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RON HEBERLE

ORCHID PHOTOS

Western Australia

By

Ron Heberle

Greg Heberle

Graham Bowden

Tony Watkinson

�Ron Heberle orchid photos Western Australia� by Ron Heberle, Greg Heberle, Graham Bowden, Tony Watkinson. Submitted to publisher May 2006.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced,

stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise

without the permission of the copyright owner.

� Greg Heberle, 2006

Published by Ocean Publishing

Printed and bound in Western Australia

ISBN 1920783 52 0

 

CONTENTS

Cover photos:

Top left to right:

Diuris amplissima, Kojonup, Nov 1989

Thelymitra nuda, Mt Barker, Nov 1988

Caladenia flava Pink, Albany, Oct 1988

Bottom left to right:

Possible hybrid Caladenia radialis x Caladenia roei, Wedin, Sep 1994

Pterostylis rufa, Murray Bridge, Sep 1994

Cyanicula gemmata, Mt Clarence, Albany, Oct 1988

 

Page

Introduction

4

Ron Heberle by Graham Bowden

4

An afternoon with Ron Heberle. An interview by Tony Watkinson.

5

The passing of legends by Graham Bowden and Tony Watkinson

12

Caladenia (Spider orchids)

16

Calochilus (Beautiful lip or Beard orchids)

40

Corybas (Helmet orchids)

41

Cryptostylis (Slipper orchids)

42

Cyanicula (Blue orchids)

43

Cyrtostylis (Mosquito orchids)

45

Diuris (Donkey orchids)

47

Drakaea (Hammer orchids)

51

Drakonorchis (Dragon orchids)

53

Elythranthera (Enamel orchids)

54

Epiblema (Babe in a cradle orchids)

56

Eriochilus (Woolly lip or bunny orchids)

57

Gastrodia (Potato orchids)

58

Genoplesium (Pygmy orchids)

58

Leporella (Hare orchid)

59

Leptoceras (Rabbit orchid)

59

Lyperanthus (Rattle beaks)

60

Microtis (Mignonette orchids)

61

Monadenia (South African orchids)

62

Paracaleana (Duck orchids)

63

Praecoxanthus (Leafless orchid)

63

Prasophyllum (Leek orchids)

64

Pterostylis (Greenhoods)

67

Pyrorchis (Beak orchids)

72

Rhizanthella (Underground orchids)

72

Spiculaea (Elbow orchids)

73

Thelymitra (Sun orchids)

74

Ron Heberle orchid papers

84

References

84

Index

85

 

INTRODUCTION

Ron Heberle photographed orchids from about 1975 until shortly before his death in 2004. After he died, his collection of photographic slides passed into my care. About 95% of his slides were of native orchids from Western Australia. The orchid slide collection contains over 1870 slides, including over 50 by others, mainly H Foote and D Voigt. Some 95% of the slides have details such as his interpretation of the name of the orchid, place of collection and date. Slides with no details have been left out of this book. Generally only scientific names appear on the slides and a similar approach has been followed in this book. Unfortunately some of the details on the slides are abbreviated, incomplete, or illegible. The available details are listed for each photograph included in this book. The collection probably includes slides of over 90% of the State�s native orchids. Generally the names on the slides are as at time of photography, so that few have names revised in the past 10 years or so. This book generally has the orchid names as shown on the slides and on the Species Orchid Society Internet site, even though many are superseded and some could be wrong. A quick check of the names on the slides compared to Hopper and Brown 1984 and 1998, suggests that the former is often followed. For a few orchids, older names have been used, including some from Erickson 1951. Obvious spelling errors have been corrected. Many of the slides depict possible hybrids, often with the likely parent species. Generally the possible hybrid is in the middle, with the likely parent species on either side.

