A Science of Our Own: Exhibitions and the Rise of Australian Public Science 0822945762, 9780822945765

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A Science of Our Own

Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century Bernard Lightman, Editor

A Science of Our Own Exhibitions and the Rise of  Australian Public Science

Peter H. Hoffenberg

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2019, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4576-5 ISBN 10: 0-8229-4576-2 Cover art: “The Intercolonial Exhibition. The Main Hall,” October 2, 1875, State Library of Victoria, accession Number A/S02/10/75/105; “Microscope by Mr. Pillischer,” the Great Exhibition, 1851, Illustrated London News, July 5, 1851, 35, courtesy of the British Library; “The Vienna Exhibition: Views of the Victorian Court.” Australasian Sketcher, October 4, 1873, 125, courtesy of the National Library of Australia, Canberra; “Scene in the Lower Botanic Gardens, Sydney,” Illustrated Sydney News, October 26, 1870, 76, used with the permission of the National Library of Australia. Cover and book design: Joel W. Coggins

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

3

ONE “Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun”



exhibiting australian science at home and abroad



23

TWO “Men Who Are an Ornament to Science”



scientists from new south wales, victoria, and queensland at the exhibitions

44

THREE “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”



ferdinand von mueller and the exhibitions

65

FOUR “Dwellers in the Desert Living in Tents”



exhibitions and overcoming scientific distance,

isolation, and wandering 87

FIVE “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”



scientists, the



Conclusions



“sciences of man,” and the australian

aboriginal past 106

theoretical and historiographic reflections on

nineteenth-century australian science and exhibitions

132



notes

143



bibliography

181



index

191

Acknowledgments

This book required the assistance of many individuals and organizations, stretching from London in the “east” to Perth in the “west.” The number of capable and willing archivists and librarians is too large for me to remember everyone’s name, particularly at my advanced age, so to many of you, please accept both my gratitude and my apologies. Close to home, though, the staff at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s Hamilton Library and Interlibrary Loan Office were generous with their time and patient with my repeated and often incorrect requests. Much of the evidentiary strength of this book is a result of their professionalism, generosity, and decency. They along with the others helped provide the foundation of newspapers and periodicals, official and unofficial exhibition guidebooks and catalogues, personal memoirs and correspondence, and government reports. My work would be even more speculative without such materials, some of which I also had the great pleasure of reading overseas in English and Australian archives and libraries; much of the rest I had the good fortune to be able to read surrounded by tropical trees, bright sunshine, and invigorating air-conditioning in Mānoa. A handful of individuals advised, edited, cajoled, encouraged, and admonished at various points as I wrote this book. Among those were Roy MacLeod, professor emeritus at the University of Sydney and a lifetime contributor to our efforts to better understand what made science “colonial” and/or “national” and/or “imperial”; Rod Home, formerly, and Linden Gillbank, currently, at the University of Melbourne, where both helped put Ferdinand von Mueller and the history of Australian science on a wider scholarly map; Tom Griffiths at the Australian National University; my dear friend and colleague of blessed memory Fritz Rehbock, who, along with Roy, encouraged me to pursue the relationships between science and exhibitions as part of my wider interests in exhibitions and colonialism; to Brett Bennett and the University of Texas at Austin gang who have done so much to help move forward scholarship on science and imperialism; and to the readers and editor at the

University of Pittsburgh Press. The book reads a lot better thanks to them. The mistakes remain mine. There are many others near and far, but Saundra C. Schwartz, Elena Florence, Libby Jennifer, and Judah Alfred patiently watched this project unfold and listened to its saga, Elena and Saundi since a noisy fax appeared in a recently evacuated bedroom in Chico, California. This book is dedicated to that beloved quartet.

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A Science of Our Own

A Science of Our Own

 Introduction

this book explores the ways by which the participation of influential

Australian scientists and the Australian scientific displays at exhibitions during the Victorian era contributed to the development of what scholars have come to call “public science.” That was the case most notably, but not exclusively, in the British colonies of Victoria and New South Wales and with eminent geologists and botanists. It was also the case with local or regional exhibitions, held in major Australian cities after 1854, their subsequent bolder local international exhibitions, and Australian participation at the shows hosted by cities in North America, Europe, and British India. Those major exhibitions began with the Crystal Palace, held in London’s Hyde Park in 1851. The major thrust of my narrative ends with the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition in 1888. The goal of this book is to consider the relationships among different levels and spaces of science, including what we often term local, colonial, imperial, national, and global science, noting in those relationships the mutual development of modern science and modern society in the Australian colonies, or, as they were sometimes called, “The British Australian possessions.” The context of popular Australian and overseas exhibitions allows me to explore those themes and to better distinguish both what Australian science and scientists

shared with others and what differentiated them. I am able to make some suggestions because of the significance of scientific participation at the exhibitions and because that participation was more often than not connected to other institutions and activities in Australian public life. While this book draws upon the rich scholarship on the history and practice of Australian science and of the many exhibitions, near and far, it was written to address the relative lack of scholarship on science and scientists at nineteenth-­century exhibitions and on the nature and impact of Australian scientific engagement with those popular shows. There is a growing body of scholarly literature about exhibitions around the world, perhaps most notably about how those exhibitions contributed to and benefited from major historical developments in art and architecture, trade and industry, and nationalism and imperialism. There is, though, very little about the explicit roles that scientists and scientific exhibits played. That is not to say that students of industry, nationalism, and imperialism ignore science; rather, this book is an attempt to treat seriously the many forms of science at the exhibitions as a core subject and not one subsidiary to what are considered larger issues. It is an attempt to better understand how exhibiting science interacted with public life and what might be called “the public interest.” This was sometimes a matter of a specific policy, such as coal production or overseas trade, and it was also a more general approach to knowledge, society, and public culture. That more general approach included the potential role that recognized scientists and their work might play in local Australian public life. Australian scientific participation at exhibitions drew upon a rather long history. Scientific exhibits were part of public exhibitions even before the Great Exhibition of 1851, recognized as the first major international exhibition. Organizers at the French National Exhibitions held between 1798 and the 1840s employed a rather straightforward system to sort such exhibits according to basic scientific categories, including “Chemistry,” “Mechanical Engineering,” and “Health.”1 Executive commissioners at England’s Great Exhibition drew upon that French precedent and the Victorians’ own keen interest in science. Visitors enjoyed before the official opening on May 1 lectures on scientific topics, such as “The Scientific Construction of the Palace of International Industry.”2 After the gates opened, visitors viewed and read about pumps, batteries, and telegraphs among nearly countless scientific and “philosophical instruments.” The local and overseas press did not ignore those displays.3 Neither did those chronicling the Great Exhibition for posterity, including Claude-­Marie Ferrier and Hugh Owen, whose photographic image of balances, a coin-­weighing machine, and an air-­pump illustrated the text in Reports by the Juries (1852) (Figure I.1). 4

A Science of Our Own

FIGURE I.1.

“Philosophical Instruments at the Great Exhibition,” Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, 1851. Reports by the Juries (1852), Claude-Marie Ferrier and Hugh Owen, Photographers, British Library Image c. 13773–91

Australians not only drew upon that tradition of exhibiting science but also drew upon the complementary tradition of including participating scientists and their staffs. Again, one could do worse than start with the Great Exhibition, at which prominent British scientists served on various official commissions to solicit, organize, and evaluate exhibits. Eminent Victorian scientists at the Crystal Palace numbered among their crowd Lyon Playfair, Richard Owen, Edward Forbes, and Joseph Hooker. They continued their involvement after Introduction

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the controversial structure was moved to Sydenham and at future exhibitions in Britain and elsewhere.4 Richard Owen, for example, was president of the scientific juries at the Paris Universal Exposition four years after serving in that official capacity at the Great Exhibition.5 Those leading figures and their staffs self-­consciously drew out scientific exhibits from the relative privacy of laboratories, universities, and learned societies for their very public display, testing, and evaluation in exposition halls during the second half of the nineteenth century. That was the case for local or regional exhibitions, as well as for bolder international ones. An abbreviated list of overseas host cities includes London, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Calcutta, while closer to home for Australians, the exhibition halls could be found in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, and a host of provincial towns. Visitors at local art and science exhibitions could number in the tens of thousands. The Paris and London turnstiles might register over two million men, women, and children. The Australian scientists exhibited amid the seemingly limitless and overwhelming galaxy of material culture and entertainment at those exhibitions, where they and their displays coexisted with artists, men and women of business, working machines, and seemingly the whole world. In one of many examples, thousands visited the Bombay Court at the Calcutta International Exhibition in the early 1880s, where they could observe a collection of astronomical and other scientific instruments, as well as scientific puzzles, alongside carpets, bronzes, ethnographic models, and weapons.6 Science and scientists were thereby embedded in the vast cosmos of nineteenth-­century public society and mass culture, and thus made available and accessible to the equally vast cosmos of exhibition visitors and critics. Science was made public amid that often dazzling and sometimes almost incomprehensible galaxy of material and human culture. Public science was continually reinvented and legitimized at the exhibitions in the interest of scientists, the state, and “the public,” not always without struggles over who controlled that science and exactly in whose name science was being celebrated.7 I am using the term “public science” to complement, not replace, the more commonly studied “national,” “colonial,” and “imperial” sciences. This argument does not eliminate the significance of those useful definitions; rather, it supplements a more political understanding with an equally significant social one. That is, the science promoted and experienced at exhibitions was in good part about the social vision with which it was partnered and the place of both scientists and the science they practiced in society or public life. This approach enables us to see the development of both universal and local science and how the social and the scientific interacted over time. 6

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Exhibitions were understood as a significant part of Australian public culture, whether those events were held in colonial cities, such as Melbourne, or in overseas urban centers, Paris among them, so it was an almost natural fit for scientists to turn to such experiences and events to promote their authority and that of modern science itself. In an enduring and profound way, elite and popular could merge at those shows, including the engagement in scientific questions, knowledge, and technologies by noted professional scientists and curious men, women, and children. Public science was and remains a meeting ground of expert, amateur, and interested parties, some elite, others more often than not part of common life. That meeting ground was more participatory in the form of exhibitions than in the cases of other significant expressions of public science, including press coverage and meetings at voluntary societies. So this is an argument not only about numbers—­exhibition visitors outnumbered those attending learned societies, if not also, at certain times, museum visitors—­but also about the nature of the engagement with science. Exhibitions invited visitors to participate in the scientific organization of knowledge and the world, intended with all sincerity to be one path of “progress,” and a path that scientists recognized was not without its problems. Visitors could observe the scientific process, not only the technologies, results, and evaluations. This book focuses on how exhibitions contributed to the development of such an active, imperfect, distinctive, “Australian” or “New South Wales” or “Melbourne” public science, or, in the words of one Sydney public figure, “a science of our own.” It was for experts and commoners. That gentleman of some prominence, Rev. Henry Carmichael, officially opened as its first vice president the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts in the early 1830s with a bold challenge: “If we mean to rise in the scale of nations, we [New South Wales, Australia] must possess . . . a science of our own.”8 That was a political and a social statement. The “Introductory Discourse Delivered at the Opening” connected “circumstances” in the city and colony with “the formation” of the institution. Context and circumstances generated an impressive list of goals envisioned by funders, advocates, and leaders. Complementing and mirroring exhibitions and other voluntary societies, the School of Arts would provide practical and general information in various formats, including lectures, displays, experiments, and a library. The vice president claimed that The collection of apparatus and models for the sake of illustrating, under the guidance of competent lecturers, the principles of science and art,—­ forms another important part of the plan laid down for the conduct of this association. The necessity and importance of this part of the provision are Introduction

7

sufficiently apparent. Lectures on the principles of science and delineations of processes pertaining to the arts, whether mechanical or chemical, would be comparatively useless without such illustrations and experiments as are contemplated in the execution of this part of the society’s plans of operation. The effect of experiment in fixing a knowledge of principles on the mind, is such as to render an adequate apparatus a necessary part of the furniture of a lecture-­room. The importance of making this provision, therefore, is proportioned to the importance of communicating scientific knowledge to the working mechanic.9

Those claims about “science” were not far from the claims made by exhibition advocates, although in this case, public science had a fixed home, whereas exhibitions were temporary events. They might result in permanent buildings, but the experience itself had a shelf-­life. Voluntary societies often opened their doors wide open, as did exhibition organizers, but the former also limited membership and access. Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts was praised by a visitor about twenty years after it opened as “a very good commencement” to the development of public institutions. “The reading-­room contains a great many English and nearly all the Australian papers, to which a library is added, members of the institute being allowed to take books home.”10 At least some of the first vice president’s scientific goals had been realized, and by then those goals had been supplemented by the capital city hosting the colony’s first local exhibitions and participation in the Great Exhibition of 1851, held in Hyde Park’s controversial Crystal Palace. The School of Arts would carry on that tradition of public science in its own building, at exhibitions, and by urging the New South Wales government to support the spread and strengthening of scientific knowledge. A deputation solicited government funding for public lectures on “the sciences of geology, mineralogy, and chemistry,” meeting with local officials in 1879, the year during which Sydney hosted Australia’s first international exhibition at the newly built Garden Palace.11 Scientific samples, lectures, and libraries in keeping with those bold ambitions were also parts of shows organized by various other colonial Schools of Art and voluntary associations, some learned, others more practically inclined. Examples from the Australian possessions could be found in major cities and provincial towns, including in the 1840s the Illawarra Horticultural and Agricultural Society and, later, the Ballarat Mechanics’ Institute.12 Ten years after its official opening, the institute could boast more members and revenue than its brother institutes in Melbourne and Geelong, a reading room, museum space, and a library of “nearly 7,000 volumes.”13 Advocates linked the science of the geological collection and its accompanying 8

