then took over the position. He was there for quite a bit longer. From 1967 to 1981. What about John, did you have a lot to do with John?
TELFORD: Yes, we went on field trips together. The first major trip to North Queensland that the Botanic Gardens ran, John and I went up to Cape York. That was in 1972. We had seven weeks I think it was up there.
HIGGINS: All right, we might at this point talk about some of these field trips. That wasn’t the first one you had been away on?
TELFORD: No the first trip was in May 1967 with Elizabeth Carroll to Queensland and then the trip I ran myself, my first one, was in August of the same year, again to northern NSW and south Queensland. Having studied botany in Queensland I tended to head that way. I realised too working in the collection where the gaps were.
HIGGINS: So who made the decisions about where the trips should be made?
TELFORD: Oh suggestions would be made to Betty Phillips and she would OK them and off we would go. I realised where the gaps were and the rain forest collection was quite poor so I made a point of chasing up rain forest species.
HIGGINS: Yes I noticed in that little book on the Botanic Gardens which came out in 1970 and a reprint in 1980 there’s a photograph credited to you captioned ‘collecting in the mangrove swamps’ so that looks pretty tropical.
TELFORD: That’s the 1972 trip with John Wrigley. Oh there’s a story I must tell about that. In the photograph you’ll see there’s a young chap carrying a rifle walking ahead and then there’s John with a knapsack filled with orchids and then I came up at the rear with the camera taking the photograph. We were walking mainly ankle deep I suppose in water through the mangrove swamp and of course this is southern Cape York crocodile country. We were walking through the mangrove swamp and we heard this rustly, rustly, splash, splash, splash coming through the water and John and I (this is after the photograph) looked around and panicked a bit and tore off through the swamp. But it turned out to be a piglet running through the water.
HIGGINS: Yes you’d want a pretty powerful rifle if you were thinking about coming up against crocs.
TELFORD: Yes, but we didn’t see any crocs.
HIGGINS: Now that was seven weeks did you say you were away?
TELFORD: It was about seven weeks.
HIGGINS: Now that’s a very long time to be away, so obviously there’s some fairly logistical planning with that. How did you travel for example?
TELFORD: We flew to Cairns and we hired a truck, a four wheel drive truck and a driver from Cairns to take us around for the whole trip. Specimens would be air freighted back to the Herbarium every three, four or five days. The shorter the better so the specimens didn’t have to sit around in the presses too long which can be deleterious to the specimens in tropical conditions.
HIGGINS: So they were the specimens for the Herbarium?
TELFORD: Yes, the pressed specimens in the plant presses.
HIGGINS: Were you also sending back cuttings for the living collection?
TELFORD: And there would be cuttings, transplants and fruit and seeds.
HIGGINS: With a transplant or a cutting, how do you keep those alive during that period?
TELFORD: They’re are wrapped up in moist newspaper and kept in an Esky and again you try to get them back as soon as possible for preparation in the nursery.
HIGGINS: So you must have had tabs on the air schedules out of Cairns so that you didn’t miss a flight.
TELFORD: Oh that’s right, yes you had to work your trip so that you’re at a ... well the little homestead airstrips we - used I think a Bush Pilot service would have been around - we used them to bring the material back to Cairns and then it was sent off to Canberra.
HIGGINS: Because you were well out from Cairns itself?
TELFORD: Yes
HIGGINS: So you wouldn’t be travelling in there every five days?
TELFORD: That’s right.
HIGGINS: And what sort of living conditions were then during the trip? Were you sleeping under canvas at night?
TELFORD: Oh yes with a mosquito net and a stretcher. That gear was provided by the driver so we didn’t have to carry all that material up with us.
HIGGINS: And were there just three of you on that one.
TELFORD: Yes.
HIGGINS: Who was the third person?
TELFORD: The driver. So there was John Wrigley, myself and the driver.
HIGGINS: Oh I see, so it was the driver carrying the rifle in that photograph.
TELFORD: No, no he was a local who we got to be guide as we walked down the estuary.
HIGGINS: I mean seven weeks is a good while to be away. Was that a valuable experience for you personally? Did you really start to feel at home up there in the tropical north or were you itching to get back to the cool climate.
TELFORD: No, I don’t like the heat I’m afraid. John and I also had two trips to the top end, to Kakadu National Park.
HIGGINS: When were they?