 

Most of Ron Heberle�s slides are available on the Species Orchid Society website:

http://members.iinet.net.au/%7Eemntee/page18.html

 

Some of his slides are available via Greg Heberle�s website:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~gregheberle/

 

This book includes over 250 of Ron Heberle�s orchid photos, some introductory notes for each genus and 3 articles covering Ron Heberle, from the Species Orchid Society website.

 

Further details of Ron Heberle�s life are presented in 2 books: �Heberle family 1500-2005� and �Heberle fishing Western Australia 1929-2004�, see References.

Greg Heberle.

 

RON HEBERLE

Ron was born on Christmas Eve 1913 in Perth WA. He grew up in the city being educated at the Victoria Park Primary School and the Thomas Street Secondary School. At the age of 17 he went, with his brother, to Kalgoorlie to work on a diamond drilling crew. It was during holidays in Esperance that they befriended a fisherman and found catching and selling fish door to door quite lucrative. So much so that his father left his Perth job and joined the boys. They spent a couple of days fishing and then sold their catches through Ravensthorpe, Lake King and as far away as Wagin. Good advice finally saw them settle their business in Katanning (1936). Ron joined the RAAF in WW2 and was sent to England as a pilot. He returned and in 1946 married Pauline.

 

The Heberles fished the fairly remote areas along the South coast from Esperance to the west of Albany and travelled through long stretches of undisturbed bush. Ron's love and knowledge of native flora was nurtured by his mother (she had a wonderful collection of pressed flowers) and his travels had him in contact with such beautiful plants as the Royal Hakea. When his father retired Ron and his family moved to Albany and it was the flower shows for his children's school (Spencer Park Primary) which had them all searching and collecting orchids. With the headmaster, Ron Oliver, Ron, Pauline and their children increased their interest in the terrestrial orchids around the Albany area. Ron learnt photography with the help of friends and family. He preferred colour slides as he found they gave him truer colours and it was easy for him to share his joy and photos with other orchid lovers. Ron has published regularly in The Orchadian, has orchids named after him, is a member of the AOF and is a valued confidant and supplier of materials to orchid people in Australia, Europe and the USA. He has an extensive knowledge of the geography of the south west of WA and the precise location of many orchid species. His interest in natural hybrids and variations within species has been beautifully recorded in his 1500 plus slides. These slides are to be donated to the National Herbarium in Canberra. Ron likes to point out that these slides only represent a fraction of his experiences with the wonderful WA terrestrial orchids. Ron and Pauline recently moved to Perth and joined our Orchid Species Society of WA. He wishes to make his records available to as many people as possible and this is why he has invited our society to put samples of his photography on our Internet site. ENJOY!

Graham Bowden 2002.

 

AN AFTERNOON WITH RON HEBERLE

The Species Orchid Society of Western Australia (Inc)

Ron Heberles Thelymitras


(An interview by Tony Watkinson)

 

(RH) When you see Thelymitra flowering it's often after a fire the previous summer. The fire must do something to the soil, or maybe it regenerates dormant mycorrhizal fungi, I don't know. A lot of people have got theories, but as far as I know the mechanism is not yet known.

This theory business dominates everything to do with nature, and what people try to do is bend nature to suit their theories. You can't do this. You can publish papers and if people swallow it, fair enough, but nature has a habit of making a fool of you.

As a guest speaker at the 1991 AOC conference I covered Thelymitra the full story as I saw it from my experience, plus bits and snips from other people.

Thelymitras are fantastic orchids and they are so aesthetically attractive. People are absolutely staggered when they see them. Not many people know much about these orchids.


(TW) I am still getting some great comments from people who have seen the web site.


(RH) Yes. I'm delighted about that. In regard to future directions, I would like to see as many of my slides put on the web site as can be done. I realize that this is a lot of work for you.


(TW) Well, yes, but it's just a matter of putting your head down and doing it.

 

(RH) If they want slides, I can supply them, but they cost to get copied, and you have to pay postage and that sort of thing. But my main interest is to see that people get to see them. I don't want to make any profit out of it at all.


