The shelf where the priceless artefacts once resided. Credit:Antoine Doyen To this day, Jeanson can't quite believe what happened, and nor can scientists and museum directors from around the world who have followed the story with horror. The specimens were both priceless and irreplaceable. How could anyone, let alone government officials, incinerate such artefacts? It was simply beyond Jeanson's comprehension. It remains so, even after post-mortems and investigations conducted in both countries, by scientists and bureaucrats, after diplomats stepped in and compensation negotiations were undertaken. With Australian officials refusing to speak about the incident beyond bland bureaucratic statements of regret, it's hard to unpick the chain of events that led to the destruction. When you do go looking for answers you find other stories, too: tales of the collection of the specimens, of shipwreck, war and endurance, of a time when exploration and scientific endeavour were as significant to world powers as conquest and trade. The story begins with a simple loan request made by Tony Bean, a botanist with the Queensland Herbarium, who according to his online professional profile is currently studying two new species of Olearia, a flowering plant of the Asteraceae family, related to the daisy and the sunflower.

We don't know exactly what Bean planned to do with the specimens, as he tells Good Weekend he's been instructed not to speak to the media. Other botanists say it appears Bean was seeking to confirm whether or not he had identified new species in Queensland. On November 17, 2016, Bean logged into a software system called Colhelper, which is used by museums around the world to manage loans to and from their collections, and made a request for the loan of the 105 specimens. The request – numbered 71250 in Colhelper – was received in Paris and, as Bean was a qualified scientist with an accredited institution, promptly processed. The Jardin des Plantes Colhelper administrator, Serge Muller, checked it over and passed it on to the curator in charge of the museum's Asteraceae collection, Florian Jabbour. The following day Jabbour sent Bean an acknowledgement of receipt of the loan request. Later, Jabbour began the process of removing the precious samples from storage and preparing them for dispatch to Australia. They left the museum in a sturdy plain brown package, marked as museum specimens, the day after Christmas. So far, says Jeanson, nothing was out of the ordinary. The Jardin des Plantes' mission is not only to preserve its collection but to share it with the world, and to that end it lends about 10,000 specimens a year without incident. He could not have known that in this instance, a flaw had already crept into the system. To truly grasp the significance of what was destroyed last March by unwitting biosecurity officers at the Department of Agriculture, you first need to understand the collection from which they came. In 1635, King Louis XIII – according to an English ambassador to his court, a stutterer "so extream [sic], that he would sometimes hold his tongue out of his mouth a good while before he could speak so much as one word; he had besides a double row of teeth, and was observed seldom or never to spit or blow his nose, or to sweat much" – founded the Jardin Royal des Plantes Médicinales, now the Jardin des Plantes. It’s not replaceable. The Mona Lisa, you can paint a fake one at least. This, it’s impossible.

This was the birthplace of the modern science of botany and it became the most important botanical collection on earth. There are some eight million specimens painstakingly pinned onto cardboard backing, treated for protection from the ravages of insects and moulds, digitised and recorded, stored in shiny yellow metal slots in endless compression shelves over four floors of a humidity- and temperature-controlled, pressurised building on the site of the original royal garden. In 1785, Louis XVI directed Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, to lead a voyage around the world. Its mission was to complete the discoveries of James Cook, to correct and complete maps, to establish trade contacts, open new maritime routes and to enrich French science and scientific collections. After visiting parts of America, Japan and Russia, Lapérouse arrived at Botany Bay on January 24, 1788, as Captain Arthur Phillip was moving the colony of New South Wales, then just days old, from Botany Bay to Port Jackson, where fresh water was more abundant. The French and English officers treated one another with great civility and Lapérouse spent six weeks among the British colonialists before he departed for New Caledonia, leaving journals and maps to be returned to France with the British supply ship Sirius. His two ships were never seen again. When nothing had been heard of Lapérouse after two years, French public sentiment demanded a response. A rescue mission was finally ordered by the French national assembly in February 1791. Its leader, Rear Admiral Bruni d'Entrecasteaux, was not only to search for Lapérouse – his efforts should be "useful and advantageous for navigation, geography, arts and sciences". D'Entrecasteaux departed France in September. Among the crew aboard two ships, La Recherche and L'Espérance, was an ambitious botanist named Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière, who had worked with the most famous botanist of the era, Joseph Banks, whose work with James Cook on the Endeavour between 1768 and 1771 had made Cook and Banks celebrities. Now Labillardière had the opportunity to make his own name. During the voyage, which entailed the circumnavigation of mainland Australia and Van Diemen's Land, Labillardiere gathered 4000 specimens, 3000 of them new to science, and wrote the first general description of Australian flora, Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen. By the time the expedition sailed on to the Dutch colonies of Indonesia, Holland and France were at war. The crew was imprisoned and its goods, including Labillardière's collection, were seized. But by then war had also broken out between Holland and England. The Labillardière collection was again captured, this time by the English, and delivered to London as war booty on November 1, 1795.