TELFORD: They were in 1980. We had some weeks in May and then a follow up trip in August. What we were doing was investigating the horticultural potential of some of the top end plants. So we amassed material for a trial down here in the glass houses and we sent material back, the ones that had been established for growing round the visitors centres and things like that at Kakadu.
HIGGINS: Just talking about some of your other trips. You also made a trip to Tasmania I think. Could you tell me a little bit about that. Now that’s going to the opposite extreme I suppose.
TELFORD: That was in 1969 with Estelle Canning who was working as botanist, she had replaced Elizabeth Carroll as second botanist.
HIGGINS: How long were you in Tasmania?
TELFORD: That was a shorter trip, only three weeks, if that.
HIGGINS: And collecting close to civilisation or out south west or ...
TELFORD: We went along the Gordon River Road but didn’t do much in the way of adventurous collecting. Oh yes I would go and climb a mountain or two, like Adamsons Peak I went up there, up to the summit and stayed in the little hut half way up. Also I did a couple of trips like that to get some of the higher mountain material.
HIGGINS: And some of the material that was collected back at that time, did you say 1969, so would some of that now be growing in the Tasmanian collection?
TELFORD: It could, I couldn’t say for certain.
HIGGINS: But the intent would have been ...
TELFORD: The intent would have been, a Tasmanian section had been mooted over the years.
HIGGINS: Looking at these different trips over the years because you undertook them over a substantial period of time, what sort of changes were there in them in terms of say, ease of getting material back to Canberra. Did you find that in the early trips it was more difficult, you mentioned a Bush Pilot service. As time went on the ever increasing transport and communication network in this country made that aspect of your work a bit easier?
TELFORD: Yes. I didn’t go on the famous Western Australian trip which was three months long.
HIGGINS: That was in 1968.
TELFORD: Yes. Estelle Canning went for the whole time and Betty Phillips went for half of it and John Wrigley for half of it and Bernie Saikes waas with Estelle. They had difficulty of course I should think in getting material back, but I remember the excitement of unwrapping the parcels and opening up the incredible half dried flowers in the specimen boxes.
HIGGINS: So when each lot was received at the Gardens, it was received with considerable excitement I guess by the staff.
TELFORD: Yes
HIGGINS: This was material that few, if any of you, had seen before?
TELFORD: And a few turned out to be new to science in fact. From that trip quite a few specimens have been nominated as type specimens.
HIGGINS: Could you give me some examples of that?
TELFORD: Ah, I know there might be three or four collections of Betty Phillips’ that are types. 'Species' you’ve got me there I think Matthew.
HIGGINS: All right, well bring that a bit more into your own personal experience then. Are there some plants that you can tell me about which you collected in your trips which were either new to science or of particular significance in terms of the Gardens collection and what we have today? The high points for you as a botanist on those trips.
TELFORD: When you find a plant and you get back and you try to work out what species it is and you can’t and you think, ‘“Oh this may be new”’, and you send it off to a specialist and they confirm that it is new and then they name it as a new species and nominate your collection as a type specimen, that’s quite exciting.
HIGGINS: It must all seem very worthwhile at that point.
TELFORD: It does.
HIGGINS: That you are making a contribution.
TELFORD: And the living material I’ve collected over the years too, I always enjoy walking out into the rainforest gully and looking into the Nothofagus grove, Nothofagus moorei grove which is in the MacPherson Range section and one of the trees dates from a seedling I collected on Dorrigo in 1967. It was a few centimetres high and now it’s a large tree. It is always gratifying to look at that.
HIGGINS: Now of course people had been collecting for the Gardens prior to your time. I mean Lindsay Pryor, Erwin Gauba would be going out in the fifties and of course Betty Phillips from 1960 onwards and then after Betty there was Arthur Court’s period as Botanist. Would you like to comment on their different styles of collecting. I think the other week you made some points about how intensively one person collected compared to another etc
TELFORD: Well I suppose I should talk about the styles of data collection and specimen collection and the presentation of the data on the specimen. All of this is quite important and shows the different styles and scientific styles I suppose you would call them of the botanists that have led the Herbarium or worked in the Herbarium.
Back when Betty Phillips was Botanist there was not much of a tradition of collecting a lot of data on habitat like soils, vegetation, associated species so in her field notebooks that is only briefly mentioned and so the data on the labels that are attached to the specimens from her collections is quite scanty and was hand-written. The labels were hand-written in ink.
Then when Arthur Court was appointed and more so when Mike Crisp was appointed, and he was appointed in early 1975. Arthur arrived in early 1974.
HIGGINS: Mike was what, second botanist to Arthur?
