Allan Cunningham – Australian Collecting Localities by Suzanne Curry, Bruce Maslin & John Maslin
ABOUT THE BOOK
Have you ever visited Point Cunningham, Western Australia?
Have you stopped at Cunningham, New South Wales or Cunningham’s Gap, Queensland?
Perhaps you have admired the beautiful Crotalaria cunninghamii commonly known as the green bird flower, or the grove of bungalow palms (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana) in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens.
Who was the person honoured by these names?
Allan Cunningham was one of Australia’s foremost botanist explorers. During his 17 years in Australia, he was responsible for collecting more than 3000 specimens of plants and exploring much of eastern New South Wales and southern Queensland.
The focus of this publication is to provide precise locality information for the numerous localities visited by Allan Cunningham between December 1817 and April 1822 when he was the botanist accompanying Phillip Parker King on his hydrographic surveys of the Australian coastline.
This information will facilitate the duration of Cunningham’s plant specimens, which are distributed among herbaria worldwide, and will assist those who wish to revisit his collecting localities.
Also provided is a synoptic, chronological listing of Cunningham’s entire itinerary for the period of his stay in Australia (1816-1839).
The above text is quoted from the inside cover of the book.
© Commonwealth of Australia 2002
Published by ABRS Australian Biological Resources Study
GPO Box 787 Canberra ACT 2601 Australia
ISBN 0642568189 (paperback)
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Suzanne Curry was a Technical Officer at the CALM Western Australian Herbarium, Science and Information Devision responsible for research curation. She has been researching Cunningham for the many years. The species Acacia curryana is named for Suzanne Curry and is an acknowledgement for her work as Bruce. Maslin’s Research Assistant between 1980 and 1988. During this period she provided support in the laboratory and in the field. Her organisational skills and attention to detail were demonstrated during the preparation of the Acacia treatment for the Flora of Australia volumes (Orchard & Wilson 2001, 2001a). A by-product of this work was a book detailing the Australian collecting localities of Allan Cunningham (Curry et al. 2002). 1
Bruce Roger Maslin AM (born 3 May 1946) is an Australian botanist and is a renowned Acacia taxonomist. Born in Bridgetown, Western Australia, he obtained an honours degree in botany from the University of Western Australia in 1967, then took up an appointment as a botanist with the Western Australian Herbarium. The following year he was conscripted to serve in the Vietnam War; he gave three years in National Service, serving in Vietnam in 1969. In 1970 he returned to his position at the Western Australian Herbarium, serving in that institution until 1987. During this time he was Australian Botanical Liaison Officer in 1977 and 1978; editor of Nuytsia from 1981 to 1983; and acting curator in 1986 and 1987. In 1987, Maslin was appointed a Senior Research Scientist, still within the Department of Environment and Conservation. A specialist in the genus Acacia, he has published around 250 Acacia taxa. He retired from his position at the Western Australian Herbarium in 2017, after 48 years of service and more than 180 scientific papers and articles. He has continued his Acacia work as an Honorary Research Associate at the Herbarium and has conducted research in south, south-east and east Asia, dealing with the region’s Acacia sens. lat taxonomy and nomenclature. Bruce was awarded Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2017.
2
John Maslin created the maps in this publication. A search of the internet has not revealed any extra information about him.
- Source: Nuytsia 24; 193-205 – The Journal of the Wester Australian Herbarium 24th August 2014 – Article by Bruce R Maslin “Four new species of Acacia section Juliflorae (Fabaceae: Mimosoideae) from the arid zone in Western Australia“[↩]
- Source : Wikipedia – Bruce R Maslin[↩]