Penny Olsen

A truly charming book. I'm always fascinated by the stories of the early botanists of Australia and Fitzgerald fits the description admirably. It helps that he lived in more or less the same area as I currently live in Sydney and I have taken walks past his house and in the same bushland that he obviously frequented.
Amazingly, he was actually a civil engineer rather than a botanist and his orchidology was more of a hobby/pastime than his full time employment. Or, perhaps, it's more accurate to describe him as a polymath....good at a variety of things.
I loved his paintings ....... maybe a bit crude in their detail in some cases. Actually, that's not quite accurate. His paintings are invariably accurate as far as drawing goes and colours seem pretty good but his brushwork is not especially fine. Though, one has to acknowledge that most of the orchids he was painting are actually very tiny and he was probably working with hand held magnifying glasses. His colleague Stopps, who did much of the lithography, is described as working with the aid of a kerosene lamp focussed through a bottle. How he got colours right and accuracy with such a setup is beyond me.
Fitzgerald initially set himself up in Balmain and then moved to Woolwich. I've just done a walk through Balmain, Ferry to Woolwich, then walked back to Rozelle via Hunter's Hill.....presumably walking right past the place where Fitzgerald had his "careless Irish house". He died at the age of 61....apparently widely mourned as he was described as a generous and genial man. Some of his latter work was collected by friends but was never published owing to the lack of a sponsor. A pity.
He comes across as a person of great sagacity, energy and amiability: had a lively correspondence with leading scientists of his day....including Charles Darwin. And probably Darwin's words written to his sister, whilst on the Beagle encapture Fitzgeral's life quite well: "Doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life as one can in any likelihood pursue".
Maybe worth giving some credit to Penny Olsen the author here. I just realised what a prolific writer she is, and looked, in vain, for some mention about her in the text. So I assume she is a professional writer for the National Library of Australia, who published this volume. But no: just checked her out via Google and found she is an Honorary Professor in the Division of Ecology and Evolution at the ANU and is mainly an ornithologist. She started off (apparently) as an experimental officer with the CSIRO. But still a prolific writer. The current book is mainly a set of paintings done by Fitzgerald ..along with a brief (well written) text by Olson and a shorter version by Barrie Hadlow on the botanical paintings. So, I guess, the main challenge in producing a book of this nature is to negotiate all the copyright and logistical publication hurdles, rather than the actual writing. Actually, I've just found that there is a whole significant article apparently written about Olsen's life......and her struggles to balance work and family life as a self funded biologist. I might try and find out more about her. Sounds interesting.
Happy to give this book 5 stars.… (altro)

The ornithologist Penny Olsen is the author of beautiful books about science and nature, and I've reviewed two of them:

• Collecting Ladies, Ferdinand Von Mueller and Women Botanical Artists


• target="_top">A Botanical Life: Robert David Fitzgerald

Now she has teamed up with anthropological historian Lynette Russell from the Monash University Indigenous Studies Centre to explore the contribution of Australia's Indigenous people to the body of knowledge we call zoology. Most Australians are familiar with the legacy of 19th century naturalists Joseph Banks and John Gould (and some of us who read The Birdman's Wife also know about the contribution of Elizabeth Gould too). But the silent and mostly unacknowledged partners in this enterprise drew on a body of knowledge that was sustained over millennia.

Through successive generations, using rock art, storytelling, dance and song, Australia's First Peoples passed on their extensive knowledge of animal behaviour, habitat, breeding habits and anatomical structures of fauna from land, sea and air, along with the seasonal appearance and uses of flora. For example,

Among the Yanyuwa people of the Gulf of Carpentaria, to become a dugong hunter an 'apprenticeship' must be served, during which an understanding of the animal's behaviour, habitat and anatomy is gained. To become a maranja, the term given to a skilled hunter, the apprentice must show that he has:
absorbed all of the teachings associated with the activity and can demonstrate the knowledge in all its areas, from hunting, butchering [which requires anatomical knowledge] and distribution of meat to aso knowing the more esoteric spiritual matters associated with the way of Dugong and sea turtle hunting. (p.11)

Even a quick flick through the copious illustrations in this book makes it obvious that colonial explorers, collectors and naturalists were documenting the knowledge and practices of Indigenous Australians in various ways. On page 14, for instance, there is a reproduction of an 1813 engraving called Smoking Out the Opossum by John Heaviside Clark and M. Dubourg (you can see a print of it here); and page 24 shows Nicholas Chevalier's 1862 drawing 'Aboriginal family hunting malleefowl near Echuca, Victoria (which you can see here). Early European explorers and settlers documented, for example, the annual feast of Bogong Moths in diaries and journals, and the ethnographers Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen made extensive records of the role of insects in the diet and cosmology of Central Australian Aboriginal groups. In Chapter One Olsen and Russell make the crucial point that the harvesting of insects is often ephemeral, leaving no tangible remains, so while there is evidence in cave deposits of charred remains and fragments of prey from small mammals, birds and lizards, if it had not been for these contemporaneous European observations there would be no archaeological evidence of insect use.

Apart from the use of fire, other hunting methods included pursuit with Dingoes, spearing, ambush, encirclement, stockades, pitfall traps and battues, where beaters drive game towards the hunters. The successful hunt was not only used for food, but also for making tools, utensils, clothing, waterbags and decorations - which obviously also involved knowledge about skins, sinews, bones and other body parts. The same was obviously also true of flora and fauna gathered by the women, who were taught from one generation to another, the sophisticated knowledge of seasonal produce across vast geographical areas and habitats. And the eel 'farms' of the Gunditjmara People of the Western District in Victoria, relied on knowledge of the predictable behaviour of the eels in order to engineer the waterways and wetlands to ensure a good catch. All of these activities required knowledge that was in the era of early zoology called 'natural history'.

There are some claimed elements of Indigenous knowledge that are contested. Rock art in Northern Australian that depicts extinct megafauna is not necessarily accepted as evidence, because dating shows that the paintings were done after the megafauna became extinct. However, this does not preclude the suggestion that it is a remembered image handed down through the generations.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/05/25/australias-first-naturalists-by-penny-olsen-...… (altro)