Field record

Expeditions

Every sheet in the cabinets began as a walk. These are the surveys that produced the bulk of the collection, with the notebooks they left behind.

88Expeditions logged

11,940Kilometres walked

206Field notebooks

1898First survey

1898

Survey I

The first walk to Mill Creek

Six weeks on foot with two presses and a mule that objected to both. E. M. Fernwood returned with 412 sheets, of which 380 are still filed under their original determination — a rate no later survey has matched.

412 sheets Mill Creek Notebooks 1–4

1911

Survey XIV

Tablelands grassland transects

The survey that gave us the grass collection: fixed transects walked in the same fortnight each summer, repeated for thirty-eight years. The method was unfashionable then and is standard now.

2,109 sheets Eastern Tablelands Repeat transect

1954

Survey XLI

The ridge above Corran

A hurried post-fire survey, and the source of most of the determinations we have since had to revise. Useful anyway: it is the only record of the ridge before the pines went in.

688 sheets Corran Ridge Post-fire

1988

Survey LXVI

Coastal heath, from the south

Four seasons of heath collecting, run jointly with two regional herbaria. First survey to photograph every specimen in situ before lifting it — the images now sit alongside the sheets.

1,455 sheets Southern coast Photographed

2026

Survey LXXXVIII

Return to Mill Creek, 128 years on

Walking the 1898 route with the original notebook in hand. Of the 96 species Fernwood recorded on the creek flats, 71 were found again, 18 were not, and 7 have moved uphill by more than a kilometre.

In progress Mill Creek Resurvey

Field notebooks

“Rain since Tuesday. Pressed nothing. Wrote down what I could see from the tent.”

Notebook 41, March 1911

All 206 notebooks have been transcribed and are consultable by readers. The originals stay in the cabinet; the transcriptions are keyword searchable in the reading room terminal.

See resulting sheets →