The Acclimatisation Society of Victoria played a fascinating, yet devastating, role in Australia’s ecological history. Founded in 1861 and existing as an independent entity until 1872, the Society recorded its objectives and activities in annual reports. These reports have been digitized by Museums Victoria and are now available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The First Annual report of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, 1862. Contributed to BHL by Museums Victoria. http://s.si.edu/2BpCcfK.

The Acclimatisation Society was established in Victoria’s capital of Melbourne at a time when the city was experiencing great economic and population growth. Gold had been discovered in the colony in 1851 and over the next 10 years the population grew from 76,000 to 540,000. The wealthy and educated flocked to Melbourne, and the 1850s saw the establishment of The University of Melbourne, the National Museum of Victoria, the State Library of Victoria and many learned societies.

The Acclimatisation Society was governed by the colony’s most eminent scientists who believed that Australia’s plants and animals were greatly inferior to those in Europe. The Society’s first president Edward Wilson argued that animals indigenous to Australia were practically useless, providing only ‘a little sport and an occasional meal’ (Gillbank, 1984).

At the Society’s inaugural annual meeting, members were roused with talk of “wharves laden with the fleeces of the alpaca…, rivers teeming with all sorts of fish, forests abounding with every variety of game, and our tables groaning with all the delicacies which can be procured in the markets of London and Paris” (Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, 1862b).

There was great nostalgia amongst the colony for the “delightful reminders of [their] early home”. Frederick McCoy, foundation Professor of Natural Science at The University of Melbourne and first director of the National Museum, proclaimed that “English thrushes, blackbirds, larks, starlings, and canaries” when “liberated” would enliven the “savage silence, or worse” with their “varied, touching, joyous, strains of Heaven-taught melody” (McCoy 1862).

Birds liberated, from The First Annual report of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, 1862. Contributed to BHL by Museums Victoria. http://s.si.edu/2DEkbzh.

The Society’s objectives were twofold: to introduce to Victoria and acclimatise “all innoxious animals, birds, fishes, insects, and vegetables, whether useful or ornamental” and to spread indigenous plants and animals from the colony to other parts of the world. President Wilson’s motto was “if it lives, we want it” (Tout-Smith, 2018).

Theirs was an enormous undertaking: “to establish a system of co-operation and exchange, with persons residing at different points in the far quarters of the globe, and to arrange for the reception, multiplication, and distribution of birds and other animals, which must first of all bear a tedious sea voyage, and then receive the vigilant attention necessary to preserve them in a new climate” (Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, 1862a).

The Annual Reports outline some significant successes (not all of which were their own doing): “the hare and rabbit have been introduced, and the latter so thoroughly acclimatised, that it swarms in hundreds in some localities” (Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, 1862c).

The Reports not only provide a timeline of species released in Victoria; they also list the species sent elsewhere: echidnas to London, wombats to Paris, kangaroos to Mauritius and possums to New Zealand (an acclimatisation “success” that New Zealand may never forgive).

Quadrupeds and birds sent away, from The First Annual report of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, 1862. Contributed to BHL by Museums Victoria. http://s.si.edu/2n4u9kb.

However, most of their expensive acclimatisation experiments failed. In the early 1870s, The Acclimatisation Society began to focus on the importation of exotic animals for display purposes and in 1872 it was renamed The Zoological and Acclimatisation Society of Victoria. Their Annual Reports (also available on BHL) provide an equally fascinating history of what would become The Melbourne Zoo, but that’s another story.

Crustacea, from The First Annual report of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, 1862. Contributed to BHL by Museums Victoria. http://s.si.edu/2n90R33.

Today Australia’s introduced species cause immense environmental and economic damage and have caused more extinctions of native Australian animals than any other factor. The Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, however, was certainly not to blame for all this devastation. While their lists of “liberated” animals include many of our most destructive invasives, they are generally only credited with the introduction of starlings, sparrows, sambar deer and European carp (Tout-Smith, 2003).

The legacy they expected to leave behind is very different from the one presented here, as evidenced by McCoy’s statement in his anniversary address delivered at the Society’s first annual meeting:

…the good we do will live after us, and the work of our hands will thrive and prosper to our hearts’ content, and so become a lasting benefit to the millions of men who will in the fullness of time inhabit this land. (McCoy, 1862)

References

• Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, 1862a. Annual report of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria. No. 1.
• Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, 1862b, Proceedings of the Annual General Meeting, 24 November 1862, Annual report of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria. No. 1.
• Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, 1862c. Annual report of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria. No. 1.
• Gillbank, L. 1984. The Origins of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria: Practical Science in the Wake of the Gold Rush. Historical Records of Australian Science 6, 359-374. https://doi.org/10.1071/HR9860630359.
• McCoy, 1862. Anniversary address delivered at the first annual meeting of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria. In Annual report of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria. No. 1.
•  Tout-Smith, D. 2003. Acclimatization Society of Victoria in Museums Victoria Collections. https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/articles/1803. Accessed 18 January 2018.

