Hugo Flecker

Hugo Flecker (1884-1957) was an Australian medical practitioner, radiotherapist, toxicologist and natural historian. He founded the North Queensland Naturalist Club in 1932, whose herbarium grew into the now heritage-listed Flecker Botanical Gardens in Cairns, Queensland. He identified the deadly box jellyfish, Chironex fleckeri.

Hugo Flecker was born in Melbourne, Victoria in 1884.

From the early 1930s there were community calls for the establishment of a formal botanical garden within the recreation reserve in Cairns. Momentum came largely from Dr Hugo Flecker and the North Queensland Naturalist Club, which he founded in 1932. Flecker was a radiologist with a strong interest in natural history, especially toxic plants and animals. He undertook valuable work on the Queensland Finger Cherry and the Tar Tree and identified the deadly box jelly, Chironex fleckeri. From 1935 he contributed a weekly column to the Cairns Post on behalf of the Naturalist Club, in which he publicly advocated the establishment of a botanic garden at the recreation reserve.

In 1933, with encouragement from the Queensland Government Botanist, Cyril White, Flecker established the North Queensland Naturalists' Club Herbarium in the grounds of the Cairns City Council's nursery in the recreation reserve. The club's collection grew from around 1,600 specimens in 1937 to about 5,000 in 1950 and an estimated final collection size of around 10,680 specimens. The collection proved popular with visitors, enhancing their experiences of the gardens. Until 1949 specimens were housed at the gardens in a storeroom supplied and erected by the Cairns City Council, then the collection was moved to the former Kuranda Barracks on the Cairns Esplanade. It returned briefly to the Cairns Botanic Gardens from 1967 to 1971, but is now fully incorporated in the general collection at the CSIRO Division of Forest Research at Atherton.

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