koala: origins of an icon

CSIRO PUBLISHING

www.publish.csiro.au/journals/hras Historical Records of Australian Science, 2011, 22, 171–187

Reviews

Compiled by Sara Maroske

Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne/School of Historical and Philosophical Studies,University of Melbourne. Email: [email protected]

David Penington: Making Waves: Medicine,Public Health, Universities and Beyond.The Miegunyah Press: Melbourne, 2010.ix + 389 pp., ISBN: 970522857443, $69.95.

David Penington has had a long and creativecareer in medicine, in public health and in uni-versity teaching and management. His autobiog-raphy is aptly titled ‘Making Waves’ because heis a doctor who has always ‘made a difference’to whatever field or project he has undertaken.Much of this ‘difference’has been challenging tovested interests, some of it controversial. Shouldany of the antagonists who drew swords withhim over the reforms to the Victorian Certifi-cate of Education read this memoir, they mightbe surprised.

Penington is a complex man: highly giftedintellectually, a classical musician, a privatestudent of theology, and an instinctive ques-tioner. He also has had great assurance in hisown judgement—or diagnosis—of a problem,whether it is drug addiction, community health,health system administration, university admin-istration, or the management of a terrifying, new,sexually transmitted disease.

That assurance is the trained assurance of adoctor who has to make difficult decisions on thebasis of the evidence and in light of a confidentethical formation, and then take action, even ifthat action is radically new or will distress vestedinterests. It is also that assurance that has some-times antagonized people who have dealt withhim outside the clinical setting. And it raises theproblem of the status of evidence-based exper-tise in the wider community where other valuesand understandings are in conflict with it.

The assurance also derives from a distinctivemoral career shaped by his family, in partic-ular his mother, and his aunt Frances Pening-ton. David Penington is an outstanding exampleof the serious-mindedness of the professional,Melbourne, middle-class that was responsive to

Christianity in Action. His mother was a paci-fist who forbade her sons to join the cadetsat Scotch College, who devoted herself to thehugely important work of the Free KindergartenUnion among the inner city poor, and who washorrified by the human misery of the GreatDepression. At school, Penington was restrictedby severe asthma and it was not until his earlymanhood that he was able to take up rowing andparticipate in sport. He found solace in musicand study, and was something of an outsiderin the sporty, militaristic manliness of Scotch.These must have been formative experiences thatthickened his skin.

The other influence was his father, whomhe loved, but whose conservatism in all things,including medicine, set the son on a courseof opposition to the Melbourne medical estab-lishment, its limited clinical vision, its privi-leges and prejudices. Penington escaped muchof the Melbourne acculturation by completinghis undergraduate medical studies at Oxford andbuilding his clinical and research career in theUnited Kingdom. When he returned toAustralia,he brought clarity of vision about running thehospitals, the necessity for research to be at theheart of the clinic, and for the academic units inhospitals to be fully integrated with the hospitalas an institution.

Penington also developed into a giftedteacher—indeed he had almost chosen teachingover medicine as a career. His passion for activelearning, where students engaged with problemsrather than absorbed facts, was to animate hisreforms of the Melbourne medical curriculum.

But the moral seriousness, nurtured by theStudent Christian Movement and his own exten-sive reading, shaped a medical vision that sawthe patient in social context, and the practice ofmedicine as needing to be community based andcommunity focussed. Penington welcomed thevision for health of the Whitlam government andagainst mainstream opinion in the profession,

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was instrumental in the foundation of the NorthRichmond Community Health Centre, and theDepartment of General Practice and Commu-nity Medicine in the Medical School. Reformof the curriculum entailed curtailing the finan-cial empires of obstetrics and paediatrics andrestructuring the decision making in the Facultyto prevent vested interests delaying necessarychange.

Likewise as Vice Chancellor, Peningtonfound university administration overly legalisticand he cut through procedures and regulations,habits and pockets of laziness and ineptitude, toproduce a more modern institution that had aclearer sense of a common purpose rather than acollection of private entitlements.

But when he stepped outside the hospitaland the university, he found himself on a trick-ier stage. As the haematologist in charge of theBlood Bank, he made the clinical decision to bangay men from donating blood. The gay commu-nity felt vilified and Penington had a bitter enemyadvising the Minister of Health, Neal Blewett.Penington had to withdraw and a different polit-ical approach engaged the gay community ina world-leading program of preventive sexualeducation and self-care. Similarly, his radicalapproach to drug addiction, by legalising mar-ihuana and undermining the drug trade, wasdifficult to sell to a conservative electorate andmedical profession.And when he took on the rad-ical education movement that was focussing oncompetencies, levelled playing fields and exper-imental assessment, he found himself recast as acreature of the establishment, defending elitismin education.

Yet in retrospect, this was not fair. There isa tension in advanced intellectual work betweenexpertise and common understandings, betweenhigh skill and general skill and the status ofknowledge itself in policy and politics. And ifPenington may seem a creature of the privateschool elite, he has done more than most toexpand the social vision of medicine in this coun-try and to advance education and research. Theuniversity and medical school he so effectively‘triaged’now presents a student body that is morediverse demographically and ethnically than everbefore and, thereby, more representative of thecommunities it will serve.

Penington has been involved in nearly everymajor health policy movement since the 1970s.

His memoir will be of major value to later his-torians of these developments and controversies.That many who were also protagonists may dis-agree with his version of events and of himselfis all to the good as it will stimulate debate on acritical period of Australian history.

Janet McCalmanUniversity of Melbourne

Helen MacDonald: Possessing the Dead:The Artful Science of Anatomy.Melbourne University Press: Carlton, 2010.x + 289 pp., illus., ISBN: 9780522857351(PB), $39.99.

Possessing the Dead, a rare combination of rigor-ous historical research and Poe-esque gothic hor-ror, explores the workings of theAnatomyActs innineteenth-century Scotland, England and Aus-tralia, and the artful methods by which themedical men and anatomy inspectors appointedto administer the Acts successfully took posses-sion of the dead. The tools of the medical menwere subterfuge, disingenuousness and disguise;their tasks were to procure bodies, circumventobjections, and prevent or discredit public out-rage. As MacDonald herself states, the picture‘is not a pretty one’ (p. 13).

Following a vivid, if somewhat involved,description of an affray between workingmen and medical students at the Universityof Edinburgh, MacDonald traces the genesis,evolution and implementation of the Act forRegulating Schools of Anatomy (1832), whichwas a response to increasing incidences of bodysnatching, and the infamous Burke and Haremurders. She details the parliamentary modifi-cations that turned custody into possession andplaced a time limit on people’s ability to object tothe appropriation of their friends’ and relatives’bodies for medical dissection (p. 220).

Subsequent chapters discuss various localmanifestations and consequences of the initialAnatomy Act and its successors. In Edinburghand Glasgow, for example, ‘funeratories’ wereestablished to house the institutional dead; theirostensible role as halfway houses between deathand burial conveniently concealed the fact thatcorpses not claimed within forty-eight hourswere automatically sent to anatomy schools. InLondon, anatomy inspectors hired ‘expediters’to superintend the removal of corpses from

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workhouses, hospitals and gaols, and compen-sated workhouse masters and undertakers forhelp in obtaining specimens, ignoring a statutethat banned body sales. Hospital pathologists,taking advantage of the Act’s failure to regulatepost-mortems, subjected corpses to aggressiveexaminations. In Australia, government offi-cials, medical officers and amateur collectorsanswered the calls of British surgeons investigat-ing the developmental history of humankind bysevering limbs from ‘racially’ interesting hospi-tal corpses and exhuming bodies from Indige-nous graves. Perhaps most disturbing of all,such ghoulish practices, in modified form, per-sisted well into the twentieth century: the BritishCorneal Grafting Act (1952) and Human TissueAct (1961), which permitted the removal of bodyparts for transplantation, medical education andresearch purposes, specified no minimum timeperiod before a corpse could be harvested,required no record-keeping, and contained nopenalties for breaking the law. Informed con-sent was only mandated in 2004; Australian lawshave yet to follow suit, and the ‘strong voices’still raised today ‘to advocate a return to takingorgans without first obtaining explicit consent’,MacDonald predicts, threaten to take us on ‘abedevilled course back to the past’ (p. 230).