Labillardière was devastated by the loss of his specimens. After his release, he appealed to Banks, hoping the botanist might use his considerable influence to have the collection returned by the British Museum. Angry letters were exchanged until Labillardière wrote to Banks: "Please my friend, make all possible efforts. You know how much could be lost for science if collections of this nature were not returned to those who made them." With Banks onside, Labillardière's Australian collection was returned, and eventually found its home to safety in the Jardin des Plantes. Just 89 of the crew of 209 who had set out on the voyage survived. The men behind the French collection, from left: Jean-Francois Laperouse, Jacques-Julien Labillardiere and Joseph Banks. Credit:Alamy Later the collection would survive the violence of the French Revolution and the horrors of the 20th century. The terrible battlelines of World War I never struck Paris. In the next war, as the Germans retreated before the Allied advance in 1945, Hitler's appointed governor, General Dietrich von Choltitz, disobeyed an order to reduce the city to rubble. In more recent years, the budget cuts that ripped through similar institutions around the world were less marked in France, where the fruits of the Enlightenment have always been considered part of the fabric of the nation; infrastructure rather than indulgence. Labillardière's collection was folded lovingly away into this gigantic national machine of arts and sciences, of relics and statues, of paintings, maps and songs, of pressed flowers, and there it lived other than when requests, such as the one from Queensland, came through. On a warm afternoon the northern autumn, Jeanson sits in a meeting room overlooking the gardens first laid out under poor toothy Louis XIII, seeking to explain the value of the lost specimens. To a botanist, the story of Labillardière's collection is extraordinary, but the samples carry a more intrinsic importance. The value of each specimen lies not only in the organic matter, but in the work of the botanist who collected it. Because scientists know precisely where and when a given specimen was collected and under what conditions, they can study how environments change over time, the impact of human development, of climate change. It is the act of scientific collection, linked to the collected material, that makes the specimens so important.

Among the 105 specimens destroyed in Brisbane were six known as "type specimens". These were the first examples of a new species ever collected and recorded, and against which all other new specimens must be compared if we are to be certain that a new species has or has not been discovered. It appears this is what Bean had hoped to do in Queensland. "Everything we understand about these plants after that type is identified relates back to that type specimen," says Jeanson. "It is a base for us taxonomists to work on, describing the world of plants. But it's a base for pharmacy, for agriculture, for any kind of science based on plants." They are, as he once put it to Le Monde, "the memory of the planet". It gets worse. The museum believes that two or three of the specimens might have been species that were unidentified and new to science. The field of botany is huge. There are more than 391,000 species of vascular plants so far known to science. Career botanists can expect to become the leading experts in the plant species they choose to specialise in, and they can expect to find new species among the existing vast collections of herbaria that were gathered years ago, but never adequately studied. "I work on palms from south-east Asia," says Jeanson. "If you show me begonia from Ecuador, I'm going to tell you, okay, it's a begonia. Is it new? I have no idea. Which species is it? I have no idea. You need the specialist of the group on the specimens to really add value to your specimen, and Tony Bean in this case is the world expert in those plants. He is basically the only one in the world you can show the specimen to and he's going to tell you this is a new species, this is a good name, this is a wrong name." This is why, says Jeanson, the constant sharing of specimens among scientists is so crucial. Jeanson does not blame Bean or the Queensland Herbarium. He believes his Australian colleagues to be as horrified as he is that anything so valuable could be destroyed so cavalierly. "It is violent," he says, grasping for words as we sit talking, overlooking the ancient gardens. "It should never happen.