A Science of Our Own

informational materials to the growing “importance” of and in the mining community. This was an accessible, applicable science, and a science matched to the public interest. That connection was even more explicit as the institute held its own “Exhibition of Science and Art.”14 Public science included explicitly governmental bodies, as well as the many voluntary societies in the Australian colonies. Keeping with the town of Ballarat, the local School of Mines provided “important scientific education directed to a practical object.” That practicality included chemistry, among other sciences. Science was connected to employment, both experts and workers participating at the school.15 Those private and public institutions, activities, and participants were part of a rather “thick text” of public science outside of elite universities and formal expeditions. Victoria’s capital city, Melbourne, offered its own public engagement with science and scientists. Men and women attended lectures and read debates concerning scientific issues, “The Great Melbourne Telescope” and the fate of the Botanic Gardens in the 1870s among them. In the case of the former public issue, the press and others commented on observations of the transit of Venus and of a photograph of the moon, both resulting from using “The Great” telescope. Points of connection were drawn linking the university, the Royal Society of Victoria, and the telescope.16 The public discussion of the Botanic Gardens invited authors and readers to consider the nature of botanical science—­was botany about generating samples and taxonomies or about creating walkways and bandstands? Who should be in charge: a gardener or a botanist?17 There almost always seemed to be some comments in the colony of Victoria’s press about local acclimatization societies. Trout ponds captured the interest of a writer and readers in early 1874; perch one year later.18 Those examples of public science from the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales had their complements across the colonial borders in South Australia and Queensland. Experiments at the Botanic Gardens in Adelaide caught the attention of local and British observers, with some Londoners particularly interested in “the cultivation of tea from Chinese seeds” at the South Australian institution.19 One of many public lectures in Adelaide on “the progress in medicine” emphasized potential scientific contributions from the colonies’ soil.20 Scientists in the various colonies contributed to public policy, men and women attended scientific lectures, museums or at least sections of museums were devoted to scientific experiments and tools, and voluntary societies held annual conversaziones. The press noted that one such yearly gathering in 1873 “brings scientific men together, and gives everyone who has something of interest to say a certainty of hearing.”21 That praise was qualified, as the author added that the Royal Society and its conversaziones “may not always be exactly up to the Introduction

9

mark of what such a body should be.” Criticism aside, conversaziones in New South Wales, Victoria, and other colonies engaged hundreds of attendees with optical, biological, and other scientific experiments and samples during the mid-­and later-­Victorian years.22 By the 1880s, the scientific meetings were being held at official exhibition buildings, including the large one in Prince Alfred Park in Sydney.23 Such public engagements with science provide a rich social and cultural perspective and context, accompanying the commonly studied political ones. A “science of our own” became not only a political claim but also a social one, a claim about the nature of public life and social interactions, if not also social institutions. Members of voluntary societies in both capital and provincial Australian cities were inclined to collect and use exhibits for scientific authority and also for their own popular legitimacy. Science was an expected and accepted part of the interactions of public culture, whether on a relatively daily or weekly basis or in the event of an unusual moment. That normalization of science, generally in institutions, provided a more local precedent for the larger and bolder scientific participation at the exhibitions. Men and women built upon that foundation and reached out for scientific objects on such special occasions, whether those were Australian intercolonial exhibitions or Australian participation at overseas international ones. Voluntary societies contributed scientific exhibits and, in turn, their libraries housed exhibition reports and displays. There were also times when the public directly engaged with the scientific activities at the exhibitions themselves, rather than at complementary or institutionally based, yet separate, engagements, at least in the sense of time and place. Visitors at exhibitions observed, tested, and read about scientific objects, technologies, and resources. The local press provides evidence about which scientific exhibits were of note and, perhaps, popular as well. A paper in the colony of Victoria informed its readers of scientific exhibits from the locality on display during the early 1870s at an international exhibition in London. One of the inventing partners was “of this town” and had displayed a similar scientific “principle” at the Melbourne Exhibition in 1873. A medal at that show was replicated with one at the later exhibition at South Kensington. In this case, a direct public connection was made between scientific practices in the colony and the successful display of such practices at both Australian and overseas exhibitions.24 A few years later, the “show case of surgical instruments and appliances” displayed at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878 caught the attention of one local Sydney paper. Its readers could enjoy, if that is the appropriate term, a rather long description of “amputation cases, hypodermic syringes, enemas . . . [and] clerical thermometers,” reflecting and encouraging public interest in medical science. Such interest was buttressed by encouraging news 10

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that “no hemorrhage, is at all likely to result” from the use of the exhibited apparatuses.25 Exhibitions, scientific events, and the press coverage of both remind us of the rich, engaging public science in the Australian colonies, although the exhibitions were of a far larger scale, were generally more participatory, and attempted to integrate science into other aspects of life. There were overlaps in which some of the same participants, objects, and lectures could be found at the conversaziones and the exhibitions. Both made at least some local scientists and a not insignificant number of men and women cognizant of a public role for science in their own societies, as they noted such roles abroad in the United States, Britain, and France.26 In studying such public perspectives and engagement with science at the exhibitions, I am attempting to appreciate the meaning of exhibitions as limited, ephemeral events and also their meaning in light of how they connected to other examples of public science, perhaps more permanent, and to the public in general. I draw upon both older and more recent studies in the expansion and export, if not adaptation, of what has come to be known as the Western or modern scientific enterprise to make my claim about the roles of exhibitions, scientists, and scientific displays in helping to create such an Australian public science “of our own.” The development of that seemingly localized national science at exhibitions was, after all, also part of the globalization of science. Connections at exhibitions presented enterprises that were thought of as unique to Australia at the time and, in doing so, also presented Australian scientific enterprises mirroring those undertaken overseas. If that were not enough, exhibitions linked the local and the overseas, suggesting similarities and distinctions in what was becoming increasingly a worldly enterprise.27 Having said that, my book is not intended to privilege the validity of a particular way of establishing, doing, and thinking about science. Others engage in that important enterprise. But this book does recognize that most scientists in the nineteenth-­century Australian colonies were not particularly interested in Chinese science or the natural history knowledge of Australian Aboriginals. They were, in fact, quite interested in what was going on overseas in London, Philadelphia, and Paris and how those developments connected with or did not connect with developments close at home in Sydney or Victoria. Exhibitions provided regular and authoritative opportunities to engage with overseas scientists and scientific developments. That engagement was not unidirectional. Australian scientists used their exhibition opportunities to contribute to the more global development of science during the nineteenth century. They were not passive participants at the grand shows and in the globalization of science. Introduction

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Exhibition participation assumed many different forms between the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851 and the international exhibitions held in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Notable among those shows were the Sydney International in 1879 and the Melbourne Centennial in 1888. Scientists collected, observed, displayed, operated, and exchanged explicitly scientific exhibits; wrote, read, and distributed scientific essays; sometimes directly interacted with exhibition visitors, men, women, and children; and in the case of the most prominent scientists, contributed as official commissioners in more general ways to the development of public science. That science included the fields of botany, chemistry, geology, and what were considered the “sciences of man.” Among those were linguistics, archaeology, philology, and ethnography (or early anthropology). Australian scientists active with exhibitions were important participants in what the prominent historian of science R.W. Home considers the “vicissitudes” of the relationship between science and the public.28 Exhibitions revealed that relationship as both “a reflection of the changing character of science itself,” as he points out, and a reflection of the changing character of the public. Australian scientists recognized as such at the exhibitions shaped both of those elements and the relationships between them, making science more public and trying to make public life more scientific. They were less successful achieving that second objective. Relative failure was not for want of effort, though, before, during, and after the exhibitions, and there was some success in generating a more scientific sense of common public history. As discussed in chapter 5, the pursuit of public science at the shows did eventually include a scientific approach to the Australian Aboriginal community. That was an effort to bring sciences, such as philology, to bear on the Australian past, rather than bringing sciences such as geology to bear on the Australian future. Public lectures on scientific topics and newspaper columns and letters about such topics were signs of how science was expressed in and shaped civil society and also how it confirmed these approaches and studies as “scientific.” The Australasian Sketcher ran a rather lengthy article in the later 1870s supporting philology as the “science of language.”29 Its contributor noted, “Probably no branch of science exhibits more conspicuously the transformation which has been effected in scientific thought of late years by the idea of evolution that that of philology.” That transformation reshaped in a scientific arc Australian public history at and beyond the exhibitions. Those larger stories were a developing narrative during the second half of the nineteenth century, although one might be able to at least suggest turning points here and there. This book argues that among those turning points were 12

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the holding of more ambitious and popular international exhibitions in the Australian capital cities and the professional pivots in the career of Ferdinand von Mueller, the most prominent Australian botanist (if not scientist) of his generation. The international exhibitions provided opportunities for Australian scientists to show what they could do and to learn from a wide variety of visitors and overseas exhibits. There might be official commissioners, exhibitors, and displays from nearly two dozen foreign polities. Mueller’s career revealed the tensions inherent in trying to make science popular, as well as public, entertaining, and educational. Public science was not always synonymous with science that had popular support, as is evidenced by the successes and failures in Mueller’s professional career, which eventually separated his work as a “scientific” botanist from what others thought more appropriate to a “popular” gardener. Mueller turned to exhibitions and botanic gardens to study the world; others turned to those institutions and events for entertainment. By the mid-­1870s, the Australasian Sketcher noted that botanical gardens offered fireworks and “a moonlight concert” as much as, if not more than, botanical experiments and taxonomies.30 The exhibition experience included that educational-­ entertainment duality, not always resolved with equal weight to both goals. The scientists themselves did not always seek that type of resolution. The colonial botanist and other Australians were engaging the growing personal and professional networks crisscrossing the Australian colonies and the British Empire and also actively shaping such networks, their nodes and links, ephemeral interactions and more enduring institutional ones. The later international exhibitions were part of those larger networks and ones in which Mueller and his scientific colleagues participated as they battled that inherent tension within public science between entertainment and education—­or the world of shrubs and the world of flowers. Exhibitions were one of those crucial experiences, repeated at least every few years, enabling significant communications and the development of not insignificant professional and social capital and roles amid these tensions.31 That was particularly the case at the larger international exhibitions held in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane during the final three decades of the century. Those interactions unfolded before, during, and after exhibitions and within the scientific world outside of the exhibition halls and meetings. Other public and sometimes popular science interactions included lectures, library and museum collections, and the public expression of scientific debates and controversies. Mueller and his scientific colleagues were often part of those public activities, institutions, and discussions. The debates about the future of Mueller’s laboratory and gardens in Melbourne invited the public expression of rather surprisingly strong positions about the scientist himself and the roles Introduction

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of his work in colonial society.32 At other times, members of the general public expressed their views about exhibition collections and their potential future as more permanent local museum displays. Exhibition activities interacted with those and other examples of public science in the later nineteenth century. There were many incentives for Australian scientists to participate at exhibitions in addition to those other public venues. In doing so, they became active travelers along and architects of webs of expertise, material culture, and both nation-­and empire-­building.33 Those were public activities in the sense that science was at times a form of entertainment or a performance, as its practitioners were cognizant of consumers and of a market. Their scientific endeavors were often explicitly connected to public questions about wealth, nationalism, governance, and the nature of society, and they engaged those questions as recognized scientists.34 Australians might not only learn about the science undertaken by others; exhibitions also offered Australia as an object of science, full of resources and opportunities. Exhibition success highlighted science itself, the scientists, and the exhibiting polity and society. Not bashful, the author of the Annual Report of the Department of Mines boasted that the colonies’ participation at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 was “highly creditable . . . particularly as regards minerals.” And that quality reflected well on Australian “progress,” on the “splendid and extensive collection” of local minerals and ores in Australian hills and valleys, and “with regard to mining a pre-­eminent position.” That confidence also had a specific scientific expression: Australian minerals were “the object of observation of scientific men” and “proof that Australia can boast of men who are an ornament to science” itself.35 Assuming some self-­ interest embedded in the official document, historians can still take note of what was emphasized—­overseas scientific interest in Australia and the participation of Australian scientists—­and the evidence of a material afterlife for the exhibition. The Report chronicled Australia’s contributions and reproduced for administrative posterity some of the exhibition publications. The following chapters consider those different, yet connected, developments in the creation of an Australian public science at exhibitions, including the popular American show in Philadelphia. It is a story of minerals, mining, and much more. Perhaps “creation” is too bold of a claim, and one that suggests a return to clear, differentiated stages in the development of science. We might think about the roles of exhibitions in the continued reworking and re-­creation of Australian science in light of public life. Chapter 1 introduces the major exhibitions at which Australian scientists and scientific displays played significant roles. Those include civic or metropolitan, intercolonial, and international shows in the Australian colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, as well as major inter 14

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national ones in overseas countries, Great Britain, France, and the United States among them. This overview considers what was displayed in the name of “a science of our own” and how such exhibits were arranged and explained. What were some of the key questions with which Australian scientists and their exhibition colleagues wrestled as they sought to represent and enhance their sciences? Chapter 2 highlights the exhibition activities of major scientists, among whom were official colonial geologists and colonial botanists. Such time-­ consuming activities were not limited to soliciting and displaying exhibits, securing exchanges, and writing reports and surveys. As noted in this and other chapters, there was much work to be done and often many parties with which to negotiate. Prominent Australian scientists undertaking such labors at the exhibitions included the Reverend W. B. Clarke, Joseph Bosisto, and Mueller. They participated in local and overseas exhibitions, sometimes traveling abroad for the shows. In one notable example, Mueller was active in expositions between Melbourne’s first show in 1854—­at which he served as an official commissioner, as well as participated as an exhibitor—­and the international shows of the 1880s. As late as 1889, Mueller organized exhibits for display, study, and exchange at that year’s Paris Universal Exposition.36 The energetic and controversial colonial botanist in Melbourne, Mueller was keenly conscious as a public scientist of the alienating and creative tyrannies shaping the scientific enterprise in the Australian colonies—­and much more. His career as perhaps the most recognizable scientist in nineteenth-­ century Australia is particularly revealing, as it underscores how useful exhibitions could be in attempting to address and manage those challenges, some of which were, if not unique, at least particularly pressing in the case of scientists practicing in the Australian colonies. There were advantages to be gained by embracing the exhibitions; there were also costs. One’s professional and personal advancements could be accelerated; they could also be stopped or diverted. Exhibitions could be a liability. The various tensions of public culture and science are more fully understood after reflecting upon Mueller’s exhibition activities as commissioner, exhibitor, judge, and essayist between the mid-­ 1850s and the late 1880s, both at home and abroad. Chapter 3 does so. In Mueller’s hands, public science was creative, not only reactive, as it helped shape as well as represent the Australian nation and society, whether those were defined in more local terms, such as the colony of Victoria, or in bolder terms, such as an intercolonial, transcontinental “Australia.” Mueller was among those local scientists who turned to exhibitions to build larger and more influential collections, positioning themselves within Australian society and intellectual life and thereby making a claim for the powerful two-­way relationship between science and the public. As discussed below, the famous Introduction