MacDonald engages with her topic both intel-lectually and emotionally. She combines a schol-arly approach to her material with a genuinesense of outrage at the contemptuous treatmentof the vulnerable by the powerful. This anger isnot merely the misguided result of ‘transpos[ing]modern sensibilities on to the past’; MacDon-ald supplies ample evidence of a widespreadawareness, amongst that past’s inhabitants, thatmany people objected to the ‘mutilation’ of theirown remains and those of their friends (p. 216).She cites British parliamentarians who believedthat respectful disposal of the dead embodied‘some of the best feelings of human nature’, Lon-don commentators who considered their gov-ernment’s proposal to ‘enact a law that sentpeople’s remains to be dissected without theirconsent’ a ‘moral violation’, anatomy inspectorswho repeatedly encountered people ‘claimingand burying corpses of others who were not theirown relatives’, medical men who ‘shudder[ed] atthe thought’ of donating themselves to scienceand ‘took care in making funeral arrangementsfor their own remains and those of people they

loved’, and the concerned correspondent whoreported Truganini’s plea to the Tasmanian Mer-cury before dying: ‘Don’t let them cut me’(pp. 9, 140, 216–227, 221). The monumentaldisconnect between these attitudes and the cav-alier appropriation, mistreatment and disposalof human bodies fuels MacDonald’s ire and iscompellingly communicated to her readers.

MacDonald notes that her history ‘uses thelanguage of the past’ (p. vii), yet it is not clearwhether the word ‘race’ falls into this category.Although most references to ‘race’ occur withinquotes from contemporary sources, phrases suchas ‘[p]arts removed from people of mixed racialdescent were considered useless in determiningracial origins’ (p. 113) imply that ‘race’, oneof history’s most insidious floating signifiers,describes differences actually and consistentlyexisting between groups of people. Recent chal-lenges to this reified notion, both by geneticresearch into human diversity and by scholarlyproblematizations of ‘race’as a purely discursiveand political construct, should, I think, have beenacknowledged.

This caveat aside, Possessing the Dead con-tributes substantially to the history of British andAustralian science. Meticulously researched andvividly written, it will interest not only historiansof science, medicine and technology, but also allthose concerned with social justice, power dis-parities, and the abuses, past and present, toooften committed in the name of science.

Hilary HowesSchool of Culture, History and Language

The Australian National University

R. Keith Johns: A Mirage in the Desert?The Discovery, Evaluation andDevelopment of the Olympic Dam Ore Bodyat Roxby Downs, South Australia, 1975–88.O’Neil Historical & Editorial Services:Adelaide, 2010. 64 pp., ISBN: 97809805201(PB), $30.

It is rare that a former bureaucrat writes a mem-oir, and in this regard Keith Johns’ recollectionsas a senior government administrator concern-ing the early years of the Olympic Dam projectare very welcome. His short review, A Mirage inthe Desert, however, barely scratches the surfaceof the controversial mining project at OlympicDam in South Australia and (perhaps rather


unwittingly) shows the eagerness of the SouthAustralian bureaucracy to see Olympic Dam pro-ceed regardless—Sir Humphrey Appleby wouldbe suitably impressed.

The review is clearly written with the implicitassumption of the gargantuan economic value ofOlympic Dam as the over-riding consideration—demonstrating that this somewhat narrow, dog-matic view was prominent in all advice given togovernments of the day. Unfortunately, the reportbarely covers actual evidence and details, espe-cially the complexity of the project, its massivecapital cost and uncertain operating costs—nordoes it adequately address any of the major crit-icisms surrounding government subsidies, andsupport versus royalties and revenues.

Perhaps the greatest weakness—indeedfailure—of the review is its lack of coverage ofthe scientific innovation in mineral exploration,which the Olympic Dam discovery ushered in.The deposit starts 400 m below ground andwas discovered partly through luck, but mainlythrough brilliant geological theorizing on therelationship between major tectonic faults andsuitable stratigraphy combined with geophysicsto target denser, mineralized rocks that producea gravity and magnetic anomaly. This approachis now widely used to discover new mineralresources, including Prominent Hill in 2001, justto the west.

Several major challenges confronted thedevelopment of Olympic Dam, not the least ofwhich was the separation of copper and uranium.These took several years of research as well as alarge pilot project to meet; yet Johns fails to coverthis adequately. These aspects are not merely thepurview of a miner—they cut to the heart of gov-ernment policy in maximising the benefits andminimising impacts of major mineral projects.Other critical issues in Olympic Dam’s historyinclude indigenous concerns from the Kokathaand Arabunna, impacts on mound springs of theGreat Artesian Basin, the major weaknesses ofthe environmental impact assessment process,uranium extraction and nuclear issues—Johns’approach is to summarily dismiss them withoutshowing an understanding of the intricacy of anyof them.

The fact that Olympic Dam ore containsuranium links the project intimately into thenuclear debate. In order to produce a mar-ketable low radioactivity copper metal, as well

as provide a potentially significant by-productrevenue stream, uranium was always intended tobe extracted. The Olympic Dam project couldhave easily been developed without extractingthe uranium and just focussing on copper, goldand silver (and possibly even rare earths)—yetJohns barely even acknowledges such options,let alone government’s role in promoting the bestpublic outcome over a single company’s desirefor profit. By 2009, uranium had only provided18.4% of Olympic Dam economic value, withcopper 75.7% and gold-silver the remainder.

The final major area that the review failsto address is the legal privilege given to theproject through the Roxby Downs Indentureact (1982)—legislation intended to protect thesanctity of Olympic Dam’s development andoperation and severely limit public scrutiny.Johns’ gives the Indenture the most coverage ofhis review, but again shows how strongly thebureaucracy backed the project without criti-cal faculties. For example, blindly accepting that‘developers needed . . . an indenture’ (p. 25) tosecure development is a weak justification in pro-tecting the public interest. Furthermore, Johnsalso acknowledges the ‘very supportive’ (p. 28)role that the media can play in such debates, sub-tly revealing that they were rather biased towardsOlympic Dam’s development.

The review will add to historical knowledge,but arguably contributes significantly less to thepublic sphere than other books such as thoseby John Showers (Return to Roxby Downs) orJohn Read (Red Sand Green Heart: EcologicalAdventures in the Outback). While the OlympicDam deposit is indeed gargantuan, as are con-cerns about its numerous aspects, Johns’ reviewremains a mirage of its own—full of hope andyet fails to deliver.

Gavin M. MuddEnvironmental Engineering

Monash University

Harry Allen (ed.): Australia: WilliamBlandowski’s Illustrated Encyclopaediaof Aboriginal Australia. Aboriginal StudiesPress, AIATSIS: Canberra, 2010.viii + 188 pp., ISBN: 9780855757137 (PB),9780855757175 (HB), $60 (PB), $140 (HB).

This beautiful book, an edited translationof William Blandowski’s original Australien

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in 142 photographischen Abbildungen nachzehnjährigen Erfahrungen (Australia in 142photographic illustrations from 10 years’ expe-rience) dating from 1862, presents what is alittle-known work for the first time to a wideraudience. Editor Harry Allen and translatorsLillian Barton and Melanie Wittwer reveal theextraordinary range of images produced dur-ing Blandowski’s trips along the Murray Riverbetween 1850 and 1857, including depictions oflandscapes, native Australian fauna, and scenesof Indigenous Nyeri Nyeri (Yarri-Yarri) life.Each illustration, painstakingly reproduced fromthe original albumen prints, is accompaniedby a translated caption and supplemented withexplanatory notes.Allen’s introduction contextu-alizes these exquisite images, providing detailedand accessible information on Blandowski’s lifeand career, the structure of Australia’s narra-tive and the technical production of its images.

The son of impoverished Polish aristocrats inGleiwitz, Upper Silesia (now Gliwice, Poland),Blandowski lived in Australia for ten yearsbetween September 1849 and March 1859.Shortly after arriving, he embarked on severalexpeditions around Adelaide and along the Mur-ray River. He also surveyed pastoral runs inSouth Australia, tried his luck at gold prospect-ing, became a council member of the Philosoph-ical Society (later the Royal Society) of Victoria,and was for a short time curator of the colony’sMuseum of Natural History. He later fell out withinfluential members of the Philosophical Insti-tute and was criticised for refusing to surrendermaterials from his Murray River expedition tothe government. Australia, published at his ownexpense following his return to Gleiwitz, repre-sented the end of his once-promising Australiancareer.

