Image:The Banksia (John White).jpg

This is an image of a plate that appeared on Page 225 of John White's 1790 Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales.

Figure 1, captioned "The Banksia", shows a Banksia infructescence. The accompanying text states that

"we cannot with certainty determine the species. The capsules are smooth, at least when ripe, and a little shining. We think this is neither the B. serrata, integrifolia, nor dentata of Linnaeus, nor probably his ericifolia; so that it seems to be a species hitherto undescribed. The leaves and flowers we have not seen."

Three years later, in James Edward Smith's A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland, the figured plant was tentatively labelled a Banksia spinulosa (Hairpin Banksia):

"We suspect the fruit figured in Mr. White's Voyage, page 225, fig. I, may belong to this species, but we have no positive authority to assert it."

However, in 1981 Alf Salkin argued that

"The cone illustrated by White (1790) is probably not as suggested from the B. spinulosa described by Smith but, may be from another member of the complex or from one of the forms of B. ericifolia.

Figure 2 is captioned "The Banksia gibbosa", but this plant has long since been transferred into a separate genus as Hakea gibbosa.

The original image appears in Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales. This digital image is taken from the Project Gutenberg transcription of that text, and is available here.

1790

No attribution for the painting is given in White's Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, and Smith's A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland attributes it to White. Salkin, has suggested that

"these were probably done by the convict artist Thomas Watling"

and this is supported by a set of paintings of the Journal plates by Watling that are held by the Natural History Museum, London. However, Helen Hewson states in Australia: 300 years of botanical illustration that

"it is thought by some that Thomas Watling, a convict artist of some ability, may have done the original artwork, but he did not arrive in the colony until late in 1792.... John Calaby believes that White had Watling copy the plates as published in the Journal for practice, because Watling was trained in landscape painting not natural history painting."