15

botanist was hardly alone in those personal, professional, and public enterprises. Exhibition exchanges, displays, and guidebooks addressed the trinity of “tyrannies” affecting colonial scientists and their scientific enterprise: distance, isolation, and wandering, both within Australia’s borders and between the continent and the wider world.37 Exhibitions made such tyrannies manageable and connected scientists and scientific knowledge in ways that made it possible to talk about an Australian science and perhaps even an Australian nation and society itself in the years before the formal declaration of the Australian Commonwealth in 1901 and the earlier creation of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS), the national scientific organization that crossed colonial borders.38 Science at the exhibitions could be a material and existentialist federation. This was a matter of science in terms of both political and social definitions and labels; not one or the other but both. It was also a matter of connecting scientists and science in Sydney with that pair in provincial New South Wales towns, Melbourne as the capital of the colony of Victoria, and overseas centers, among them Calcutta, Philadelphia, Paris, and London, as discussed in chapter 4. The final chapter discusses the participation of scientists and their advocates connected to the fields of ethnography (or early anthropology), archaeology, and linguistics. Such “sciences of man” were present and engaging at exhibitions, their supporters making rather strong claims about such scientific pursuits and the contributions those could make to nationalism and society. Those contributions included scientists discovering, preserving, and displaying the Aboriginal “past-­in-­the-­present.” Exchanges of “Stone Age” exhibits and the study of Australian Aboriginal languages were only two of the various such scientific enterprises undertaken before and for the exhibitions, whether those were shows in London and Paris or Melbourne and Sydney. Mueller was among the scientists noting that the Aboriginals might provide information about soils, plants, and water. In doing so, the colonial botanist and his colleagues helped create a scientific past for a continent seemingly without one. Exhibitions proved to be effective and popular experiences for making that scientific sense of the Australia past, a narrative grounded in the public expressions of the “sciences of man.” Scientists collecting, evaluating, and exchanging such displays for the exhibitions were active participants in what the influential Australian historian Tom Griffiths has called the Australian “antiquarian imagination.”39 The scientists’ “hunting” and “collecting” focused on exhibitions, whereas their professional and amateur colleagues might have focused on museums, voluntary societies, or even their own private personal collections. Scientists at the exhibitions helped scientifically prove the earlier existence and persistence of non-­white humans. 16

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The book concludes with one reflective chapter pondering the historiographical opportunities and challenges in focusing on public science at the exhibitions. It is intended to complement the ones more directly focused on Australian scientists and exhibition participation and to suggest one larger scholarly context in which to place what Australian scientists did at the shows and the effects thereof. I hope that discussion is useful for historians of science in other societies and polities, and I look forward to a conversation about such issues. Science was nearly always part of the white Australian settler experience, including the public transmission of knowledge through lectures and writings, museums, and botanical gardens. The latter are addressed in chapter 3. The practice of science was part of British settlement itself in the forms of mapping, mineralogy, and botany, often practiced with explicit government support. That was certainly true of the mid-­and later Victorian era. Lindy A. Orthia has recently pushed the timetable for Australian science back further to the first generation of settlers and convicts. She posits that Sydney’s media and popular culture were filled with what we would call science, as long as we do not limit ourselves to the institutional production and evaluation of scientific information. Orthia’s scholarship is a helpful reminder of some of the more local scientific foundations upon which Australian exhibition participation was built.40 There were also early attempts by scientists, explorers, and religious figures to uncover and chronicle whatever fossils rested in the physical landscape. Those fossil hunters included Sir Thomas Mitchell. His exploration and survey of “fossil bones which have been imbedded in the rocks and in the lime-­ stone caves” of New South Wales began as early as the 1830s, helping to establish a public tradition of exploration and science, as those materials were discussed and put on display at the first mechanics’ institutes.41 Exploration, bones, and fossils continued to interest and impress Australians; for some they might be evidence of “The Flood,” but for many others, they were evidence of a tangible historical or more secular “past” for this “new” land. Scientists active after 1850 at the many exhibitions in the colonies and abroad participated in and drew upon these and other earlier local interests and activities and, in turn, contributed to the public institutionalization and discussion of scientific practice and knowledge. The influence of Australian botanists, chemists, and geologists, among others, was rather considerable before, during, and after the exhibitions, as one considers the longer-­term consequences of events that were never solely ephemeral, even if some advocates and opponents intended them to be. Exhibitions contributed to the creation of scientific centers, experts, institutions, and collections; that is, a more local, or civic, and, at times, possibly “national” science. They mobilized science Introduction

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and scientists in the public life of Australian cities and colonies, as they displayed and discussed science at the shows not only in the name of science alone but also in the name of political identity and social order, of both “the public” and “the public interest.” Science at the exhibitions contributed to the development of ideas, institutions, and the urban communities hosting the events, often as a result of intercity and intercolonial competition. One local newspaper termed such tensions examples of “intercolonial jealousy,” although its contributor joked that the term was probably disproportionate to those tensions.42 That being the case, competitive juices flowed amid the colonies and their leading cities. Scientific achievements and the holding of exhibitions were two criteria by which to measure both absolute and relative progress—­absolute in regard to what preceded those and relative in light of what a different colonial city was doing. Australian science at the shows was not dissimilar to the holding of annual scientific association meetings and scientific congresses in nineteenth-­ century British towns and cities, a further case of intellectual and social competition.43 Exhibitions thus contributed to the growing recognition of not only science but also its practitioners as recognized experts and professionals in competing colonies and urban centers. Those changes occurred at Australian universities and in ANZAAS by the end of the nineteenth century, but before then, exhibitions and the participation of key scientists at such events helped promote that federalism, or federation, one of knowledge and policy. Not unlike railways and trade, competitive public science was an agent of nation-­building, if not “jealousy.” This was also a social federation, or society-­building enterprise, in the sense that active scientists held a particular vision of colonial and Australian society and their roles in that social order, not only a vision of formal science and political relations. That social vision transcended colonial borders and established polities. It was a claim not only about the utility and authority of living, working scientists but also about the place of scientists in the pantheon of public heroes: in this case, the “heroic” scientist-­explorers. One piece of the public face of science by the 1880s were the texts, stories, and monuments to “Australian Heroes,” including those “who devoted their lives and energies to the cause of science.” These were the not uncommon “martyred” explorer, Burke and Wills among them.44 The strands of science, exploration, religion, and claiming the land were woven together in this compelling public narrative and in numerous exhibition displays and publications about such explorations of the allegedly “blank” continent.45 Science and scientists were helping to fill in that emptiness regarding the human and “natural” pasts, an effort publicized at the exhibitions. 18

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With the above in mind, some of the larger historical, historiographic, and theoretical issues to be considered in this book will be as follows: The development of and relationships among what we often call local, colonial, imperial, and national science. As noted, as early as the 1830s, some in Australia were intent upon creating “a science of our own.”46 What did the vice president of the Sydney Mechanic’s School of Arts and others mean by that phrase? Did the exhibitions help create such a science on Australian terms, intended, in part, to help New South Wales (and Australia) “rise in the scale of nations”? In suggesting that exhibitions could have played a significant role, I am not dismantling or even profoundly challenging the orthodox chronology of metropolitan, colonial, imperial, and national science. I am, rather, suggesting that exhibitions played a significant role in all of those stages or types. Additionally, those apparent stages might coexist for exhibition participants, whose various experiences affected the transitions and relationships between and among the local and the civic, imperial, national, and global sciences. Those coexisted with and became “public science.” Exhibitions were a public space and social experience at which science associated with the Australian colonies could be colonial and national, metropolitan and imperial. Each political definition also held within it a social vision and a particular place for scientists in that vision. The emphasis here is less on the “stages” of scientific development and more on the growing understanding of a social role and place for science and scientists. That would be true whether one labels science “national” or “imperial.” The relationships among what historians and sociologists of science term public, popular, and official (or elite) science. To a degree, the exhibition experience for scientists and visitors was about negotiating and experiencing all of those in a public forum and spectacle. Exhibiting and displaying science had some official authority, and at the same time, it gained authority from its public staging and consumption. I hope to suggest that the relationship between science and society unfolded as the ideas and structures of both were changing. Neither stood still, and as science changed, it affected society, and vice versa. Fundamental questions of entertainment, education, competition, and value, or truth, were at play and not always coexisting peacefully. If a national science established certain political distinctions and hierarchies, public science had its share of those measures. The public “sciences of man” helped shape the public sense of the past. There were also questions and controversies. For example, should public science promote comparison and competition, and should it privilege entertainment over education?47 All of those issues were matters of contributing to political control and political life, as Russell Dionne and Roy M. MacLeod recognized years ago in their important article on science in British India.48 Those matters and the Introduction

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exhibition experience resulting from their resolutions, or attempted resolutions, also contributed to society and public life, complementing the political. Distinctions between political and social might also be considered in light of how the scientists contributed to public policy. I see in their efforts a significant contribution to local economies and social relations and institutions, as much as if not more than explicitly government policies. Scholars see the contributions of scientists in nineteenth-­century Britain to the rise and workings of a modern administrative state. I do not quite see that in the Australian case, although I am more than receptive to future conversations on this and all other points.49 Comparing science and scientists in the Australian colonies and British India. What might have been some of the similarities and differences in how Australian and British Indian science was displayed at the exhibitions, and what might those say about the roles of science in a settler colony and in a non-­white subject colony during the Victorian era? The marginal roles that Australian Aboriginals played in public science before the twentieth century suggests a different foundational and social relationship between science and socialization for non-­white colonial subjects. There were few institutionalized methods to include Aboriginal scientific, hence not religious, understandings of the natural world or to educate and train Aboriginals to become scientists. In contrast to Gyan Prakash’s significant thesis, imperial and national science also did not really “go native” in the Australian colonies as it did in colonial India, or not to the same degree and significance.50 Science was staged in both colonial possessions, but the Australian experience does not seem to have been driven by the objective of moving subjects from superstition to wonder, or with the conundrum of the colonial subject as the knowing object and subject of science. The Australian Aboriginals were not a participating party in the construction of public science in the Australian colonies, and interactions in the pursuit of knowledge were in many ways less complicated and historically shaped than those involving science in British India. Mughal India had its own recognized scientific traditions. One recalls here the memorable midcentury image in the English press of three South Asians observing, touching, and discussing “The Great Aerolite” in the Museum of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (figure I.2). One account in the press noted that this was one of two samples donated for study and display by “officers in the East India Company’s service.”51 The author confidently boasted that one of the “officers” “saved what portions he could from the depredation of the superstitious natives, who were conveying the fragments away as fast as possible,” allegedly to be used as “charms, objects of worship, and for medicinal purposes.” In contrast, South Asian visitors to the museum were being educated and socialized. There are no nineteenth-­century images 20

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FIGURE I.2.

“The Great Aerolite, from the Kurrukpoor Hills, Near Monghyr, India,” Museum of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta. Illustrated London News, December 13, 1851, 700, courtesy of the British Library, London

that I know of with Australian Aboriginals in Sydney or Melbourne mirroring that scene from Calcutta, although there are references to Aboriginal “charms” and “superstitions.” But the image illustrates a side of public science not developed or appreciated in the Australian colonies in contrast to the cities of British India. But, if the match is not perfect, there are some points of at least comparative discussion of the roles that science played in colonial exhibitions and in the exhibition courts of such British colonies at overseas shows. The “native” to be entertained and educated was not the Australian Aboriginal in this case but the immigrant and the settler, the miner and the worker. This was a social distinction in which race played a role but, as discussed below, a somewhat different role than it would play in exhibiting science in the East India Company’s and the Raj’s exhibitions. Those distinctions held within them hierarchies, inequalities, and “the civilizing mission.” Participation in science was not among full equals, whether in Bombay or Melbourne. Introduction

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The practical applications of science to agriculture and other economic endeavors were also emphasized by exhibition promoters in both the Australian colonies and British India. Sciences including animal husbandry and cotton growing were called upon by prominent East India Company officers during the 1850s. J. Forbes Royle’s participation at provincial exhibitions in Madras is one such complementary example to his Australian colleagues’ scientific contributions to their exhibitions.52 The same can be said of the irrigation and breeding scientists who promoted their own local “improvements” at exhibitions in Lahore during the same decade. Those experts corresponded with associates in Sydney at the time.53 The contributions that exhibitions, scientific displays, and the scientists themselves might be able to make to the growing scholarship on networks or webs. Network analysis is at the center of much of the current work on the history of the British Empire and in the field of the history of science. Might the exhibitions help us better understand the development and workings of both the empire and modern science in terms of networks? I am thinking here of the interest in webs, circulation, and collaboration, as well as the development of coexisting networks, not only crisscrossing the British Empire, or “British World,” but also within a particular polity itself, such as New South Wales, and how those sets were connected.54 Networks connected the local and the global, shaping both, and established a new public science as a result of those interactions. Again, this is also a social question, as networks created a vision of society and a social experience, as well as the infrastructure of a nation-­state. Networks positioned scientists and science as part of a social order, not only as parts of a political one. In doing so, did the exhibitions help make public life more scientific, as they made science more public or popular? If so, for what benefits and at what costs? Mueller’s career helps us begin to answer that query. Scientific exhibits and the participation of scientists married in an often uneasy relationship utility and beauty, expertise and popularity, culture or society and science. That narrative continues today, as we still ponder the relationships of science, entertainment, and education in democratic societies.

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A Science of Our Own

 one “Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun” Exhibiting Australian Science at Home and Abroad

nineteenth-­century exhibitions seemed to display

“nearly all possible and impossible things under the sun,” in the opinion of one London weekly, without any differentiation between the profound and the banal, the permanent and the ephemeral.1 Hundreds of thousands, if not multiple millions, of visitors could view pigs as well as steam engines, performing fleas at the same time as paintings. Or, in the words of Horace Greeley, the famous American newspaperman visiting the Crystal Palace in 1851, “The ludicrous, the dissonant, the incongruous are not excluded from [the Great] Exhibition.”2 A trip around the halls at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition in the British colony of Victoria over twenty years later might bring one face-­to-­face with Japanese vases, Australian Aboriginal tools, American harvesters, French hats, and Australian gold nuggets, not to mention an array of items to eat and drink and people to observe and, perhaps, with which to “flirt.”3 Popular exhibits at the Crystal Palace and the later Australian show also included the physical elements of modern science, most notably the specimens, publications, and instruments created and used by scientists.4 Among the many scientific exhibits in 1851 were telescopes, scales, microscopes, compasses, and air pumps. Alongside their complements, these composed “the sciences of the age in their various ramifications and objects,” according to a

FIGURE 1.1.