Modelled on the publications of British andFrench explorers, Blandowski’s Australia usedvisual images and commentary to convey ‘acomprehensive account of Australian naturalhistory and the life of its Aboriginal inhab-itants’ (p. 9), proceeding from birth throughto adulthood, in sickness, and at death andburial. Blandowski sympathized with the Indige-nous groups he encountered and was anxiousto correct popular misconceptions. He argued,for example, that the ‘exertion’ involved incatching wombats in their burrows showed that‘[t]he accusation that the Aborigines have a

lack of energy and endurance is a very unfairone’ (p. 82), and wrote admiringly of Indige-nous hunting techniques, including spear- andnet-fishing, emu-stalking and duck-trapping.His depictions of Indigenous life alternatelyemphasise its strangeness and its familiarity.He described ‘Aboriginal dances’ as having an‘ambiance of mystery’, and admitted that someparts of the men’s initiation ceremony to whichhe had devoted fourteen illustrated plates were‘not entirely understandable’, while others, inconsequence of Indigenous silence on spiritualand ritual matters, remained ‘unknown’ to Euro-pean observers (pp. 109, 113, 119). Conversely,his montages of daily life show familiar scenes:friends embracing, boys playing football, youngmen participating in wrestling competitions (pp.48, 60, 116–118). These illustrations of ‘quietdomesticity’, Allen suggests, ‘provide insightinto the ordinariness ofAboriginal life’, connect-ing us as viewers with the Indigenous peoplesdepicted and confronting us with their ‘undeni-able humanity’ (pp. 9, 11). In an explanatorypostscript, Blandowski stressed the ‘qualitiesof head and heart’ of the Indigenous peoplehe had come to know, praising their courageand ‘natural decency’ and describing them as‘faithful and warm-hearted friends’ (p. 163).Although he believed that their decline and (sup-posed) disappearance represented ‘the outcomeof processes beyond human control’, he openlydeplored the violence of attempts by colonialsettlers to exterminate them.

While Blandowski’s illustrations form thecore of this book, several supplementary essayshelp further our understanding of their signif-icance. Mark Dugay-Grist, archaeologist andformer Curator of South-eastern Australia atMuseum Victoria, eloquently emphasizes theimportance of Blandowski’s work for NyeriNyeri descendants. Unlike many of his contem-poraries, Blandowski recorded the Nyeri Nyerinames for the animals, fish and insects he col-lected; he also acknowledged Indigenous peo-ples’ contributions to his knowledge-gatheringendeavours and recorded his thanks for theirassistance. The Blandowski expedition, Dugay-Grist adds, took place at ‘an all-important timein the greater scheme of things’, when the NyeriNyeri were ‘fully developed as a hunter-gather[sic] society . . . at the height of [their] cul-ture’ (p. 2). Artist Brook Andrews’ meditation


on the contemporary uses of nineteenth-centuryphotographs, despite its sometimes turgid prose,and Luise Hercus’s informative overview of theIndigenous people and languages of the Murrayin the 1850s offer further insights. As Dugay-Grist suggests, this thoughtfully-presented rein-terpretation of Blandowski’s classic images is atrue ‘gift from the past’ and one to be graspedwith both hands.


Australian National University

Carolyn Rasmussen with Alister Danks:Double Helix, Double Joy: David Danks:The Father of Clinical Genetics in Australia.The Miegunyah Press: Carlton, 2010.344 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0-522-85799-3(HB), $49.99.

At the end of Double Helix, Double Joy itsauthors have included a very useful appendix,a tabulated time-line that juxtaposes a columnrecording the key events in the life of DavidDanks with a second column offering a snapshotof other relevant happenings in and around thoseyears. This table vividly brings home the pointthat Danks began his clinical training in 1952,just one year before Watson, Crick, Franklin andWilkins published their papers on the discoveryof the double helix of the title of this biography.One year after the papers were published Danksgraduated from the University of Melbournewith his MB, BS. Looking back at these dates,one marvels at the rapidity with which the youngmedical graduate not only absorbed the contentand implications of this new discovery, but alsoeven more remarkably, applied it with such facil-ity to usher in the era of clinical genetics in hisown country a little over a decade later.

The 250 or so pages preceding this tablegive an account of Danks’ life both in andout of medicine and science, beginning with abrief account of his roots and ending with apostscript (following the brief notice of his deathin 2003) about the fate of the Murdoch Chil-drens Research Institute, which was the homefor Danks’ most lasting legacy to his chosenfield of medical genetics. As biographies go, itis not a particularly innovative narrative, nei-ther breaking new ground in the art of biographyor historiography, which many of the scientific

biographies that have been appearing over thepast two decades have been wont to do. But thenagain, it does not purport to do any of thesethings. The primary motivation for writing thisbook, according to one of its authors AlisterDanks, the youngest son of the subject, was ‘topull together a record of [David Danks’] achieve-ment and to understand [. . .] the challenges thathe had faced and how he had achieved success’.

In this endeavour Danks succeeded admirably.He began the project shortly before his father’sdemise (who died after battling Parkinson’s Dis-ease for some years) by conducting a seriesof interviews with various colleagues and in2007 began to collaborate with Carolyn Ras-mussen, the Melbourne-based public historianand biographer. Although Rasmussen never hadthe opportunity to meet David Danks herself, sheappears to have captured the essence of his phi-losophy and work ethic—to find the ‘fun’ in hiswork—and communicates this to readers.

The title of the book comes from the title oneof Danks’ own public lectures in 1985, in whichhe predicted the immense benefits to be reapedfrom an understanding of the double helix.Nowhere better is his belief vindicated than in thesolid legacy that David Danks left in the guise ofthe Murdoch Institute and the Clinical GeneticsServices. David Danks obviously had an enor-mous and far-reaching impact as evidenced bythe wealth of positive comments quoted in thisbiography from friends and colleagues overseasand at home. After reading his biography I amleft with the feeling that I would have liked tomeet the man, share travel stories over a cup ofcoffee or a drive somewhere perhaps, and mostof all, been privy to his enthusiasm for his workand his conviction in its value.

Neeraja SankaranThe American University in Cairo

Cairo, Egypt

Libby Robin, Chris Dickman and MandyMartin (eds): Desert Chronicles: TheImpulse to Conserve. CSIRO Publishing:Collingwood, 2010. xx + 352 pp.,ISBN: 9780643097490, $59.95.

The French have a useful (and not disapprov-ing) phrase, haute vulgarisation. By this theydescribe the kind of book that synthesizes thefindings of many specialist scholars into an

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overview acceptable to academics and accessi-ble to intelligent members of the general public.In history, eminent practitioners of the genreinclude Simon Schama and Geoffrey Blainey.Multi-disciplinary studies by their nature presenta challenge for this sort of enterprise. An obvi-ous response is to compile an anthology of essaysfrom authorities in each of the fields concerned,but this requires skilled editing and a clearunderstanding of the dominant themes underconsideration. Desert Chronicles is a modelexample.

Its chapters are set in the Channel Countryof south-western Queensland, once the scene ofa receding sea on whose shores giant reptilestrod the earth, but in recent millennia the local-ity of river systems draining into the sink ofLake Eyre. Often dry, sometimes in flood, thesewatercourses—the Mulligan, the Georgina, theDiamantina, Cooper’s Creek—do not behavelike conventional rivers but spread themselvesthinly over a land of poor and uneven rain-fall, giving sustenance to a remarkable varietyof animal and vegetable life. These creatureshave survived through many adaptations to liv-ing in an environment of ‘boom and bust’. Thehumans who have chosen to live in this regionhave showed the same adaptability. It is wellknown that the Iningai people throve in the coun-try where Burke and Wills perished through lackof understanding about the proper preparation ofnardoo; perhaps less well known that the Mulli-gan River Aborigines drove a brisk trade throughtheir command of Duboisia hopwoodii, the shrubfrom which the narcotic pituri originates. Latercomers also adapted resourcefully, and if the firstpastoralists showed ignorance of good conserva-tion practices, especially in the use of apparentlyinexhaustible supplies of artesian water, theirsuccessors have learned better.

