Latest news with #JosephBanks
Sydney Morning Herald
08-08-2025
- Sport
- Sydney Morning Herald
The Wallabies are back. Bring on the Boks
Greatness across the board Loading The news this week, that the 12-year-old Tahitian surfer Kelia Mehani Gallina will become the youngest ever competitor in the WSL, and compete against our own Molly Pickum at the world-famous Teahupo'o break, rests on two wonderful historical foundation stones. See, the world's first surfing correspondent was none other than Captain Cook's resident botanist Joseph Banks, as the Endeavour made its way to the Australian east coast to make its 1770 landing at Botany Bay, and stopped on the way at Tahiti. Banks was out and about one morning, collecting botanical specimens, when his attention was arrested by the Tahitians doing something as curious as it was stupendous. Tell 'em, Joe: 'In our return to the boat we saw the Indians amuse or exercise themselves in a manner truly surprising. It was in a place where the shore was not guarded by a reef as is usual, but a great surf broke on the beach. The men sometimes 20 or 30 would take each the stern of an old canoe and wade with it to the outermost breakers, there wait for a large wave and at the moment it came, place themselves on the top of it, and were driven to the shore with incredible swiftness. Sometimes they were driven up far on the beach, and sometimes they would loose their canoe and be obligd to swim for it again; they seemd however to be so fond of this diversion that I have seen them continue it for hours.' The Hawaiians were also aficionados and the sport made its true public debut in Australia on a January day of 1915, when a charismatic Hawaiian by the name of Duke Kahanamoku came to Sydney, and gave a demonstration of a great Hawaiian passion called 'surf-shooting' to several hundred Sydneysiders gathered at Freshwater Beach. For three hours, Kahanamoku wowed the crowd with his skill, before calling for a volunteer. The 15-year-old Isabel Letham put her hand up! With great care, Duke took her out on his board, and turned as the wave approached. 'He paddled on to this green wave,' Letham would recount, 'and, when I looked down it, I was scared out of my wits. It was like looking over a cliff. After I'd screamed, 'Oh no, no!' a couple of times, he said, 'Oh, Yes, yes!' He took me by the scruff of the neck and yanked me on to my feet. Off we went, down the wave.' Her life would never be the same again. She was hooked, as was Australia in short order. Letham surfed right up to her mid-70s and when she died in 1995, the local board-riders paddled out beyond the breakers, formed a circle, and scattered her ashes in those same waters in which she had first surfed. And now here we are, in 2025, a 12-year-old Tahitian girl, taking on the world's best in her own waters. Isabel Letham would be proud, and Joseph Banks thrilled. What They Said The write-off for Paul Cully 's column, after the third Lions Test: 'The Wallabies pushed the envelope with their aggressive style of play and the Lions folded faster than Superman on washing day.' GENIUS! Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt is claiming moral victory over the Lions: 'We lost the first half of the series, I feel like we won the second half. I feel like we've grown into the series.' Peter V'landys on the NRL's next TV deal: 'The Vegas experiment has worked. The Vegas games have certainly put us in the eyes of the streamers in America.' Peter, please. Your contention that the mere 50,000-odd Americans who watched the Vegas games on cable – and some seriously odd ones – has made the broadcasters say, 'Hey, we need a bit of that action!' is absurd. Pull the other one. David Warner on Joe Root's chances in the Ashes: 'Josh Hazlewood tends to have his number quite a lot. He will have to take the surfboard off his front leg.' I'm not quite sure I get it. Do you? Lewis Hamilton on not having it like he used to: 'It's me every time. I'm useless, absolutely useless. The team have no problem. You've seen the car's on pole. So we