When they had the World Orchid Conservation Conference here in Perth in 2001, they approached me about ideas for putting the terrestrials in the exhibition hall. I said yes, I had about 100 prints and I could get some more made to exhibit. There were about 400 of them and they were an absolute sensation. Most of the locals had never seen some of them, never mind the visitors.


(TW) Unless you are wandering about the bush, you wouldn't see them.


(RH) No. And you've really got to know your way around in the bush, they are not very co-operative, they are cunning little devils, they don't make things easy for we humans, all they are interested in is perpetuating the species. When it comes to Caladenias, you need to be more selective because there are a lot of Caladenias that are not aesthetically attractive. They are uniquely different, but they are not any where near as colorful as the Thelymitras. Some are very attractive but others are not, so you have to say, well, all right, what am I going to do, just entertain people or am I going to produce something that's got a bit of meat to it. From my point of view, that's my approach. If people just want to look at them, then that's OK, but I want to produce something that makes people think, makes them get off their tails and do something.

 

TW) When did you first become interested in orchids?


(RH) Well, my mother was mad about general flora when we were kids in Perth, and the whole area where we lived was bush and covered in wildflowers. You could walk from Claremont up to North Beach and there wasn't a house or anything. At North Beach there was a pub, a couple of stores and two or three houses. There wasn't anything in between at all. And it was a tremendous patch of bush and orchids too. Kids are fascinated by orchids. I mean wildflowers don't bother them much, they are pretty naff, but orchids, they've got something that's entirely different, and kids get fascinated as my sisters and I were. And when we grew up and went to school, if you mentioned that you were interested in all that, they gave you the treatment so we sort of, dropped out of it. But when Pauline and I got married. She was a country girl, lived on a farm at Geeralying and there were orchids everywhere. We were living in Katanning and I, along with five other people, started a naturalists club. The bulk of the members were farming people and in those days, every farm had a patch of bush on it. So we used to have a couple of wildflower shows, and natural history shows every year. The farmers would bring in buckets of Donkey Orchids and White Spider Orchids. I volunteered, with Pauline's help with our kids, to be responsible for the orchids. We just picked what we needed for the shows; about three specimens of every one. From that time on we sort of concentrated on orchids. When we went to live in Albany, we were fortunate that the headmaster of our kid's school was also wrapped in orchids. Albany is a marvelous area for orchids. There are more orchids within 200 km of Albany than anywhere else in the state. We got involved with the wildflower society and we did the same thing there as in Katanning. We took over responsibility for collecting and displaying the orchid section, and as such, we were invited to do something similar in other country towns. So we built up an interest on the basis of learning something about them, not just finding them. That's been very difficult but after 40 years, I've got a few clues. The problem with orchids, as I've mentioned, is that they are cunning little devils, diabolically cunning. You think you know something about them and then you are confronted with irrevocable evidence that you were wrong. This goes on all the time, so you keep having to change your ideas, but eventually, you come to the inescapable conclusion that you've got to accept that the varieties are infinite. There's neither a beginning nor an end to them. Some professionals like to put them into tidy little boxes called genera and species. They won't stop in those boxes; many jump straight out of them. Once a professional publishes something and has it validated, under the international code, we are all expected to follow it. Well, I do a bit of that, but I query them. I write and publish papers representing different points of view. Well, I'm sometimes not very popular for that. Some don't like amateurs they consider are encroaching on their preserves. Some taxonomists change the genera and species and are going overboard by splitting up genera, and this has made it very difficult. These revisions, if anything, are supposed to make things clearer, instead of that, they make a highly complex business more complicated. Anyway, that's another story.


(TW) When did you start taking Photographs of orchids?