A great virtue of Desert Chronicles lies inthe fact that its authors include not merely thescientists, naturalists and historians who wouldbe expected to contribute to such an anthol-ogy, but also representatives of both the ancientand recent indigenous inhabitants of the Chan-nel Country. Their contributions are unified by ashared passion for the conservation of their vul-nerable environment and a ceaseless curiosity tolearn about its ecology. Their research requirespatience and a readiness to accept surprises. Adecade of observation led to the publication of

a paper arguing that a Simpson Desert marsu-pial, the dasyurid, Wongai Ningaui, bred onlyonce in its short life; the year after the paperappeared, the ningauis bred twice. Fossilisedtracks at Lark Quarry from ∼95 million yearsago suggested that a herd of smaller dinosaursstampeded on encountering a large carnivoroustheropod; but, as I was drafting this review, newshas arrived that the aggressor was herbivorous.The process of continuing discovery, if at timesdisconcerting, must be enlivening.

Along the way, the authors share with theirreaders many insights into survival techniques inthe Channel Country. Many creatures from theechidna to the tiniest frog endure hard seasonsby deep burrowing. Others like the dunnarts aremore opportunistic, commandeering other crea-tures’ burrows. Desert crabs seal their holes andslow their metabolisms, even their production ofurine, remaining in a state of suspended anima-tion for several years if necessary, until the goodtimes come again. For urban readers (like most ofus) these essays are informative and fascinating.

Even the finest survival techniques are notalways proof against introduced predators suchas the fox, cat, goat and camel. The casualty listincludes the desert rat-kangaroo, a tiny creatureswift enough to tyre three horses when the natu-ralist Finlayson observed it in the 1930s, but notswift enough to avoid extinction. Poorly thoughtout developmental projects offer a further threat,such as the proposal to impound waters for cot-ton growing. Among the strongest opponents ofthis scheme are the settler families who havecome to understand the country through threeor four generations. They join the naturalistsand scientists in urging the necessity of system-atic conservation. State and federal governmentshave responded sympathetically from time totime, but not always systematically.

The sixteen essays and several sidebars in thiscollection are written readably and accessibly.They are reinforced by a generous selection ofwell-chosen photographs, some with the imme-diacy of good family album snaps, others chosento focus attention on some telling detail of thenatural or built environment that might otherwiseescape the casual observer. These are augmentedby the patiently created landscape paintings ofMandy Martin. In a book whose standards ofproduction are generally attractive, the maps arethe only disappointment; they are not always


easy to read and sometimes seem to miss placessuch as the Vergemont Channels, which a readerunfamiliar with the country would like to locate.Otherwise this is a splendid book that deserves tobe read by specialists and general readers alike.

Geoffrey BoltonMurdoch University

Penny Olsen: Upside Down World:Early European Impressions of Australia’sCurious Animals. National Library ofAustralia: Canberra, 2010. 258 pp., illus.,ISBN: 9780642277060 (PB), $39.95.

There is more to Penny Olsen’s Upside DownWorld than first meets the eye. From a cur-sory glance the book appears to be a collectionof thirty-nine short pieces, each of them deal-ing with the introduction of Australian animalsinto nineteenth-century English scientific cir-cles. These pieces are interesting in themselves,and sometimes amusing, but there is a subtletyabout the presentation that builds into a wholethat is both more interesting and greater than thesum of its parts. On a closer reading, Olsen’sbook is a social history of a significant periodof natural history study, as well as a demonstra-tion of how the wheels of natural science enquiryturned in the early nineteenth century.

England loomed large in the scientific affairsof its distant colony, and continued to do so forat least a century after European settlement. Butthe excitement that revolved around the new andpeculiar Australian animals was not confinedto scientific circles. As Olsen points out in herIntroduction, there was popular enthusiasm forthe new fauna, helping to spark what became awidespread interest in natural history and leadto the formation of popular societies to studynature.

The volume is structured in a straightfor-ward fashion: each of the thirty-nine chaptersthat follow the Introduction focuses on a par-ticular species. The chapters are grouped underthree headings: ‘Mammals’ (nos 1–16); ‘Birds’(17–31); and ‘Reptiles, Amphibians and Fish’(32–39). Details are provided of the European‘discovery’ of the animal, the process wherebyits scientific name was arrived at, and the firstpublication of its image. Each of these pieces isprofusely illustrated with colour reproductionsof the earliest images of the animal. In several

cases (one could say too many) Olsen also notesthat the particular species is now extinct. Thesubstantive part of the book concludes with asection titled ‘Who’s who: the main observers’.This part comprises a series of brief biographies,alphabetically ordered by surname, of the majorobservers ofAustralian fauna in the earliest yearsof European settlement.

This is a useful list of impressive individuals.The efforts to document the amazing creaturesbrought from Australia involved many of theluminaries in natural history of eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. Men such as Joseph Banks(who was the central figure in a network of col-lectors and observers, mostly working on hisbehalf), Robert Brown, Ferdinand Bauer, JohnGould, Richard Owen and many others madecontributions to the scientific understanding ofthese animals. Keeping specimens alive during asea voyage to England was often difficult—thefirst Koala reached UK in 1880, although the ani-mal was described as early as 1798—so Englishresearchers were reliant on local informants andcollectors. Much depended on accurate draw-ings, paintings and description by men like JohnLatham, John Hunter and John White, as wellas a group of artists known as the Port JacksonPainter.

With reputations to be made or maintained,English scientists would rush into print withevery new discovery. Given this, and the num-ber and the strangeness of Australian animalssuddenly coming under scientific gaze, it isunsurprising to find that there were many mis-conceptions published about the fauna. SeveralAustralian marsupials, theThylacine and theTas-manian Devil for example, were initially thoughtto be varieties of possums, and ascribed tothe genus Didelphis, the American opossums—previously the only known examples ofmarsupials.

For anyone interested in natural history thisis a book to cherish, for both the informationand illustrations. The author and publisher areto be commended for bringing to a wide audi-ence the wonderful stories that make Australiannatural history such an enthralling and endlesslyinteresting study.

Gary PreslandSchool of Historical and Philosophical Studies

The University of Melbourne

Review Section 179

Rebecca Jones: Green Harvest:A History of Organic Farming andGardening in Australia. CSIRO Publishing:Collingwood, 2010. 208 pp.,ISBN: 9780643098374 (PB), $49.95.

CSIRO Publishing has done a fine job in recentyears of bringing the history of Australianscience—in all its many facets—to public atten-tion. In my own field I think of Helen Hewson’s300 Years of Botanical Illustration (1999) andRob Freestone’s Urban Nation (2010) as finecontributions to scholarship. And now GreenHarvest by Rebecca Jones joins that worthygroup.

Jones covers her ground in four chaptersefficiently organized around the themes of soilimprovement, chemical-free horticulture, eco-logical well being, and the ‘Back to the Land’movement, each concluded with a substantialcase study profiling a key contributor. A fifthchapter summarizes the last decade, while copi-ous notes and a bibliography round out the book.Her approach is to tell the story of Australianorganic farming and gardening from the perspec-tive of the organic growers themselves. Hereinlies one of the key strengths of the book, andalso—to my mind—a possible weakness.

The author’s research is wide-ranging, and thesynthesis of a great mass of disparate researchmaterial (written and orally based) is whollyadmirable. And yet I was left wanting additionalhistorical context, especially of organic garden-ing’s ‘pre-history’.Although not disclosed by thebook’s title, the story of Green Harvest startsin the 1940s—when the word ‘organic’ wasfirst consciously used by growers—but through-out the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,organic horticultural practices were routinelydiscussed in Australian garden writing (espe-cially in the weekly press and in technical docu-ments put out by newly established governmentagricultural departments).This is rightly the sub-ject for another time and another book, but theidea of a fully formed movement commencingduring and immediately after World War Two—although an appealing thesis—seems to maskearlier interest in the subject.

The fourth chapter ‘Back to the land’ is themost vividly written, perhaps because the authoridentifies herself (in the book’s introduction)with this phase of organic gardening. Elsewhere

I occasionally yearned for a more engagingtone—this book is based on the author’s doctoralthesis and its origins are sometimes betrayed bythe mechanistic, block-building approach sanc-tioned by the academy. A more finely nuancedincorporation of the case studies would surelyhave helped here: perhaps twenty-four vignettes,each one-sixth the length of the four exist-ing essays, seamlessly incorporated might haveresulted in a more satisfying literary fusion oforganic gardening theory and practice.