TELFORD: Yes, so Arthur had worked in Melbourne Herbarium. Michael had just received his PhD in ecology from Adelaide University. It was Mike’s first job. In fact he was appointed with his ecological background to assist with the horticultural side of the Gardens but got into taxonomy very early on. He realised that more data on habitat should be collected with the specimens.
And so Michael, with the aid of David Cummings, drew up a new field notebook that had prompts to prompt you to take notes on geology, soil, vegetation type and associated species, this sort of data. So if you look at the labels being prepared ... at about that stage too, the labels were typed, so label preparation was much easier for the botanists. Instead of laboriously hand writing the labels, the field notebooks were passed onto typists who typed up the label that was attached. Things improved later on of course when the collection was data based and the new accessions were keyed in and the labels were computer generated. Of course this took away a lot of the drudgery of label generation.
HIGGINS: Just comparing those different periods with different people, and again in another way, how adventurous do you think, to use that word, some of these different people were? I mean how far off the beaten track did they go?
TELFORD: Well Mike was adventurous. He liked to climb mountains he knew where new species may be so together we discovered Eucalyptus imlayensis on the summit of Mt Imlay on the south coast of NSW. We collected the type of that together. In fact Mike named that species.
HIGGINS: And you were with him on the trip?
TELFORD: Yes.
HIGGINS: When was that?
TELFORD: Um 1977 I think. We spent several days down on the south coast.
HIGGINS: What about Betty herself in this regard?
TELFORD: Her favourite collecting vehicle was a Kombi Van. I don’t know why, she wasn’t particularly adventurous. Without the four wheel drive she didn’t get into more wild areas and so the collection reflected that early on. So when we got more adventurous and had four wheel drive trip vehicles we could fill in the gaps that were quite obvious in the collection where the species where not represented. We could run off into areas of more difficult terrain and add them to the collection. Both to the Herbarium and to the Gardens.
HIGGINS: Now I realise that Lindsay Pryor and Erwin Gauba had gone on from the Gardens a good while before you started, but were they looked up to well not as legendary figures but did people speak of their names in hallowed terms for the pioneering work they did in terms of collecting?
TELFORD: Oh I suppose so, but mainly in frustration at the little data recorded on the Herbarium labels so today when Sarah York for instance is trying to work out the locality and it just says ‘Central Australia’, that’s no help.
HIGGINS: Sarah York was that?
TELFORD: Yes she’s the ... what’s her title? She’s Registrar, she registers and keys in all the data on the collections.
HIGGINS: Yes I’ve noticed on some of the collection specimens that I’ve seen there are very much more precise statements like ‘wet, sandstone, slate’ or something like that as well as the actual regional name which gives the horticulturalist a much greater idea of how to propagate or to cultivate the material in the Gardens.
TELFORD: Oh yes, the requirements are essential for the siting of the plant correctly in the garden bed.
HIGGINS: Otherwise the people here are in the dark trying to grow it. Now how often were you going out on collecting trips? Was it an annual event or more often than that?
TELFORD: Probably a largish one and a smallish one. Large would be three or four weeks once a year perhaps. Maybe a shorter one as well.
HIGGINS: Were they looked forward to by the Herbarium staff as the high point of the year?
TELFORD: I think so. I certainly enjoyed field work and I’ve done a fair amount of it. I’ve travelled from the tip of Cape York to the bottom of Tasmania and from Cocos Keeling Islands to ... well I collected on Lord Howe that wasn’t an official field trip but I’ve collected on Lord Howe and Norfolk Island which was official. The most easterly territory.
HIGGINS: Ok, I think that’s most of the questions about collecting trips that I had in mind. Just go back to our discussion about the personalities of the place. Now we were talking about John Wrigley and you mentioned that after the position of Curator was begun there was some difficulty with Betty because she had formerly had that role of running the horticultural side of things so there were difficulties that John faced in his work because of Betty’s viewpoint on that subject?
TELFORD: Yes, well she thought of it I suppose as invasion of her territory as she had organised the plant outs, positioned the plants even in the garden as well collecting them and identifying them. Then along comes a Curator. Yes, there were difficulties but I don’t think it affected the Gardens.
HIGGINS: Now Betty was succeeded by Arthur Court who came up from Melbourne Botanical Gardens ...