“Microscope by Mr. Pillischer,” the Great Exhibition, 1851. Illustrated London News, July 5, 1851, 35, courtesy of the British Library

prominent post-­Exhibition public lecturer.5 Alexander Ross’s astronomical telescope and “Microscope, by Mr. Fillischer” (figure 1.1) drew the attention of the Illustrated London News, which provided text and engravings for that and other exhibits.6 Visitors more inclined toward books could enjoy volumes with plant and other natural history specimens.7 Commissioners for the 1875 Melbourne Intercolonial solicited, among other exhibits, “Scientific Innovations, and New Discoveries” from throughout the Pacific region.8 Much of what was exhibited in Melbourne—­including zoological models and geological sketches, maps and botanical samples—­was subsequently forwarded to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition the following year for display alongside and linked to local manufactured goods and art.9 The Australian colonies invited visitors to their own individual colonial courts at the well-­attended American show. Geological samples, such as gold, 24

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were among the most popular Australian displays, whether one visited displays from New South Wales or from Victoria. The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition is nearly the chronological midpoint for this book. Earlier exhibitions include the metropolitan shows held in Sydney and Melbourne. Those were more locally focused, marking the centrality of the host city. They were popular in the 1850s. Building upon those precedents and their participation at the Great Exhibition, Australian scientists embraced intercolonial exhibitions in the 1860s and 1870s, events that emphasized not only the host city but the host colony and were often held as preliminary events to organize Australian contributions to overseas international exhibitions the following year. Among many examples, the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866– 1867 helped Australians get their bearings to send exhibits and representatives to the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867, and the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition of 1875 ensured a better-­organized, higher-­quality, and more comprehensive Australian contribution to the subsequent year’s show in Philadelphia. The apex of the international exhibition movement was in the 1880s. At that point, colonial cities were hosting their own ambitious shows. Calcutta and Melbourne each welcomed visitors, exhibitors, and displays. In fact, Melbourne hosted two international exhibitions during that decade. Major European cities, including Paris and Amsterdam, also hosted ambitious international exhibitions. Scholars often downplay for sensible reasons the metropolitan and intercolonial exhibitions. They were hardly as bold or popular as the international shows. Their ambitions were more restrained. The exhibition halls were often fairgrounds or museums, rather than the memorable exhibition halls built specifically to host the later shows. On the other hand, they were important in the history of Australian public science as having local consequences and as providing the necessary opportunity to effectively organize for overseas exhibits and more direct personal participation. The major scientists and their staffs discussed in this book actively engaged those less well-­known exhibitions. They often did so, though, with the dominant international exhibitions also in mind. Geologists intended not only to promote local science at smaller shows but also to connect that science to more global, and certainly British and European, science. That connection could be made more explicit and with more enduring legacies at the well-­studied international exhibitions. The bolder later shows considered in this book include the major Australian international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879), Melbourne (1880–1881 and 1888), and Adelaide (1887) and most, although not all, of the most popular and meaningful overseas ones. Among those were the series of Paris Universal Expositions (1855, 1867, and 1878), international exhibitions at London’s “Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun”

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South Kensington (1862 and the early 1870s), and several held in the United States and on the European continent. The Vienna International Exhibition (1873) and Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1876) proved particularly successful in generating a positive response to Australian exhibits. Those popular displays included local minerals and scientific texts. One of the enduring themes running throughout the century was, not surprisingly, imperialism, or the Australian colonies’ connections to Britain and the British Empire. Those connections were apparent in the world of exhibitions in at least two ways relevant for displaying Australian public science. Did scientists and visitors comprehend science from New South Wales as a “national” enterprise, as the result of either Australian or British nationalism, or did visitors and participants more often comprehend an “imperial” enterprise? The following chapters come to terms with this tension, although I do not offer a final answer, only some suggestions and examples. Some of the suggestions relied upon how science was exhibited. Were Australian samples exhibited alongside British ones, or in a British court, or were they clearly identified and separated in a recognized “New South Wales” court? The use of local names, sometimes Australian Aboriginal ones, might be interpreted as a more local definition of nationalism and a response to those only using common English and Latin names. The enduring imperial theme also runs through the century and this book in the form of special British imperial exhibitions. There were a handful during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but this book focuses on only one: the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886, held as part of a series of thematic shows at South Kensington during the early and mid-­1880s. Each of the Australian colonies forwarded to London scientific displays and reports. Many also sent their own scientists. As discussed in chapter 2, those examples included the colony of Victoria, which officially dispatched Joseph Bosisto as botanist and colonial executive commissioner. South Kensington offered an instructive example of how “national” and “imperial” might be integrated in the public display of science. Static objects and working instruments at the exhibitions were both part of publicly “staging science,” the helpful term used by the postcolonial scholar Gyan Prakash in his consideration of science in modern India. His influential scholarship includes discussion of nineteenth-­century scientific displays at exhibitions in British India.10 Members of the Royal Society in England in 1851 had been particularly enthusiastic about many of the Great Exhibition’s working, or staged, scientific displays, such as ones representing “the advanced state of magnetic science” in the host country. That “state” was well represented by instruments, although there was relatively little analysis of the data collected by them.11 26

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Not surprisingly, science was performed and staged perhaps as much as if not more so than it was documented and analyzed, and that staging was most popular when connected not only to industrial and manufacturing processes but also to the sense of entertainment. There was explication and enchantment, a dual purpose for which exhibitions were well suited, as were other more permanent public attractions. Visitors to and residents of London could experience these at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, the Royal Panopticon, and Wyld’s Globe.12 At an equally fundamental level, exhibitions were also about comparison and competition. They were, in theory if not always in practice, examples of a viable marketplace of goods, experiences, and peoples. By 1875 and the time of the Melbourne Intercolonial, visitors could expect to observe numerous and varied examples of science from the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland. Those samples could include minerals, tools, plants, and research papers. The vice president of the Royal Society of New South Wales, the oldest Australian colony, was enthusiastic about exhibitions demonstrating and encouraging scientific progress. He remarked in Sydney that the Great Exhibition had “set all nations in motion, enjoying an international intercourse previously un-­known, and with friendly emulation striving for progress and improvement.”13 That optimism was not only about trade and foreign relations but also about science and its public application and appreciation. Scientific exchanges and purchases, appreciation of what was unique and universal, and the immediacy of observations and samplings encouraged that Australian optimism at the exhibitions. Such optimism was shared by others at the time, and it seemed to know no physical or chronological borders. The Australian’s comments echoed the remarks of Prince Albert and the writings of Charles Babbage, one of England’s leading scientists. Babbage, a mid-­Victorian advocate of both science and exhibitions for whom the Crystal Palace was not a complete success, still considered the event a testament to the internal advantages of the “inter-­ communication of the difficulties, the doubts, and the discoveries” of scientists. He added that direct links could be made between men of science and “the manufacturer.” That connection was advantageous to both, remarked Babbage, if not to the consumer, or general public, as well.14 Such sentiments were also expressed rather strongly by Joseph Henry, the American scientist and keen advocate of his country’s participation at the Great Exhibition, among other exhibitions. He envisioned significant public improvements from participating in exhibitions.15 That contagious enthusiasm for the generally accepted, mutually beneficial relationship between science and exhibitions was readily apparent to “Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun”

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contemporaries, but it has rarely received scholarly attention. That is, there is limited scholarship about science at the exhibitions, the popular impressions of those displays, and other related activities. A handful of studies address science at the Great Exhibition and at American expositions, but those are overwhelmed in number by the important studies of art, “human displays,” commercial goods, nationalism, and architecture at the exhibitions. This book attempts to redress that relative absence by focusing on the roles of Australian scientists and science at major exhibitions during the second half of the nineteenth century. This first chapter charts the history of Australian scientific displays at significant exhibitions, both at home and abroad. The Melbourne Intercolonial was only one among many Australian examples—­whether those examples of Australian science were on display in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane, close to home, or in distant Paris, Philadelphia, Calcutta, Vienna, and London. Science was a part of the first Australian shows held in Melbourne and Sydney in 1854 and continued at the ambitious Australian international exhibitions of the 1879–1897 period. The first of those was hosted in the Garden Palace in Sydney; the last, Brisbane. One could cautiously chart a chronological narrative of increasing numbers and diversity of scientists and scientific displays as time went on, with the hosting of significant collections and visiting scientists at Sydney and Melbourne (1880–1881 and 1888) as perhaps turning points in strengthening the public roles of those active local Australian scientists and their understanding of public science. As noted above, the earlier shows in the Australian colonies demonstrated public science as civic science and, at times, as local science in comparison with science across the colonial borders. Melbourne could compare its public science with that of neighboring New South Wales. Perhaps, looking back, those do not seem to be significant developments in the longer-­term narrative of science. But they were significant to contemporaries, although not as significant in Australia as the discovery of gold or the end of convict transportation during those years. The later and larger shows at home and abroad encouraged comparisons between Australian science and scientists and those of much of the world. Hosting such events was also a claim that the colonies, or at least the host capital cities, had arrived as recognizable urban centers. That recognition included the development of scientific studies, societies, and museums. By the 1880s this meant Melbourne science could be compared to that practiced in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, among many other nation-­ states. Those later exhibitions allowed Australians to show off their own science and learn from the science of modern nations, as they did in 1893 at the hugely popular World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was not unusual 28

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for foreign scientists to recognize Australian scientific contributions at those later shows. Australian public science at the exhibitions included a rather broad approach to what constituted “science,” although that category was distinct from art and manufactures, and the emphasis remained on what was new and innovative. Practical science was not ignored. Visitors could expect mineral samples with both scientific and economic purposes. Terms could be debated, though, and the era’s political terms could be just as fluid as those defining an intellectual pursuit. Australian science could be noted as both “national” in the sense of being generated by a specific colony and “national” as being part of the larger British section. It could be defined as the British Empire, or not. It certainly was in 1886, when the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at South Kensington was limited to imperial participants, among whom were the several Australasian colonies. The historical narrative of Australian science and scientists at the exhibitions begins in the 1850s, when science was considered part of civic and colonial life at the earliest local exhibitions. “One of the most interesting (not certainly in external appearance, but by reason of its historical associations)” of the objects on display at Sydney’s Metropolitan Exhibition was “the last remaining portion of the tree, near which were buried” the remains of one of the early French naturalists to explore the Australian continent.16 Considered a “relic” by the exhibition organizers, the natural antiquity displayed “the names and portions of a few words, carved on the bark a few feet about the ground.” That exhibit brought together local interest in natural history, early exploration and claims, Australian Aboriginals—­as their fires allegedly “defaced the inscription, and in parts obliterated it”—­and connections with the outside world. The relic would be returned to France at the following year’s Paris Universal Exposition. Several hundred “Geological Specimens Illustrating the Succession of the Rock Formations in New South Wales” also greeted visitors to that first official Australian exhibition in Sydney in 1854.17 A recognized local geologist, Rev. W. B. Clarke, had organized the scientific display of more than 400 samples not so much “to the illustration of the Geology of every separate District in the Colony, as to that of the whole—­when viewed with respect to the Stratigraphical Arrangement of the Formations that compose it.” Local rocks, fossils, ores, and minerals revealed “the high antiquity” and breadth of Australian geological formations, perhaps the “most ancient and primitive” forms available for scientific study. Here were scientific exhibits by periods and types, arranged in a “national” order and setting. Exhibits were also contributed by the Woodwardian Museum at the University of Cambridge. In total, there were over 430 samples. “Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun”

29

Not to be outdone by their colonial neighbors, Melbourne’s organizers solicited an array of scientific and “natural history” displays for their own first metropolitan exhibition in 1854: animals, skins, ferns, “eggs and nests,” metals, minerals, and gems. Some were bound with their Sydney complements for Paris and its Universal Exposition the following year. All were expected to have attached to them “local” information: names, locations, and “other descriptive particulars.” Visitors might also appreciate information about the commercial and economic applications of such scientific exhibits.18 Significant Australian, if not “national,” precedents for the display of science at exhibitions had been set at home in the colonies. Such scientific exhibits suggested a colony’s and locality’s “national” and public resources, rather than only those of a specific region, or district, or only as a part of the British Empire. The scientific whole of a colony’s exhibited parts was greater than the sum of such parts—­although visitors could still appreciate the more local origins of the displays. Integration of the local and the national was a scientific dress rehearsal for a broader integration, if not federation itself. The 1854 shows, as was the case with many later Australian ones, were held as preliminaries to major overseas exhibitions. Those included the Paris Universal Expositions, scheduled once every decade between the 1850s and the turn of the twentieth century. Australian exhibits drew the attention of foreign visitors and experts at Paris in 1855. Among those expressing interest was Richard Owen, the well-­known English scientist. He was “seen attentively examining” the geological and fossil specimens forwarded and described by Rev. W. B. Clarke.19 The colonial press was happy to report that Owen was not alone in spending time admiring and studying the New South Wales samples. In two more of nearly countless examples, the first Australian colony shipped to the subsequent Paris Universal Expositions of 1867 and 1878 collections of human and animal fossils, minerals and ores, zoological models, and stuffed birds. Those were catalogued and displayed in the “Class 45. Natural History, etc.” category at the 1878 show as part of that larger scientific empire, or empire of science.20 The 1867 scientific collections from New South Wales had attracted the attention of earlier visitors to Paris, one of whom noted “the very interesting geological specimens forwarded by Mr. R. Brough Smyth, Secretary to the Department of Mines,” and the “large collection of fossil remains of mammals, birds and reptiles found in the caves of Wellington Valley and classified by Mr. Gerard Kreft.”21 New South Wales was not alone. Its neighboring colony, Victoria, was also active in forwarding for display exhibits that fulfilled the criteria for “scientific” inventions, machines, and samples. The younger colony’s commissioners and exhibitors took advantage of Sir Henry Cole’s efforts to separate science from art by displaying scientific models and apparatus at the London 30

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International Exhibition in 1873.22 Those included a “new weighing apparatus,” a drawing of a sundial, and samples of “Sullivan’s Disinfectant Preparation.” Additional colonial scientific contributions were arranged with the natural history and ethnology exhibits. Most exhibition organizers requested that scientific exhibits be displayed alongside other classes of exhibits from the participating nation in a national court, although those displays from the scientific world might be compared with their brethren from other nations in reports and catalogues. Such was the situation at the Vienna International Exhibition, also held in 1873, at which Victoria filled its court with a vast diversity of goods and samples. Visitors could see in that array examples of science, among which were animal skins, “large trunks of trees,” and cases of valuable minerals (figure 1.2).23 In this more common arrangement, the impressive scientific exhibits were part of the colony’s attractive court and understood as key components of colonial life. Touring the court, visitors could enjoy and study a cosmos of exhibits, within which science played an important role, but a role shared with and connected to other aspects of material and philosophical culture. Science from the colony of Victoria was not easily compared with science from France or from the colony of New South Wales, as it could be at Sir Henry Cole’s London shows in the early 1870s. As executive commissioner, Cole collected and displayed scientific exhibits in their own special courts. A third option for Australians was to significantly physically separate their exhibits from those of other participating polities. A separate structure might house the Australian displays, whereas at other shows they might be separated by a signpost or temporary division. Men and women walking around South Kensington in the early 1870s could note fossils, birds, coral, and other scientific exhibits at the special Queensland Annex. The colony’s agent-­general and government geologist oversaw an impressive collection of photographs, mounted samples, and exhibits in glass cases, representing the relatively new colony’s natural history and the many products of the soil. Among those were tea, gold, cotton, and arrowroot.24 Some of those exhibits were displayed both in London and Vienna. Rev. W. B. Clarke was enthusiastic about taking advantage of such a colonial annex, or eventual colonial museum, particularly as it would attract the attention of British geologists and zoologists. The colony’s scientific samples—­ fossil bones, “agate, limestone, basalt, etc.”—­had “gone home to be immortalized in the records of Science.”25 As will be seen in chapter 4, Clarke could be quite lyrical, calling upon his religious learning and duties when describing Australian science and scientists. He was not hesitant to be so in his public addresses, including the “Annual Presidential Address” before the Royal “Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun”

31

FIGURE 1.2.