At the book’s widest level, environmental his-tory forms the lens through which Rebecca Joneshas examined her subject, embracing changingideas about health and environment. Such ideasare not merely confined to pragmatic practicalaspects of horticulture: Green Harvest tackles farless tangible aspects of rebellion, refuge, self suf-ficiency, closeness to nature, and the continuityof the yeoman idyll (which inspired the ideologybehind much ofAustralia’s rural settlement).Thebook is at its strongest when canvassing suchideas and linking them to the core subject oforganic farming and garden.

Richard AitkenThe Australian Garden History Society

Melbourne

Andrea Bandhauer and Maria Veber(eds): Migration and Cultural Contact:Germany and Australia. Sydney UniversityPress: Sydney, NSW, 2009. x + 254 pp.,ISBN: 9781920898632 (PB), $35.

If you thought that Dada, Sigmund Freud andIndigenous Australian culture had nothing incommon, think again. Migration and CulturalContact, the result of a symposium held in2006 in the Department of Germanic Stud-ies at the University of Sydney, tracks theseand other historical, and contemporary, con-nections between Germany and Australia in anexceptionally diverse collection of essays. Whilesome of these, notably John F. Williams’ discus-sion of German Anzacs, offer new perspectiveson relatively familiar topics, the majority ofthis volume’s contributors bring to light little-known and often unexpected cultural, intellec-tual and aesthetic exchanges between the twocountries.

The editors have imposed an effective struc-ture on the disparate topics covered by grouping


related essays into four sections. The first two ofthese centre on the German-Lutheran mission-ary Carl Friedrich Strehlow (1871–1922), who in1894 took charge of the Hermannsburg Missionnear Alice Springs and learned the languages ofthe local Luritja and Arrernte peoples. Section I,‘Cultural Disseminations of Missionary Ethnog-raphy’, focuses on the impact of Strehlow’sseven-volume Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämmein Zentral-Australien (The Aranda and Loritjatribes in Central Australia, 1907–20) in Ger-many, specifically in relation to European under-standings of so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. ThusOrtrud Gutjahr, in a particularly interestingaccount, traces the incorporation of informa-tion gathered by Strehlow into early twentieth-century discourses of ethnopsychology, notablySigmund Freud’s Totem und Tabu (1913). WalterF. Veit shifts this focus from science to literature,examining the Dada poet Tristan Tzara’s PoèmesNègres, French translations of Indigenous songsfrom Africa, Oceania and Australia, includingfour totemic songs collected and translated fromthe Arrernte and Luritja languages by Strehlow.The essays in Section II, ‘Living the Mission:Religious Disseminations’, turn to Strehlow’slife and work at the Hermannsburg Mission,exploring the origins of its European patriarchalstructures and the ways in which these playedout in the unfamiliar surroundings of CentralAustralia. Bandhauer andVeber’s study of the let-ters of courtship exchanged by Strehlow and hisfiancée, Frieda Keysser, illuminates the explic-itly gendered hierarchy underpinning the Ger-man Lutheran missionary project, while AnnaKenny’s essay focuses on the ways in which keyaspects of Strehlow’s theology were expressedand transformed through the mutual engagementbetween Strehlow and his Indigenous flock.

Section III, ‘Narratives of National andCultural Identity’, covers a somewhat eclecticrange of topics. Gerhard Fischer lists researchdesiderata relating to Germans in Australia,Kathrine M. Reynolds analyses factors influenc-ing emigrations from nineteenth-century Nas-sau to Australia, and Frederika van der Lubbesurveys the historiography of Cook’s voyagesfrom the German perspective. The final section,‘Imaginations of Australia in German Liter-ature’, contrasts two very different fictionalworks: Judith Wilson examines Therese Huber’sAbentheuer auf einer Reise nach Neu-Holland(Adventure on a journey to New Holland,

1793–94) and its depiction of a South Sea arca-dia, while Birte Giesler discusses Urs Widmer’sLiebesbrief für Mary (Love letter for Mary,1993), a ‘highly ironic piece of intercultural lit-erature’ which toys with language problems andcolonial stereotypes in order to mock simplisticGerman images of Australia as ‘untouched’ and‘close to nature’ (pp. 243, 252).

My principal criticism of this volume isstylistic rather than content-related. Referencesalternate uneasily between in-text citations andfootnotes; the latter are generally reserved forlengthier (e.g. archival) references and/or com-mentary, but the overall effect is awkward, partic-ularly when both translated and original texts areincluded. Several paragraphs of Veit’s essay, forexample, are simply crawling with brackets andparentheses. While this meticulousness atteststo the authors’ scholarly approach, it notice-ably hampers ease of reading; in my opinion,a purely footnote- or endnote-based referenc-ing system would have been preferable. Withregard to content, however, the essays are bothscholarly and accessible. They admirably ful-fil the editors’ stated purpose of offering ‘aseries of insights into ongoing interdisciplinaryresearch . . . in areas such as German literary andcultural studies, history and ethnology’ (p. 1).The volume as a whole will be of interest tostudents of Australian and German cultural, sci-entific and literary history.The first two sections,which provide exciting new perspectives onthe intimate and extensive interactions betweenIndigenous and European cultural worlds, rep-resent a particularly welcome contribution tothe history of anthropology and the study ofEuropean-Indigenous encounters.


Australian National University

C. Fisher and J. Calaby: The Top of theTop End: John Gilbert’s Manuscript Notesfor John Gould on Vertebrates from PortEssington and Cobourg Peninsula(Northern Territory, Australia): withComments on Specimens Collected duringthe Settlement Period 1838 to 1849, andSubsequently, The Beagle, Records of theMuseums and Art Galleries of the NorthernTerritory, Supplement 4, 2010. 240 pp.,ISSN: 1833-7511, $66.

Review Section 181

When this large, 240-page tome slid from itspostal envelope onto my already cluttered desk,I shuddered. My initial thought was, ‘yet anotherlong read that will occupy me for some timeand add little to my knowledge of Northern Ter-ritory wildlife’. Still, as I commenced a quickflick through the pages, I could see that what Iknew was a mere drop in the bucket; here wasa plethora, a mine of new information. It wassomething that I could really get my teeth intoand learn from.

The authors are Clem Fisher, a dedicatedmuseum worker with years of experience inEngland, and the late John Calaby, a man withwide field and museum experience and a wealthof knowledge on Australia’s mammal fauna.I vividly recall sitting at John’s kitchen-tableyears ago while both authors waxed lyrically onvarious aspects of the work.

The basic purpose of this monograph isexplained in its title, the reproduction and anno-tation of notes on northernAustralian vertebratesmade by John Gilbert, a taxidermist for theZoological Society of London, who travelled toAustralia with John Gould in 1838. AlthoughGould made extensive use of Gilbert’s notes inthe text for his famous works on the birds andmammals ofAustralia, they have not been appre-ciated in their entirety before, perhaps, in part,because Gilbert met an untimely death in 1845after being speared by an Aborigine.

The result of years of dedication, it is muchmore than a facsimile edition. The authors’contributions include a wealth of informationregarding another of Australia’s best-knownsecrets—‘The Top End’. How many times hasthat phrase reverberated through conversationsinspiring scientist and traveller alike? How littleapart from the semi-regular documentaries do weknow of this harsh, tropical, environment and itsfantastic European history?

One thing that stood out during my read-ing of The Top of the Top End is the great carethe authors took with the ‘proper documenta-tion of Australia’s fascinating fauna’ (Preface).Each section of the work delivers a closely knitaccount of each included species. Subject mattervaries widely from history, people, and four ver-tebrate groups (Ichthyology, Herpetology, Mam-malogy, and Ornithology) all documented withaccounts of early and modern specimen detailsand illustrated with renditions from early artistsand modern photography. To complement many

accounts are images of other early and recentfield data and diaries. How could you possiblynot become enthused by the quantity and qualityof the data!

Several tables provide data summaries com-plete with interesting facts while more detailand images on specimens is provided within thespecies accounts. It is here we see some of thededication of the authors—locating and docu-menting details on specimens from institutionsscattered across the face of the globe. Specimensand documents have been dispersed to manymuseums from Europe to Australia and NorthAmerica and elsewhere.