TELFORD: Oh, that prompts me now Mathew, thanks. Betty had had some ill health and had some time off and the stocktake team had answered to Betty Phillips as Botanist. They were the people who went around and saw which plants had survived and mapped the garden beds marking the position of the plants on them and organised the labelling of the plants, put out the labels and organised the carving of the labels. They have a little engraving machine; they actually did their own engraving at that stage in the Green Hut.
So in one of these periods of Betty Phillips’ ill health the stocktake team was taken over and looked after by John Wrigley. They answered to John Wrigley, not to Betty Phillips. That caused a bit of a problem particularly when Arthur Court took over. So Betty retired because of ill health and then Arthur was appointed as the Senior Botanist but the stocktake team didn’t go back so the position that Arthur Court took up wasn’t quite as he expected. He thought he would be running a bit more of the botanical side than he actually got.
HIGGINS: His personality was a rather different one to Betty’s too, wasn’t it?
TELFORD: Yes. Both were difficult to some extent to work under but in Arthur Court’s day there was Mike Crisp there and he was my superior. Mike was wonderful and then Mike did more than anyone else to increase the scientific standing of the Herbarium. The Gardens of course had quite a bit of horticultural kudos but the Herbarium was quite low in scientific standing. Betty Phillips never presented a taxonomic paper or published anything taxonomic, nor did Elizabeth.
HIGGINS: So they weren’t going out and speaking at conferences and getting themselves known?
TELFORD: Or publishing new species. Mike lifted all of that and also then Jim Armstrong arrived as Curator, a botanical research section was set up later on and this pushed the scientific standard of the Herbarium even higher.
HIGGINS: My understanding was that well I think you said the other week that the Gardens Herbarium had a low scientific standing particularly in comparison with CSIRO. Did you say that the other day?
TELFORD: Well there was this, you could almost say, rivalry. Betty Phillips as Botanist-in-Charge at the Botanic Gardens Herbarium and Nancy Burbidge as Botanist-in-Charge at the Plant Industry Herbarium as neighbours virtually in Clunies Ross Street and Plant Industry of course belonging to a scientific institution, CSIRO, with taxonomic publications coming out from the botanists employed there. So yes, so there was this difference of the scientific standing of the two institutions but there was a bit of stifling I think of the scientific endeavour in the Botanic Gardens by Plant Industry. There was a botanist, in those days she was employed as a gardener like we all were, called Jean Pulley.
HIGGINS: P-U-L-L-E-Y is that right?
TELFORD: Yes. She had worked on Plantago, the taxonomy of Plantago - the plantains - for her honours project and wanted to do further taxonomic research at the Gardens and she wanted to work on the genus Hibbertia. Now there was a botanist called Ruh Hoogland, Plant Industry who was interested on working on that group too and pressure was brought to bear by a letter to the minister I believe to actually suppress the research at the Botanic Gardens.
HIGGINS: And did that occur?
TELFORD: Yes it did. It took quite a while to overcome this and Mike Crisp eventually fought it and was allowed to do taxonomic research at the Gardens.
HIGGINS: So that was a break through?
TELFORD: Mmm.
HIGGINS: When I was talking to Dave Shoobridge last year he was saying that the CSIRO or Nancy couldn’t get a good building or good buildings for its herbarium collection whereas the Gardens did. I’m not sure whether he’s referring to the 1966 building or the 1974 herbarium building which would seem to indicate at least that the Gardens were getting resources for their herbarium even in spite of this perhaps higher scientific or higher academic profile at CSIRO.
TELFORD: Yes the building that the herbarium was housed in in those days at CSIRO was one of those tin huts that are still standing in a row along the lower levels there. In fact it’s not to do with the CSIRO that we’re talking here, but the building of Barry Drive was held up, there was a loop put in it, it was partly constructed as a loop until the new Herbarium was finished and then the shed was demolished and Barry Drive was completed. Nancy had organised that at least ...
HIGGINS: So the site for her new herbarium was what was causing the loop in Barry Drive, or the other way around?
TELFORD: No, no. The new building for her herbarium hadn’t been completed and to save having to pack the specimens up so the old herbarium could be demolished to allow the completion of Barry Drive, they actually held up Barry Drive and put a loop in it until the new herbarium was finished and the move could be finished.
HIGGINS: So she’s obviously a woman with a forceful personality and some weight.
TELFORD: Oh yes she was.
HIGGINS: Continuing on about the Herbarium significance at different times of course Erwin Gauba’s collection went with him to the ANU in 1960 I understand and therefore the Gardens had to start collecting all over again?
TELFORD: Not all of it, there are still quite a few Gauba collections in the Herbarium here.
