Acknowledgement of Indigenous Cultures

Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria acknowledges the many Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia. We honour their custodianship, knowledge of and connection with plants, land, water and sky. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and Elders past and present. We acknowledge that our two Gardens sites are located on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong Country.

Users of this site should be aware that some of the historical letters published here contain views about Australia’s First Peoples. A minority of these views are pejorative or prejudiced, and these are recognised as inappropriate irrespective of when they were written. Neither the editors nor Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria endorse such views.

Treatment of Indigenous Cultural Knowledge

Some of the correspondence held in the corpus of letters at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria includes references to Indigenous Cultural Knowledge, such as the medicinal use of certain plants by Traditional Owners. In order to minimise the risk of exploitation of such knowledge,

an exhaustive review of the letters was carried out to identify and exclude such letters from online publication. Approximately 100 letters were originally excluded from this site for this reason.

The knowledge explicitly mentioned in these excluded letters is subject to review by the Traditional Owners of that knowledge to determine whether they can be published online. Letters cleared for online publication are added to the site automatically.

If access to the remaining excluded letters is required for academic research purposes, please contact the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria Library with full details of your request. All requests will be assessed on a case-by-case basis with access granted at the discretion of the reviewing team.

While every effort has been made to exclude all such examples of Indigenous Cultural Knowledge from the corpus, it is possible that certain instances may have been unintentionally overlooked. Please notify the editors immediately in the event that a likely candidate for exclusion is discovered.