“The Vienna Exhibition: Views of the Victorian Court.” Australasian Sketcher, October 4, 1873, 125, courtesy of the National Library of Australia, Canberra

Society of New South Wales. The 1880s were a busy time for exhibition participants—­perhaps the busiest of all decades—­and visitors expected to see scientific displays. Science had 32

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become a normalized part of the exhibition experience. The noted Scotsman Patrick Geddes could easily connect scientific exhibits and lectures to his notion of “social progress.” Reviewing international and industrial exhibitions of the future, he highlighted in 1887 the importance of including illustrations of the sciences “not only in detail, but what is now becoming more important, in synthesis.” That is the application of science to public life and the public opening of science to men, women, and children. Commissioners and other organizers could invite astronomers, chemists, geologists, and biologists, as well as new men of science, such as anthropologists. While the “claims” of these last might be “set forth by the Indian Village or the like,” their colleagues could contribute telescopes, “a tiny patch of garden plot . . . to make a type of botanic garden,” and other components of the later-­Victorian world of science.26 The Australians were not about to miss out on these exhibition opportunities during the final two decades of the century. New South Wales embraced the International, Colonial, and Export Trade Exhibition at Amsterdam in 1883. Reverend Clarke was among the loudest advocates of participation and he was not shy about his enthusiasm. He was particularly confident about the advantages to be gained for the colony by exhibiting mineral deposits and “representative blocks of coal from the leading carboniferous districts” and “suitable samples of the kerosene shale,” also found in the colony. These were important for economic and scientific reasons.27 Not alone, Clarke and his associates ended up filling courts and glass cases with a variety of scientific exhibits. Those were collected, organized, and reported on by a group of public and private scientists, among whom were the director of the Sydney Botanic Gardens, the professor of chemistry and mineralogy at the University of Sydney, officers at the Department of Mines, and trustees of the Australian Museum. Those figures along with private citizens, such as James S. Bray, displayed a collection of fossils, minerals, stuffed birds, and Australian Aboriginal “ethnological exhibits.” Private exhibitors sent clubs, fishing lines, “bark from which cord is made,” boomerangs, and shields.28 Colonial participation did not go unrewarded, as exhibitors from New South Wales and elsewhere in Australia earned medals and diplomas for minerals, maps, insects, birds, and other scientific exhibits.29 A few years later, the Australian colonies would join the many other “British possessions” for an exclusively “imperial” exhibition: the Colonial and Indian at South Kensington in 1886. This was part of a series of thematic exhibitions, and this one was limited to the empire.30 “National” science that year meant “imperial,” as much as a more local definition of the fluid term. Among many other colonies, New South Wales forwarded to central London “Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun”

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a series of stuffed animals, descriptive scientific catalogues, and scientific instruments. The exhibits included a “Recording Anemometer” and a “Compound Microscope,” both manufactured in New South Wales. That point of origin was not insignificant, as it marked a homegrown scientific development. Those and the other scientific exhibits were provided by an array of sources, including the trustees of the Australian Museum, the government astronomer, and a private instrument maker.31 Nearly all of the colonies had some scientific exhibits, and they were generally found with the other displays from that colony, rather than separated as a distinctive type of exhibit. Science was self-­consciously part of both colonial society and the imperial enterprise, a component of public life and not separated from it. Those and the hundreds of other Australian exhibitors before, during, and after the 1880s drew upon previous shows and exhibits, and also upon local public individual, institutional, and collective scientific labors. There were strong connections between those and the exhibitions, a mutually reinforcing relationship between public science at the exhibitions and science in public life outside of the shows. It was not uncommon for local acclimatization societies to contribute for display animal and plant collections, participation that was not reserved for one particular colony. The Acclimatisation Society of Queensland was awarded a First Degree of Merit for its collection of economic plants at the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879.32 Its Victorian branch cousin contributed several exhibits at the London International Exhibition at South Kensington a few years beforehand. Those displays included fish and fowl.33 Ostrich feathers, Angora wool, and trout often filled the colonial acclimatization societies’ cases and tables at shows both at home and abroad.34 There was considerable local interest in the colonial societies’ exhibition activities, an interest commonly expressed in local press coverage. Other significant interactions concerning science occurred among the institutions of Australian civil society, notable scientists, and the display and study of science at the exhibitions. Science registered with the public, confirming its place in local society and public life, and the place at exhibitions for the voluntary societies filling up that public life. Mirroring Britain, the Australian colonies by the mid-­nineteenth century offered residents and visitors mechanics’ institutions, libraries, universities, and other examples of an active social and intellectual life, most particularly in the cities and larger provincial towns. Scientific demonstrations, publications, collections, and education were part of this flourishing civic life and not beyond the praise of local figures and newspapers. This municipal public science was often connected to exhibitions. Members of such voluntary societies in both capital and provincial Australian cities were 34

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inclined to collect and use exhibits for scientific authority and popular attention, often reaching out for such objects when intercolonial and international exhibitions were in either their own or neighboring colonies, or when colonial committees for overseas exhibitions wanted the institutions to participate. They also held their own exhibitions with scientific displays and activities. The Mount Gambier Institute in South Australia was one of those organizations. Its leadership proposed “short lectures with scientific experiments” and museum displays for its own local exhibitions in the 1870s and 1880s, held at the same time as larger exhibitions in the colony’s capital city, Adelaide. The institute offered a variety of permanent exhibits and temporary shows. One active local exhibitor and commissioner provided for the institute “an Illustrated Table referring to silk-­worms,” and the South Australia Museum in Adelaide forwarded to its provincial siblings zoological and mineralogical exhibits. Institute officers also collected and forwarded to South Australia’s courts at overseas exhibitions various displays, including “Native Weapons and Implements of Chase” for the Paris Universal in 1878.35 The institute connected in other ways to promoting science at major overseas exhibitions, and those investments in time, materials, and labor reaped rewards at home. After the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, for example, exhibition officers forwarded to the institute for its members’ permanent reference various official and unofficial exhibition catalogues and reports. Included were the catalogues for the Portuguese and British sections of the American exposition, which both provided scientific information.36 This was among the many local Australian examples of how different scientists and scientific communities were connected in the exhibition superhighway, a beneficial public connection for all parties and for the growth of public science. Here was sincere public engagement with science before, during, and after the exhibitions. In those and other ways, the Mount Gambier Institute’s scientific collection grew, and there were calls to establish within its building a permanent exhibition room. Local residents in 1885 collected funds for “a suitable room or rooms to be used as a lecture gallery and Museum.” This effort resulted in donations of Aboriginal weapons and flora and fauna samples. By the end of the century, one contemporary claimed that the institute offered residents “a fine building, which besides being architecturally ornamental, supplies ample accommodation for every necessary purpose of such a structure,” including holding its own scientific collections and exhibitions and contributing to others. The institute began to play a more central role in the region’s public scientific life, a development in a not insignificant way connected to its roles as home for local exhibitions, source for Australian and overseas exhibition displays, and repository of overseas exhibition materials. That regional “Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun”

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development was intimately connected to the institute’s active participation in Australian public science at home and abroad, including the use of the “sciences of man” to generate a local sense of the past, which could fit the more universalist taxonomies of ethnology and archaeology. The intercolonial and international exhibitions’ popularity was not ignored by local scientific societies and institutions. Noting the impressive numbers visiting and enjoying Australian exhibitions, members of the Royal Society of Victoria lobbied for official participation in the 1873 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. Proponents argued that the exhibition could help make the society’s projects and science in general more popular in the colony, a self-­consciousness, or awareness, about being part of what we have come to call “public science” and how that participation could assist the less public aspects of the scientific community. The society’s council took advantage of the show to display “new discoveries and inventions” and to introduce “a popular element” in its membership and activities.37 Council members reached out to non-­experts and non-­scientists in the community, but without intending to erode the integrity of its science behind doors. Refreshments were served and both theoretical and practical scientific topics discussed at a series of “extra meetings” before the exhibition officially opened. The results included new members and a renewed impulse for the Royal Society’s efforts to foster science in the colony. It is also significant that scientific publications prepared for exhibitions were not isolated from the growth of general scientific literature in the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria. The authors of exhibition essays also wrote essays for local periodicals and books at the time. As Mueller, Clarke, and their colleagues were organizing science exhibits for shows in Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, and London, they and their contemporaries could enjoy the birth of periodicals such as the Sydney Magazine of Science and Art. They could also contribute to it, either directly or indirectly. Initiated in the later 1850s by Joseph Dyer, this journal incorporated the proceedings and writings of the Australian Horticultural and Agricultural Society with those of the Philosophical Society—­groups to which significant and numerous exhibition commissioners and exhibitors belonged—­in an effort to call more attention to “the development of a taste for science, literature, and art,” an effort mirroring that of local exhibition proponents.38 Among the contributors was Reverend Clarke. Science and scientists could not help but benefit from and contribute to the public discussion of such issues, as they could not help but benefit from and contribute to the complementary public exhibitions. Dyer and his associates were particularly keen on promoting scientific information to increase agricultural and commercial development—­objectives shared by exhibition 36

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commissioners and participants, Sir Redmond Barry in Melbourne, perhaps foremost among them—­and thought that the ways to do so would include publicizing scientific writings, shows, competitions, and lectures. Thus, inquiry, knowledge, and competition would be combined for the reading public in the later 1850s as they had been for visitors and exhibitors at “the Paris Exhibition” a few years before.39 This was the case with Dyer’s publication, as it was with others during the era, not only in the Australian colonies but also, for example, in British India. Madras was one of several South Asian cities in which advocates of science found expressions of their practical goals and visions of society in learned societies, periodicals, and exhibitions. Advocates and leaders included Alexander Hunter, who linked public projects in his capacities as superintendent of the School of Arts and Industry, exhibition commissioner and exhibitor, and member of local learned and scientific societies.40 That marriage of interests was not without its difficulties, some internal and others external. Many in New South Wales and Victoria shared Dyer’s goal of developing “a taste for science, literature, and art,” a goal expressed in the official and unofficial pronouncements at nearly all exhibitions, whether metropolitan or international. That was the case in the Australian colonies and in British India.41 Unlike some of the exhibition participants, though, Dyer argued that “the constant attention to business, which is characteristic of colonial life, appears very unfriendly to the development” of art and science. Reverend Clarke and other exhibition enthusiasts would argue more often than not that exhibitions provided the venue by which that “constant attention” could be shared among science, art, and business, to the mutual benefit of all three. Did science or business represent the public interest? Was there a way to convincingly merge the two, generating a more local yet not parochial vision, a vision connecting various parts of the Australian colonies not only with themselves but also with the outside world? For many Australians, Dyer and prominent scientists among them, there was a way: the exhibitions. Dyer proposed merging commercial, scientific, and cultural advancements in his call for a large Sydney exhibition, modeled on the recent success of the Melbourne Intercolonial of 1866–1867. That “Grand Intercolonial Exhibition” would “celebrate the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the colony” of New South Wales and, in doing so, improve local art, taste, science, business, and wealth.42 Those events and experiences invited participation in a particular view of society, at the core of which was public science. This was a science that at least early on need not compete unsuccessfully with art, business, and entertainment. It could be a public and popular science. Australian scientific participation at exhibitions in the colonies and else“Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun”

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where also included more than collecting and displaying their own scientific materials or writing about local scientific specimens and achievements. Australians also sought non-­Australian scientific exhibits for exchange and purchase, some of which were then distributed to provincial institutions. Before traveling to Philadelphia for the Americans’ Centennial Exposition, commissioners from New South Wales were instructed to obtain foreign fossils, minerals, rocks, physical and mechanical scientific apparatus, and information about scientific education and museums for use and study back home.43 Various scientific exhibits, timber and mineral displays among them, returned with the Australian commissioners. Similar activities unfolded during and after other American and overseas expositions. Whereas early Australian scientific exhibits were limited in number and scope, the same could not be said about the expectations of local commissioners. They were quite confident that scientific displays would address fundamental colonial dilemmas and provide essential education for the general public and, in some cases, children in particular. Advocates of Sydney’s Intercolonial Exhibition in 1870 concluded that knowledge about Australian flora and fauna—­including knowledge on display at their show—­might very well prevent “the disastrous termination” of so many local expeditions and enterprises resulting from “the pioneer’s ignorance of the natural products” in the colonies.44 Local scientific knowledge exhibited at the Sydney exhibition could prevent the ironic starvation of so many “in the midst of plenty.” Exhibited and available for study were various natural forms that even “the lamented Burke and Wills” could have eaten. Survival and wealth were two of the foremost gains to be realized when scientific exhibition displays worked in tandem with “the study of natural history at our schools, the establishment of district museums,” and the general education of children to observe the “habits and economy of different animals,” most particularly the useful ones.45 By the later 1870s, Australians organizing their own larger intercolonial and international exhibitions presented to the public rather ambitious science displays and thus transcended earlier educational and entertainment goals. Visitors touring the Garden Palace at Sydney’s International Exhibition observed extensive displays for “Classes 300–307. Scientific and Philosophical Instruments and Methods.” Those included local chronometers, scales, and timepieces as part of the “Education and Science” category.46 Reports were quite enthusiastic. Less than ten years later, Adelaide’s Jubilee International Exhibition in 1887 offered judges and visitors scientific instruments, methods, and samples under a wide “Education and Science” category, which included four distinct sections: “Educational Systems, Methods,” “Scientific and Philo-