END OF SIDE 1 OF TAPE
TELFORD: But yes it did go to the ANU with Pryor and Gauba to become the basis of the university herbarium which was called ‘The Gauba Herbarium’ of course.
HIGGINS: Did you ever meet Gauba yourself.
TELFORD: No. There’s another link there of course because Mike Crisp of course is now botany lecturer at ANU and so he looks after the Gauba Herbarium so there’s another little link there.
HIGGINS: Circles.
TELFORD: Yes.
HIGGINS: Now the cryptogam collection which now comprises the herbarium still remaining at the Gardens site as I understand, that was established in 1977, could you talk a little bit about that. Why was it decided to commence herbarium collections in that area?
TELFORD: Well Heinar Streimann had been working at the Gardens for a year or two then.
HIGGINS: Could you just spell that out?
TELFORD: S-T-R-E-I-M-A-N-N. He had come down from New Guinea where he had been working as a botanist and realised the deficiencies in the cryptogamic collections in Canberra and set about rectifying that by starting moss, liverwort and lichen collections.
At that stage too, Doug Verdon, V-E-R-D-O-N, he had been working at the Gardens for a while at that stage but he was interested too and so he helped hire, collect, identify and establish the cryptogamic collection. I must tell you about Doug Verdon’s original appointment. He had been working at Yarralumla Nursery where he had been working on grasses and of course we were part of Parks and Gardens in those days so Yarralumla Nursery and Botanic Gardens were under the same umbrella. They thought Doug would be valuable working in the Herbarium with his skills in identification particularly of grasses where he had been working but there was no gardener position available. So Doug was appointed as telephonist. So he was working in the Herbarium identifying plants with the classification of telephonist.
HIGGINS: So officially he was telephonist and I suppose if anyone from the Public Service Board came around he had to go and quickly, don headphones and answer some phones.
Was there any impact on the Herbarium resulting from the move from the Department of the Interior or Capital Territory as it was then in 1985 to Department of Arts, Heritage and Environment. Did that have any impact at all as far as resourcing or organisation?
TELFORD: It didn’t have any impact on the work I was doing.
HIGGINS: It subsequently moved to Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service in 1990. Did that have any effects?
TELFORD: Not in the area that was affecting me.
HIGGINS: Nothing that you can speak of?
TELFORD: No, except really I should say for the size of the collection. If you look at staff numbers in the Herbarium with the collection of 16,000 in 1966 and staff numbers in the Herbarium with a collection of 250,000 in 1992 to 93, you will realise there the effects of the staffing that may have resulted from policies that were changed because of the switching around but I can’t say.
HIGGINS: Are you saying that it was understaffed or ...
TELFORD: Oh yes. With the small collection and the staff it had back in the sixties compared with the size of the collection and the staff it had in the nineties, the size of the collection is way beyond the means of the staff.
HIGGINS: Before going to the background to the move of the herbarium collection over to where we are now, just the buildings at the Gardens site. Now of course the first purpose-built herbarium building was 1966 and replaced in 1974. Why was that new building built? Was it simply that the collection had outgrown the old one or was there more to it than that?
TELFORD: There was a nasty story that Betty Phillips wanted her own little kingdom up the hill away from the horticultural people who moved into her building but I don’t know if there’s any truth in that. David Shoobridge might have commented, I don’t know.
HIGGINS: But do you know why, was it purely a need for a bigger building?
TELFORD: Oh no the Herbarium was only half built anyhow.
HIGGINS: Half built? The 1974 building?
TELFORD: Yes, no no, the 1966 building was never completed while it was the herbarium. It was a bit later on. But there was scope for doubling the size of the space but that didn’t happen while it was the Herbarium. It happened later on.
HIGGINS: With the entire new building?
TELFORD: When the new building was built and then the herbarium space was altered in the old building to office space and laboratories, laboratories in fact at first.
HIGGINS: In 1994 finally the long mooted move of the herbarium collection takes place from the Gardens here to the CSIRO establishment which is now called the Australian National Herbarium. Could you give me some idea of the background to that move. I believe that there were precedents even from Dickson’s time in the 1930s onwards in terms of the need to have all this collection in one area rather than having several disparate herbarium collections.
