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A
‘thing’ for plants
Peter Jobson, University
of New South Wales
& University of New England, Australia
It
doesn’t take much for Peter Jobson to admit that perhaps he
is a bit of nerd.
During a casual bushwalking expedition around Smiths Lake
on the New South Wales mid-north coast, Peter explained that,
“Even as a primary school kid, I was one of those nerds who
always looked for dinosaur bones and things like that in the
back paddock.”
Having decided to move on from amateur palaeontology
, the focus of his interest seems to have remained relatively
on ‘inanimate things’. The difference now being they are very
much alive.
"I was one of those nerds who always looked for dinosaur
bones and things like that in the back paddock.”
Peter is a Botanist and divides much of his time between volunteering
at the University
of New England (UNE) Herbarium and lecturing at the University
of New South Wales (UNSW). He has also previously worked for
the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney.
Cold Work
April 12th turned out to be a relatively normal day for Peter
Jobson with most of it spent data-basing
samples left behind after the death of a previous botanist
the year before. John Williams had been a world renowned botanist
in rainforest ecology and many of the samples were rainforest
species, collected from the Dorrigo
National Park in early 1983.
Getting these specimens into the UNE database means that Peter
and his colleagues need to identify and check the identification
of every plant collected, before labelling them and mounting
them onto cards. It is cold work though – to prevent insects
from destroying the samples the herbarium has to be kept at
a very chilly 16°C.
" It is quite important to get it into collections
so that we know what we have got.”
Although staring through microscopes at flowers and leaves
all day may not sound very interesting, to Peter this work
is very important. “A lot of the samples are early records
of the vegetation of the New England Plateau,” he explained.
“It is quite important to get it into collections so that
we know what we have got.”
" The future isn’t all grounded
in plants…”
Peter completed a Bachelor of Science with a double major
in Zoology and Botany. With an appreciation for both fields,
when it came time to decide on a career path, he found it
to be difficult to choose between the two. In the end, thanks
to a bit of work experience, Peter decided to choose botany.
“I had done some work experience at the Royal Botanic Gardens
in Melbourne and that was what sort of fired me up to get
into plant systematics.”
Peter has never regretted his decision to follow Botany and
hopes to continue his work on plant systematics
as well as becoming an honorary associate at UNE. The future
isn’t all grounded in plants though. In a few years time Peter
also hopes to be the proud owner of his very own Kashmir goat
farm.
Written and Edited by David Murray
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