Born: 2 December 1936, Australia
Died: 30 June 2021
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: NA
This biography has been shared from The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, published by the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Estelle Canning was a botanist who, after a varied career as teacher, including in Papua New Guinea, and learning singing in London, joined Canberra Botanic Garden in 1967. She was largely involved with the work of the Gardens’ herbarium, particularly field collecting and identification of specimens, curation of the herbarium, and developing the Public Reference Set. The Gardens’ herbarium was merged with the Australian National Herbarium in 1994 and it was from that institute that Canning retired in 1995. By then the Herbarium held over 10,500 of her specimens collected widely across Australia and in Papua New Guinea. She continued her association with the Herbarium for some years after retirement. Canning was widely respected for her experiments in using indigenous plants for dying the wool from her flock of ‘coloured’ sheep.
Chronology
1967
Career event – Appointed Junior Botanist, Canberra Botanic Gardens
1968
Career event – Participated in Canberra Botanic Gardens 2-month collecting trip to Western Australia
1995
Career event – Retired