The History of Natural History Some biographical sketches by Craig Robertson The history of natural history features a legion of characters that attract our interest. They come to notice at least back to the Middle Ages, even among the Ancients. In this page I list just a few that I find of interest, in short sketches that give the information I have to hand. If anyone is interested enough to research please go for it; I've given a few references where available. Even this limited sample illustrates the diversity of people who have engaged with 'natural history' throughout Australian history, and in the wider world.

Robert Hislop (1869 - 1936)

Bertie Hislop was born in Victoria, then moved to north Queensland where his father set up a farm on the Bloomfield River near Cooktown. The family were protective of a large group of aborigines living on the farm and he grew up with their children, fluent in their language. About 1892 he married, by tribal law, Jennie, a Wayalwayalarra woman and they had three childen, one of them dying in infancy. His life was beset with business, work and financial trouble and eventually Jennie left him for another, aboriginal, man.

Bertie and his brother Francis engaged in some bird egg collecting. They hosted the visiting collector William Le Souef in the 1890s. The latter became director of the Melbourne Zoo and, aside from egg collecting, came looking for Bennett's Tree Kangaroos for the zoo. That was a species the family was well-aquainted with; kangaroos and the brush turkey were on the menu at the farm. Bertie collected for Le Souef, and later for H.L. White. Most of his clutches wound up in the Melbourne Museum via the Le Souef and White collections. He died in the Cairns district hospital.

Ian J. Mason & Gilbert H. Pfitzner, 2020. Passions in Ornithology: a century of Australian egg collectors. Canberra, 2020. (CanPrint Communications Pty Ltd, 10 Nyray St., Fyshwick, A.C.T.)

Photo courtesy of National Library of Australia Picture Collection, Canberra

Jane Ada Fletcher (1870 - 1956) Born in Victoria, Jane became a Tasmanian school teacher. She inherited a love of nature from her parents - her mother a botanist and father an ornithologist. As a young child she lived in Queensland on a family plantation among Kanakas. She was taken for bush walks by an aboriginal man who imparted knowledge of the bush to her. There was also a good teacher of English literature. They were two other influences, but it was also many years of school teaching that shaped how she would become a children's author and historian. She published several successful books for children and on Tasmanian history, and from about 1923 to the 1950s, wrote particularly on Tasmanian Aborigines. Following the death of her mother in 1889, she and her two younger sisters went to live with their grandmother at Bundoora outside Melbourne. It was an unhappy household, granny did not approve of her birding, and the bush was the great escape until she was able to make the move in 1892 to an aunt's farm in Tasmania. The bush and birds were her passions. She was a keen photographer of nature, and the first woman to deliver a lecture to the Royal Society of Tasmania. It was ornithology that became her chief interest; she was a founding and life member of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, often hosting visiting ornithologists. She met and corresponded with A.J. Campbell, having used his 1883 book on nests and eggs during her Bundoora days, sent to her by her father. Campbell was then working on its massive 1901 sequel to which her father contributed. Later she met leading ornithologist Gregory Mathews. She corresponded with him and sent him nests and eggs. She published numerous papers on birds herself throughout her life, her birding mainly around localities in northern Tasmania. In ornithology she took a special interest in waterfowl - the Rallidae, and also the Southern Emu-wren Stipiturus malachurus. There are a number of her clutches in the Melbourne Museum collections. I tend to imagine her striding through misty swamplands in her 'wellies', but apparently she was also quite willing to go after school and wade through when required.

Unfortunately her field work, some of it for Mathews, came to an end in 1936 owing to a severe injury. That was the year the Tasmanian Tiger became extinct. Jane was also a close friend, and spent holidays with another ornithologist, Mary Roberts. She was the founder and first curator of the Hobart Zoo for native birds and animals. She kept thyalcines and Jane witnessed the trading of a pair to London Zoo in the early years of the century. Years later that zoo was the site of the oft-shown and only known film footage of the Tasmanian Tiger.