38

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sophical Instruments and Methods,” “Engineering, Architecture, Maps, etc.,” and “Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man.”47 Among the judges at the Adelaide exhibition were local professors, engineers, and government officials, whose reports included discussion of over 170 separate geological and mineralogical exhibits, as well as the evidence in the exhibition halls of the growth of local chemical manufactures. A special jury convened to evaluate “Scientific Instruments.” Its members subsequently awarded for their display a variety of Australian, European, and British exhibits, among which were instruments to weigh and measure. Some jurors noted the electrical and telegraphic displays appealing to the contemporary interest in those practical applications of science. Keen-­eyed visitors might have also detected the connections between science and the host colony’s own territorial ambitions. Those ambitions focused on “The Northern Territory,” adjacent to South Australia, and an allegedly politically unclaimed space represented at the exhibition by its own Northern Territory Court. Claims were expressed in the interest of not only economic development but also scientific knowledge particular to the territory, knowledge which South Australian scientists could label, study, and explain.48 Science was part of claiming at the very public exhibition the territory for the colony of South Australia, not for all of Australia or for Great Britain. The quality and variety of Australian scientific exhibits sometimes surprised foreign visitors. That was the case at Melbourne’s Centennial Exhibition in 1888, where the American commissioners were impressed with the Australian exhibits in “Group 2. Educational and Instruction, apparatus and processes of the liberal arts.”49 Those included materials from Australian scientific and learned societies, scientific expeditions, and zoological collections. The Americans’ official Report concluded that such scientific exhibits could be balanced against the predominance of “the natural products of these young countries.” Australia might be a socially new country, but it was geologically very old and thus could look forward to a promising scientific future. That promise was made more tangible and attractive when scientific exhibits suggested commercial, as well as intellectual, benefits. Queensland’s “economic plants” at the Centennial show realized those criteria. The colonial botanist who organized that exhibit made certain to highlight in both the display and the accompanying literature those vegetable substances which Australian settlers and Aboriginals had applied for practical and economic purposes.50 The scientific lesson in natural history was also one in commerce. The promise suggested by scientific displays—­including those commented upon by the Americans visiting Melbourne—­was sometimes greater than the Australians’ performance, reminding Australians and their overseas

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co-­exhibitionists that theirs was, after all, a relatively “new” and distant society. Its fruits could be more readily and convincingly found in the displays of raw materials and commercial goods. Gold nuggets and merino wool were certain to capture and hold the public’s eye at the exhibition with more certainty and fanfare than most science displays, but this does not mean that scientific exhibits were ignored or not appreciated as valuable. At times, though, Australians were not able to fill all of an exhibition’s scientific categories. Reports from Sydney’s Intercolonial Exhibition in 1870 record no entries for a variety of scientific objects, such as air pumps, hydrometers, and chemical and electrical apparatus.51 Whether no exhibits in these categories could be found or no exhibits of good enough quality to be listed in the catalogue were available cannot be determined from the remaining records, but the end result was the same: the official report lists “No entry” for those classes of exhibits. It was also true that Australian organizers could not find local experts to evaluate exhibits for all of the scientific categories in 1870. Melbourne and Sydney were, after all, examples of “comparatively small” communities in general and in the world of scientific expertise more specifically.52 That being the case, though, specific scientific areas, such as astronomy and geology, were well represented by local exhibits from local scientists, who also described and judged exhibits. Among the other concerns expressed at the time was ensuring that judges should not also be exhibitors in the categories they were evaluating and that there should be no familial or business connections between the judges and the exhibitors. Exhibition commissioners were determined to guarantee or at least appear to guarantee to the public both “competence” and “impartiality.” Skill and experience were also valued, as was noted by Australian observers of the juries at the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition.53 Those concerns were not unique to Australian exhibition organizers, participants, and observers. The absence of a particular display or the limited number of experts and judges in a specific scientific field was not necessarily a reflection of the depth of commitment on the part of many scientists, public officials, and others in general Australian society. Members of the Australian learned community in particular attempted to develop local science in ways that would improve manufactures, prestige, and perhaps social order—­not always in each and every scientific field and not always as an extension of what the British were doing or wanted. Some Australians advocated at the time of the exhibitions that while “science culture” was the very “mainspring of advancement in arts and manufactures,” that relationship was best applied to local circumstances and goals after consideration of what German scientists were doing, rather than what their English counterparts were undertaking. 40

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H. C. Russell, vice president of the Royal Society of New South Wales, advised his listeners and readers in 1877 that the best way to avoid decline and “deterioration” was to not only keep science in the foreground but to do so in the ways that Germany was doing. His evidence? German advances in chemistry and engineering. “Now England has lost one of her best customers and found a rival instead.”54 His message was not intended for the English but for the Australians—­or, more particularly, the colonists in New South Wales—­ and it might be addressed by developing science, scientists, and the scientific enterprise at exhibitions, whether in the colonies themselves or at events hosted by overseas countries. Either way, there was much to learn in the public display of science, a display with a potentially non-­or even anti-­British “national” orientation, and one that contributed significantly to answering Australia’s “national” and “social questions.” In other words, scientific exhibits and the participation of scientists helped both Australians and others answer who was an Australian, what was Australia, and how Australians were experiencing a particular modernity. That was one increasingly on their own terms, or at the very least not solely on British terms. This was notably the case when science and industry merged, such as, once again, with impressive German exhibits at shows such as Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The colonial botanist from Victorian corresponded with a visitor thusly impressed.55 The German and other science exhibitions were fundamentally “Western” displays, sharing their essential organization, explanation, and wonderment. The Australian science displays were also in good part “imperial” or “Western” ones, but not entirely so. They were part of local public science in the colonies and often according to more local rules, expectations, labels, and uses. The ways in which they were exhibited and diffused did not necessarily or without contest reflect imperial hegemony but rather expressed the complex interplay of local and distant material culture and ideas: in some cases, produced overseas but consumed at home in the colonies. The exhibitions could be turned, in Mueller’s view, to clear Australian or, more specifically, Victorian advantages, commercial, intellectual, and scientific in nature, which might coexist with British interests and science and would do so in and on increasingly Australian terms. Such Australian advantages could be gained by using local names and information about local uses when organizing and labeling displays, as had been the case with scientific items solicited for Melbourne’s first exhibition in 1854.56 Mueller participated in this effort from those early days, again both at home and abroad, as a government official and leader in the local scientific community. He was not only colonial botanist for Victoria and director for many years of the local botanical garden; he also participated in expeditions “Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun”

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and surveys and actively served the local scientific voluntary societies and institutions, the Royal Society branch among them. Exhibitions were a further illustration of his deep interest in educating both publics about local botanical matters. His use of and commentary on Australian Aboriginal and settler names and applications for timber displays were intended to make them, and thus science, more accessible to local exhibition visitors and more informative for and accessible to those unfamiliar with Victoria or Australia in general. This was “a science of our own,” and a public one, as well. Mueller was not satisfied using only the officially recognized scientific titles and Australian Aboriginal names. He advocated also including “the English and common, as well as the scientific and Latin names” when labeling samples for the general public. That was a call with a local antiquarian, if not democratic, ring to it, or at least a ring of larger accessibility, and one that coexisted with a more universalist and global one.57 It was a local measure without being parochial, or disconnected from the larger world of science. The local and the universal were not inherently contradictory or incompatible. The local imperative helped drive the botanist’s museum and exhibition labors; but it did not limit them or their public presence. In fact, he expanded that presence. Mueller noted that the Melbourne museum offered “a popular institution as well as a scientific collection” for the colony and its visitors, so that the common Aboriginal and English names known to the local population and English-­speaking visitors should be attached “wherever applicable.”58 Mueller was convinced that his essay on “Australian Vegetation, Indigenous and Introduced” and the various colonial scientific exhibits for Melbourne’s Intercolonial Exhibition in 1866 and its successor the following year in Paris would provide New World “teachings of science” to the Old World in areas such as botany, geology, and forest culture.59 Such “teachings” could include local labels and samples, and also local ways of representing such samples, or the technologies of representation and organization. Mueller thought that he might have been the first to use “woodbooks” at the exhibitions for displaying samples, a rather convenient way to publicly display timber. The historian of science Linden Gillbank notes that Mueller adopted that method at the 1862 London International Exhibition, subsequently had “a series of them made,” and then later sent them off for the colony’s court at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition. That was not the case at Melbourne’s International in 1880– 1881.60 For some reason they were not used at that local international exhibition. Might not those and other public teachings and technologies of information have helped legitimate Mueller, white Australians, and their visions of the integration of science, society, and the nation? That might include, in Mueller’s terms, “the occupation of the territory.”

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A Science of Our Own

Exhibition collections, labels, and exchanges suggested a subtle, collaborative, and integrative approach to the local, colonial, imperial, national, and global scientific enterprise, one that crisscrossed social, cultural, and political borders. Naming claimed the land and its materials, past, and peoples for Victorians and Australians as much as, if not more than, for the British or their empire. The act of such claiming was part of the longer-­term process of defining the nation and society in increasingly, but by no means exclusively, local terms and of naturalizing the presence and authority of not only earlier settlers and scientists but also the new Australian-­born generation. Mueller’s reports and collections informed English and European scientists and their publics about colonial or local scientific practices and revealed how the response to imperial and other overseas calls for scientific knowledge encouraged local and, at times, distinctive public developments, as well as the spread of English, European, and imperial practices. Science and scientists played important roles in such larger intellectual, social, and practical developments, roles that induce us to return to some fundamental questions about public science in the Australian colonies: How else did science interact or register with the general public, or civil society, or how did the exhibitions connect with public life beyond the events themselves? What in practical terms did scientists do before, during, and after the exhibitions, and thus what were some of the longer-­term consequences of their exhibition activities? Those are specific matters of who, what, and when, and more general and contextual matters about meanings, which framed how Australian scientists undertook their exhibition activities and, in turn, how such activities were understood by the general public, whether Australian or not, and by more formal governmental bodies, again whether Australian or not. Addressing this series of questions helps us better understand the institutionalization and growth of public science, or an Australian science “of its own” in the words of the New South Wales public speaker in the 1830s. The following chapters tell together a story of the ways by which Australian scientists negotiated and shaped the scientific, professional, and material culture networks crisscrossing the Australian colonies, the British Empire, and much of the world during the nineteenth century. Those networks converged at the exhibitions, where scientists from the Australian colonies exploited advantages, encountered obstructions, and developed out of both relationships conducive not only to their own personal advancement but also to the advancement of public science. Such achievements were not secured without personal and collective costs, as will be discussed.61

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 two “Men Who Are an Ornament to Science” Scientists from New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland at the Exhibitions

australian science, scientific authority, and their roles in public life

were represented and strengthened by the various ways in which colonial scientists participated at local and overseas nineteenth-­century exhibitions. Scientists from the various Australasian colonies—­most notably New South Wales and Victoria—­were exhibitors, commissioners, essayists, and judges, engaging in both official and unofficial capacities, sometimes as agents of the government and at other times as private savants. In this way, all facets of the modern scientific enterprise were exhibited: not only the scientific method and examples of scientific knowledge but also the approach to and construction of that knowledge, as well as the intellectual, social, and physical capital of science.1 This was, then, the “thick text” of science writ and read large. And it was a very public text.2 Science became a metaphor and provided the language, materials, and vision not solely for the British Empire, or imperialism itself, or the Australian nation, but also for Australian society, or civic life itself. That was the case whether nation and society were defined and experienced in light of a single colony or as a continental intercolonial one; that is, as New South Wales and/ or Australia.3 That development did not necessarily mean that science became popular or that national science was understood in a transcontinental

way, but it suggests scientists were cognizant of courting public opinion and that science had become part of the wider field of public culture, that world of elite and common, official and unofficial, shared, exchanged, and negotiated objects, ideas, institutions, and experiences.4 Scientists from the colonies and colonial cities became public figures at the exhibitions as much as they were national, imperial, or British ones, often reconciling those different sources of identity and authority. Locality, or civic identity, wove together the social and the political. In the words of a local newspaper, scientists contributing to the exhibitions by organizing and introducing collections, delivering lectures, and engaging their overseas colleagues were “men who are an ornament to science.”5 Such human “ornaments” included scientists from the well-­known colonies of Victoria and New South Wales, and also from the lesser-­known ones, Queensland among them. This chapter considers as case studies some of the more influential scientists from that trinity of colonies at the exhibitions, though the discussion does not exhaust the list of such scientists. Exhibition participation enabled those scientists to help mold the public debates about what was Australia and who was Australian; that is, they helped shape the asking and answering of common and fundamental questions about the nature and ideas of the polity and society, and did so in light of an Australian public science at exhibitions. Science was not marginal to the Australian public debates about and representations of the nation and society. Rather, science was central to those developments, made so by the engaging and persistent inclusion by Australians themselves of science at the popular exhibitions and the recurring engagement of the wider community with such scientific matters. Similar developments occurred in other white settler colonies, New Zealand and Canada among them, but the narrative unfolded differently in British India. South Asians trained as “modern” scientists had to come to terms with their own recognized scientific traditions, and the plurality of those scientific histories suggested a plurality of nationalist and potentially social ones, as well. The pursuit of “imperial” science in British India could have local, South Asian nationalist implications and results, which were different from those unfolding in New South Wales or Victoria. Indigenous elites, note two scholars of science in colonial India, could use their “encounter with science as a path of revitalization.”6 That was not the case in colonial Australia. Local colonial scientists there were not thought of as revitalizing a former society or polity, if not “nation,” nor an earlier local scientific tradition. Australian scientists were understood as midwives to society, and the nation, and perhaps even its creators. Additionally, white Australians did not note modern science as necessarily connected to their being conquered and “Men Who Are an Ornament to Science”

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ruled by the British, even if British conquest and rule were two historical facts with which South Asians also engaged. Rather, white Australians generally understood science as part of conquering the Australian land and the Australian Aboriginal but not dominating the common settler men, women, and youth. The social and political meanings of public science differed between the colonial possessions and their occupants. Australian scientists created the critical scientific mass and its convergence with public life at exhibitions both at home and overseas by turning to such events to broaden existing and create new exchange networks within and outside of the Australian colonies; create and expand permanent local scientific collections; articulate and represent their own scientific literature and intellectual grids for exhibition and publication; institutionalize contact with colleagues at home and abroad in an intellectual community, which now could float because it was anchored, as well; and engage a wider audience in social, geographical, and political terms. Australian scientists often did so as official exhibition commissioners and professional staff for local committees that were part of metropolitan and intercolonial exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide. Additionally, such scientists were commonly members of Royal Commissions for and exhibitors at the more ambitious international exhibitions held in Vienna, Philadelphia, London, Paris, Calcutta, and the Australian capital cities, among other major metropolises. What did those positions and roles mean in practical terms before, during, and after the exhibitions? One prominent Australian recorded that exhibition commissioners and staff, including scientists, were responsible for collecting official and unofficial displays, making the necessary preparations for their classification and effective display, obtaining judgment on their merits, evaluating them on juries and in essays, and repacking them for return, sale, exchange, or display at future expositions.7 In a representative case, the New South Wales astronomer not only provided government exhibits for Sydney’s international show in 1879 but also judged scientific instruments for official citations.8 Such dual and, in some cases, multiple roles were not uncommon for Australian scientists engaged at the exhibitions, whether engaged as official representatives of the local government or as individual experts. Those and other exhibition activities were not always undertaken without controversy. Acting as exhibition commissioners, Australian scientists faced the polycentric tensions of local, colonial, and imperial science and public life, although prior to 1901 each Australian colony had its own “national” scientific and cultural institutions. Those tensions included focused and persistent opposition in some quarters to the use of public monies for scientific projects and sometimes for exhibitions themselves; sacrifices in time and materials made necessary by often inadequate funding and staff; the push and pull of 46