BHL Australia started 2017 with a dream – to digitize biodiversity literature from EVERY state and territory in Australia (for those readers not in Australia, we have six states and two territories).

The Australian branch of the Biodiversity Heritage Library is led by Museums Victoria, in collaboration with Australia’s national biodiversity data aggregator, the Atlas of Living Australia. The Australian project started in 2011 with just one library contributing.

The first scientific description of a kangaroo, from George Shaw’s The Naturalist’s Miscellany, or Coloured figures of natural objects, volume 1, 1790, contributed to BHL by Museums Victoria. http://s.si.edu/2mMRKFG.

In May 2016, BHL Australia signed on as a full BHL member. By this time, we had grown to five contributing organizations from four states: Museums Victoria and the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (in Victoria), the Queensland Museum (in Queensland), the South Australian Museum (in South Australia) and the Australian Museum (in New South Wales).

By the end of 2016, the number of Australian contributors had doubled. We had welcomed five new BHL contributors, including the Western Australian Museum and the Royal Society of Western Australia (from Australia’s largest state of Western Australia) and Geoscience Australia (from the Australian Capital Territory).

Left: Records of the Western Australian Museum and Art Gallery, volume 1 number 1, 1910, contributed to BHL by the Western Australian Museum. http://s.si.edu/2EL3oYw. Right: Page from Richard Gurth Dodson’s 1971 Antarctic geological field notebook contributed to BHL by Geoscience Australia. http://s.si.edu/2B8EPCo.

In 2017 we purchased a new scanner and uploaded a record number of pages onto BHL: 48,863 (compared to 27,647 in 2016). We continued to attract new contributors and, by the middle of the year, there were 15 Australian organizations contributing to BHL. However, the Northern Territory and Tasmania were still not represented.

In October 2017, BHL Australia’s Manger Ely Wallis and Coordinator Nicole Kearney spoke about BHL at the combined annual meeting of the Council of Heads of Australian Faunal Collections (CHAFC) and the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria (CHAH).

We are thrilled to announce that, as a direct result of this meeting, we have three new Australian contributors: the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, the Northern Territory Field Naturalists’ Club and Tasmania’s Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.

Left: Records of the Queen Victoria Museum Launceston, volume 1, 1942, contributed to BHL by the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. http://s.si.edu/2DG0Fjs. Right: Northern Territory Naturalist, volume 1 number 1, 1978, contributed to BHL by the Northern Territory Field Naturalists’ Club. http://s.si.edu/2mFQKCm.

As we’d dreamed, BHL Australia will be spending 2018 digitizing the biodiversity heritage of every state and territory in Australia – from the library collections of 20 Australian organizations (thus far).

To keep up with BHL Australia’s contributions and activities, follow us on twitter at @bhl_au.

The BHL Australia operation would not be possible without the work of our wonderful volunteers: Bob Griffith, Chris Healey, Grace Blake, Heidi Griffith, John Hurley, Sue Halliwell, Tiziana Tizian and Virak Seng. In November 2017, we welcomed seven new volunteers to our BHL Au family: David Tink, Ian Farnsworth, Liz Murray, Ruth Dickinson, Sharon Lewin, Susan Roderick and Wenping Zhang. In December 2017 we uploaded 7,745 pages onto BHL: this was our highest upload month ever. 7,745 cheers for our volunteers!

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest online repository of library and archival materials related to biodiversity. Its aim is to make the world’s biodiversity literature openly available online.

In Australia, BHL is managed by Museum Victoria and we have been contributing to this global resource since 2011. We have a team of wonderful volunteers who digitise our rare books and historic journals and prepare the digital versions for publication online. Over the past 4 years, BHL Australia has digitised 593 items comprising almost 150,000 pages of our biological heritage that used to be locked up in our library archives.

Bob Griffith, BHL Volunteer, digitising a rare book from the State Botanical Collection. Image: Nicole Kearney. Source: Museum Victoria.

Earlier this year we learned that our digitisation operation would have to be shut down for several months while Museum Victoria undergoes a major reorganisation of its collection stores. The stores will be much more efficiently arranged after the move, but while the relocation is occurring the collections will be inaccessible – and this includes our library collection.

An idea began to germinate…

The National Herbarium Library at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria have long been interested in the BHL, and researchers at the Herbarium certainly use and appreciate the BHL resource. They were very keen to digitise their own library collection, but didn’t have the resources to do so. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to collaborate and undertake a project that would be of benefit to both institutions.

National Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Image: Nicole Kearney. Source: Museum Victoria.

