Good afternoon to all. I am privileged to speak after these amazing women. I stand gratefully on Palawa country. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
In Lutruwita Tasmania there are many thousands of people like me. I doubt that TMAG keeps the figures. Its curators, its staff and volunteers, they just give.
I am one of the very many whose research has relied on TMAG. To illustrate this I want to tell three short stories:
Some time ago in the Collections and Research facility, I held in my hand the skin of a bird collected by the TMAG director J.R. Cunningham at Orielton in 1960.
It was my only chance to touch in Tasmania the bird that I would follow through Australia, to China and Arctic Alaska.
The Grey Plover is an unremarkable looking bird, little known in Australia generally, with an extraordinary story of long distance migration.
It was the staff of TMAG who necropsied the bird to show it was female, who looked after that specimen for 65 years, and made it available just so someone like me could hold and contemplate it, and in our work tell its story.
What a treasure house of such stories that unremarkable building at Rosny is.
When I came to write The Ancients, about Tasmania’s trove of globally important long-lived paleoendemic trees, I was welcomed at the Herbarium.
People there enabled me to search histories of discovery, of King’s Lomatia, of King Billy, Pencil and Huon Pine in particular.
John Davies, Lyn Cave, Miguel De Salas and others all shepherded this naive beginner. I was amazed by the riches in specimens held by the Herbarium, by the unfolding stories of discovery documented there, by the very many volunteer and professional collectors who assembled this information in these fragile specimen folios that I could touch — even by things like revelatory marginalia on these pages.
The Herbarium is a plant bank of timeless value. It sits there, unassuming next to Churchill Avenue but again it offers inspiration for research that should be more widely recognised by the public, and by political leaders.
My third story hasn’t made it into a book — yet.
Those of us who live along country roads in Tasmania I think become almost inured to the toll of roadkill. But on our local road we were stopped in our tracks when we came upon a dead Wedge-tailed Eagle, belly up, showing no sign of being hit by a vehicle.
We took it to a freezer at Raptor Refuge and from there it made its way to TMAG — another fatality for the very steadfast Judy Clarke to necropsy. She indeed determined in some detail this next milestone on the road towards extinction of this species.
It was a juvenile male that perhaps had tried to settle on the pole beside where it was found. Judy found burn marks and haemorrhaging that confirmed beyond doubt that it was electrocuted by the old, bare copper wires above.
How lucky we are to have this kind of difficult, but true public service from such professionals.
The current projected budget cuts give the impression that political decision-makers think an institution like a Museum or Herbarium is static, and just needs a few folk to dust and mind the collections.
This is so wilfully wrong. Instead these are constantly evolving organisms, full of expertise.
Is there a cultural erasure going on in Tasmania’s public service? We are hearing from the government of ‘short term budgetary pain’. But there is no long term gain in these projected cuts. There is only a dismantling of expertise.
The challenge for the government instead is to reverse this course, and to find ways to guarantee the work of people who are doing their best to exalt Tasmania.
Thank you.
This is the transcript of a speech given by Andrew Darby, award-winning journalist and nature writer at the public meeting organised by the Friends of TMAG in Hobart on 8 October 2026