Leonard Wall, Fletcher, Jane Ada (1870 - 1956), Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/fletcher-jane-ada-10202
Published first in hardcopy 1996, accessed online 25 November 2024.
Fletcher, Jane Ada, 1916. Nature and adventure in Australasia for boys and girls. MacMillan, London, 1916.
Marcus, Julie (Ed.), 1993. First in Their Field: Women and Australian Anthropology. Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria, 1993.
Whittell, H.M., 1954. The Literature of Australian Birds: a History and a Bibliography of Australian Ornithology. Paterson Brokensha Pty Ltd, Perth, W.A. 1954
Ian J. Mason & Gilbert H. Pfitzner, 2020. Passions in Ornithology: a century of Australian egg collectors. Canberra, 2020. (CanPrint Communications Pty Ltd, 10 Nyray St., Fyshwick, A.C.T.)

Harry St John (Jack) Bridger Philby (1885 - 1960)

He was born in Ceylon, as it was in the days of Empire. When his father went broke due to coffee leaf rust his mother took the kids to London where he went to school with boys like Rupert Brooke and Jawaharlal Nehru. When he grew up Jack went back to India, in the civil service, at the heart of the Empire. In 1910 he married Dora Johnston; a distant cousin Bernard Montgomery - later a Field Marshall - was best man. They had a son and three daughters.

Career-wise Jack became increasingly at odds with the ruling elite. During World War I they sent him to Basra, then later to Bagdad after its capture from the Turks by the British. By 1917 he was again at odds with others in the bureaucracy. He decided to go exploring rather than sit in an office. At this point he 'went native' as the saying went - he was an accomplished linguist. One observer wrote that he could only be distinguished from 35 Bedouin tribesman as his feet were not quite as dirty. He made his name mapping remote parts of Arabia for the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), and gathering large collections of zoological and geological specimens, which he donated to the British Museum of Natural History (BMNH). He discovered new species for science: Philby's Partridge Alectoris philby, and Arabian Woodpecker Dendrocopos dorae (named for Dora).

Later in London he was something of a celebrity, giving lectures to packed out audiences. He idolised the Arab leader Ibn Saud. When the man came to London he took him to meet the king and interpreted for them, and then took him to his little son's school. He was a colleague of T.E. Lawrence and would agree with him that the British had betrayed the Arabs after the war. By 1922 he was effectively governor of the new territory of Transjordan. Tourists came there, including Dora and their son. But after more trouble with his superiors he resigned, sick of the British policies regarding India and the Middle East.

In 1930 he converted to Islam and in 1932 made another exploration across Arabia to Mecca. From this he gave another lecture in London to the RGS attended by Dora, and his son came too, from Cambridge. The Times newspaper listed him as one of the lecturers of the year along with the likes of Albert Einstein and J.G. Frazer. The public saw him as a hero similar to Scott and Lindbergh. Unfortunately by the 1930s Jack was so long-wedded to the Arab cause he became compromised with the British fascists and then the German Nazis. After the war he lived out his life in Beirut.

In January 1938 the BMNH found evidence of oil in Arabia from his mineral collections; the geologists went looking using his accurate maps, the start of Saudi wealth. By then his son had started his career. Born in India in the days of Kipling and the Raj, of course that was Kim.

Holzman, Michael, 2021. Kim and Jim: Philby and Angleton: friends and enemies in the Cold War. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 2021.
Knightley, Phillip, 1989. The Master Spy: the story of Kim Philby. Knopf Publishing Group, New York, 1989.

Edward Charles Stuart Baker (1864 - 1944)

Stuart Baker was an Englishman who, on completing his education in 1883, joined the Indian Police in Assam, where he went on to become Inspector-General. In 1910 he went into Special Criminal Investigation. Then in 1912 he went back to England to reorganise the Port of London Police, which he headed until his retirement in 1925. After that he was very successful in local politics as a councillor.

Baker's years in Assam were formative in his pursuit of natural history, especially ornithology, but also involved the usual big game hunting. He lost his left arm in an encounter with a leopard. To save himself he thrust his arm down the leopard's throat until his local men killed it. He was twice tossed by a bison, and trampled by a rhinoceros. In what seems in this day and age a Pythonesque response he remained a crack shot and a champion tennis player. He married Ethel Roffrey and they had four daughters.