probably need to change driver.' Melbourne Swift Kate Moloney after they won the Super Netball title: 'One more thing – how good is Plan A? We're going to the pub.' NRL journo James Hooper, after crashing his car and allegedly registering a reported .025 on the blood-alcohol test: 'I've let the game of rugby league, my employers, my wife and kids down terribly. Clearly I'm not handling the tough side of the job. Hopefully this is the punch between the eyes that will set me straight.' It was remarkably similar to the self-immolation executed by former Fox Sports colleague Paul Kent in recent times. Loading US Golfer Cameron Young on finally winning on the PGA Tour after seven runner-up finishes: 'Where do I go? I've never done this before.' The NRL throwing the book at the Panthers: 'It is alleged the trainer unnecessarily interfered with and distracted Gold Coast Titans player Jayden Campbell as he was attempting a conversion kick, in breach of the NRL operations manual and NRL code of conduct.' Panthers statement: 'The club is adamant that the actions of the trainer were an honest mistake and there was no intent to breach the rules or gain an advantage. The trainer immediately apologised upon realising the error.' Fair enough, but Ronnie Palmer must have been out there for four or five decades and was never once within a bull's roar of the kicker, yes? England captain Ben Stokes after they drew 2-2 with India: 'It's been an incredible series - the commitment and energy has been outstanding. We're bitterly disappointed we couldn't get the series win but myself being a massive advocate of the game of Test cricket, this series has been an unbelievable advert for it across the world. All the doubters saying it's dying a death, this series has said the opposite.' Melbourne coach Simon Goodwin last Saturday: 'I'm the coach of the Melbourne footy club. I'm proud to be able to do that. Clearly, I've got a clear plan. I'm well-supported by the board in terms of where we're heading and what we're trying to achieve.' Goodwin on Tuesday after he was sacked: 'Obviously I got that wrong. Clearly the club are taking a different approach – and I totally respect that decision.' 45-year-old Venus Williams, playing tournament tennis again: 'Winning and losing knows no age. All that matters is that I'm prepared and ready. And the longer I play, the more I get into it, the more I train, the better I get.' Chris Woakes on batting with a dislocated shoulder to try help England win their final Test against India: 'I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I didn't try. You just know you're part of something bigger. It's not just you that you're playing for out there. It's your team and your teammates, all the hard work and the sacrifices they put in, the people watching at home and in the ground. You just feel a duty to do it for everyone.' Team of the Week Wallabies. Beat the British and Irish Lions in the Third Test, to restore order, honour, and the general rightness of things. Played in a manner to give hope for the future, and the home World Cup in 2027. You heard me. Melbourne Vixens. Won their three finals by a combined four goals, claiming the title after defeating the West Coast Fever in a fantastic grand final. Loading The Australian Icelandic Horse team. Laura Hall, Eira Backan and Birgit Kossmann, with team leader Susanna Wands and coach Anna Eschner, have been knocking their socks off, and their hooves, this week in the World Championships for Icelandic Horses, being held in Switzerland. It is the first time an Australian team has qualified, and there has been huge media about it locally. And they've done well! Titans and Rabbitohs. Will fight out the NRL's 'Spoon Bowl' on Sunday. Could supercoach Wayne Bennett be looking at his first wooden spoon? English Premier League. Starts next Friday night, UK time, as Liverpool host Bournemouth. Be still, my beating heart. RIP Sam Backo. Rugby league icon passed away aged 64. They could chisel on his tombstone: Good man, great player, widely loved, an Australian original.