"Mistakes happen. Sometimes we send specimens without the required form. Usually the people just get back to us and say, 'Hey, we have this box that we're keeping at the quarantine service, please send the associated document so that we can release it.' They don't let it come into the country, they just ship it back to the person who sent it. "For us it's unconceivable that you can just burn collections, without even sending a notice like, 'Please send this document or we're going to burn your specimens.' We would have taken the phone and said, 'What's going on? I don't understand.' We never, ever faced such a drastic solution and definitive solution of burning. Who does that? Nobody does that. Would you burn the Mona Lisa if it was sent?" Some of the specimens destroyed by Australian officials. Credit:Antoine Doyen What went wrong has never been publicly explained. As mentioned, neither Bean nor Gordon Guymer, director of the Queensland Herbarium, will speak to us. Dr Guymer refers Good Weekend to the Department of Agriculture, which refers us back to the bland statements of regret made after the specimens were destroyed. Jeanson has more answers, though it still makes little sense to him. On March 1, 2017, two months after the specimens left France, Bean sent Jeanson an email asking after the loan material, which he had not received. Jeanson passed the message on to the Colhelper administrator Serge Muller, who checked his records and confirmed via an email to Bean the following day that it had been sent after Christmas: "Could you check if you received it?" Still, no one was worried.

On March 6, Bean wrote again, reassuring Muller that, "after several telephone calls, we have discovered that the Lagenophora loan arrived in Brisbane in early January, but was held up by our quarantine service, due to a miscommunication. They have agreed to send it on to our herbarium this week". But then, on March 17, he wrote again, saying, "Our quarantine people are now refusing to send the Lagenophora loan (Request No. 71250) on to us, until they receive a 'Quarantine Declaration' from you. The document is only a single page, but I am told it needs to have the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle letterhead on it. I am very sorry to make this extra work for you, but it is the only way to resolve the impasse. If you can send this on to me, I would be very grateful." This was the flaw that had crept in at the start. According to Jeanson, Colhelper has a function that allows people making loan requests to attach any necessary customs documents. This was apparently not done for this loan. Compounding the oversight, nothing in the procedures of the French museum prompted them to check Australian requirements. After all, says Jeanson, they send material around the world that needs no such accompanying paperwork. In any event, the paperwork was identified, filled out and sent off. "That looks like what they want," writes Bean on March 24. The next message Jeanson received was from Bean's boss, Dr Guymer, on April 7. It's the one that made him scream: It is with very deep regret and sadness that I write to inform you that your loan material of request number 71250 (Lagenophora) was inadvertently destroyed by the Australian Department of Agriculture and Water Resources. I have attached a letter with the relevant details. Yours sincerely, Gordon Guymer

News of the destruction flashed around the world. It was reported by the BBC and in the Smithsonian magazine. Jeanson himself contacted major institutions in London, New York and Geneva to ask if they'd had similar problems with Australia. It was soon revealed that at around the same time, a package of rare New Zealand lichens collected in the 1930s and sent from a herbarium in New Zealand was destroyed after its arrival in Canberra. So unusual was the loss of such samples that Australia now had the world's attention. "This story is likely to have a major chilling effect on the loan system between herbaria across national boundaries," Austin Mast, president of the Society of Herbarium Curators and director of the herbarium at Florida State University in Tallahassee, told the leading American journal Science Magazine in May. "Without the free sharing of specimens, the pace of plant diversity research slows." A Cornell University botanist told The New York Times that the destruction was "obscene". Barbara Thiers, director of New York's Steere Herbarium, the world's second largest, immediately suspended loans to Australia. It was not lost on the international community of botanists, she tells Good Weekend, that it was Australia, with its infamously bureaucratic customs regulations, that managed to destroy such significant artefacts. The rules have long been a source of frustration to Thiers, who believes the chance that a seed could drop from a sample, find its way into soil rich enough to germinate it, then pass unnoticed until it reproduced in such numbers as to become an invasive pest, was so remote as to be impossible. The significance of the incident was recognised, too, in Australian diplomatic circles. The relationship with France had once been seen as stable, amicable and not hugely significant. Today, it has never been closer. Australia's largest defence deal, $50 billion worth of submarines, is now with France and since Brexit occurred, intelligence and security ties have become more important, just as anti-terrorism co-operation has deepened.