TELFORD: Well I believe when Dickson wrote the report Plant Industry had just started assembling an herbarium and I suspect Dickson had hoped that the Plant Industry Herbarium may in fact be the herbarium associated with the Gardens. I don’t know if that was in his mind or not because throughout the world the example of a herbarium of high standing associated with a botanic gardens of high standing, I use the example of Kew which is the most famous one, but right across the States there’s New York Botanic Gardens and its herbarium, Missouri Botanic Gardens and its herbarium, the association of herbarium and botanic gardens. Maybe Dickson had hoped that this would have happened on the Black Mountain site but it didn’t. The Herbarium was started by Pryor and Gauba and the vouchers were put into the Botanic Gardens herbarium for the living collections that were made for the Gardens and the Plant Industry one was used for their own research purposes so they had different aims.
HIGGINS: That is CSIRO vis a vis the Botanic Gardens. Do you think that Dickson’s choice of the Black Mountain site might have been influenced by that site being here?
TELFORD: ... Plant Industry being here adjacent. I think so. It can’t have been for the soils, atrocious clays and rocks on the sides of Black Mountain.
HIGGINS: Sorry did I interrupt your flow there when you were making the point that Pryor established his own Gardens herbarium so the Gardens own herbarium started from that point?
TELFORD: Yes.
HIGGINS: And grew from that. Now there was a third herbarium in Canberra, a forestry herbarium too I understand.
TELFORD: Yes that was taken over by Plant Industry a few years ago, that was over at Yarralumla.
HIGGINS: The old Forest Research Institute. With the move here to the CSIRO for you and I guess other members of Gardens staff in late 1994, what sort of impact was there for you personally to be moved off the site over here?
TELFORD: A bit isolated I’m afraid. It was rather nice to actually be working in an herbarium in a garden so that even though we are not that far away, it’s still removed from the Gardens. It was rather nice to just walk out of the building and walk down the garden path amongst plants you had collected and identified. It was a feeling of belonging which isn’t quite the same on this site at CSIRO.
HIGGINS: And is there still the same contact that you would have had with the horticultural staff over there. I assume that there’s a constant contact back and forth between the two sides.
TELFORD: Oh yes. Specimens are still sent over for identification for the stocktake team but again in the Herbarium on the garden site you could go out and chat to the gardeners who are tending the gardens and again perhaps tending plants you collected. You’d see them working in the garden outside and you’d go out and have a chat to them about what conditions that species ...
HIGGINS: Prostantheras are looking good sort of thing.
TELFORD: Yes and what conditions they like in the wild and so forth which of course is impossible from here.
HIGGINS: We’ll just go back, we skipped over a couple of things. Again talking about people and their influence on the place, for the first nearly ten years of your period with the Gardens Dave Shoobridge was ultimately at the helm as head of Parks and Gardens and Robert Boden was appointed as first Director in 1979 a few years after Dave had retired, would you like to talk about those two people in terms of their influence on the establishment.
TELFORD: Well ...
HIGGINS: For example during David’s period we see really the concreting of the Gardens, you know buildings going in, the infrastructure, the stone walling and roads and water, all those vital things which really got the Gardens to a stage where they could be opened by the Prime Minister in 1970. What sort of a person was David because he’s obviously a significant figure in the history of the Gardens. I know you said you didn’t see him very often but are you in a position to comment on say that period versus the later period?
TELFORD: No not really. Ferretting away in the Herbarium working on looking down the microscope and on field trips identifying. I just wasn’t involved in that side of things. The administration was really of little interest to me I must admit.
HIGGINS: All right, putting it in a different way, I’m just trying to get an idea of how the culture of the place changed because you have been associated with it for nearly thirty years. Can you comment on how the culture or ethos of the Gardens has changed over time. Have there been changes?
TELFORD: Oh yes quite obvious ones. The botanical side of things, we are at the Botanic Gardens so one would think that presentation of the plants would be almost the be all and end all but things have changed a little and public programs have gone in other directions with not such a ....
HIGGINS: Do you mean it has become broader?
TELFORD: It’s broader yes. Possibly to the detriment of the botanical side of it. In the horticultural side of things there was the intention when I started this to collect the plants from the wild. So the charter of the Gardens was to have in cultivation as many native Australian plants as possible, but things changed and plants were bought from nurseries so there were no wild origins. They weren’t as scientifically valuable as those from wild collections.
HIGGINS: When did that nursery purchasing start to come about?
TELFORD: Oh it’s an insidious thing building up through the years. Not that there weren’t nursery raised plants planted in the Gardens with no known wild origins back in the sixties. I remember some potted Cordylines came over from Yarralumla Nursery and these were planted in the Gardens and then it was realised they were New Zealand Cordylines not Australian Cordylines.