(RH) In the mid seventies. I was invited to become a collector for the State Herbarium. It was pretty difficult to get specimens to Perth, and I didn't know what they wanted, so I thought that if I photograph them, they could have a look at the slides, and if they want them, I can go and get the specimens for them. Well, I started off with an old second hand Practica SLR with a standard lens and distance rings, and using natural light. Albany's not a particularly good place for natural light, and with that equipment which is very basic; there were endless problems with focusing and depth of field. The depth of field is essential when photographing orchids. Anyway, after about two and a half years of this, and making a mess of a lot of film, I met Herb Foote who came down from Perth to photograph the wildflowers. He looked at my camera equipment and said "Oh Ron, you'll have to get something better than this. You're never going to do any good with these. You need much superior equipment. Anyway, in 1981 I bought a Pentax K1000 with a zoom, flash and a "one to one" screw on lens for macro shots. I didn't know how to use the zoom lens and I couldn't find anybody in Albany who could either. Herb Foote showed me how to use the zoom. It has an automatic stop down so that when you focus, you've got the aperture wide open and you can get it exactly as you want it. Then when you select the "f" reading you want, it stops down to that reading automatically. That solved the problem of focusing and the depth of field was solved with the one to one adaptor and the zoom lens, which has a lot of magnification; I could get in real close. And later, I bought a set of diopters so I could take super close ups. Eventually I got to the stage where I could take a decent photo, but I still messed up a bit of film here and there. It's not hard to do.
I also use a flash. The flash meant that I could take photos regardless of the weather, no matter how poor the light was. For super close-ups I had to pick the flower and take it into my studio where I could put the camera on a tripod along with the flash to juggle the two to get what I wanted. I found, by trial and error, that colour is something that governs the aperture setting to get a sharp photo. I found that I had to have the flash 12 inches (30cm) away from the camera, 12 inches away from the screen, (backing board) for light coloured orchids, and 8 to 9 inches (20 to 30cm) for dark coloured orchids, and in between, for all different colours. I had a book in which all these results were written down. Eventually, I memorized it and didn't need the book any more. This meant that I was then taking quality photos. Another thing I did was to have the flash on one side slightly above the lens and angled down so that it hit the middle of the screen. I got a bit of cooking foil and crumpled it up and held that on the opposite side so when the flash bounced, it hit the foil and bounced back so that it lit up all round.


(TW) A deflector?


(RH) Yes. Some people use two flashes but the flash has got to be very low powered. If it's a high-powered flash, it just washes the colour out. Automatic setting only gives you an average shot. But it's not good enough. The flash must be the correct distance from the orchid and you must use manual settings.

 

(TW) So how many cameras have you had altogether?


(RH) Oh, that's all, only those two. The K1000 was only an update of the old Praktica, but a much better camera.


(TW) So when did you get the K1000?


(RH) I bought it in one of those arcades in Perth, where they sell photographic equipment. That would have been '81 or '82. The K1000 has been superceded by something now that will do everything. I tried borrowing other people's cameras but I made a bigger mess than I did with my own. Every type of equipment gives you a different result so you've got to learn to handle the equipment that you've got. There's always an average you can use, but with orchids, the detail has got to be shown and the average is just not good enough. It's got to be precise.


(TW) Do you prefer to take them indoors or out side in natural light?


(RH) Well, I do both. It depends on the weather. When it's windy, it's a waste of time taking them, they jump around and you can't get them. You can stop some of the movement, as long as it's not too much, with the flash, but if the wind is very bad, you are wasting your time. If it's inclement weather, drizzling and raining and so on, the orchids don't look too good with water droplets all over them. So I've taken about half of my photos in the bush. I take different coloured sheets of card. If the orchid has a bush behind it as background, then that's beautiful, but if the bush is further back, as often as not, the camera will focus on the bush. I used different coloured card; white, gray, pale green, pale blue and black which I carried in the car. I had two bits of wire, bent up like a staple, and I would just bend them round the orchid and put them down just to hold each end attaching the card so that it went out of focus. Another thing that I found, with super close-ups, was that when I photographed the whole orchid, the front part of it was out of focus. By pure accident, I took a photo one day and had focused on the tip of the orchid that was closest to the lens. It looked all blurred in the background, but when I got the slides back, it was in perfect focus.I took a photography course at TAFE for a while, but their equipment was different to mine, and if I did what they did, with my equipment, it didn't work. These are pitfalls that occur. You really need to study photography if you take on this business, because orchid photography is the most difficult. I'd never owned a camera till I tried to break into macro-photography, and of course, I was naturally behind the eight ball.