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party politics; internal professional and scientific disagreements; and uncertainty as to which works and ideas should form the basis of a national public scientific culture, whether “national” was defined in terms of a specific colony (such as Victoria), the collective transcontinental Australian colonies, or Britain and overseas Britain. “National” was a fluid concept at the time, its identity and labels covering all of those spaces and communities, sometimes more than one at a time. In other words, there was not always agreement or consensus on what was in the public interest and on the relationship of science to that interest. Exhibitions offered a public space and experience with some authority and legitimacy as Australians considered and debated those definitions and relationships. Public funding potentially came from different levels of government. On some occasions, though, the enthusiasm for science and other fields at exhibitions was met with lack of interest or inadequate funding. Colonial legislatures and local shire councils could be hesitant about, if not averse to, spending money to collect, insure, ship, and return exhibits or to pay for visiting commissioners. That happened for ambitious overseas exhibitions and for more local ones as well.9 This discussion, then, is not intended to suggest that scientists participated at exhibitions without controversy and disagreement among themselves or between themselves and others. Not without precedent, Charles Moore of New South Wales was dismissed for tardiness with exhibits as his colony’s commissioner for the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867. Nor is it to argue that their exhibits were always popular and successful, even if, unlike in Moore’s case, those exhibits were delivered and displayed on time. Nevertheless, the local and imperial governments continued to select for exhibitions Australian scientists, and they continued to turn to and appropriate popular nineteenth-­century exhibitions to position in wider Australian public culture and civil society the scientific enterprise and themselves, both individually and collectively. That union of scientific and practical men waxed about by Charles Babbage and Prince Albert, among others at London’s Great Exhibition in 1851, was well represented by the public exhibition activities of these Australian men of science.10 Such positioning and engagement enabled scientists to help shape that dynamic culture and society, and be shaped by such dynamics, while securing legitimacy and authority for the scientific enterprise and scientists. Public activities included establishing permanent scientific institutions and collections, lobbying for governmental funding and official sanction of activities, soliciting public recognition of scientific services and labor, and advocating the general application of scientific methods and results to public policy.11 This was the transformation and improvement of what Babbage called in 1851 “the “Men Who Are an Ornament to Science”

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position of science,” a predicament in which the Englishman thought that its practitioners were not recognized as a class or interest and science itself was not considered a profession.12 Babbage had hoped that the Great Exhibition would be the crucible to forge that professional identity and status for English science and scientists. Australian scientists pursued similar goals for themselves and science in general at exhibitions, starting with the Crystal Palace. Prominent colonial scientists regularly participated as members of official Australian exhibition committees and as individual experts between 1851 and Melbourne’s Centennial International show almost forty years later in 1888. Many of the same names from the colonies of Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland appeared year after year in exhibition catalogues, government records, and both official and unofficial firsthand accounts and correspondence: Joseph Bosisto (1824–1898), Reverend William B. Clarke (1798–1878), Frederick McCoy (1823–1899), Charles Moore (1820–1905), Frederick Manson Bailey (1827–1915), Walter Hill (1819–1904), Prof. Archibald Liversidge (1846– 1927), and Ferdinand von Mueller (1825–1896). As noted below, these scientists were often joined by their subordinates and other more junior members of their staff or department. Those names are also in the historical record, although usually not as prominently. The major scientists were emigrants, arriving in Australia from England, Scotland, or continental Europe; Mueller, for example, was born in Rostock, in what would later be Germany, while Bosisto emigrated from Berkshire in Britain. More often than not, they specialized in geology, botany, and other fields of natural history, with a few chemists thrown in for good measure.13 Mueller made his name surveying botanical and timber samples, among other ways. Clarke studied gold and coal. Students of gender might add that the scientists most active at the exhibitions in official roles were men. Many of the visitors to the shows were not. The exhibition scientists generally held official scientific and administrative positions in colonial governments, museums, and learned societies, if they were not also among the co-­founders of such bodies and institutions. Mueller was president of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria and, later, of the Royal Geographical Society, Victorian Branch. Clarke was president of the Royal Society of New South Wales. Participation in those local societies included publishing scientific papers in official proceedings, a professional activity embraced by Mueller and Clarke. The former published during the mid-­1850s nearly one dozen papers in Transactions of the Victorian Institute for the Advancement of Science, and Clarke published about eighty papers during his long career. The exhibitions were for most of them only one of many overseas adventures and responsibilities, which could include, quite frankly, making money. 48

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FIGURE 2.1.

Joseph Bosisto (1824–1898). Reproduced with the permission of the Victorian Parliamentary Library, Melbourne, Victoria

That was the case with Bosisto (figure 2.1), who combined his expertise in pharmaceutical chemistry with a keen entrepreneurial spirit to become the leading figure in the production, marketing, and sale of eucalyptus oils. Those efforts included pondering the medicinal uses of eucalyptus and working with Mueller to export eucalyptus seeds as far and wide as California, British India, Hong Kong, and Algeria. Commercial and health objectives were married in “Men Who Are an Ornament to Science”

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their efforts, and by most accounts they seemed to have struck up a mutually beneficial relationship. Bosisto and the other scientists discussed below were active in different capacities in public life. That could include starting and steering professional bodies, as in the case of Bosisto and the Pharmaceutical Society of Victoria, and assuming official administrative positions. The geologist Brough Smyth was director of the Sandhurst School of Mines in Bendigo during the 1880s and secretary to the Board for the Protection of Aborigines a few years before. He also served in a public capacity as an inspector of mines. Most avoided explicit political life and office holding, although Bosisto again took the reins and sat in the Legislative Assembly and Municipal Council. He even served as mayor of Richmond in Victoria. Australian and overseas exhibitions provided popular venues for Bosisto and others to display scientific samples and sell commercial products. The botanist started that long engagement as early as 1861 at the Victorian Exhibition. As was the case with most of his colleagues, he found no need to radically disassociate spreading scientific knowledge and making money. Bosisto displayed nearly thirty samples of oils from different native Australian plants for that early Melbourne show, some of them earning him a bronze award at the following year’s London International, held in the new South Kensington buildings.14 The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 was particularly successful. The popular American show garnered Bosisto a series of awards for “Essential Oils” and “Chemical and Pharmaceutical preparations from the eucalyptus globulus.”15 The colony’s official exhibition secretary reported that “the various products of the eucalyptus attracted much attention,” and he spent considerable time answering questions and providing information “upon the nature and properties of the many interesting articles exhibited by Mr. Bosisto, M.P.”16 The scientist and businessman continued to successfully exhibit through the 1887 Adelaide International Exhibition, as did many others with botanical inclinations and ambitions also eager to demonstrate their “discoveries” for scientific and commercial reasons.17 The influential and seemingly ubiquitous Bosisto also served as one of Victoria’s official commissioners at various exhibitions. In one notable case, the chemist authored as that colony’s executive commissioner a comprehensive report on the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, held at South Kensington in 1886. He took advantage of that opportunity to publicize the importance for Australians of participating in such exhibitions, including their scientific and economic benefits. One of those benefits was the public reminder that Australia needed to train its own artisans, as were other participating countries and colonies, and that Australians should undertake their own scientific study of commercial crops. Silk and tobacco were listed as 50

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worthy of study and commerce.18 There were both challenges and opportunities at the exhibitions, reminders of how far the Australian colonies had come and how far they still had to go. Bosisto’s official position at South Kensington was preceded by one at the Calcutta International Exhibition in 1883–1884. Sensing benefits in India for himself and the colony of Victoria, he engaged the moment in three different, but interconnected, capacities: scientist, businessman, and president of the colony’s exhibition commission, organized to oversee Victoria’s official participation at the exhibition. That participation included ensuring “a thorough representation of the indigenous products of Victoria,” as well as presenting samples of those “to various public institutions in India, with the view of obtaining analogous collections in exchange.”19 Bosisto received official travel passes from the Government of India’s Revenue and Agriculture Department.20 Displays of chemical and pharmaceutical preparations obtained from the eucalyptus tree and of eucalyptus liqueur earned for the chemist first-­class certificates of merit and gold medals at Calcutta.21 While on the subcontinent, Bosisto also toured the northwest region, observed canals, and delivered a public lecture at the Dalhousie Institute on “Australia As It Is.” That address included the colonies’ “physical and social characteristics.”22 Among such “characteristics” was the relatively mild climate and habitat, a welcoming call to potential visitors and emigrants from the Raj, notably Anglo-­Indian ones. Who might those be? The chemist suggested “retired Indian civil and military officers” eager to relocate to a “climate . . . most favorable to human life.” Bosisto’s audience heard his charming claim that the Australian climate was so favorable that one could sleep outside amid the blue gum (eucalyptus) trees.23 Among other official activities in Calcutta, Bosisto oversaw the exchange of scientific samples between Australian and Indian institutions, as such exchanges had become a regular and expected part of the exhibitions.24 Some of those were direct, in which officers of institutions exchanged specific exhibits; in other cases, materials were acquired in general, the reciprocity secured often indirectly by the acquisition from a third party. Bosisto ensured that the “extensive collection of grain and fodder seeds, fibre plants, etc.” from the Agricultural Society of India, initially exchanged for “samples of cereals, etc. . . . from the Victorian Court,” eventually was distributed to various different societies and organizations back home in the colony.25 Scientific societies, botanic gardens, and government departments joined Bosisto in those exchanges, generally strengthening the roles of the institutional, material, and intellectual center—­whether London, or Melbourne, or Calcutta—­but not doing so without reciprocity and shared agency. Bosisto’s “Men Who Are an Ornament to Science”

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exchanges—­and those of other scientists at the exhibitions—­suggest a more nuanced, multipolar, and perhaps in some ways equal relationship among the multiple imperial and colonial centers and peripheries on one hand and, on the other, the core urban institutions and their provincial smaller siblings within each nation and colony. Such networks included hierarchies as well as equalities, which might be imperial or more local. Rev. W. B. Clarke also well understood and navigated those networks, initially within the colony of New South Wales and between it and neighboring colonies. Later, his ambitions included connecting science in New South Wales with the science practiced overseas in Britain, France, the United States, and elsewhere. Clarke understood how participation at the exhibitions enabled local scientists to forge stronger connections and ensure for themselves a position of relevance and authority in local society. Whereas Bosisto had turned to eucalyptus as an indigenous source of knowledge and profit, Clarke’s attention focused on gold and coal fields. He was not averse to leaping into mineralogical debates concerning the age, location, and uses of those valuable Australian resources. Clarke held more than his own as arguably the leading Australian geologist of his time, “the father of Australian geology” in the words of one biographer.26 He was also influential as an Anglican clergyman. In his fascinating case, public life meant reconciling Clarke’s scientific career as a geologist and his theological one as a clergyman. He brought with him to New South Wales strong backgrounds in both fields, studying with Rev. Adam Sedgwick at Cambridge University. One denotes in both Clarke and Bosisto, among other Australian scientists, the not uncommon mid-­Victorian union of theology and geology. Exhibition displays and publications provided opportunities to take public positions on scientific issues and controversies and to have those opinions spread far and wide. Those ambitions informed Clarke’s participation at local and overseas exhibitions, some limited in scope as in Melbourne in 1854 and others seemingly without any limits, as at the Paris Universal Expositions. The geologist served as a member of the New South Wales Commission for the 1878 Paris show, only one of many official exhibition positions Clarke held. He also participated as an exhibitor of scientific displays and author of scientific papers on gold and coal deposits for official exhibition catalogues.27 Clarke reached the apex of his exhibition activities during the later 1860s and early 1870s, a period in which his “Reports” on coal and gold fields, Mesozoic fossils, and other geological phenomena were common parts of the official New South Wales’ exhibition catalogues.28 His many public addresses complemented those exhibition publications, the two exhibitions in tandem representing not only mineral wealth, realized and potential, but also the 52

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disagreements and controversies about such public matters. The dating and extent of coal fields, among other examples, provided fuel for such learned and public debates.29 Clarke was joining other scientists, officials, and exhibition participants in making the shared compelling point that the application to mineral wealth of science would more than likely provide “a larger and steadier yield,” notably when science was applied alongside modern technology and healthy amounts of capital. Among the earliest vocal advocates of Australia’s potential mineral wealth, Clarke also understood that such a vision and policy meant in an equally if not more fundamental way science providing the language, authority, and connections of public and national life itself, without sacrificing the authority of religion.30 Scientific claims by Clarke and his colleagues within and outside of New South Wales were, then, as the prominent Sir Redmond Barry in Melbourne and others knew, also social and political statements. They were not reserved for the relatively small community of practicing scientists, or only for those looking to apply to business a particular scientific discovery. Promotions of science at the exhibitions and elsewhere implied that scientifically organized, or science-­biased, mineral exploitation, in one prominent example, could provide for a more stable economy, polity, and society than one connected to disorderly, random mineral rushes. That resulting society would be one more in keeping with national middle-­ class interests than the “bunyip” aristocratic pastoral economy or the radical workers’ egalitarianism of Barry’s many and varied political opponents.31 That was a claim for a particular social order and for the authority in that order of scientists and scientific institutions, including voluntary societies. Science could provide the language and ways to legitimate, represent, and manage society and the nation. In this case, public science at the exhibitions demonstrated the material and cultural foundation of public life—­its order, wealth, relationships, knowledge, technology, and language, if not its past and future.32 Participation at the exhibitions located scientists within colonial society and the world-­system of science during the nineteenth century, thereby enabling members of the scientific community to address the peculiarities of living and working in nineteenth-­century Australia. Local scientists at the exhibitions positioned themselves and their authority at the nexus of several professional, social, historical, civic, imperial, and national boundaries. They were not only seeking public attention and funding but also seeking to define and shape that public; that is, they were helping to create the Australian public sphere, with science and scientists playing prominent roles in it. Public science did not just reflect civil society; it helped create it in nineteenth-­century Victoria and New South Wales.33 “Men Who Are an Ornament to Science”