This monograph will fascinate the uninitiatedwhile providing positive inspiration and knowl-edge to the better informed. A great read and onethat I will regularly consult.

N. W. LongmoreMuseum Victoria

Peter Emmett and Tony Kanellos (eds):The Museum of Economic Botany at theAdelaide Botanic Gardens: A Souvenir.Board of the Botanic Gardens and StateHerbarium of South Australia, Adelaide,2010. 186 pp., ISBN: 978-0-9775608-9-9, $40.

The term ‘economic botany’ is perhaps not wellunderstood these days, being redolent of old-fashioned notions of what botany is about. Amuseum of economic botany conjures visionsof fusty objects of vegetable origin, tedious intheir proliferation in old-fashioned glass cases,and accompanied by hand-written labels statingthe name and country of origin of each object,but little else.

In fact, economic botany touches on theeconomic, environmental, social, and culturalfabric of all human societies. It encompassesthe utilization of plant materials for tools, food,medicine, building materials, and as cultural andritual objects. Museums of economic botanywere a notable feature of many nineteenth-century botanic gardens, including those inAustralia. According to Sir William Hookerwho, as Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens,Kew, instituted that Garden’s Museum of Eco-nomic Botany in 1857, the collections in such amuseum were designed to show all sorts of usefuland curious products furnished by the vegetablekingdom for the use and convenience of man.These museum collections contained material


that could not be exhibited in the living collec-tions or in the herbarium, and hence formed theessential third part of a botanic garden.

In Adelaide, Richard Schomburgk, like hiscounterparts in Melbourne, Kew and many otherplaces, was convinced that the key role of botanicgardens was to undertake programs to promotethe local economy, and a museum of economicbotany was critical in this endeavour. He read-ily adopted the model provided by Kew formuseums of this kind.

In celebration of the restoration and reopen-ing of theAdelaide Botanic Gardens’Museum ofEconomic botany comes this ‘souvenir’. This ispossibly one of the few remaining such muse-ums. How better to mark the restoration andrejuvenation of a gracious nineteenth-centurybuilding and its invaluable contents than with awork of this quality?

The book is in five sections, the first ofwhich addresses the history of the Museum.Prominence is given to people who were inte-gral to the establishment and operation of theMuseum, especially Schomburgk, during whosedirectorship the Museum was opened in May1881. Also discussed are the design and build-ing of the Museum, with descriptions of theoriginal layout and the contents of each displaycase. Sources of objects in the Museum includedgovernment agencies, nurseries and commercialenterprises, and individuals, from all over theworld.

Next come sections that address issues inthe use of plant materials and the process ofrestoration. These include discussions of eco-nomic botany in relation toAustralianAboriginalethnobotany and the applications (and impli-cations) of modern scientific techniques suchas genetic modification. In the description ofhow the restoration was accomplished, it isclear that the object was not just a faithfulrestoration of the Museum in its heyday, but toensure that it operated as an up-to-date exhibi-tion space, with room for temporary exhibitionsand the implementation of high quality museumpractices such as appropriate lighting.

Photographs of the new display cases follow,each devoted to a particular class of product,with a brief statement of the significance of theexhibits. Showcased are things such as papersand books, drugs and medicine, and also, asindicative of the nineteenth-century origin of the

Museum, models of fruit and fungi, and busts ofnotable scientists.

In the last section, several people were invitedto examine an object from the Museum and writeabout their response to it. Things as diverse asdibbles, dragon’s blood and dogon cloth are illu-minated for the reader according to the variedspecialties and experience of the writers.

This book is not just a dry catalogue of theexhibits in the Museum. Instead the Museum ispresented as a vibrant part of a forward-lookingBotanic Garden, and the on-going relevance ofthe Museum collections is underlined. The senseof achievement on the part of the participants inrestoring the Museum to its former position andmaking it relevant to our times is apparent fromthe enthusiasm of their writing. There is a gen-erous quantity of photographs of objects in theMuseum, the luminaries involved in its history,and people in all parts of the world preparing andusing plant materials. The wide range of peo-ple writing articles in the book, thirty-three inall, offers similarly diverse perspectives on thevalue of the Museum and its collections, as wellas highlighting what might be called the person-ality of the individual objects that are allowedto ‘speak’ in the last section. Not only is thebook an invaluable record of the Museum and isrestoration, but it is also an inducement to visitthe Museum and an invitation to consider moreseriously how economic botany has relevance formankind into the future.

Helen M. CohnRoyal Botanic Gardens Melbourne

Kevin Markwell and Nancy Cushing:Snake-bitten: Eric Worrell and theAustralian Reptile Park. UNSW Press:Sydney, 2010. 240 pp., illus.,ISBN: 9781742232324 (PB), $39.95.

The intersections between travel and natural his-tory are well documented; indeed, they comprisea major strand in the historiography of colonialscience. This genre is dominated by the move-ment of collectors and their specimens: by theexpeditions, encounters, transfers and appropri-ations that paradoxically devitalised ‘nature’wellinto the twentieth century. What happened, how-ever, when the process was everted—when thespecimens and the collectors themselves becamethe objects of travel? In short, how do we account

Review Section 183

for the growth of relocated ‘nature’ as a touristphenomenon?

The authors of Snake-bitten are well quali-fied to address this question: Kevin Markwell isa scholar of tourism with a background in bio-geography, whilst Nancy Cushing is a culturaland environmental historian. Together, they havepublished an eminently readable account of theinception and evolution of the Australian ReptilePark, a seminal post-war attraction situated in thelocale of Gosford, mid-way between Sydney andNewcastle.

Markwell and Cushing’s narrative is pro-pelled by the biography and legacy of the park’screator, amateur naturalist-cum-entrepreneur,Eric Worrell. Self-taught and a prolific author,Worrell remained a boundary rider on the out-skirts of twentieth-century Australian biologicalscience. His work both informed and drew uponthe rapidly sub-dividing disciplines of vertebratezoology (particularly herpetology), clinical andexperimental toxinology, and ecology and con-servation. One of the strengths of Snake-bitten isthe way in which Worrell and his park are locatednot as the amateur periphery of these increas-ingly professionalised sciences, but rather as aninterchange central to public engagement withlocal biology and ecology. Indeed, a telling inci-dent early in the book relates how Worrell wasinvited onto the grounds of Sydney Universityto locate a juvenile crocodile ‘misplaced’ by theZoology Department.

Yet Snake-bitten provides more than a con-textualised biography. It reconstructs the travailsattending the genesis and regeneration of theAustralian Reptile Park as an institution: a work-place, a training ground, a production facility,a tourist destination, a commercial enterpriseand an artificial habitat for its many non-human denizens (including Ploddy, the 26.5 m-long concrete dinosaur). The text seamlesslyintegrates Worrell’s publications with popularmedia accounts, archival documents and numer-ous interviews with scientists, entertainers, localgovernment figures and—not in the least—current and former employees of the park.The book’s cover image adroitly encapsu-lates this complexity: milking snakes for theirvenom comprised not only an entertaining‘show’ for tourists, but served simultaneouslyas a platform for Worrell’s conservation andfirst-aid messages. Furthermore, the extracted

venom was then sold for antivenom production,fuelling research and clinical management ofsnakebite whilst returning a commercial incomefor the park. Moreover, it provided Worrellwith everyday opportunities to interact withand better understand his beloved ophidians,whilst asserting his dominant role within themenagerie.

Inclusive as this account is, however, its focuscomes at a contextual cost. The early chapterssketch out some of the interwar antecedentsfor Worrell’s ambitions, including the AdelaideSnake Park and the fading tradition of snakeshows that lured out Sydney’s amateur herpetol-ogists.Thereafter, Worrell’s Ocean BeachAquar-ium (1950–60) and its successor—theAustralianReptile Park—are positioned as prototypes for anew mode of public engagement with captivenative fauna. Insufficient consideration is given,however, to comparable local venues that haddisplayed indigenous animals for popular edifi-cation since the 1870s. By 1950, these includednot only the long-established zoological gar-dens in major capital cities, but also regionalattractions that predated Worrell’s initiatives,including Le Souef’s Aquarium and Museum inRosebud and the Sir Colin McKenzie Sanctuaryin Healesville. Moreover, there is little refer-ence to the exponential growth of other zoos,parks, reserves, aquariums and ‘worlds’ thatcompeted with the Australian Reptile Park fol-lowing the transformation of Australian tourismin the 1970s.