Sydney Morning Herald
23-07-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
When I visited Sydney, I was shocked by the antisemitism I encountered
We found the park with relative ease. But the mysteries of Google Maps did not guide us to the entrance. We turned into Dent Street hoping that might lead us to the entrance, but in truth we had no idea where to look. Then we saw just what you're looking for when you want directions – a young family, a friendly Aussie mum, dad and kids all on bikes with smiling faces under law-abiding helmets. We pulled up and asked. They obligingly directed us to the entrance and with abounding friendliness wished us a great day in the park. The amicable civility portended a happy day. Then as I wound up the window and pulled away, the Aussie dad called out 'Free Palestine'. I was momentarily shocked. Then I turned the car around and pulled up beside him again. I wound down the window and asked why he thought it was OK to single out Jews and call out provocative slogans. His answer was at once outrageous and hilarious. 'I wasn't doing that, but I saw your kippas [skull caps]'. Perhaps I should have realised at that point that I was talking to more of an idiot than an ideologue and driven off. But I did not. I replied with the obvious: that's my point – why do you think it is OK to single out Jews for your commentary? He replied: 'I just wanted to see if you agreed with what I said.' Apparently, having thought more deeply about the matter, Aussie dad now thought that with his kids around him on bikes and my three little grandsons in the back seat eager to get to the park, this was an opportunity to call out a provocative slogan to invite discussion about one of history's most intractable geopolitical conflicts. I don't think so. Loading I told him I thought he was a disgrace to Australian society. I drove off while he continued to tell me he just wanted to see if I agreed with him. In fairness, he did so without rancour or aggression – quite a nice guy, really. Then came the jeering laugh of moral righteousness as I drove away. So, where does this leave us? What do we call it when a seemingly pleasant person singles out other people on the basis of their race, with provocations? I thought that was racism pure and simple. And when it is directed at Jews, I thought that was antisemitism pure and simple. But the man I encountered would no doubt be horrified by the suggestion that he is a racist or an antisemite. On the contrary he is the guardian of morality, the protector of the colonially oppressed. By calling out the Jew in public for the tragedy that has befallen the Palestinian people, he is a hero of good conscience. It is all the more perilous that this well-meaning chap is clueless as to his own moral failing – perhaps much like Joseph Banks himself, an unashamed champion of colonisation (and thereby forced dispossession) of a land to which his people had no right or connection. In the end, I do not think I need, and I most certainly do not intend, to hide or cower. My intuition is that the lovely Irish woman need not be as concerned, and the outwardly pleasant dad is an outlying sanctimonious fool. I am the product after all of generations in this great country. 'She'll be right' and 'no worries' have historically been effective antidotes to Australians' anxieties. They also make for good recipes for inaction. It is hard to know whether those renowned Aussie epithets are the products of cheerful optimism or national indolence. I harbour a sickening suspicion that I may be mistaken. For the sake of Australia's social fabric and the future of its communal cohesion, I hope my intuition and historic optimism is well placed.
The Age
23-07-2025
- The Age
When I visited Sydney, I was shocked by the antisemitism I encountered
We found the park with relative ease. But the mysteries of Google Maps did not guide us to the entrance. We turned into Dent Street hoping that might lead us to the entrance, but in truth we had no idea where to look. Then we saw just what you're looking for when you want directions – a young family, a friendly Aussie mum, dad and kids all on bikes with smiling faces under law-abiding helmets. We pulled up and asked. They obligingly directed us to the entrance and with abounding friendliness wished us a great day in the park. The amicable civility portended a happy day. Then as I wound up the window and pulled away, the Aussie dad called out 'Free Palestine'. I was momentarily shocked. Then I turned the car around and pulled up beside him again. I wound down the window and asked why he thought it was OK to single out Jews and call out provocative slogans. His answer was at once outrageous and hilarious. 'I wasn't doing that, but I saw your kippas [skull caps]'. Perhaps I should have realised at that point that I was talking to more of an idiot than an ideologue and driven off. But I did not. I replied with the obvious: that's my point – why do you think it is OK to single out Jews for your commentary? He replied: 'I just wanted to see if you agreed with what I said.' Apparently, having thought more deeply about the matter, Aussie dad now thought that with his kids around him on bikes and my three little grandsons in the back seat eager to get to the park, this was an opportunity to call out a provocative slogan to invite discussion about one of history's most intractable geopolitical conflicts. I don't think so. Loading I told him I thought he was a disgrace to Australian society. I drove off while he continued to tell me he just wanted to see if I agreed with him. In fairness, he did so without rancour or aggression – quite a nice guy, really. Then came the jeering laugh of moral righteousness as I drove away. So, where does this leave us? What do we call it when a seemingly pleasant person singles out other people on the basis of their race, with provocations? I thought that was racism pure and simple. And when it is directed at Jews, I thought that was antisemitism pure and simple. But the man I encountered would no doubt be horrified by the suggestion that he is a racist or an antisemite. On the contrary he is the guardian of morality, the protector of the colonially oppressed. By calling out the Jew in public for the tragedy that has befallen the Palestinian people, he is a hero of good conscience. It is all the more perilous that this well-meaning chap is clueless as to his own moral failing – perhaps much like Joseph Banks himself, an unashamed champion of colonisation (and thereby forced dispossession) of a land to which his people had no right or connection. In the end, I do not think I need, and I most certainly do not intend, to hide or cower. My intuition is that the lovely Irish woman need not be as concerned, and the outwardly pleasant dad is an outlying sanctimonious fool. I am the product after all of generations in this great country. 'She'll be right' and 'no worries' have historically been effective antidotes to Australians' anxieties. They also make for good recipes for inaction. It is hard to know whether those renowned Aussie epithets are the products of cheerful optimism or national indolence. I harbour a sickening suspicion that I may be mistaken. For the sake of Australia's social fabric and the future of its communal cohesion, I hope my intuition and historic optimism is well placed.
