Corporate Body

Museum of Economic Botany (1881 - )

Adelaide Botanic Gardens

From
1881
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Functions
Collection Management, Economic botany and Museum
Alternative Names
  • Santos Museum of Economic Botany (Subsequent name, 2009 - )
Website
https://www.botanicgardens.sa.gov.au/visit/adelaide-botanic-garden/museum-economic-botany

Summary

The Museum of Economic Botany was founded in 1881 by Richard Schomburgk, Director of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. He took as his model the museum at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The Adeliade Museum is housed in a heritage-listed building within the Gardens. It is the sole remaining such museum of its kind in Australia. The original intention was to display and encourage the study of plants of practical use to humankind. Plant materials on display included fibre plants, dyes, food and beverage plants, essential oils, gums and resins, timbers and tapa cloth. There were also papier mâche models of fruit and fungi, and aboriginal plant products. The Museum declined from the 1890s until revived in the 1970s under the directorship of Noel Lothian. It currently houses over 3,000 objects. The now-restored building regularly hosts exhibitions relating to the practical, medicinal and economic use of plant materials. In 2009 it was renamed the Santos Museum of Economic Botany.

Published resources

Books

  • Aitken, Richard, Seeds of Change: an Illustrated History of Adelaide Botanic Garden (Richmond: Board of the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium/Bloomings Books, 2006). Details
  • Emmett, Peter, Harvest: an exhibition about plants and place from South Australian collections, Santos Museum of Economic Botany, Adelaide Garden, 30 May - 23 August 2009 (Adelaide: Botanic Garden of Adelaide, 2009), 45 pp. Details
  • Emmett, Peter and Kanellos, Tony, eds, Santos MEB Museum of Economic Botany: the Museum of Economic Botany at the Adelaide Botanic Garden, a Souvenir (Adelaide: Botanic Gardens of Adelaide, 2010), 186 pp. Details
  • Kanellos, Tony, Imitation of life: a visual catalogue of the 19th century fruit models in the Santos Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Garden, a collection of papier maché models made by Heinrich Arnoldi & Co. Gotha (Adelaide: Board of the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium, 2013), 384 pp. Details

Resource Sections

Helen Cohn

EOAS ID: biogs/P007434b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P007434b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260