Soon after the destruction of the specimens, senior Australian diplomats, including Angus Mackenzie, the deputy head of mission to France, were dispatched to the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle to meet its president, Bruno David. Jeanson says the museum of has still not received a full explanation from Australian authorities as to why the specimens were destroyed. Until that happens – and until it can be reassured it won't happen again – the museum will maintain its suspension of loans to Australia. The ban includes not only botanical specimens, but those from across the museum's vast holdings in areas such as mineralogy, geology, palaeontology and comparative anatomy. In Australia, the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria agreed that the institutions they represent would stop even making requests until they could ensure the safety of specimens. It was just far too risky. Before Christmas, a botanist from the Jardin des Plantes visited the Queensland Herbarium to discuss the possibility of organising a botanical field mission with scientists from both countries, funded by Australia, to serve as some form of compensation for the loss. Negotiations are continuing. Images of the types of Lagenophora species destroyed by Australian officials. Credit:Courtesy of The French National Museum of Natural History

So what exactly happened? According to the timeline in Guymer's letter, the Queensland Herbarium contacted the Department of Agriculture when it was notified the package had been detained, writing to a "verbally provided email address". The letter says there was no "bounce back email" but that the department "did not receive it". "Miscommunication resulted in a delay in contacting the department again, though they were able to confirm that the package was still being held March 3, and would be released on the provision of a quarantine declaration on museum letterhead," Guymer writes. He notes that the Queensland Herbarium contacted the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle twice more before it received the appropriate documents on March 22, and provided them to the department the following day. On March 29, the Department of Agriculture contacted the Queensland Herbarium to say the specimens had been destroyed by "an external contractor". Looking back over it, Jeanson says he cannot understand how a bureaucracy could order the destruction of museum specimens while a paperwork bungle was sorted out. The first official response from the Department of Agriculture was not received well by the international scientific community. The department released a dry and defensive statement that observed in part that the destruction served to "highlight the importance of the shared responsibility of Australia's biosecurity system, and the need for adherence to import conditions". In other words, it was not their fault.

The statement said the department received "no prior notification of the package's arrival or its significance". As though, Jeanson observes drily, parcels in the post are preceded by letters of introduction. The department said it had held the items for 76 days, far in excess of the required 30 days and, given the low value of the item, it had destroyed them in keeping with its protocols. Michelle Waycroft, who chairs the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria, which works closely with the department, disputes this. She says she understood that under the department's protocols, such material should not have been destroyed in any circumstances. Further, the department's statement appears to justify the destruction on the grounds that the customs declaration that eventually found its way to the box declared that the goods inside were worth just $2. This detail outrages Jeanson. "It's absurd and it is just a reflection of the lack of knowledge about the way we work." The specimens, he says, are of no monetary value. They are priceless. Further, it's standard practice for research institutions to mark the lowest possible value on such forms because customs taxes normally reflect the declared value. If institutions around the world began paying high fees on each item they shared, their scientific work would halt. The Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria has now ended its moratorium on making loan requests. Professor Waycroft says that since the incident, the department and the Council have agreed to a new set of protocols to ensure that nothing like this happens again. After consultations, she's now satisfied that the destruction of the New Zealand specimens at the same time was simply a terrible coincidence. Waycroft says staff at quarantine facilities have been trained in new procedures. From now on, specimens from herbaria are to be stored separately, on special shelves at each facility.

Back in Paris, Jeanson guides Good Weekend through pressurised doors, past tables at which scientists with accents from Germany, America and Australia work, up four floors of compression shelving to a unit marked "Lagenophora". He spins the wheel and the walls that tower over our heads separate. We walk to the end of a row, where under a window at about eye level sits a yellow tin shelf. Empty. It once held most of the 105 specimens gathered at such terrible human cost in the early days of the penal colony, then burned somewhere in Brisbane about this time last year. "It's not replaceable," he says, his voice hinting at the agony of a French scientific mind contemplating an Australian bureaucratic one. "It's absolutely unique. The Mona Lisa, you can paint a fake one at least. This, it's impossible. When I heard about it I thought, 'Gosh they destroyed our collection, but they destroyed their history.' This is the discovery of your country and you destroy it? It is absolutely crazy." To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age.