The Spinoff
14-07-2025
- Science
- The Spinoff
Could we save the kererū by eating it?
Once so abundant they darkened the skies, kererū are now struggling to survive. Dr Madeline Shelling argues it's time to rethink our conservation model – and consider restoring tikanga-based harvesting to help save the bird. Prior to colonisation, native birds ruled the land of the long white cloud. Aotearoa was cloaked in dense, abundant forests, teeming with manu. Joseph Banks, the botanist aboard the Endeavour, even wrote the following in a diary entry dated January 1770, as they were parked offshore from Tōtaranui (Queen Charlotte Sound), Marlborough Sounds: 'This morn I was awakd by the singing of the birds ashore from whence we are distant not a quarter of a mile, the numbers of them were certainly very great.' But that's just one man's diary of a first encounter. It's a drop in the ocean compared to the vast mātauranga Māori and deep scientific ecological knowledge developed over hundreds of years of a sacred, symbiotic relationship. Kererū, also known as kūkū or kūkupa in Te Tai Tokerau, are an essential part of our forest ecosystem. With a slightly larger cousin on Rēkohu/Wharekauri (Chatham Island) called parea, these birds are the primary distributor of at least 11 of our biggest forest tree species; including karaka, miro, tawa, pūriri, and taraire. Deforestation and pest introduction have been the biggest drivers of their rapid decline since European arrival. They produce only one offspring per breeding season, and only breed on good fruiting seasons, making them even more vulnerable. While there are some success stories over decades of well-meaning efforts, kererū repopulation outside of pest-free sanctuaries is not fast enough to overcome predation and competition from cats, stoats, rats, possums and even myna birds. Once so plentiful they could block out the sun as they flocked in their hundreds, the protection of kererū requires a radical transformation. If they die out, our forest will forever struggle to regenerate itself. My solution? A carefully managed kererū repopulation programme that flips conventional conservation on its head. My goal is that through this programme, kererū once again become so abundant that it is no longer controversial to eat them. Phase one: Establish or partner with secure breeding facilities, large aviaries or pest-free sanctuaries dedicated to kererū reproduction. Phase two: Focus entirely on population recovery. Every single bird produced would be dedicated to boosting wild populations in predator-proof areas. Tree planting and pest eradication efforts will ramp up across the motu. Phase three: Once healthy population targets are met, introduce tightly regulated, tikanga-based quota systems allowing 1–2% of kererū to be harvested for ceremonial and customary use. Why eating kererū could save them Kererū were, and sometimes still are, a highly prized food source. By the 1860s, laws began to control hunting activities. From 1864, hunting seasons were set in certain areas for kererū and native ducks. In 1865, The Protection of Certain Animals Act prohibited using snares and traps to catch native birds – meaning that shooting became the only approved form of hunting. This restricted traditional methods that had ensured an ongoing food supply for whānau, but allowed Pākehā to continue hunting kererū as game. Disputes over the hunting season ensued, as Māori preferred late autumn and winter when the birds were fatter, while Pākehā preferred early autumn, when the birds were more agile, adding to the 'sport'. The law was repealed in 1866 but reinstated in 1907, when all hunting of native birds was outlawed. However, the reduction of the kererū population is not due to traditional harvesting, but the drastically destructive changes to their environment. Deforestation has stripped away the ancient forests that once provided abundant food and shelter. Introduced pests have decimated their numbers by preying on eggs and chicks, while also competing for food. These combined pressures have driven kererū populations into decline, despite hunting bans and conservation efforts. This raises a critical question: if the greatest threats to kererū are habitat loss and invasive species, where are our current conservation approaches falling short? Could a return to traditional practices – including consumption – be the key to saving them? Consumption as conservation Western conservation models are rooted in colonial ideas of European superiority, which promote 'preservationism' – building fences and restricting human activity. While effective in some contexts, this approach contradicts Indigenous active management strategies and undermines the rights and knowledge of Indigenous peoples, who have managed their lands sustainably for generations. As put by Catherine Delahunty: 'Pākehā environmental thinking is stuck in preservationism, as if the natural