(TW) So you had to learn from scratch?


(RH) That's right.


(TW) What sort of film do you use?


(RH) Well, originally it was Kodak 64, but eventually I switched over to Fuji 100's, and the bulk, the best of my photography was done with Fuji 100's. These days people are using 400 film with natural light, and getting beautiful results. I never tried that, I was on a good thing and I stuck to it. Well, I reckoned I was.

 

(TW) You knew and understood what you were doing and what you were working with.

(RH) That's right. Also, I learned, like everybody else, by my mistakes. The essential thing is to write down everything you do. Write down the distance the flash is away. Write down whether its full size orchid or half size or whatever. When I took my orchids inside, I used f22, which gave beautiful depth of field. But if I tried to use F22 out in the bush, they were all underexposed because the opening was too small so I used F16 with the flash and got very good results. But I had to write all this down.


(TW) So you used the flash outside too.


(RH) Yes. All I did with the flash outside. You can have the flash attached to the camera but its pretty cumbersome to cart them around. A lot of people have one flash angled up from below the lens, and one angled down from the other side of the lens, and they get excellent results, but all I do, using the zoom lens and the adaptor, is hold the flash alongside the lens. There's a tolerance of a half inch (12mm) in the flash distance and anywhere in that half inch, you get fairly good results, but if its over half an inch, well, it shows, either over exposed or under exposed.
We concentrated on 200kms from Albany, and we've possibly looked at 1% of what's there.


(TW) You've got some orchids named after you. What are they?


(RH) Yes, ones a Donkey (Diuris heberlei) orchid and the other's a Spider (Caladenia heberleana) orchid. The Donkey orchids are something that we should be put on the net. They are beautiful.


(TW) You have slides of them too do you?


(RH) I have all the named WA species and a few that haven't been named. For some obscure reason, they don't appear to hybridize over here. I've only seen one Donkey orchid that, I think, is a hybrid. In the Eastern States they hybridize like mad. It's all a question of pollinators. The Donkey orchid has probably got a specific pollinator and there aren't many of them around. Whereas Caladenias, most of them have non-specific pollinators, any sort of insect will do. It's a possibility and it could be a probability, but you're going to be hard pressed to bring it up to a probability. I've got a lot of correspondence from a chap who lives in the U.S.A. He had a theory that some orchids have a specific pollinator, and if that pollinator is not present, it never got fertilized. He published a series of very plausible papers built around this theory, but the more I got into hybrids, the more I was quite certain that he was going up the garden path. So he came over, he had four trips to Australia, and he came down to Albany. I invited him to stay with us, and every night I'd take him into the lounge room where we had the projectors set up, and I'd show him all these hybrids. I said that they couldn't have a specific pollinator because of all these hybrids. He said 'Ron, I'm convinced that what I wrote was wrong in some cases. No one challenged me'. He was one of the first in that field of study you see.
When anyone publishes anything, it's up to be debated. You get a personal point of view, and a single personal point of view isn't worth that much. If a personal point of view is backed up by a great many others contributing, well then, maybe you are on the right track.