Last week Museum Victoria moved its entire digitisation operation to the other side of Melbourne. The equipment, volunteers and our BHL staff will be spending the summer at the Royal Botanic Gardens. Just yesterday we digitised the first book from their State Botanical Collection and it will soon be available online.

Illustrationes florae novae hollandiae, sive icones generum quae in prodromo florae novae hollandiae et insulae van diemen descripsit robertus brown by Ferdinand .L. Bauer, from the State Botanical Collection. Image: Cerise Howard. Source: Museum Victoria.

As the lead organisation for BHL in Australia, a major part of our role is to encourage and support other organisations to digitise their own collections. The Royal Botanic Gardens joins our other partners – the Australian Museum, the South Australian Museum and the Queensland Museum – in making their own biodiversity heritage openly available online. ​

As the Coordinator of BHL Australia, I’m based at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. This is a very long way from BHL headquarters in Washington DC – in both space and time. The time difference between Melbourne and DC is 14 hours and, while I’ve had countless conversations with BHL staff via email, our opposing work hours make phone calls or virtual meetings almost impossible.

Last month I was able to visit my BHL colleagues in person. I had been invited to speak at the Society of American Archivists conference about my work digitizing and transcribing the handwritten field diaries of Australia’s early naturalists. I joined six other speakers, including BHL’s Julia Blase, in a session about the importance of natural history archives. The meeting was in Cleveland, only a stone’s throw (from my perspective) from Washington, D.C. This was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

I spent four days at the Smithsonian Libraries and had face-to-face meetings with every member of the BHL Secretariat, as well as with staff from the Transcription Center, the Digitization Lab and the Cullman Rare Book Library. Many of our discussions were about how to make BHL work even better for our users, such as how to display transcripts of handwritten items and ensuring we have the most accurate article-level metadata for historic journals.

Books on display at the Joseph F. Cullman, 3rd Library of Natural History, Smithsonian Libraries. Image Credit: Nicole Kearney.

A highlight of my visit was seeing the rare books in the Cullman Library of Natural History. I had of course perused the digital versions of these treasures online (on BHL), but it was awe-inspiring to see them in the flesh and to listen to their Curator Leslie Overstreet speak so passionately about their history. I also particularly enjoyed seeing the Once There Were Billions exhibit, having read so much about it on the BHL blog. I took home origami versions of Martha (the last passenger pigeon) for my children and work colleagues so we too could #FoldtheFlock.

My visit coincided with that of Professor Ian Owens, Director of Science at the Natural History Museum, London. In his presentation to Smithsonian staff, he emphasized the contribution BHL has made to our understanding of global biodiversity. To make his point, he showed the illustration from the first published description of the Platypus from The Naturalist’s Miscellany, Vol. 10, George Shaw, 1799, a publication contributed to BHL by Museum Victoria. I was also proud to hear him mention the digitization and transcription initiatives of our funding partner, the Atlas of Living Australia.

Bone Hall, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Image Credit: Nicole Kearney.

I had been to Washington, D.C. only once before, when I was fifteen. A highlight of that visit was the Bone Hall in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. I was fascinated by the variety of skeletons and the way they had been arranged to demonstrate form and function. I went on to become a zoologist, specializing in science communication. I still think this display is one of the best I’ve seen, and I was thrilled to find it relatively unchanged on my return visit – twenty-three years later!

It was wonderful to meet the dedicated people who keep BHL running so smoothly, and I am most grateful for the time they spent with me, answering questions, walking me though procedures and making me feel so welcome. Now that I’m home, we’ve resumed our communication via email, but I can now picture the friendly faces that sent them. I hope our paths will cross again soon.

BHL staff with Nicole Kearney. Back Row, Left to Right: Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director), Bianca Crowley (BHL Digital Collections Manager), Julia Blase (Field Book Project Manager), Nicole Kearney (Coordinator, BHL Australia, Museum Victoria), Carolyn Sheffield (BHL Program Manager). Front Row, Left to Right: Jacqueline Chapman (Smithsonian Libraries Digital Collections Librarian), Grace Costantino (BHL Outreach and Communication Manager). Image Credit: Nicole Kearney.

From our end here in Australia, the BHL team at Museum Victoria have recently been focusing on the digitization of rare books relating to Antarctic exploration, including a number donated by local philanthropist Sir Thomas Ramsay. We have also continued to digitize works on Australian fauna. A particularly significant recent addition to BHL was A synopsis of the birds of Australia, and the adjacent Islands by John Gould. This work was issued to scope interest in what eventuated in one of his most celebrated works, The Birds of Australia.

Ross, James Clark. A voyage of discovery and research in the southern and Antarctic regions, during the years 1839-43. v. 1 (1847). http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/46551029. Digitized by Museum Victoria.

Explore the books in the BHL Australia Collection today.