world was a museum or a magical depopulated Narnia where the plants and animals are waiting for the white ecologist rescuers to come and save them from evil.' On the other hand, indigenous management works in reciprocity with nature, emphasising stewardship, sustainable use, and co-existence – maintaining ecosystem health through active, place-based practices. Māori enactment of kaitiakitanga is not just for environmental and food security reasons – it also represents revitalisation of important cultural activities, allowing for the continuation and transmission of mātauranga Maori. In Tūhoe, generations have relied on a range of qualitative indicators, including visual (e.g. decreasing flock size), audible (e.g. less noise from kererū in the forest canopy), and harvest-related (e.g. steep decline in harvests since the 1950) indicators to monitor kererū abundance and condition in Te Urewera. They have consistently demonstrated that autonomy is vital, highlighting that the ability to make management decisions according to mātauranga is likely to yield more effective and sustainable outcomes, both ecologically and culturally. Mātauranga like this should guide transformational restoration efforts. However, Māori-led active management embedded in mātauranga and kaitiakitanga is a constant battle for recognition and meaningful integration in the conservation ideology of Aotearoa. This is certainly the case in Aotearoa, where Māori sovereignty and Te Tiriti-guaranteed rights to manage their own taonga species is often denied even at the highest level of government. While hunting kererū is illegal under the Wildlife Act 1953, te Tiriti o Waitangi guarantees full and undisturbed possession of taonga to Māori, which includes rights to harvesting. Hapū retain the right to enact kaitiakitanga, rangatiratanga and the responsibility to establish tikanga pertaining to the harvesting of kererū. Len Gillman, a biogeographer at Auckland University of Technology, also argues that sustainable harvesting of kererū could satisfy everyone's needs. Gillman suggests that careful management, including sustainable harvesting quotas based on kererū numbers and age distributions, holds great promise. Sustainable harvests would require robust monitoring and adaptive management, ensuring only surplus birds are taken and young birds have the opportunity to learn survival skills from older individuals. A kererū breeding programme with the end goal of reclaiming harvesting traditions would challenge preservationist ideals. However, it could strike the balance between conservation and Māori rights better than the Wildlife Act ever could. Active management based on tikanga, such as controlled harvests, quota systems, and qualitative environmental monitoring informed by mātauranga, can improve species resilience and restore ecological balance. The real question isn't whether we should eat kererū, but whether we can afford not to try radical solutions, because sometimes, saving a species might just mean putting it back on the menu.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
How Orchid Hunters Complicate Colonial Narratives
In September 1890, William Digance, the son of an impoverished farmer from Surrey, set off for Brazil to hunt orchids. Full of excitement and bravado, the 25-year-old assured his employer, 'I mean to succeed.' But Digance struggled with the language and the amount of money everything cost; he found himself stranded by rising water and thunderstorms in the rainy season, overpowered by the heat, and repeatedly sick. In his letters, he protested that he'd been deceived by his employer's business manager, who'd assured him the trip would be 'easy.' The man only said that, Digance wrote bitterly, because he hadn't visited Brazil himself. It was easy enough to travel in the capital or by rail, but the situation was quite different once one headed into the interior, '& everything has to be done with animals they are not English roads—it is a series of climbing up one mountain & down another through rivers & woods where one has to sometimes stop & cut a road. it is not very easy I can assure you.' Six months after his departure, Digance was dead. Plant hunting may conjure up images of bold Victorian explorers, intrepid grail seekers, and storied men of science—Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace. Certainly, that is how plant hunters have been described in recent works, including a 2012 children's book, The Plant Hunters: True Stories of Their Daring Adventures to the Far Corners of the Earth. And that's how they were depicted in the Victorian age too. In illustrations, plant hunters are handsome mustached men wearing boots and plaid khaki pants as they venture into the tropical rainforests. But this is only one slice of the story. The majority of plant hunters were not particularly fashionable or wealthy; they did not become members of the era's august