Wiecek, Barbara M. (1958 - )
Born in Darwen (with an "e" but still some-what prophetic), Lancashire, UK.
In her own words, ASBS Newsletter 1991:
Her mother (from Liverpool) and father
(Polish airforce) met during WWII.
The English
climate played havoc with Barbara's lungs, and the
sun had set on the British Empire, so they decided
to migrate to Australia when Barbara was 18
months old.
After a stint in tin army huts at East
Hills, they moved to the western suburbs of
Sydney.
Primary school was Our Lady of the
Rosary in St Marys, an establishment left completely unscathed by the Catholic reformation.
At Our Lady of Mercy College at Parramatta the inquisition was actually
over, and there were lay teachers (unfortunately
mostly female), so high school was relatively bearable.
When university choice came around, Barbara
decided that two chemists in the family was definitely enough, and plumbed for biology. Zoology
was her first choice, but while the subject matter
was fascinating the disseminators were user-hostile
and slightly reminiscent of primary school. Botany
looked more promising; at least the botanists
seemed to like having you around.
She met David Morrison [her co-editor of the ASBS Newsletter in the early 1990s] about 1977; "he was then a skinny kid with lots of
dark hair. During the plentiful lulls in excitement
during plant kingdom lectures David was want to
circulate notes and improper suggestions to young
ladies in his vicinity".
When university ended, Barbara was wondering why she hadn't done accounting or optometry
or anything that might make you employable,
when, to her surprise, she was offered a position at
the University of N.S.W.
She has been employed
in a botanical capacity ever since.
Most botanists
have the sense to work on one or a few obscure or
complex groups which no-one else knows much
about. This reduces conflict within the profession
and enables everyone to string out grants indefinitely. Barbara didn't quite twig to this, and generalised, thus ending up in her present position as an
Identifications Botanist at the National Herbarium
of NSW.
In 2004-05 Dr Barry Conn and Barbara Wiecek got a $50,000 grant from the NSW Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources (DIPNR) to undertake Plant
Identification for native vegetation mapping.
By 2014, in an obituary to Elizabeth Anne Brown, it states that Elizabeth "spent her weeks with her friends in Sydney and her weekends with Barbara Wiecek
and John (Rex) Harrison at Tahmoor with the horses, dogs, hens and their garden."
Source: Extracted from:
Austral. Syst. Bot. Soc. Newsletter 66 (March 1991) p.22
RBG SYD Annual Report 2004-2005
Telopea Volume 17: 1-10, 7 March 2014 Obituary - Elizabeth Anne Brown
Portrait Photo: 1990 Getty Images, credit Fairfax Media Archives.
Collecting localities for 'Wiecek, B.M.' from AVH (2025)
Data from 5,427 specimens