Baker made serious study of the fauna of India, collected bird skins and eggs, and published many papers and books on the work. He became the foremost authority on the birds of India, ultimately publishing the second edition of the 'Fauna of India' in eight volumes 1922 - 1930, the standard work ever since. Most of his collections are in the Natural History Museum, London, including a major collection of cuckoo eggs.

In the 1920s, the chief of MI6 ('C'), the British foreign intelligence service, was known to be keen to recruit ex-India men on their return to England. In the early 1930s Baker took two collecting trips to Lappland. A few egg clutches from these trips have wound up in the Melbourne Museum. Their localities where collected look interesting. Some are pretty close to the border with Soviet Russia. Given Baker's background in the imperial police and his political contacts, one can't help wondering if all he was doing there was raiding the nests of some hapless sandpipers.

W.L.S., 1944. Edward Charles Stuart Baker: Obituary. Ibis, 1944: pp. 413-415.
T.S. Palmer, 1945. Obituaries: Edward Charles Stuart Baker. Auk, Vol. 62, Jan. 1945: p. 172.
Knightley, Phillip, 1989. The Master Spy: the story of Kim Philby. Knopf Publishing Group, New York, 1989.

Arthur Edward Brent (1858 - 1928)

He was born in and spent his life in Tasmania, mainly around Hobart, one of thirteen children. Their large family home at Austin's Ferry, 'Roseneath', was destroyed in the 1967 bushfires that invaded the outer suburbs of Hobart. Arthur, a farmer, collected birds' eggs, and was involved with some of the leading collectors of his day, such as A.J. Campbell and H.L. White.

I came across one egg of his in Melbourne Museum that I found rather poignant. A small white egg, it was inscibed '1/5 O.B.G.P. 3-12-99 AB'. (His initial letters were, typically, locked together, a characteristic mark for him; other collectors did a similar thing.) The 'OBGP' was Orange-bellied Grass Parakeet, an old name for Orange-bellied Parrot Neophema chrysogaster, now very rare and struggling to escape extinction, with the very active help of conservationists.

These beautiful little birds were once seen in flocks of hundreds. I hasten to add that after some years studying the old-time egg collectors and their collections, I don't believe there is a single Australian bird species that was ever threatened by their activities. Indeed their collecting, when done expertly and methodically has provided much valuable knowledge of avian breeding biology. The famous case of DDT causing shell-thinning and breeding failure, then being banned, is an example; much else could be learned from better use of the historic collections and their associated records. Birds lose their eggs all the time through natural causes - predation, storms and the like. If conditions are good they will simply lay again. The best collectors knew when to take a clutch early in the season so that would happen. The problem for conservation is always the loss of habitat. I grew up in the era when governments were actively campaigning to stop egg collecting. This was unquestionably justified, but it wasn't because the collecting was threatening species but because species were already threatened by the wholesale transformation of the landscape by agriculture and forestry pratices. The notable component of that transformation for most parrots was and remains the relentless removal of old hollow-bearing trees from the landscape. (The collection of skins by shooting and trapping live birds is far more contentious; one thinks of Rothschild collecting in the Hawaiian Islands.)

The locality of Arthur's OBGP collection was York Plains, a little whistlestop on a railway line running north of Hobart. I doubt if an OBGP has been seen around there for a hundred years. A check of the 1899 calendar and sure enough 3 December was a Sunday. I imagine Arthur chuffing off on the Sunday train full of picnickers, probably wearing a three-piece suit and tie, carrying a lunch of corned beef sandwiches and a home-grown apple. He was probably with company because they would have been carrying climbing gear - a rope ladder - to get up to the nests. He got a few clutches in those parts and corresponded about them with Campbell. That single egg appears to be the sole surviving memento of that day in the bush.

A.J. Campbell, 1901. Nests and Eggs of Australian Birds, including the Geographical Distribution of the Species and Popular Observations thereon. Two volumes. Printed for the Author by Pawson & Brailsford, Sheffield. See Volume Two, p. 652.
Ian J. Mason & Gilbert H. Pfitzner, 2020. Passions in Ornithology: a century of Australian egg collectors. Canberra, 2020. (CanPrint Communications Pty Ltd, 10 Nyray St., Fyshwick, A.C.T.)
Longmore, W. & W. Boles, 1989. The Curate's Egg. Australian Natural History, Vol. 23 (2), Spring, 1989.

