Banksia Incognita

I have reverted to an Australian accent for these readings: not sure if people are liking it, though, because I have had views but no comments on the other one...

 

Pictures: Naturalist’s Pocket Magazine; or, Compleat Cabinet of the Curiosities and Beauties of Nature, 1800-1801. Portrait of Sir Joseph Banks, engraved by William Dickinson after Sir Joshua Reynolds. Herbarium specimen of Banksia from the collection of Banks and Solander.

 

BANKSIA INCOGNITA

 

Those first landfalls, gaining firm legs

After months of open sea, and the creaking

Of hempen rigging, can only have bewildered,

 

And the sounds of the morning, as Banks awoke,

Made him know how far from England he had strayed.

 

Above the sea spray, the heath resounding

With guttural twin notes of honeyeaters, plying

The tall, nectared inflorescences,

 

The lapping of the pigmy possum, drowned

By the laughing of kookaburras

And the chunter of their children –

 

Were there echoes of these, in the herbarium,

Where the pressed inflorescences were painted,

And the cones, bristling with hooked beard hairs,

Examined, compared with the fruits of pines?

 

Source material: NPM, Volume 2. The genus Banksia was first described by the Endeavour’s botanist, Joseph Banks. See Patrick O’Brien, Joseph Banks: A Life, Chicago, 1987, p. 232.

 

For further details about these poems and images, see the New Holland Miscellany set on my photostream.

 

Done