Emil Thoma


Emil holding the plant named after him

“I’m not a hypocrite,” announces Emil Thoma. “I drive a car and it’s made of steel. Mining iron ore is vital to world economic growth and to local communities such as those here in the Pilbara. But my job as a botanical advisor employed by Pilbara Iron is to help the company preserve as much of our environment as possible. So, when it comes to mining and the environment, I wear two hats and walk both sides of the street.”

Emil, who came to Australia from Switzerland 30 years ago and fell in love with the country, spends many weeks a year out in the Pilbara studying plants and their locations, building a file in his office of more than 1,000 samples of flora and close to 7,000 photos.

“It takes botanists about three years visiting a flora location to know what’s usual,” Emil explains, “before they can start identifying what’s unusual. So I arrive at a site of interest to Pilbara Iron two to three years before operations may commence. My job is to ensure that no rare plants or species are endangered by subsequent mining.”

“Of course, when a rare plant is known it is protected by law, but a lot of flora in the Pilbara has not been classified, which means I have to ascertain if plants at a site are really rare and unique to the location or if they are prolific elsewhere.”

“When I’m in doubt,” he continues, “I mark my map with the exact location of plants as given by my GPS system. That information is fed into a computer from which we configure chips to be inserted in the GPS systems of the bulldozers. That makes the places I’ve marked no go areas for the ‘dozers.”

So successful has Emil been in his botanical work for Pilbara Iron that the WA Herbarium has recently named a wattle found in the Mount Channar Range after him –‘Acacia Thoma’.

“It was the seed pods that helped identify this acacia as a different type,” Emil says. “At first I thought it was rare. Now I’m beginning to think it may be quite prolific further into the range.”

“But,” he grins, “rare or not, it’s nice to be remembered for something more than being a bloke who wears two hats.”