I published my first paper on Caladenia hybrids about 1991 in the Orchadian. A chap had written to me suggesting that I should publish a paper about Caladenia hybrids. I agreed and roughed out some notes (I'd never written one before) and I sent it to a friend of mine who was a big noise in the orchid world in Sydney, for his advice. He wrote back and he suggested certain amendments and so on, and he said,"Look, if you are going to publish in the Orchadian, you should get in touch with the Orchadian editor and get his assistance". This was a chap named Joe Betts. We swapped letters back and forth, and eventually the paper was drafted as a professional paper, though even with his assistance it was written by an amateur. He published it, and, I didn't know it, but at that time it was the first paper that had ever been written about Caladenia hybrids in Australia. So it was a benchmark. I made some predictions. Only one of them has survived because they were wrong. For instance, I said that apart from the early flowering and late flowering Caladenias, all the rest are free to hybridize. Well I've never seen an early flowering hybrid but we found late flowering hybrids, so maybe I was half right. I got interested in hybrids and as far as I know, few others have. In the first paper, I suggested that other people should do the same work in other locations and then the full story might be known some day, but as far as I know that hasn't happened.


(TW) I guess most people would want a fair bit of money to do the sort of work that you have done, but you have done it as a hobby.


(RH) Yes. We spent a lot of money. Neither of us drink nor smoke and we haven't got any expensive habits, so we always had a few bob to fill up the car and go somewhere. We were very lucky in that we had friends and relations spread all through the country and could nick up on a Friday night, stay the night with them and go out looking at orchids the next day. They knew the bush and where the orchids were. Then we could set off back to Albany by another route and get back about 6 o'clock Sunday. In that way we could really cover the countryside. We would never have been able to do it without them.


(TW) You told me once that you tried to grow some Thelymitras and you hadn't been 100% successful.


(RH) No. The Thelymitras were easier to grow than Caladenias in general, but some of them were impossible. The easy ones are a lot of those blue ones. But they survive in the pot from three to five years because they use up the mycorrhizal fungi and it isn't replaced so they die.

 

(TW) I see. So if you could find some way of replacing the fungi.


(RH) Yes. That's what they are doing today. That's what Heinrich Beyrle does.
The most beautiful Thelymitra vareigata I've ever seen, used to grow on Mt. Wylieyung, which is behind the airport at Albany. It was a big granite rock. The farmer sold the rock to Australian Blue Metal and they started blasting it out for road making. They dumped the metal dust on top of the Thelymitras. You are lucky to find one or two there now. It's a great heap of metal dust now. About 200 square metres. It was the only place I've ever seen these. They were the most beautiful colour forms we had ever seen. There are some T. vareigatas growing north of Perth that I have never seen, and they are beautiful. They used to grow all around the Swan River when I was a kid. They grew from Belmont, down through Burswood, Victoria Park, South Perth, Mt. Pleasant, down through Jandacot to Woodman's point, Twelve Mile Well and right around where Kwinana is now, down to Rockingham, Point Peron, and then all the way down to Bunbury. Of course, many of them are gone.


(TW) Thanks for talking with me today Ron. I'm sure many people will be interested in your comments.

 

THE PASSING OF LEGENDS

Special Newsletter of the

The Species Orchid Society of Western Australia (Inc)

 

The Passing of Legends

By Graham Bowden and Tony Watkinson

February 2004 was a sad time for our members as we lost two of our great friend within a day of each other. Both Ron Heberle and our President, Reg Allison passed away, leaving the membership in mourning at their sad loss.

The death of Ron Heberle marked the end of an era. Ron was a noted orchid identity, not just in his home State of Western Australia, but throughout Australia and the world. Ron had just celebrated his 90th birthday the previous December. His birthday party being marred by the death a few days earlier, of his wife Pauline who had been his lifelong partner.

Ron was one of those giants in the field of orchid identification and a true self taught naturalist. He was a genuine character, the like of which very rarely comes our way. He had the kind of booming voice that has filled many a hall of orchid lovers, in delivering his slant on WA's terrestrial orchids, their habitats, varieties and hybrids.

