Colin M Finney
1993
The early generations of European visitors to Australia found themselves surrounded by a flora and fauna entirely different from anything they had seen before. For naturalists, this land in which ‘all things were queer and opposite’ was a cornucopia, and from Joseph Banks onwards they avidly collected the novelties that abounded in order to classify and name them according to the principles of order established by Linnaeus or his successors. Short-term visitors carried away vast numbers of specimens to fill the drawing rooms and museum cabinets of Europe. Some of those who came and stayed made money by becoming professional collectors to supply the popular market ‘at home’. Others, less commercially inclined, sought out new species for the purpose of serious scientific study, either by themselves or, as was almost always the case in the early years, by patrons in the upper echelons of European science. As the settler population grew, so too did the number of residents who took a systematic interest in Australia’s unusual natural forms. This made feasible the formation of scientific societies where like-minded people could seek support and encouragement, and exchange information and ideas. Colin Finney in his new book explores how this worked out in practice, from the coming together of the tiny but ambitiously titled Philosophical Society of Australasia, founded in Sydney in 1821, to the formation of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (forerunner of ANZAAS), established in 1888 with very different objectives and embodying a rather different view of what the scientific investigation of nature amounted to. He offers us, in short, a social history of natural history in Australia during the nineteenth century. In the early days, Finney shows, when the population of the various colonies remained small, any scientific society that was formed depended for its strength and legitimacy upon gaining the support of the local governor. Scientific societi
Read this work at the World Public Library (library card needed).