OUR MIDWEEK MEDITATION: WATTLE
“And I love the great land where the Waratah grows. And the Wattle-bough blooms on the hill.” Henry Lawson
So the Olympics have come to a close, and those of us who’ve been sleep deprived for the past few weeks can eschew the sofa for our beds at last.
It was just before our Australian contingent began to leave for London in their droves, that I noticed the wattle – the green and yellow bloom which is the inspiration for our athletes’ outfits – was starting to bud. It seemed a happy synchronicity.
I love it when the wattle flowers begin to appear in their cheerful, sweet-smelling profusion; for me the wattle heralds the beginning of the end of winter.
The green and the gold… the uniform of our London 2012 Olympic team.
The combination of a bout of nationalistic fervor coupled with the landscape’s physical representation of that fervor set me thinking – how did Australia choose wattle as its national emblem and why?
I remembered how moved I was when the-then Governor General Sir William Deane, picked sprigs of wattle from the gardens of Government house to toss into Switzerland’s Saxeten River gorge to commemorate the 14 Australians who had died there in the 1999 canyoning expedition that went so horribly wrong.
“It is still winter at home,” he said during the ceremony. “But the golden wattles are coming into bloom. Just as these young men and women were in the flower of their youth. And when we are back in Australia we will remember how the flowers and perfume and the pollen of their, and our, homeland was carried down the river where they died to Lake Brienz in this beautiful country on the far side of the world. May they all rest with God.”
The push to make the wattle our national flower emblem was started by Victorian ornithologist Archibald Campbell who founded the Victorian Wattle Club in 1899.
A few years later he delivered a lecture entitled Wattle Time; or Yellow-haired September, putting forward the case for the wattle to be Australia’s National Flower.
By 1912 we had our first truly national Wattle day, and in the same year it was first introduced into Australia’s coat of arms by Royal Warrant.
Wattle, however, didn’t have a completely smooth run on its way to the top – there was another, and some might say, more splendid, more unusual, more perhaps uniquely Australian flower that many wanted to adopt as the floral emblem – the waratah. Botanist and musuem curator R.T Baker wrote: “The expression, ‘the land of the Waratah’, applies to Australia and no other; it is Australia’s very own. In the Wattle, Australia has not a monopoly like the Waratah, for Africa has over one hundred native wattles, and it also occurs in American, East and West Indies and the Islands….”
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10 Responses to this article
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Candida August 15, 2012
That’s a shame you guys! I’m alright with wattle, but the macadamia flowers up here on the north coast do it to me…so I sympathize…
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sue bell August 15, 2012
We used to have wattle day here in Victoria, in the early 1900s there were special wattle trains travelling out to Wattle Glen on the day.The trains were not enclosed carriages and hundreds of young men would travel out to Wattle Glen to pick great branches of wattle to take home to their beloveds.
We should still celebrate wattle day as it is our national floral symbol. Wattle gives us hope in the cold months, that spring will return again.
We also used to have another public holiday for Arbour Day when we all planted trees. This is another national holiday we need to bring back. -
sue bell August 15, 2012
Another comment on the glorious waratah. Did you know there are red and white waratahs? White waratah is said to be the spirits of children who have been lost and died in the bush.
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LOVO August 21, 2012
G’Day, Wattle Day is not lost its is still being celebrated in many towns and cities all across this great land. Canberra has celebrations WA has celebrations, even Broken Hill in the bush celebrate the day.. You can still catch a steam train at Melb. Station to Hurstbridge to celebrate Wattle Day…. Google it……. this year is the 102 yr Wattle Day has been celebrated, in never went away completely… Happy Wattle Day (www.nsw2880.com)
