Australian Botanical Liaison Officer

During 1998 – 1999 I was seconded as Australian Botanical Liaison Officer at the Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London. This involved being 'the eyes and ears' of the Australasian botanical community at major herbaria such as Kew, the British Museum, Edinburgh, Paris, St Petersburg etc. as well as UK liaison for Australasian botanical research and work-related research projects.

My time at Kew opened me up to the milieu of global taxonomy, meeting taxonomists and systematists from all parts of world as they visited to make use of K’s amazing collection. In subsequent years I was lucky to revisit Kew on the way to or from international meetings in various countries to discuss biodiversity informatics or take PERTH’s votes to the IBC’s Nomenclature Section in both St Louis and Vienna. In 2002 I took up the position of Oceania secretary of the Taxonomic Databases Working Group that was leading the development of global standards for aggregating collections data which provided key infrastructure

for initiatives such as Australia’s Virtual Herbarium, the Global Biodiversity

Information Facility and the Atlas of Living Australia.

Alex George edited and published a complete history of the ABLO Scheme in 2023: ‘The Australian Botanical Liaison Officer Scheme at Kew, 1937—2009’. AS George (ed.) Four Gables Press, Kardinya.

A gathering of PERTH ABLO's at the WA Herbarium on 7 November 2023 to celebrate with ALex George the launch of his book on the ABLO Scheme, to which we all contributed chapters.

You can read my chapter on my time as 42nd ABLO in full here:

ABLO book Alex Chapman 268-273.pdf

Download PDF • 5.07MB

Three ABLOs—Alex Chapman, Bob Chinnock, Ken Hill (holding cans of Fosters)—and Bob Johns outside the ‘ABLO flat’, Gloucester Court, 27 August 1999. Photograph, Shona Chinnock.