the plant was featured in curtis's botanical magazine in 1825, where it was given the common name middle-sized microtis. according to allan cunningham it appeared from a sod of earth containing a "cephalotus", collected by phillip parker king from same location, and flowered to provide the source of the illustration by franz bauer. the description was "whole plant, in general aspect, very much resembling the m. "parviflora" represented in our last plate, but more than twice the size. the flowers too are extremely similar, and the chief difference is to be found in the lip, which is here larger in proportion to the rest of the flower, and it is singularly wedge-shaped, truncated, and obtuse, even retuse at the extremity :–the disk being moreover furnished with two oblong, warty callosities, and the margin of the lower half and apex, with several globose, tuberculated processes".