Eric Worrell died in 1987, and the authorsmay have been wise to close their account at thatpoint. In detailing the park’s rejuvenation beyondthis nadir, the final chapters display less criticaldistance from their source material than hitherto,and the text takes on a disquietingly teleologicaltone. It would perhaps have been preferable todevote the final chapters to analysing the shiftingcultural impact of Worrell and his wildlife attrac-tions from 1950 to 1990, before completing thenarrative arc in a short afterword.

Snake-bitten is a well-crafted work targetedto a general readership. The authors’ prose bal-ances description, explanation and anecdote withan openness to their protagonist’s whimsicalside. Moreover, it serves a valuable purpose inillustrating the blurred boundaries between ‘pop-ular’, ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ biology thataccompanied new ecological understandings of


native fauna in mid-to-late twentieth centuryAustralia.

Peter HobbinsDepartment of History

University of Sydney, New South Wales

Richard Aitken: The Garden of Ideas:Four Centuries of Australian Style.Miegunyah Press: Melbourne, 2010.243 pp., ISBN: 9780522857504(HB), $64.99.

The Garden of Ideas is the culmination of aseries of productive explorations of Australiangardening that began with The Oxford Compan-ion to Australian Gardens, edited by RichardAitken and Michael Looker (2002). This wasfollowed by Aitken’s Gardenesque: A Celebra-tion of Australian Gardening (2004), BotanicalRiches: Stories of Botanical Exploration (2006),and The Garden of Ideas (2010). The three mostrecent titles, published by Miegunyah Press,are visually exciting from the temptingly tactilecovers to the last page.

The sub-title—Four Centuries of AustralianStyle—places the content within the broad con-text of international social and cultural history,ranging from the opinions of the Third Earl ofShaftsbury in the early eighteenth century toCharles Jencks’ ‘Garden of Cosmic Speculation’(1989–2007) in Scotland, from the Greek geog-rapher Ptolemy’s ideas of a southern continent toBernard Tschumi’s award winning design for aParisian park (1982–84).

Aitken’s chapters are broadly chronological,with some inevitable overlap. He begins withideas about ‘the Australian garden’ from the1600s, when the ‘great south continent’ wasvariously imagined as ‘waste, wilderness, orparadise’. Early explorers often perceived theAustralian landscape as a ‘natural park’, butthis ideal was difficult to sustain due to lowand irregular rainfall, nutrient-deficient soilsand the lack of skilled labour. The 1820s to1840s saw experiments in colonial landscapeand ornamental gardening as new villa resi-dences linked ‘money and ambition, ground andpotential, power and privilege’. Town planningincluded the establishment of parks and gardensfor recreation, leisure and botanical purposes.

Earnest debate over the best style of lay-out for these new spaces—whether formal or

informal—ensured that such urban green spacesand their settings were truly gardens of ideas(p. 61).

Australian flora interested botanical collec-tors, but gardeners usually preferred familiarintroduced plants, and the widespread plantingof ornamental native plants was not commonuntil the second half of the twentieth century.The1860s to 1880s saw an emphasis on scenic effectusing floral bedding, conifers and foliage plants.Cities and gardens of the 1880s to 1920s wereinfluenced by the professionalization of gardendesign, increased urbanisation and a growingsense of Australian identity. The ‘modernism,functionalism and naturalism’ of the 1920s to1960s presented the private garden as an exten-sion of the house, and the public garden as theproduct of modern town planning. Now, in theearly twenty-first century, there is an enormousrange of garden styles, from naturalism to theuse of bold styles and textures. However, loom-ing climate change emphasizes sustainability—the use of simple materials, and planting forlow maintenance with plants from comparableclimates.

The Garden of Ideas contains Aitken’s ‘per-sonal selection of key moments and stylisticmovements in Australian garden making’. Theevocative images—drawings, paintings, plans,prints and photographs—are large, clear, and,generally, published here for the first time.Extensive captions ensure that this book willbe enjoyed at random, as a coffee-table volume,while its erudite yet engaging text also makesit a valuable resource for the garden lover orhistorian of science.

Gwen PascoeMelbourne

Rob Youl, Brian Fry and Ron Hateley(eds): Circumspice: One Hundred Yearsof Forestry Education Centred on Creswick,Victoria. Forestry Education CentenaryCommittee: South Melbourne, 2010. xvi +278 pp., ISBN: 9780977524068 (PB), $40(+$15 postage from Department of Forestand Ecosystem Science, Melbourne Schoolof Land and Environment, The Universityof Melbourne, Water Street, Creswick,Vic. 3363, Australia).

Review Section 185

The century of Australian forestry education thatbegan in the Victorian School of Forestry (VSF)at Creswick in October 2010 was well worth cel-ebrating. As for many centenaries, a committeewas formed and a publication prepared to markthe event. The genre of centenary publicationsis rich with names, anecdotes, reminiscences,old photographs and often with finely researchedessays; this book no less so. The three editors—who also wrote several chapters—took a happygeological metaphor when they began ‘conglom-erating’ the contributions of twenty-one authorsrepresented in the four forewords, twenty-fiveshort chapters and an appendix. Short memoirsof a further sixty-six contributors, varying inlength from a single sentence to a few pages,are carried in the penultimate chapter. This con-glomerate of large and small is held together byits narrative of change from modest beginning tointernational standard. It is also imbued with asense of uncertainty about the future of forestry.

The Victorian School of Forestry began asa government training school that took youngmen of 14 or 15 years old with a Leaving Cer-tificate for three years of mixed practical andclassroom teaching to equip them as field stafffor the Forestry Department, later Commission.Its relationship with the University of Melbournewas critical to its success and eventual incor-poration into the University, as described inchapters by Linden Gillbank and Ian Fergu-son. A. J. Ewart, the foundation Professor ofBotany, Director of the Botanical Garden andChairman of the Board of Examiners, insistedon high standards of scientific training from thebeginning. It was achieved enabling the Uni-versity to accept a handful of VSF diplomatesdirectly into the second year of a BSc coursefrom 1929. No doubt it was Ewart’s influencethat stimulated the School’s extensive herbar-ium, described in a chapter by Tina Bell, PennyBlackwell andAmandaAshton. In 1949, the Uni-versity started a two-year BSc course in forestryfor VSF diplomates, and in 1981 it took over thecourse at Creswick to provide a four-year BScForestry degree that it taught across the Creswickand Parkville campuses. Research and postgrad-uate education expanded on both campuses inthe same period. Falling student numbers and arestructuring of the University’s model of edu-cation ended its undergraduate forestry courses.Now forestry in Victoria can only be taken as

a post-graduate course after a general sciencedegree, and the Creswick campus is used asa centre for ecosystem science research andindustry technical courses.

Centenary publications risk a ‘Good OldTimes’tone, but there is little of that here; indeed,the changes of the 1970s ‘chipped away at granitetraditions’ that were austere and bureaucraticallypetty, as Ray Spencer and Rob Youl describe.Nevertheless forestry education at Creswick cre-ated a strong esprit de corps among Victoria’sstate foresters that served them well until it dissi-pated in the reorganisations of government agen-cies from the late 1980s. The subsequent declinein forestry education is apparent from the excel-lent appendix prepared by Thomas Baker andFiona Hamilton that records the VSF and Mel-bourne University graduates in forestry, 1912–2009. The book’s last chapter by Gerd Bossingerand Rod Keenan puts a brave face on the futureprospects for ecosystem science in Australia andoverseas.

The institutional changes and developmentsare the large components of this book. Theirgeneral history has been recorded in other pub-lications to which the chapters by Gillbank andFerguson provide welcome additions. The othermajor institution was the Australian ForestrySchool, founded by the Commonwealth Gov-ernment in 1926 and closed in favour of a newDepartment of Forestry that started in 1965 in theAustralian National University. Its history hasbeen recorded, but the history of forestry educa-tion in the University of Adelaide from 1911 to25 still needs to be explored. Forestry is alsooffered in Southern Cross University and theUniversities of Queensland and Tasmania, butthey are too recent to provide historical subjects.

