John Staer (1850–1933): the patronym behind Eucalyptus staeri, the Albany Blackbutt

Abstract

Millennia of evolutionary ecology have seen Australia become one of the driest and flattest continents on Earth—and in the process, home to more than 700 species of Eucalyptus. Colonial scientists named them using a binomial system, thereby overwriting local vernaculars that had persisted for tens of thousands of years. This paper traces the man commemorated in the Albany Blackbutt, Eucalyptus staeri, a tree unique to the Great Southern region of Western Australia, traditionally the land of the Menang Noongar people. Using a biographical lens, the paper examines the intersection of Western science and commerce in plant collection and naming, and the ways in which these processes exclude or discount Indigenous knowledge. The paper argues that a more holistic and inclusive historical interpretation of herbarium specimens of E. staeri is achieved by correcting and re-analysing information about the German settler after whom it is named, John Staer, while at the same time acknowledging the Noongar people’s deep knowledge (kartijin) of plants that has been passed down over many thousands of years.