Mary Harriet Bate

Mary Harriet Bate was a noted collector of botanical specimens for Australian botanists in the 1880s. Her significant contributions to Australian botany are perpetuated and recognisable in the names of several species that she first gathered from the Bermagui River-Mt Dromedary-Tilba area.

Mary was born in Sydney in October 1855. She was one of nine children born to Henry Jefferson Bate and Elizabeth Kendall Bate. From the age of 14 until she married at the age of 30, Mary lived on the family property "Mountain View" at Tilba Tilba.

Between 1881 and 1886 she collected specimens of flowering plants, algae, fungi and mosses from the local area. Most of the plants she posted to the German-Australian Frederick von Mueller, the Victorian Government Botanist, who identified and catalogued them. The algae, fungi and mosses were frequently sent to other botanists.

Mueller had recruited 225 women and girls, the youngest of whom was six years of age, to gather plant specimens from all around Australia. Bate was one of the more prolific of them.

The two wrote to each other regularly, and he encouraged her by writing ‘You are one of the very few Ladies in all Australia, who have any taste for botanic science, in contrast to what is observed in all Europe and North America’. And when naming Myoporum batae to honour her, he wrote ‘I hope this acknowledgment will encourage you to continue your searches as doubtless a whole host of rare plants and some new ones remain there yet to be discovered.’ The National Herbarium of Victoria and the Melbourne Botanic Gardens still have 361 of Mary Bate’s plant specimens in their collections.

(Mueller, himself, is very interesting. As well as being the Victorian Government Botanist, he was the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne and he founded the National Herbarium of Victoria. He also took a leading part in promoting Australian exploration, especially by championing the Burke and Wills expedition which became the first to cross the continent, and he played a significant role in the various attempts to unravel the mystery of the disappearance of the explorer and his fellow countryman, Ludwig Leichhardt. In 1882 he published a ‘Systematic census of Australian plants’ which described 8,464 species. In 1889 an updated edition of his census was published which included details of 8,839 species of flora – including those collected by Mary Bate from around the Tilba area.)

In September 1886, Mary Bate married John Griffiths, a shopkeeper from Bombala. They were to have five children. In 1921 the family moved to a Jersey stud farm at Kyogle on the NSW North Coast. Mary died there 30 years later.