Since his childhood, Ron had a growing interest in WA's wildflowers, and it was the flower shows for his children's school (Spencer Park Primary) which had him and his family all searching and collecting the native terrestrial orchids. With the headmaster, Ron Oliver, Ron, Pauline and their children increased their interest in the terrestrial orchids around the Albany area, and eventually, Ron became an orchid collector for Kings Park. Ron found some difficulty in sending orchids to Kings Park for identification, as they did not last long enough in reasonable condition. In his typical style, he bought a camera and taught himself how to use it so as to take slides of the orchids in situ. He later updated this first camera to an SLR to enable him to get better close ups and truer colours. Over the next 30 odd years, Ron was to take thousands of slides of the native WA terrestrial orchids in the wild which he was happy to share with other orchid lovers. Ron was published regularly in The Orchadian and other orchid publications. He has had orchids named after him and was a foundation member of the AOF and a valued confidant and supplier of materials to orchid people in Australia, Europe and the USA. He had an extensive knowledge of the geography of the south west of WA and the precise location of many orchid species.

Ron Heberle in hospital shortly before his death. Still loving his WA native terrestrials.


His interest in natural hybrids and variations within species has been beautifully recorded in his slides. Ron liked to point out that these slides only represent a fraction of his experiences with the wonderful WA terrestrial orchids. Ron and Pauline had recently moved to Perth and joined the Species Orchid Society of WA. His wish was to make his records available to as many people as possible and to this end, had invited the society to put samples of his photography on the Societies Internet site.

Ron's orchid experience came from field work rather than from any formal education, and as such he had very little patience with some trained botanists whom he saw as hypothesizing from ivory towers, and had no compunction in telling them so.

He was very interested in the natural hybridization of native WA terrestrial orchids and would make them a focus at the slide shows that he often gave to local orchid Societies in and around the Perth region. Even at 90 years of age, Ron was still happy to give these slide shows, and indeed he was due to present one at the Orchid Society of Western Australia the week he died.

Pauline & Ron Heberle. March 2003

 

Both Ron and Pauline will be missed by the orchid community here in WA and everywhere that Western Australian terrestrial orchids are appreciated.

 

Reg Allison, at age 56, was in his second year as President of the Society and, like Ron Heberle, was also well respected and loved by all who knew him. Reg was one of those quiet, unassuming people, who manage to get the impossible done without seeming to have tried too hard.

 

He was a returned serviceman, having served with the Australian SAS contingent during the Vietnam conflict, and later was recruited into the initial Australian Anti Terrorist organization. According to Reg, his health problems stemmed from his training with the later group, when he and other trainees were subjected to a mock gas attack which left them all gasping and coughing for weeks afterward.

Reg seemed to recover eventually, and after leaving the Army, took up employment in the civilian world. He prided himself on his fitness and frequently ran marathons just to for the hell of it. He became interested in caged birds and had quite a large collection of them, when he collapsed one day with lung problems.

After much hospitalization and having half of one lung removed, he was advised to get rid of the birds as their dust and feathers could have been a contributing factor to his health problems. This he did, and began to increase his interest in orchids. Reg first came across Australian native orchids when he was training with the SAS in the Queensland rainforests in which orchids abound. He was often seen scaling trees to get a closer look at some orchid or other, as his army friends can attest.

 

One of the first orchids that Reg 'acquired' was a Dendrobium speciosum, which he still had at the time of his death. It is one of the biggest plants of this species that most of us have ever seen and, happily for the plant, Reg's widow, Trish, is to keep this orchid as a kind of memorial to Reg.

Reg's interest in WA's native terrestrial orchids was sparked by Ron Heberle and his nephew, Graham Bowden, the Societies hard working Secretary. The three of them often would travel many kilometers around the state to look at terrestrial orchids in their natural surroundings.

Reg was instrumental in organizing a rescue dig where the Mitchell Freeway is to be extended north of Perth. He had the tenacity to wend his way through a minefield of bureaucracy that would have daunted others, to finally get permission to remove the orchids to safety, a task that was taken up by many members of the Society.

 

Reg, doing what he loved best. Saving orchids.

With the passing of Reg Allison and Ron Heberle, it is up to the members of the Species Orchid Society of Western Australia continue the work that they have pioneered.

Their loss is deeply felt by all who knew them.