HIGGINS: And they were summarily ripped out.
TELFORD: Yes they were.
HIGGINS: Has that been significant though, the numbers of plants planted that haven’t come from the wild?
TELFORD: It has increased yes. The cultivar registration authority was taken on board by the Gardens and so the growing of cultivars was pushed a little, a little too much I think. With a limited gardening staff it spreads it thinly when you’ve got to tend these manipulated plants as well as the wild things.
HIGGINS: So is what you are saying Ian that the aims or activities of the Gardens had broadened out and possibly because of lack of staff and other resources possibly to the detriment of those original aims.
TELFORD: I think so to some extent.
HIGGINS: Certainly one change that is apparent to me and this is probably a natural evolutionary thing, is when the Gardens started there was always a very strong emphasis upon scientific and research aspects of the Gardens and they were definitely NOT a public a public recreation park. Even in 1967 it was stated for example that there wouldn’t be a kiosk which was symptomatic of that public recreation side of things which you see in all botanic gardens and yet of course in 1980 the kiosk was opened and now we have various activities such as the plant sculpture show which I am sure would never have been foreseen by earlier leaders of the Gardens. How do feel about that? Do think this growth is still in keeping with the Botanic Gardens or is there a diminishing integrity?
TELFORD: I have my doubts about a bit of it. It’s nice to build up visitation figures by holding concerts and so forth but I would like to see the plants get a better go and be pushed a little more but then I suppose you’ve got to cater to what the public wants and if the public wants fast foods and concerts that’s what they get to build up the numbers otherwise they stay away if they don’t want to see the wonderful flora of Australia presented in a garden setting. If they want concerts and fast foods it’s a problem I think and does defeat the purpose to some extent of the Gardens. Walking through the Gardens today the smell of frying oil permeating the rainforest gully is not pleasant.
HIGGINS: I think you’ve made the point well there. One particular event which I assume that you were at was the official opening in 1970. Did you attend?
TELFORD: I was there.
HIGGINS: Can you tell me about that because I understand that although it was an auspicious event in many ways, it was somewhat embarrassing when it came to John Gorton’s speech. Do you remember those sorts of details?
TELFORD: No, I don’t sorry.
HIGGINS: Well the speech ran along and to some extent he can be excused I guess but from my understanding he made the point that, ‘If this isn’t a fantastic botanic garden, which I am sure it is, but if it isn’t Mr Shoobridge will attend to it’ which is very embarrassing for poor David. Do you remember that speech?
TELFORD: No.
HIGGINS: What was the feeling within the staff finally that the place was open officially, was it a big day for you all.
TELFORD: Well there had been people coming through for a couple of years before then but really it was just an official function which really didn’t mean much, I don’t think, to the staff because it had been open. It made no change to the running of the place.
HIGGINS: Of course the Gardens did open to the public I guess about a year after you began, September 1967 when the public started coming in. So you weren’t there for a long time without the public being around, but was it apparent to you even though you were off with the microscope in the Herbarium that there was a lot of public interest in the Gardens? Were there a lot of people coming in?
TELFORD: Oh I think so, yes. The old herbarium was down low and above, in those days, the newly constructed ponds and the path came up from the parking area past the ponds so we saw the people arriving. Yes it grew quite quickly.
HIGGINS: Now you also played a role in the horticultural side of the Gardens to some degree and speaking now with particular reference to the Rainforest Gully and you offered some advice in that regard as to the systematic organisation of that. Could you tell me something about that?
TELFORD: Yes well the first plantings in the gully were in a random fashion with no natural groupings of species from one area or another and I thought it would be a good idea to use the length of the gully as a transect down eastern Australia with the lower end of the gully as Tasmania and the top end northern Queensland. So as one followed the path up the gully one would go through the different regions and the associated rainforest species of that region growing together planted in a naturalistic way.
Over the years that was developed and at the present stage it’s not bad. There are a few little shrubs and trees still out of place with some Sydney basin things growing in north Queensland and that sort of thing but I think with a little bit of work it will be a fine example of Australian rainforests. Now it’s getting to maturity my little Nothofagus that was a few centimetres high now is a big tree and quite a few of the other trees are now approaching quite large proportions, it starts to look like a rainforest. When the first trees were put in and there were a few tree ferns and a bit of Eucalyptus and a bit of grass it didn’t look very rainforesty and we had our doubts for a while but it has come good.
