A new exhibition at Parliament House in Canberra shows prints of Joseph Banks' discoveries from his 1770 South Pacific voyage

And they're not just confined to art galleries and archives; our own Australian Parliament House holds a significant artistic and cultural collection of its own.

An exhibition opening September 7 at Parliament House explores a rarely-seen but significant milestone art-science marriage.

It shares prints from the 35-volume Banks Florilegium, along with notes and cuttings taken by Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and the team Banks assembled to accompany him on Captain Joseph Cook's 1768 expedition to the South Pacific.

Voyage of Discovery: Sir Joseph Banks' Florilegium has been curated to acknowledge the 250th anniversary year of James Cook's arrival at Australia, and the International Year of Plant Heath.

The Australian Parliament House Art Collection is home to more than 7,000 pieces, including 337 plates of Australian flora from the Florilegium.

With only 100 copies made and a modern-day price-tag upwards of $45,000, the collection of botanical prints, produced by Alecto Historical Editions and the British Museum, is only held by a handful of collecting institutions, and rarely displayed.

When gentleman naturalist Joseph Banks was appointed to join Captain James Cook's HMS Endeavour in 1768, Banks invested his own money to ensure places for the team he would need to support appropriate scientific discovery and record-keeping.

In his crew were the Swedish Daniel Solander, the Finnish Herman Sporing, two artists - Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan - and four servants.

As the Endeavour explored the coast of Australia, then called New Holland, and put in at locations now referred to as Botany Bay, Seventeen Seventy and the Endeavour River, Banks' team made cuttings of and gave names to previously unknown (by the British) botanical species.

In his diaries, copies of which are held in the State Library of New South Wales and with a facsimile copy on display in the exhibition, Banks describes the working conditions on the Endeavour.

"We sat at the great table with draughtsman directly across from us. We showed him how the drawings should be depicted and hurriedly made descriptions of the natural history objects while they were still fresh."

On board, botanical illustrator Sydney Parkinson made 674 detailed drawings and 269 watercolour illustrations of the new specimens.

He never completed this work, as he died from dysentery when the Endeavour visited Batavia on their voyage home.

Joseph Banks would later become President of the Royal Society, and commissioned artists and engravers to produce 743 copperplate line engravings from Parkinson's illustrations, though his grand vision for a publication of the full work was not completed in his lifetime.

In 1980, a team from the British Museum - to whom Banks bequeathed the plates and illustrations - completed Banks' original vision, assembling a team to employ the original 17th-century printing technique known as à la poupée, in which each colour is applied directly to the plate.

Checking colour accuracy against Parkinson's notes, each plate took from one week to two months to proof, with the full folio of work taking a decade to produce.

Rebecca Richards, from the Australian Parliament House Art Collection, has selected 35 works from the folio, consulting with Assistant Director Landscape Services Paul Janssens to match the botanical species in the prints to species found in the peripheral gardens on the Australian Parliament House grounds.

For Richards, immersing herself in research for the exhibition exposed "how groundbreaking the voyage was in terms of it being the first instance where artists were working together with naturalists on board the ship to classify and document materials and collate a visual representation of a voyage".

Richards worked with teams at CSIRO and the Australian National Herbarium on Black Mountain to loan original cuttings of specimens made by Banks' team at Botany Bay, NSW and various locations in Queensland.

For Richards, the print of the Banksia serrata is a favourite work.

"The plant use and protocols around its use by Western Australian Indigenous people is interesting and the Florilegium captures the menacing look of the plant," she says of the spiny-leafed national favourite.

The Herbarium team also loaned botanist tools and equipment, including plant presses.

Meanwhile, Richards dug further into the Australian Parliament House Art Collection for portraits of botanical artist Sydney Parkinson, botanical illustrations from other artists from the APH art collection, and copperplate engraving of Joseph Banks by Nicholas Schiavonetti, and of Captain James Cook by John Keyse Sherwin.

For those unable to travel to Canberra in this current era of border closures, the Parliament House team have also produced an online gallery of pieces from the exhibition.

This will allow viewers to explore through high-resolution imagery the relationships between the Florilegium, Parliament House and original specimens collected by Banks along the east coast of Australia.

Voyage of Discovery: Sir Joseph Banks' Florilegium can be seen at Australian Parliament House until November 8.

Due to COVID Safe restrictions, free tours are timed 30 minute bookable sessions available at aph.gov.au/tours.

The online exhibition can be viewed at florilegium.aph.gov.au