natural-history societies. On the contrary, the men who answered newspaper job advertisements for 'plant collectors' were generally poor and ill-educated. Many were barely literate. These plant hunters don't fit neatly into the archetypes that have come to dominate stories of colonial extraction. They were neither powerful imperialists nor dispossessed native people. These men didn't write famous books, but they did leave records, though these documents were never intended to be published. Employers demanded detailed letters from their hunters—information on each area visited, plants found and their condition, numbers of boxes shipped and their transportation routes, and, most important, spying notes on rival hunters operating in the region. On torn, faded pages, many bearing the imprint of a local hotel or railway station, hunters attempted to answer their employers' demands. Most letters were long ago destroyed, but a substantial archive is preserved at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. They are remarkable documents, a window into the lives of many plant hunters that would otherwise be lost to history. The men emerging from these letters complicate how historians of the Victorian period think about the British Empire. For a long time, many have argued that the romanticized image Britain presents of itself—including the adventurous plant hunter in khakis—has been used to cover up the violence and hubris that characterized British colonization. We historians have studied the ways in which countries all over the world were robbed of their cultural treasures and natural riches—including orchids—as a result of colonial plunder. We have come to see colonizers as oppressors and colonized peoples as oppressed. [From the June 1919 issue: Orchid-hunting] But plant hunters are not easy to place in this dichotomy. They advanced imperial interests but gained little in the process. They were sent to exploit resources of a foreign land but were themselves victims of exploitation. They were not only tasked with bringing home the product but expected to be part of the product: Their stories of adventure contributed to orchids' commercial appeal. According to the companies that employed them, plant hunters were men of 'indefatigable zeal' who loved nothing more than danger. This was not what the hunters wrote. Frederick Sander reached the peak of his career as a nursery owner in the final decades of the 19th century, a time when emerging middle classes in North America and Europe longed for 'exotics.' Queen Victoria bestowed on Sander the honorific 'Royal Orchid Grower,' and the Romanovs made him a Baron of the Holy Russian Empire. Sander's lavish nursery premises in St. Albans, outside London, were one of the wonders of Europe. After a visit, the orchidophile Frederick Boyle wrote in 1893: Orchids everywhere! They hang in dense bunches from the roof. They lie a foot thick upon every board, and two feet thick below. They are suspended on the walls. Men pass incessantly along the gangways, carrying a load that would fill a barrow. And all the while fresh stores are accumulating under the hands of that little group in the middle, bent and busy at cases just arrived. They belong to a lot of eighty that came in from Burmah last night—and while we look on, a boy brings a telegram announcing fifty more from Mexico, that will reach Waterloo at 2.30pm. The letters of Sander & Co.'s hunters, however, reveal what it took to achieve 'orchids everywhere.' On thousands of pages, dozens of collectors recount losses—of fragile orchids destroyed to prevent rival hunters from acquiring them, orchids trampled underfoot and discarded in frenzied scenes of collection, orchids dying en masse on the journey home in crates or freezing, the night before a sale, in the auction rooms. They also narrate their own losses: of health, money, possessions. Sander was hugely demanding of his employees as hunters and as writers: He instructed Claes Ericsson, a Swedish hunter, to 'write me longer letters.' Digance, whom Sander employed, wrote that he anticipated a 'devil of a row for not writing oftener.' If Sander felt any sympathy for the hunters' struggles, he did not express it in the few of his own letters that survive. He used violent turns of phrase: 'MOUTH SHUT!' he wrote once, and 'If I'd got you here I would beat you until not a single patch of your skin was left unbruised.' In an 1896 interview published in a magazine called Tit-Bits, Sander bragged of spending up to 3,000 pounds—more than half a million dollars in today's money—on each hunter every year. In truth, he spent about one-third of that, but that sum covered considerable traveling expenses. Sometimes, he simply refused to pay up in advance. 'I would have sent you more 50 cases but got no money, so I'm going to put them on the rubbish heap tomorrow,' Ericsson wrote, after months of begging his employer to help him cover his hotel bills. 