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Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian

realise that there is a colour illustration to illuminate the useful discussion of the Mueller systematic versus Guilfoyle park-like garden plans for the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. There are a number of excellent historical reproductions of gardens, and some fine contemporary images, including a couple of images of the witty bollards in the Geelong Public Gardens depicting the 1860s curator and plantsman Daniel Bunce pursuing a thieving young lady in possession of his prized Sturt’s Desert Pea. To the extent that there is an argument in the book, it is centred around the claim that Victoria was particularly early and rich in Public Botanic Gardens, and exploring the reasons for this. Pascoe sees the cause as a combination of factors: influential individuals—both well-known ones such as La Trobe and Mueller, and lesser-known local civic leaders—land policy, and forms of community expectation and community rivalry. Once a few large centres identified a Botanic Garden as on the list of desirable attributes for an advanced settler community, everyone wanted one, and this appears to have had something of a domino effect in Victoria. While there were delays in many areas, and some failures to follow through, what Pascoe traces so carefully is the remarkable extent to which many communities did develop public gardens with some botanic pretensions. Apart from the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, the Melbourne University System Garden (on which Pascoe has written elsewhere) and to some extent Geelong and Portland Botanic Gardens, most of the gardens outlined were ultimately ‘using botanic as a courtesy title’ (101). Although many of the gardens deliberately included wide ranges of exotic and rare plants, with the above exceptions they were not planted to demonstrate scientific orders or relations. Although Mueller as Government Botanist, and Guilfoyle as Director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, sent seeds and samples to the regional gardens, there is no record that the gardens undertook systematic trials for economic or horticultural purposes in most cases. In general, for the gardens, ‘recreation was more important than science’ by the end of the century, and botany was ‘incidental’ (105–6). Apart from some narrowness in the theoretical and historical referencing and speculation, this is a useful, fascinating and attractive book. My only other quibble would be its awful bibliography, divided up into overly specific sub-sections.