Published Resources Details
Book
- Title
- Upside Down World: Early European Impressions of Australia's Curious Animals
- Imprint
- National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2010, 258 pp
- ISBN/ISSN
- 9780642277060
- Subject
- History of Natural Sciences Biological Sciences
- Abstract
The blurb:
"In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the animals of the new Colony of New South Wales were viewed as odd and inferior, even unbelievable: the swans were black and eagles white; birds built shell-strewn avenues of sticks to cavort in; and parrots walked on the ground. The mammals carried their young in a pouch and there were furred animals that laid eggs. By the 1820s, Australia had become known as 'the land of contrarieties': an image that was partly serious, partly mocking and an attempt to keep the Antipodean riff-raff in its place.Upside Down World is lavishly illustrated with early European images, most held in the National Library of Australia's collection and some of which have never before been reproduced . Scattered throughout are fascinating and colourful descriptions of species from collectors' and naturalists' journals, showing us how the scientific knowledge of Australian fauna evolved. Read about the koala that 'much resembles a sloth', the malleefowl which incubates its eggs in an 'oven' and a 'bird so very singular in its several characteristics . . . the bill seems most allied to a hornbill, but the legs are those of a toucan, and the tongue is more like a crow than any other'. Plus, of course, the platypus, which defied rational explanation-with its webbed feet and duck's beak attached to a mammal's body, surely it was a hoax on the part of those cheeky colonials.
Penny Olsen is a research scientist and natural history writer. Based at the Australian National University in Canberra, she is the author of Brush with Birds: Bird Art in the National Library of Australia (2008) and Glimpses of Paradise: The Quest for the Beautiful Parrakeet (2007) ."
- Source
- Cohn 2011
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