Person

Mack, George (1899 - 1963)

Born
2 October 1899
Killearn, Scotland
Died
24 October 1963
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Occupation
Museum director and Ornithologist

Summary

George Mack was an ornithologist who made significant contributions to both the National Museum of Victoria (NMV) and the Queensland Museum. He came to Australia in 1919 and was appointed Assistant Taxidermist at the NMV in 1923. Such was his interest and expertise in birds that he became the Museum's Ornithologist in 1935: he also had responsibility for the fish collections during WWII. While at the NMV he obtained his BSc from the University of Melbourne. Mack published extensively on bird taxonomy in The emu, the journal of the Royal Australasian Ornithological Union. He believed, somewhat controversially, that that it was necessary to study bird skins to make a positive identification. In 1945 he moved to Queensland where he served as Director of the Museum from 1946 to 1963. His responsibilities as Director took him away from taxonomy and ornithology, but among his achievements was to reorganise and modernise the storage of specimens. Mack was active in local scientific organisations, being President of the Royal Society of Queensland, the Queensland Naturalists' Club, and the Anthropological Society of Queensland. He also served on the Great Barrier Reef Committee.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1914 - 1919
Military service - Served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
1919
Life event - Migrated to Western Australia
January 1935 - 1945
Career position - Ornithologist, National Museum of Victoria
1935 - 1945
Career position - Ornithologist, National Museum of Victoria
1945 - 1946
Career position - Senior Scientific Assistant, Queensland Museum
1946 - 1963
Career position - Director, Queensland Museum
1946 - 1965
Career position - Director, Queensland Museum
1949
Career position - President, Queensland Naturalists' Club
1953
Publication - Birds from Cape York Peninsula, Queensland
1957
Career position - President, Royal Society of Queensland

Related Corporate Bodies

Archival resources

Queensland Museum Library

  • George Mack - Records, 1945 - 1963; Queensland Museum Library. Details

Published resources

Edited Books

  • Mack, George ed., Handbook of Queensland: prepared for the use of members of the Association on the occasion of the twenty-eighth meeting, held in Brisbane, May 1951 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1951), 188 pp. Details

Journal Articles

  • 'Obituary: George Mack', Emu, 63 (4) (1964), 343-344. Details
  • 'George Mack: Obituary', Queensland Naturalist, 17 (3/4) (1964), 75. Details
  • Jack, N., 'Obituary: Mr George Mack', Emu, 63 (4) (1964), 343-4, https://doi.org/10.1071/MU963343. Details
  • Mack, G., 'A revision of the genus Malurus', Memoirs of the National Museum of Victoria, 8 (1934), 100-25, https://doi.org/10.24199/j.mmv.1934.8.07. Details
  • Mack, G., 'John Gould's Correspondence with Sir Frederick McCoy', Emu, 38 (2) (1938), 212-6. Details
  • Mack, George, 'New displays in the Queensland Museum', Museum international, 6 (3) (1953), 178-83, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0033.1953.tb00219.x. Details
  • Mack, George, 'Birds from Cape York Peninsula, Queensland', Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, 13 (1) (1953), 1-39. Details
  • Mack, George, 'The Queensland Museum, 1855-1955', Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, 13 (2) (1956), 107-24. Details
  • Mack, George and Gunn, G. B., 'De Vis' types of Australian snakes', Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, 13 (1) (1953), 58-70. Details

Resources

See also

  • Amey, Andrew P. and Couper, Patrick J., 'Herpetological type specimens held at the Queensland Museum: a catalogue', Memoirs of the Queensland Museum - nature: 64: 19-259, 64 (2022), 19-259. https://doi.org/10.17082/j.2204-1478.64.2022.2020-12. Details
  • Marsh, Walter, The butterfly thief: adventure, empire, and Australia's greatest museum heist (Brunswick, Vic.: Scribe Publications, 2025), 368 pp. Details
  • Robin, Libby, The Flight of the Emu: a Hundred Years of Australian Ornithology 1901-2001 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 492 pp. Details

McCarthy, G.J. & Rosanne Walker

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 20 August 2026

EOAS ID: biogs/P001474b.htm

This Edition: 2026 August - Bibliographies
Larneuk - Gariwerd calendar - Pre-spring: late July to August - season of nesting birds
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-larneuk-season-of-nesting-birds

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P001474b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260