In November 2014, Museum Victoria started a project to digitize and transcribe the field diaries in our collection. These diaries, handwritten by Australia’s early field naturalists long before the days of electronic notetaking, are rich in scientific data and historic detail. They provide insights into past species distribution and abundance, as well as the trials and wonders experienced on historic expeditions.

Afternoon tea with Graham Brown (this diary, volume 4, is now viewable on the Biodiversity Heritage Library). Image: Museum Victoria. Source: Museum Victoria.

They are fascinating sources of information and yet very few people have ever read them. As handwritten documents, each was created as a single hard copy. They have been carefully stored in the museum’s archives for decades, protected from dust and light but inaccessible to anyone but the few curators who knew of their existence. Until now.

Rebecca Carland, Museum Victoria’s History of Collections Curator, with Graham Brown’s field diaries. Image: Nicole Kearney. Source: Museum Victoria.

Over the past nine months we have digitised 24 historic field diaries from our collection and have been steadily uploading them onto DigiVol, the online volunteer transcription portal developed by the Atlas of Living Australia and the Australian Museum. In DigiVol, the pages can be individually transcribed, with a verification process ensuring the quality of the result.

We are immensely grateful to the volunteers who have contributed their time and attention to transcribing our field diaries. Ten field diaries have been fully transcribed and the volunteers are now working on a diary written by notable ornithologist Frederick Lee Berney between 1898 and 1904.

The first collection of five field diaries to be run through the digitisation and transcription process was produced by Graham Brown between 1948 and 1958. Now that they have been transcribed, the contents of the diaries can be searched and the data extracted. When analysed, Brown’s diaries contained 5611 bird sightings, complete with dates and locations. This historic data will now be made available to scientists and can be used to inform climate change studies and species management plans.

A small fraction of the 5611 bird observations Graham Brown recorded in his diaries. Image: Nicole Kearney. Source: Museum Victoria.

The next step is to make the images of the field diaries available through a publicly accessible website. We have just uploaded four volumes of the Graham Brown field diaries and their transcriptions onto the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and we will continue to add more over time. Museum Victoria has already contributed over 500 rare books and historic journals to this global repository of historic literature (through a project funded by the Atlas of Living Australia). We are thrilled that our field diaries are now joining these other significant volumes.

Help us unlock the observations in our historic field diaries
If you would like to become a transcription volunteer, sign up on the DigiVol website.

This post originally published on the Museum Victoria blog to welcome the “Art of Science” exhibit to the museum and introduce audiences to BHL. Explore the latest BHL Australia developments in this past post. See the Museum Victoria collection in BHL here. 

The Art of Science exhibition presents the finest examples from Museum Victoria’s remarkable collection of natural history artworks. These include rare books from the 18th and 19th centuries, field sketches from early colonial exploration of Australia’s wildlife, and contemporary scientific photographs.

The books on display contain some of the most beautiful and significant illustrations of flora and fauna ever produced. The exhibition’s curators must have had a torturous task selecting which page from each book to display. Because that’s all they could display – a single double page spread from each precious volume.

Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo, illustrated by Elizabeth Gould for John Gould’s A synopsis of the birds of Australia, and the adjacent islands, 1st edition, London, 1837-38, on display at Melbourne Museum. The entire book can now be viewed online. Image: Nicole Kearney Source: Museum Victoria

The Art of Science has only just opened at the Melbourne Museum. Before coming home, it toured Mornington, Ballarat, Adelaide, Mildura, Sale and Sydney. Visitors to the traveling exhibition were awed by the stunning illustrations, but they were also a little frustrated. They wanted to turn those beautiful pages. They wanted to see more.

Wombat, from An account of the English colony in New South Wales, from its first settlement in January 1788 to August 1801, David Collins, 1804. The entire book can now be viewed online. Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library

And so, before the books went on display for this final time, we asked the exhibition’s curators if we could borrow them. Each page of every book was carefully photographed and the images color matched to the originals. This work was meticulously performed by a group of dedicated museum volunteers, supervised by Museum Victoria’s library staff.

Ground Parrot, illustrated by James Sowerby, for George Shaw’s Zoology of New Holland, volume 1, 1st edition, London, 1794. The entire book can now be viewed online. Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library

We then uploaded the scanned volumes into the world’s largest online repository of biodiversity literature and archival materials – the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). BHL is a global consortium of natural history libraries working together to make biodiversity literature freely and openly available to everyone.

Museum Victoria coordinates the Australian component of this giant online library, and we are thrilled that the books displayed in The Art of Science exhibition are now part of it.

So if you too would like to turn those tantalizing pages, now you can (whether you’re in Melbourne, or not):

• Visit the BHL website to view The Art of Science books in their entirety.
• Visit The Art of Science exhibition at Melbourne Museum to view a selection of the scanned pages on an interactive screen.