Centenary publications have a captive read-ership for whom names must be mentioned butneed no introduction. For a wider readership theyand minor matters can be skipped, but in doingso small components can easily be missed andthat would be a pity. The VSF’s motto, Circum-spice provides the book’s unexplained title andcan be read as ‘look about you’. It is a goodinjunction in the forest and an encouragement tohistorians of science to dip here and there intothis ‘conglomerate’ book.

John DargavelFenner School of Environment and Society

The Australian National University


Stephen Jackson: Koala: Origins of anIcon. Allen and Unwin: Crows Nest, 2010.337 pp., ISBN: 978 1 74237 323 2, $35.00.Stephen Jackson and Karl Vernes:Kangaroo: Portrait of an ExtraordinaryAnimal Icon. Allen and Unwin: Crows Nest,2010. 338 pp., ISBN: 978 1 74175 903 7,$24.99.

The kangaroo is perhaps one of the most endur-ing symbols ofAustralia.Australian backpackersin the far corners of the globe forgo our flag(so readily confused with other former Britishcolonies in the Pacific) in favour of an image ofthe animal universally associated with our coun-try. No matter how far from home, no matterhow remote, or how great the language barriers,kangaroos inevitably seem to emerge as the onething everyone knows about Australia.

Koalas similarly occupy a large part of theforeign imagination about Australia. If not liter-ally an ‘icon’ in the strictest sense, they certainlyfeature in the top ten Australian sights to see,and like many of Australia’s unique and distinc-tive animals, they hold a special place in theimagination of many people.

Small wonder then that Allen and Unwinwould wish to build a series following on fromAnn Moyal’s classic tale in Platypus (first pub-lished ten years ago), by adding Koala andKangaroo to a timely reprint of the original book.

For historians of science, these new pub-lications immediately invite comparison withAnn Moyal’s elegant and substantive, founda-tional book, and her own subsequent follow-upbook Koala published by CSIRO Publishing.Theother comparison to be drawn, particularly bymore scientifically inclined readers, is with sim-ilar series such as the long-running AustralianNatural History Series, once published by Uni-versity of New South Wales Press, but now alsocontinued by CSIRO publishing.

Ann Moyal’s books are well known to mosthistorians of Australian biology, presenting aconcise analysis within a broad social historicalframework of the discovery and understandingof the species being discussed. The AustralianNatural History Series will be more familiar toscientists, typically written by biologists as ageneral summary of the latest knowledge on thespecies, often with a technical slant.

Both Kangaroo and Koala are written bybiologists with excellent credentials both in

mammalian research, and in popular writing. Itis perhaps not surprising then, that these booksreally hit their stride when discussing the naturalhistory and biology of their respective species. Inthese chapters, the books present an easy to readand accessible overview of the animal’s biology,ecology and behaviour. As expected from a tradepublisher, the books are formatted for ‘reading’rather than having the more structured formatof the Natural History Series aimed at technical,educational and reference audiences. Many tra-ditional trade publishers remain convinced thatgeneral audiences find diagrams, sub-headings,tables and indexes off-putting; however, the lackof these features also makes it more difficultfor readers to dip into books and seek out theinformation they are looking for, which maybe a negative for the growing educational andnon-fiction markets. Fortunately, Kangaroo andKoala have retained excellent reference lists (forboth text and images), good illustrative mate-rial in support of the text, some informativeappendices and reasonable indices.

While these books are well suited to a broadgeneral readership, they are unlikely to provide ahistorian of science with the careful and criticalanalysis of social history they might expect fromthe association with Platypus. On the positiveside, however, the books benefit from an addeddepth of scientific knowledge. Both aspects ofthis are illustrated in the retelling of the first cap-ture of a koala by a European. Francis Barrallier,a Frenchman appointed as ensign to GovernorKing, lead expeditions seeking passage throughthe Blue Mountains in 1802. On one of theseexpeditions, his Aboriginal guides brought backparts of a ‘colo’ to eat. Barrallier managed toobtain two feet, in exchange for two spears anda tomahawk, and sent the specimen back toGovernor King. Barrallier has also been widelycredited with securing Governor King the firstlive specimen of a koala, which was reported bythe Sydney Gazette in August 1803 as havinggiven birth to ‘two pups’. Moyal, the histo-rian, notes that Barrallier was unlikely to havebeen the source of this specimen since he leftAustralia, out of favour with King, in May. Incontrast, Jackson, the biologist, is rather morestruck by the report of rare koala twins.

Both koalas and kangaroos are charismaticand interesting enough species to warrant amultitude of books, written from a diversityof perspectives and for a variety of audiences,

Review Section 187

even if the publishers seem to suffer from animagination deficit in coming up with origi-nal titles. Nonetheless, these two new booksare certainly attractive additions to that grow-ing collection and will no doubt prove popularon the ‘Australiana’ shelves of bookshops andlibraries alike.

Danielle ClodeFlinders University

Adelaide

Exhibition review

‘Exploration and Endeavour: The Royal Soci-ety of London and the South Seas’, NationalMuseum ofAustralia and the Royal Society, sup-ported by theAustralianAcademy of Science andthe Australian Institute of Marine Science, 15September 2010 to 6 February 2011. Curator:Michelle Hetherington. Design: Freeman RyanDesign.

Stepping into ‘Exploration and Endeavour’inthe National Museum’s new studio gallery space,it is clear from the outset that it is a gem of anexhibition. A celebration of the Royal Society’s350 years, this is no plodding account of the Soci-ety’s history; curator Michelle Hetherington hascreated an elegant dance through the Society’sengagement in our region. The enticing glint ofa delicate orrery and Captain Cook’s quadrantin the first cases hook one’s curiosity, a backlitWilliam Hodges scene of a Tahitian bay on therear wall glows in the low lighting, leading youin, and you slip into a slower pace, and into thepanel text, as a Handel sonata plays, flowing thento the sound of waves.

The story told here begins with the motivatingimpetus for scientific endeavour embodied in theRoyal Society’s motto: ‘Take no-one’s word forit’.The narrative moves deftly through key inves-tigations: from the Transit of Venus, to the questto measure longitude, to treatments for scurvy,right through to a link to the present day: withthe final alcove of the exhibition holding a coralcore sample from the Coral Sea, tracing climatechange, a record stretching from the eighteenthcentury to now.

Hetherington’s text is captivating, and shetakes care to explain the workings of theinstruments as well as the part they play inthe unfolding story. Major personalities in thevoyages: Joseph Banks, James Cook, Matthew

http://www.publish.csiro.au/journals/hras

Flinders are given presence through their letters,images, and text. Including the Society Islanderswho travelled with the voyagers: Omai (Mai)and the navigator/high priest Tupaia, we cangain through their experiences some sense of theimpacts European expeditions would increas-ingly have on the indigenous people of theregion.

The objects, images and narrative are deftlyinterwoven, and this carries through in theexcellent catalogue. The main corpus of instru-ments and documents were selected from theRoyal Society’s collection, but these are supple-mented with the National Museum’s Endeavourcanon, William Bayly’s magnifier, and platesfrom Banks’ Floreligium. Being presented withobjects such as the quadrant that Banks had tocarefully recover from the Tahitians who hadtaken a shine to it, and the very substantial,grandfather-clock of a regulator from the Res-olution voyage, one starts to comprehend morefully the practical challenges of Enlightenmentexperimentation on far-flung shores.

The opening show for the National Museumof Australia’s new ‘studio gallery’ space, Explo-ration and Endeavour sets a high standard. Thespace has a neatly contained feel, a bite-sizedoffering, always a useful outlet for curatorialexperimentation. The public program for theexhibition was limited to a single event, anentertaining reading from journals and corre-spondence between several key figures, per-formed by Rhys Muldoon, Andrew Sayers andMichelle Hetherington. Held in the studio, it wastightly packed, but again, this provided a suitableintimacy that would have been lost in the largetheatre.

This beautifully crafted exhibition andaccompanying catalogue and website are fittingtributes to the contribution that the Royal Soci-ety made throughout the eighteenth century toa growing understanding of the Southern Seas.And, as the coral core demonstrates, this is aprocess that continues, through the work of theAustralian Institute of Marine Science and theAustralian Academy of Science, which was setup in 1954 by the Royal Society’s AustralianFellows.

Jenny NewellCentre for Historical ResearchNational Museum of Australia

koala: origins of an icon

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