'Now I'm so upset I can not write any more.' [Read: America's lost crops rewrite the history of farming] Sander abandoned the plant hunters when they cost too much. Ericsson was deserted in Singapore without money for the trip home; a fellow hunter had to lend him the cash. When another, Louis Perthius, was abandoned in Brazil, his father, Léon, wrote letters to each of Sander's offices to excoriate the businessman for his cruelty. How was it even possible, Léon asked, that a man with his own family, a father, could treat another man's son this way; could risk a young man's life and sacrifice his youth to 'enrich your establishment'? Scholars today don't know whether or how Sander responded to these cries for help. Although most of Sander's letters were lost, presumably discarded abroad, his head office staffers annotated the letters they received, so that we can at least see what moved readers in London as they read. Vigorous underlinings indicate interest in new plants, new shipments, and the plans and actions of rival companies. Pleas for money to cover expenses and reports of disease outbreaks were, for the most part, left unmarked. The Dutch collector Cornelius Oversluys started a letter in April 1893 in his usual, quite well-formed handwriting, only to start quaking as he succumbed to yellow fever. 'The fever don't let me finish … I am all shaking,' he wrote, in frenzied and wobbly script. Digance, after a sequence of 'colds' and attacks of 'colic,' would die of 'bilious fever' in Rio de Janeiro. A colleague, Bavarian Fritz Arnold, died after suffering stomach pain while collecting orchids near the Orinoco River. A fellow hunter itemized Arnold's possessions—a revolver, a watch, a suitcase, keys, and money—and notified Sander. Rather than lamenting these losses, in media reports, Sander glamorized stories of his hunters' deaths. According to Sander, for example, Arnold's body was found not near but literally on the Orinoco River, in thrillingly mysterious circumstances: His corpse lay 'in an open boat,' and 'the cause of his death was never definitely known.' Sander told an interviewer that another of his hunters was burned to death by priests for blasphemy—a fate recalling that of the main character of Rudyard Kipling's short story 'The Mark of the Beast.' Eventually, British and European society began reckoning with some of the uglier aspects of its orchid mania—but this reckoning had nothing to do with labor conditions. Critics began to point out that the abundance of orchids in Europe and North America meant they were disappearing from their natural habitats. 'Not satisfied with taking 300 or 500 specimens of a fine Orchid, they must needs scour the whole country, and leave nothing for many miles around,' lamented Eduard Ortgies, the director of the Zurich botanical garden in 1877. 'This is no longer collecting, it is wanton robbery.' The magazine The American Garden singled out Sander and one of his competitors, Siebrecht & Wadley, noting that their hunters were working to cut out the few orchids 'still trembling in their tropic homes.' Victorians all along the political spectrum worried about their obsession with things and accumulation. The packaged orchid had become, to quote contemporary Karl Marx, a 'commodity.' Marx wrote about the ways in which commodities become detached from geographical and human origins, but the bit about the human origins didn't worry Victorian society as much. Perhaps Sander and other orchid sellers were so successful in painting a certain picture of plant hunters that the human cost of plant hunting, unlike the environmental one, never leaked to the press. [Read: The board games that ask you to reenact colonialism] If anything, the hunters in Sander's sensationalized media reports became subjects of satire. The plot of the 1903 West End musical The Orchid, for instance, concerns a side-splitting hunt in Peru for the rare purple Cattleya—which could easily be found in Britain. That was a new problem with orchids: They became too common. The orchids went from precious exotic that cost the lives of so many working-class plant hunters to the mundane commodities they are today–that ubiquitous office gift, a couple of steps up from scented candles and boxed soap. The plight of the hunters remained invisible. 'Do not forget your Travellers in Brazil for the Bricks of St. Albans,' Ericsson begged Sander in March 1892. He understood that the company's successes, the spread of orchids across the windowsills of homes in rich countries of the world, were built on the sacrifices of expendable men like him. *Lead image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Hulton Archive / Getty; SSPL / Getty; The Ohio State University Library; Getty. This article has been adapted from Sarah Bilston's new book, The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession. Article originally published at The Atlantic
