Abstract

Plants, Places and Space: Exploring Indigenous Knowledge in the Pacific, c. 1768-1839 The period from the time of James Cook’s voyages in the late 1760s to the mid nineteenth century saw more plant species being described as ‘new’ to European natural history than ever before or since. Central to this was increased travels in the Pacific—during which European naturalists placed extensive reliance on information supplied by Indigenous people. After giving an overview of earlier accounts, this talk explores the extensive archive of botanist Allan Cunningham (1791–1839) who was employed on the recommendation of Joseph Banks as the King’s Collector for Kew, one of the first state funded appointments of its kind, to collect and record the plants of Australia and New Zealand in the early nineteenth century. Cunningham relied on accounts given by Indigenous Australians and Māori when collecting, tabulating descriptions of the geographical distribution and uses of plants with the construction of a new ‘statistical’ botany of these regions. In this talk I demonstrate how information obtained from Indigenous people, through a variety of diverse means that represent the fraught political landscape in a period referred to as ‘the age of revolutions,’ shaped systems of classifying the natural world often regarded as the invention of naturalists based in European institutions.