Five bronze plaques of eucalyptus clippings have been set into the rooftop garden of the new Powerhouse Parramatta museum in Sydney, ABC News reports. They honour Daniel Moowattin, a Burramattagal man who gathered plant specimens for the botanist George Caley in the early 1800s.
Curator Emerson Radisich tracked down around 100 of Caley’s herbarium sheets, following them from Canberra and Kew to London’s Natural History Museum. Caley’s notes credited specimens as collected by Dan, but that acknowledgement was later dropped from the official records.
Handwritten notes on the sheets also preserved four Dharug words for eucalyptus, and one, Dhuramba, has been confirmed as the name for grey ironbark. The artwork, by artist Keg de Souza with Dharug elder Uncle Chris Tobin, puts both Moowattin’s contribution and his language back where people can see them.
Source: ABC News