Protecting Australia’s native plants

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This will had come about in the most suspicious circumstances you could possibly imagine.

**Damian Carrick** (0:12)
Who gets what when someone dies, and who decides?

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The difficulty with undue influence often is proving it.

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Join me, Damian Carrick, for the Law Report Special Series on Wills, Over My Dead Body.

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The person felt like they had no option, but it's difficult to prove that.

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To hear, search for the Law Report and look out for Over My Dead Body. Find it on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

**Natasha Mitchell** (0:37)
It's National Science Week, and I'm very excited to tell you that this year, the ABC wants you to nominate Australia's most amazing wildflower.
You've got 10 beautiful blooms to choose from. From the flying duck orchid, yes, it looks like a duck, to the blue bladderwort, which traps prey in its bladder, to one of my personal favorites, the flannel flower, so soft, you could sleep in it. So get online and vote right now, and then tune in this Friday for the live countdown in the Big Ideas time slot at midday on ABC Radio National, with Wat the Ducks, Anne Jones, and the science shows, Belinda Smith.
And today on Big Ideas, for Science Week, we are talking plants because Australia is home to an incredibly diverse range of flora. In fact, nine out of 10 of our native plants occur nowhere else on the planet. So let's meet a leading plant researcher today who will tell you why plants matter. You don't need to tell me that. I'm Natasha Mitchell. Welcome to the show.

**Rachael Gallagher** (1:55)
A lot of people don't know that the majority of threatened species in Australia are plants, the vast majority. So we hear a lot about koala and morgianskate and you know, you name it, we hear about animals a lot, but please, if you go away from this talk with nothing else, know that plants are the most threatened category of species in Australia, and there's more than a thousand of them that are currently listed.

**Natasha Mitchell** (2:22)
Rachael Gallagher is a professor in plant ecology and conservation at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University.
Her current work involves investigating which of Australia's 25,000 plant species really need extinction risk assessment and conservation action. In 2020, she won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Early Career Research in Biology for her work assessing the impact of the black summer fires on plants. And Rachael joins you on Big Ideas from the Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains on Gundagurra Country in New South Wales for the annual Liar Bird Festival. Asking the questions is journalist and oral historian Gregg Borschmann, who starts by asking about one of Rachael's first jobs as a uni student.

**Gregg Borschmann** (3:10)
Rachael, look, I'd like to, it's not quite the beginning of the beginning, but I'd like to start in a back room of the National Herbarium of New South Wales established in 1853 Since grown to a collection of 1.4 me implant specimens, you got your first job there, it was a volunteer job as an undergraduate student in 2004
Were you like a kid in the lolly shop?

**Rachael Gallagher** (3:36)
Oh, I was. Yeah, it was a really wonderful opportunity.
So I started out as a volunteer, sowing specimens on to cards. And so sitting in the volunteer room, sowing dried plant specimens that had been collected in the field on to pieces of cardboard and fixing the label to those specimens and popping them in boxes and sending them off to the collection.

**Gregg Borschmann** (4:04)
So where had those plant specimens been all that time? Before you put them on a piece of paper and the date and the place and the collector, where had they been before that?

**Rachael Gallagher** (4:13)
Oh, that's a great question. So they come in from all the hard working botanists that we have across Australia. So people are out in the field somewhere every day across Australia collecting plant specimens, drying them, pressing them and dropping them off at a herbarium so that they can be identified and we can catalogue Australia's plant diversity in that way.

**Gregg Borschmann** (4:36)
The specimens collected all the way back by Joseph Banks and botanist Daniel Solander during the voyage of the HMS Endeavour in 1770 were often under lock and key, but you've seen, you've touched those collections. I mean, can you describe that moment? I mean, I know that there are some plants of that ilk that you have worked with. What was that moment like? Almost like time travelling.