In this blog for the Environment and Gender series, Susan Broomhall discusses the history of Indigenous women’s knowledges and botanical collecting.
In 2025, I edited a Themed Issue of Australian Historical Studies exploring how gender ideologies have shaped management of resources in settler colonial Australia. The issue brings into conversation new lenses on Australian environmental history, with studies by Clare Davidson, Lorinda Cramer, Galiina Ellwood and Janice Wegner, Ruby Ekkel, Ruth A. Morgan, Katie Holmes and Karen Twigg, and myself.
Among the issue’s many contributions are further analyses of the involvement of settler colonial women and men in processes that rendered Aboriginal women and girls ‘resources’ to be ‘managed’ in Australian environmental interactions.
Hidden histories of collaboration
Race, gender and other ideologies were institutionalised and performed in new, specific and entangled ways through settler colonialism on this continent. This included acts of dispossession where settler colonial women and men took specimens and knowledge from First Nations communities.
Recent emergence of interest in white settler women as botanical collectors also brings attention to their own, hitherto obscured, collaborations with local Indigenous women and with white men whose names are still often associated with collections.
Anna Haebich has highlighted distinctions in the practices and restraint (or lack of it) shown by Charles Von Huegel and Charles Darwin respectively. This is compared to Georgiana Molloy whose relationships with local Menang Nyungar custodians provided access to botanical specimens and knowledge.
Yet settler women such as Georgina Molloy could be as thoroughly invested in the colonising and transnational imperial project as their male contemporaries. This is a significant reminder that gender is only one of a number of elements that drove individuals’ engagement and opportunity in these spheres.
The ways such knowledge was produced in movement across the globe not only contributed to generating a perception of plants as specimens to be collected and catalogued. It has also afforded little recognition to First Nations (and other world cultures’) knowledges and relations with these vibrant living worlds.
Major international botanical collections such as those in Paris and Kew make little or no mention of the Indigenous knowledge and labour attached to the plants that currently reside there.
Yannow Boonark
In 2023, I was involved in a project made with support from Australian Catholic University to produce a short film for the State Library of Western Australia, Yannow Boonark: Slow Moving Trees. The film sees Nyungar women including Whadjuk Ballardong Birdiya Marie Taylor and Traditional Custodians Betty Garlett, Chelsey Thomson, Gladys Yarran and Marlene Warrall, share their rich knowledge about the plants and trees of southwestern Australia.
Major international collections still hold historic specimens, taken from Nyungar Country and other places, by eighteenth-century French and British explorers. Yet Indigenous women’s specialist knowledge, based on traditional practices, does not currently form part of the information to be found in the catalogues of these institutions.
Deep listening to these women revealed concerns not only for ongoing management of their Country but also for the fate of such plant materials removed from Country.
Haebich, in her exploration of nineteenth-century botanical colonization, asked whether Nyungar people might see collected plant remains ‘as their living cultural heritage’. These women clearly expressed an ongoing interest in potential repatriation of such plant life.
The generous sharing and indefatigable determination of these Nyungar women highlights another potent opportunity for past, present and futures of human and nonhuman relations in Australia.
Susan Broomhall is Director of the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre at ACU. She has recently authored ‘Women as Environmental Change Agents’ for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women’s History and is General Editor of the 6-volume Bloomsbury Cultural History of Gender (2026). She was executive producer and collaborator in the film projects for the State Library of WA (SLWA) Yannow Boonark: Slow Moving Trees (2023) and Yorgas kaala katitje: Women Knowing Fire (2023), a podcast and short film exploring the essential fire knowledge of Aboriginal women that supported the survival and cultural practices of Indigenous communities across millennia. Previously, she researched the SLWA podcast, She’ll be Apples, produced by Gina Pickering, exploring the little known story of the Lady Williams apple and the role of cultivator and innovator Maud Williams, in Western Australia’s multi-million dollar apple industry.
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