Order of Australia medal for Albany’s Ruth Byrne after two decades of volunteering with WA Herbarium

Ruth Byrne’s initial reaction to finding out she was going to be awarded an Order of Australia Medal as part of the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours List was surprise. “I felt I really didn’t deserve it, but my husband thinks otherwise,” she said. She has been recognised for her service to conservation and the environment. For the last two decades, Ms Byrne has been volunteering for the WA Herbarium alongside her husband Geoff. Together they have collected, photographed and described more than 8800 WA plant species. Ms Byrne said she and Geoff could not “just stop” following their retirement in 2002. “I suppose you can, but both of us would have been six-foot under very quickly,” she said. “I’d always had an interest in flowers but didn’t have the opportunity to do any courses or study in it, but Geoff had. “Working with the herbarium has been great for me because it has meant pursuing an interest I had since I was about eight.” The role saw the couple live in a caravan travelling around WA for eight years. Mr Byrne, with his experience in botany, would dictate and describe the different specimens, while Ms Byrne said she would “go ahead and find the plants” and also type up her husband’s dictations. Since leaving school, Ms Byrne said she worked mostly as a secretary in fields unrelated to botany, but she applied methods learnt during a course about birds to spot interesting plants. “You might ask ‘without a degree, how would I find the plants’,” she said. “Well we did a bird course many years ago and they said ‘Look for the GISS, the general impression, size and shape of a bird’, really that’s what I have applied to plants. “If it had a different leaf colour, I’d wonder what it was.” It was that method that led to identifying what would later be confirmed as a new species while exploring a wetland northeast of Broome in 2008. Ms Byrne said she was walking ahead as usual when she spotted a “beautiful little flower with no leaves coming out of the mud”. She said didn’t want to move because it was “such a tiny flower”, but at the same time, two rare birds flying overhead also caught her attention. “I was asking Geoff to grab his binoculars and put down his camera,” she said. “It was all a bit of fun.” She said they collected a couple of specimens and that it took a few years to confirm it was a new species. “One was sent to the east to a botanist studying that particular type, and he realised it was a new species,” she said. “He had the GPS, so he came all the way across to WA to check it out. “Then he confirmed that it was a new species.” The Utricularia Byrneana was officially named after its discoverers in 2015. “It has little bladders underground that suck in water, and inside the bladder it has fine hairs,” Ms Bryne said. “So it sucks in the water with insects on it, then it blows the water back out and then has the insects to digest.” After spending eight years on and off the road with their caravan, the Byrnes moved to King River in 2010, but they have continued to make regular trips around WA to help document the State’s flora. Ms Byrne said it was a misconception that wildflowers were only around for two months each year. “They’re not, they are all year round,” he said. “We’ve collected from January through to the end of the year from all different places. “Sometimes we go back to a particular area two or three times at different times of the year.” Closer to the place they now call home, Ms Byrne has been involved with the Albany Senior Choir since 2011. She said it was a wonderful group based on friendship which brought people of various ages together to sing, but also in a social setting. For Mr and Ms Byrne, now both in their 80s, this will be their final year volunteering for the herbarium, but they still don’t have plans on slowing down to a stop. “I’m very keen to go back to some of the areas, not so much to collect but to find out the history of some of those areas,” Ms Byrne said. “I think we are going to miss this a lot, but we’ll find other things to do. “We are not likely to just sit back and think what now, what are we going to have for dinner tonight.”