HIGGINS: There was a wind storm I believe at one time which took out a number of trees in the rainforest gully and broke a number of the tops off trees. Do you recall that?
TELFORD: Some of the tall eucalypts yes.
HIGGINS: When was that, do you remember?
TELFORD: It was fairly recently, a couple of years ago.
HIGGINS: There was one then but I think there was one earlier in David’s time.
TELFORD: Oh maybe. What has influenced the gully more than anything of course it was an open Eucalyptus forest gully naturally on Black Mountain but when the irrigation was put in of course the Eucalyptus trees couldn’t stand that amount of water and so they died. Perhaps they should have been removed before the plantings were made but the removal of the dead eucalypts out of the establishing rainforest was quite difficult with the cranes brought in to lift out the tree bits.
HIGGINS: Well those mature eucalypts have been left intentionally haven’t they to provide shelter for the younger plants?
TELFORD: To provide shelter yes but they could have been taken out earlier or taken out before the rainforest plantings were put in and the nurse trees like rainforest acacias put in as the nurse trees like blackwood Acacia melanoxylon which is a rainforest Acacia which is fast growing would provide required shelter. That could have been put in and the eucs taken out. I don’t think the effect of the high water regime on the eucs was foreseen originally. I think that might have been the problem.
HIGGINS: We were talking a little bit earlier about this scientific versus public recreational role of the Gardens and the realisation of the Gardens' original aims, you commented the other week about Burley Griffin’s original aim itself of a continental arboretum which I guess is the starting point for the concept of the Gardens, would you like to talk about that and what you feel about the continental arboretum had it been achieved?
TELFORD: Well I think Burley Griffin’s vision of a huge botanic gardens around the lake shores was wonderful and it’s a pity that Weston, I suppose it would have been in those days in charge of the nursery at Yarralumla, didn’t actually push for that and start doing major plantings of trees and shrubs in the areas designated as the various continental areas by Burley Griffin on his plan. I believe there was some discouragement by Joseph Maiden at the Sydney Botanic Gardens saying a lot of these things won’t grow in Canberra. There was a push for deciduous trees and street trees and so forth.
HIGGINS: I’m sure that is one of the miracles of the Gardens that staff have been so successful in making such a wide range of plant material survive in this climate.
TELFORD: And on the Black Mountain soils.
HIGGINS: If I asked you to nominate your favourite part of the Gardens, if indeed you have one, would it be the rainforest gully or ...
TELFORD: I think it might be Mathew.
HIGGINS: That’s close to those Queensland roots.
TELFORD: Yes
HIGGINS: All right just continuing after that short break Ian, we’ve discussed a little bit earlier about some of the workers within the Herbarium and you were going to make some other comments on the longer term staffing situation within the Herbarium.
TELFORD: Well with the preparation of specimens, I might talk about that. I mentioned how we had positions called the specimen preparators who would look after the drying of the specimens and the mounting of the specimens on the herbarium board with the label glued on to get the specimen ready for incorporation into the Herbarium with its associated data. These positions were slowly whittled away as other areas of the Gardens were manned. The scope of the Gardens widened, the staff ceiling was there and it seemed that the Herbarium positions suffered because of this and the Herbarium technicians who were doing the collecting and the identification had to do the specimen preparation as well.
Luckily, with Bob Makinson as the Curator the awful problem of a backlog of specimens which was building up to be a mountain of unprocessed material, the problem was partly solved at least by the volunteer mounting set-up with the volunteers drawn from the Friends, to a large extent, and they took over the job of mounting the specimens not the drying of them that was still done by the technicians but the mounting of the specimens. Now they’re over here at the CSIRO site with a much larger mountain of backlog of specimens.
HIGGINS: They’ve inherited other people’s.
TELFORD: Yes, so we’re eating into that slowly.
HIGGINS: This period we’re talking about is from the early nineties onwards.
TELFORD: Oh yes Bob from the early nineties but before then the positions were going and not being replaced as people retired.
HIGGINS: With the Internship Scheme is that a separate ...
TELFORD: Again Bob Makinson is responsible for that. We started that in the summer of 1992 drawing upon botany students from universities of south eastern Australia. We offered 15 positions working in the Herbarium. They had tuition and helped us with Herbarium duties and we took them on tours of research institutes in Canberra and we have continued that to the present day. We’ll be having another group in during January 1996.
HIGGINS: All right Ian we seem to have covered most of the subjects that we had in mind this evening, so once again thanks very much for your time.
TELFORD: Pleasure Mathew.