Photo courtesy of National Library of Australia Picture Collection, Canberra

Hendrik Geysen (1921 - 1994) Hendrik Geijsen was born and grew up in Holland, and trained as a ship's officer in the merchant navy for two years just before the Second World War broke out. As a very young man he found himself trapped by the Nazi invasion of 1940. He escaped to England on his third attempt in 1943. In early 1945 he was dropped into Holland along with weapons for the Resistance. He was commissioned in the field as a resistance organiser. He had also trained as an airforce pilot and flew for the RAF in the UK and Ceylon. After the war he became an executive of KLM Airlines. In 1951 he came to Australia, became a citizen in 1953 (as Geysen), and married Joan Spence; there were six children. In 1956 he joined Southern Airlines and became general manager the following year. In 1960 he led a 33-man team to Antarctica, as Officer-in-Charge of Australia's Mawson Station. They sailed down on the Thala Dan. He was also at Davis Station in 1961. At Mawson a blizzard blew away and destroyed two of the three aircraft they were equipped with.

During his time in Antarctica he led expeditions to study the Emperor Penguin colony on Taylor Glacier, about 100 km. west of Mawson. He collected a number of natural history specimens now in the Melbourne Museum: a Snow Petrel and Southern Giant Petrel; the eggs of an Emperor Penguin (1), an Adelie Penguin (2), and a Southern Polar Skua (1).

Those were pioneering days; 'Henk' has a glacier named after him in the mountains of the interior: Geysen Glacier. It was mapped from aerial photos taken by the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition (ANARE) in 1956-7. ANARE was led in those years by Dr. Phillip Law, who became Director of the Antarctic Division of the Australian Government. Geysen was the chief at Mawson the year Law got into trouble with his boss for trying to smuggle his wife Nel on to the ship down. But Nel got to go. The first Australian woman to set foot on the frozen continent, she was a painter and did landscapes from the ship's deck, or sketched the ship while perched on the ice.

Traces of War/Geijsen, Hendrik
Various items referring to Hendrik Geysen can be found via the National Library of Australia's Trove. See issues of Current notes on international affairs, Dept. External Affairs press releases, newspaper clippings etc.
Kathleen Ralston, 1998. Phillip Law: the Antarctic Exloration Years 1954 - 66. Ausinfo, Department of Finance and Administration, Canberra, 1998.

Cobby Buchan (c. 1900 - 1910)

This is where the historical record gets very sketchey. Cobby seems to have been known as Cobby Buchan, or Joe Cobby, or just Cobby. He was an aboriginal man who collected specimens for a collector named George Savidge, along the Clarence River near Copmanhurst in northern New South Wales in the years around the turn of the Twentieth Century. This was by no means a unique relationship. It would be an interesting study in itself as to what extent collecting was aided by aboriginal people. They would find the nests, climb the trees and retrieve the eggs, or collect other specimens in the bush, and often not get their name or even their presence in the record.

John Houwing's datacards: two clutches of Whistling Duck eggs from the late 1930s

John Houwing Jr. (c. 1915 - ????) John Houwing Jr. began collecting birds' eggs as boy in the Netherlands when the First World War was still raging. Then some time after June 1922 he went to Java with his family, who were in the plantation business. Growing up in the countryside he continued his egg collecting and traded with at least two Australian collectors. He carefully marked his eggs and documented their provenance on nicely designed and printed datacards, filled out in a meticulous script. He used Stuart Baker's catalogues (see above) - rather privileged to have had a set of those in the house! - or perhaps he had access to some colonial library. There are many such cards in the Melbourne Museum. Their dates range from the 1920s to the latest 1930s. The latest I know was April 1940. So the mystery is - did the Houwings escape Java before the Japanese invasion of March, 1942? I had a great aunt who didn't, and starved her way through nearly four years of war. I would dearly like to know the fate of John Houwing.