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Official government botanists in the colonies contributed to those larger developments before, during, and after exhibitions. They and their staffs provided local flora for ornamentation and study, authored authoritative essays about such displays and local timber, and solicited samples of overseas and intercolonial vegetation for their embryonic but growing gardens and museums. Both scientists and holders of public office were keen advocates of exhibitions for such botanical purposes, which were both commercial and intellectual. In his capacity as New South Wales botanist, Charles Moore encouraged and assisted Bosisto, Clarke, and other commissioners and scientists as they all prepared for Australian and overseas shows. Moore shared “specimens of the leaves and flowers” he could not identify as he prepared for the Sydney exhibition in late 1879.34 Moore’s relationship with exhibitions began as early as the first Sydney exhibition in 1854, at which he prepared “an extensive collection of Woods; of which they [Moore and W. Macarthur] procured in the whole above 300 specimens.”35 He also wrote a scientific paper describing the “Woods” collected in the Northern Districts. The botanist’s overseas exhibition engagements included collecting timber samples from the Richmond and Clarence Rivers districts for the London International Exhibition in 1862 and being appointed to “a Board to aid, with information and advice, intending Exhibitors at the Dublin International Exhibition of 1865.”36 That appointment was approved by the governor of New South Wales, and it was no surprise in light of Moore’s local scientific activities. Those included overseeing the public gardens, delivering public lectures, publishing scientific papers, and landscaping the grounds around the Garden Palace. That new structure housed the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879. The New South Wales botanist extolled the intellectual, scientific, and commercial advantages to the colonies of not only participating in such exhibitions but hosting them as well. Displays of raw and manufactured vegetable products and of the various scientific processes connected to them would lead to only a few of the many local benefits, among which was increased regional trade. Moore made such bold claims for New South Wales and presumably the other participating and future hosting Australian colonies in the optimistic aftermath of the Sydney International.37 Those activities and successes are somewhat balanced by the reminder that the New South Wales Assembly removed him as official commissioner for the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition, a sign that he did not always escape controversy.38 Moore was not alone. William Carron (1821–1876) worked for Moore at the Botanic Gardens in Sydney. He had a long and impressive resume. Initially selected as a botanist for Edmund Kennedy’s Cape York Peninsula Expedition in 1848, Caron subsequently worked with the Customs Department and 54

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Convict Office before becoming clerk and librarian at the Botanic Gardens in 1868. He regularly reported on forest and timber resources, sometimes in his official capacity as Inspector of Forests for the Clarence River District. Carron participated in multiple exhibitions in various capacities. He was an official commissioner and exhibitor at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition in 1866–1867. In a later official exhibition capacity, he toured the Clarence, Grafton, and Richmond Rivers districts to collect timber samples for New South Wales’s court at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.39 Carron collected and prepared displays—­including leaves, flowers, and fruits—­from over seventy different species of timbers, a total which was not only twice the number initially listed by the commissioners for the 1876 American exhibition but also significantly more than had been made previously available for both the London International Exhibition in 1862 and the Paris Universal Exposition five years later. The botanist and explorer’s field books from that expedition offer insight into the process of collecting and displaying scientific and commercial samples, as well as the political and social visions that such labors might draw upon, if not generate.40 In a practical sense, the field books also expressed the great variety of applications for overseas visitors and purchasers offered by the colonial samples and the rather common frustrations of preparing exhibits—­in this case, timber—­when the desired natural products were out of season. Carron surveyed local regions for the locations and amounts of various timbers in the process of procuring his relatively large collection of samples. In doing so, he not only generated local scientific knowledge and samples in response to the exhibition but also expressed an early environmentalist regret upon noticing “a great deal of bark is stripped from the trees” to make settlers’ dwellings. When displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, Carron’s timber samples promoted one vision and practice of local wealth and “progress,” but for him, at least, those came at a price. Here were colonial development, science, and pride—­the assumed positions taken by the Australians—­but here also, perhaps, was the claim that that particular vision of economic development included a sense of loss, a nostalgic embracing of the unstripped flora, fauna, and landscape, or at least a strong disapproval of perceived damage, if not wastefulness. That embracing suggested a language for expressing a national identity with an alternative or complementary claim on the landscape, a claim of study and preservation, not only exploitation and disappearance. Could scientists and, in this case, the use of timbers reconcile those competing claims to the unique Australian landscape in the battle for the nation and society? Could scientists help link Australian national identity with a preserved, commercial, and managed landscape and natural history? The exhibitions were “Men Who Are an Ornament to Science”

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one venue to ponder, publicize, and encourage acceptance of that powerful linkage between nature, commerce, and the nation, a naturalist-­inspired vision of the economically and environmentally viable polity, increasingly articulated by and among white settler nationalists, whether independent or colonial.41 Could one’s society and public life have profit and preservation? Carron was not so confident about that marriage during and after his exhibition-­ related travels, but his articulation of and engagement with that issue suggested the central role that science, scientists, and exhibitions could play in its public discussion, if not resolution.42 Across the Australian colonial borders in Queensland, Frederick Manson Bailey, scientist and official colonial botanist, collected displays for exhibitions in Australia and England. He was most active during the 1880s and 1890s. His woods, grasses, and other botanical exhibits were on display at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886 and Melbourne’s Centennial Exhibition two years later.43 Among the exhibits at the Centennial in 1888 were “economic plants,” including medicinal ones with commercial applications.44 Those and similar projects drew upon the impressive exhibition labors of Bailey’s immediate predecessor, Walter Hill, colonial botanist for Queensland and director of the Botanic Garden in Brisbane. Hill participated in both local and overseas exhibitions in keeping with those twin official capacities. Among his many exhibition activities, Hill communicated about plants displayed at the London International Exhibitions in the early 1870s and both collected and organized specimens of timber and shrubs for intercolonial and other international exhibitions in Australia and abroad, as well as for the local civic ones organized by his colony’s Agricultural and Horticultural Societies. His exhibition efforts were often rewarded with praise and prizes. That was the case on two occasions in New South Wales. The Illustrated Sydney News provided a special note praising the “large and varied contribution” on display at the Metropolitan Intercolonial Exhibition in 1870. The collection of vegetable and plant samples (tea, coffee, sugar, arrowroot, and timbers, among others) attracted “a continuous throng of visitors,” apparently bent on seeing not only raw but also manufactured exhibits, evidence of “the rich resources” and the thriving science in the colony of Queensland.45 Success at the start of the decade was repeated at its end. Hill “obtained a first prize for a collection of 250 varieties of native woods” at the Sydney International in 1879.46 Hill wrote a few years before that it was “my duty to afford every assistance” to exhibitions, including drawing attention to new plants that might be of commercial value in the colony. That “duty” took him to Ipswich and Toowoomba, among other provincial towns outside of Brisbane. Not surpris-

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ingly, the botanist’s time, health, and monies were taxed by those and other exhibition projects, particularly “the collection, division, and packing of seeds for distribution” at Queensland’s exhibition displays outside of the colony, whether in the neighboring one of New South Wales or across the seas in England, New Zealand, Vienna, and Philadelphia.47 Such “past services” efforts were listed by Hill in 1881 among his reasons to be granted “twelve month’s leave and remuneration.”48 Bailey and Hill’s many efforts mirrored those of Richard Daintree (1832– 1878), their colony’s agent-­general in London and government geologist. He was known for developing mining districts and had done so since his first appointment as government geologist for Northern Queensland. Daintree ensured that Queensland’s material and scientific resources were well represented at the international exhibitions held at South Kensington in the early 1870s. In fact, the Queensland Annex was one of the few successes of Sir Henry Cole’s ultimately failing scheme of annual shows, so successful that other colonies intended to join with Queensland to establish a Colonial Museum in London. Gold and other minerals, fossils, and Australian Aboriginal weapons were among the scientific displays accompanied by photographs.49 A similar display was up and running at the Vienna International Exhibition in 1873, at which Daintree’s colored photographs of scientific subjects and contexts drew considerable attention. They were near the series of stuffed Australian birds and animals (see figure 1.2).50 The pair of Queenslanders Daintree and Hill, Bosisto, and Moore were joined by fellow travelers as the century drew to its closing decades. That was the case whether the exhibitions were at home in the Australian colonies or abroad, the scientific networks crisscrossing the Australian colonies themselves or linking those colonies with the outside world, Britain and British India included. Among their contemporaries and successors was Prof. Archibald Liversidge from New South Wales. He was notably active at the series of major exhibitions in the 1870s and 1880s—­shows in Amsterdam, Melbourne, Philadelphia, London, and Paris, for which he sat on official commissions, exhibited and judged samples, and, on more than one occasion, earned awards.51 Honors were bestowed upon his mineral and ethnological exhibits. Liversidge was particularly busy at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878. The professor acquired numerous scientific specimens for Sydney’s Australian Museum, among which were microscopes, minerals, display cases, and sample bottles exhibited in the Italian and American courts. He was also charged with disposing of “certain Natural History and other specimens” from New South Wales by exchanging them for primarily European scientific displays. The

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parties interested in Australian scientific specimens included Thomas Huxley and representatives from Kew Gardens, the British Museum, the Royal School of Mines, and institutions in Poland, Austria, Italy, and Belgium. Australian eucalyptus oils, coal, grass, and gemstones attracted such individuals and institutions.52 Liversidge was also active as a commissioner and exhibitor at various other overseas exhibitions, often in his capacity as professor of chemistry and mineralogy at the University of Sydney. It was as a public scholar and educator that he provided displays for the “Educational Appliances, Models of Schools, School Furniture, and Books” class of exhibits at the Calcutta International Exhibition a few years after the Paris show. Under the general section of “Education, and Application of Liberal Arts,” Liversidge exhibited tables for qualitative chemical analysis, reports upon science and museums, and models and educational charts of “The Minerals of New South Wales . . . arranged for the use of students.”53 He also served as an official member of the colony’s exhibition commission. Even when not serving in such a capacity, Liversidge remained active. Offering his services “in an unofficial capacity” for the Sydney International Exhibition, the scientist assisted with various education and science committees and toured various collections “to send out such educational and scientific exhibits” and advised on their “proper arrangement.”54 Australian scientists were busy establishing and using networks with their British, imperial, and European colleagues. Exchanges of publications and exhibits were common, whether the Australians were visitors or hosts at the exhibitions. As the century evolved, Australian scientific interest also turned to the United States. Scientists noted many common questions and problems and found that some of those were shared with the Americans but not with the Brits or Europeans. At the time of Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876, members of the local New South Wales exhibition commission instructed their representatives in Philadelphia to obtain “working drawings, models, and Reports upon all modern mining operations and machinery . . . a collection of characteristic American fossils, minerals, rocks, and ores . . . collections of physical & mechanical scientific apparatus, diagrams, etc. . . . [and] scientific publications, . . . such as the maps and reports of the geological & other surveys.”55 There was interest in both official governmental materials and those generated by private parties. Redmond Barry, Victoria’s executive commissioner, and scientists, such as the directors of Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens and Agriculture Department, participated in a similar way, touring the exposition grounds for those many and varied objects and texts desired back home in their own colony. The visiting Australians appealed to shared public interests by organizing after the 58

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Centennial show a series of exchanges with the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. Exchanged items included woods, grains, seeds, and trees.56 Formal scientific exchanges between the Australians and Americans diffused not only the material culture of science but also the scientific method and organization of knowledge. Smithsonian officials, for example, collected “a selection” of South Australia’s displays after the Philadelphia show because of their “interest in a scientific point of view.”57 Other American parties desired “specimens of Australian plants, seeds, woods, minerals, insects, birds, or shells.” Those were only a few of the many exchanges between the Australians and prominent American individuals and institutions. Barry considered those exchanges to be among the most important labors of the overseas exhibition commissioners; he did not think of himself or his colleagues as passive participants in that process. Rather, the colony of Victoria’s leading exhibition commissioner sought to actively establish and oversee during his visit to Philadelphia “a correspondence and system of exchanges” according to terms negotiated and agreed upon by both Australians and Americans. Those exchanges would be between governments, public institutions, and private societies on both sides of the Pacific.58 The transpacific scientific comparison and exchanges continued at the exhibitions as the century drew to a close. The United States offered a political example to be followed, suggesting a role for public science in nation-­building. In the case of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, science could represent a vision of Australian federation, the very sinews of scientific knowledge and practice crossing internal political borders. If science could do that for the host nation’s states and regions, then why not with the Australian colonies? The popular and influential show included suggestive and extensive science exhibits, including impressive mineral and mining technology displays from different American states and Australian colonies. Those displays proved attractive to a variety of visiting Australians, as they had in previous, less impressive cases. Among those Australians wandering the halls and studying the minerals in Chicago was Joseph E. Carne (1855–1922) from New South Wales, the colony’s assistant government geologist and senior geological surveyor. He joined the Survey in 1879 and subsequently served as curator for the Mining and Geological Museum, attached to the New South Wales Department of Mines and created after a devastating fire destroyed the Garden Palace and most of its collections, the mineral and geological ones among them.59 Carne was a keen exhibition and museum advocate and participant, organizing mineral and geological displays for shows and collections in Australia and abroad during the 1880s and 1890s. That long list of scientific activities included preparing samples for the Australian Museum, Newcastle School of Arts, and “Men Who Are an Ornament to Science”

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government agents from South Africa, California and Russia, often in return for their samples of diamonds and other “economic minerals,” which he could study and exhibit at the Department of Mines. The public and scientific efforts to prepare his colony’s mineral exhibits at the Amsterdam (1883), London Colonial and Indian (1886), Adelaide (1887), and Melbourne (1888) Exhibitions were part of a larger effort to participate in the nearly global scientific and exhibition networks and to create from that participation a bigger, more diverse and accessible collection back in Sydney. Carne and his colleagues intended that collection to include fossils, minerals, and other geological items, the magnitude and apparent value of which provoked him to petition the colonial government for a larger structure. He could then include Australian Aboriginal implements as part of the exhibits. Various parties called upon Carne for not only his scientific knowledge but also, apparently, his organizational and management skills. By the final decade of the century, those parties included the Imperial Institute in London and Ballarat’s Juvenile Exhibition, as well as the official New South Wales commission for the Columbian Exposition.60 Carne toured Chicago’s exhibition courts, waxing enthusiastically about building stones from New York, coal from West Virginia, and silver from Idaho.61 Information about Standard Oil Company’s wells also caught his attention, as did the machinery for testing, smelting, and excavating. Not all of the American machinery on display impressed him: some was old; some did not work. While the novelty and quality of American mineral samples captured his eye and pen, the Department of Mines official simultaneously thought of the show as an opportunity to exhibit Australian minerals to a global audience and to rethink Australia’s own geological and fuel conditions. As expected, Carne’s official report from Chicago described foreign samples and their uses, but, more unexpectedly, it also took stock of Australian ones. Might there be a more local (or Australian) political and economic message at the American show? Carne was convinced there was. He wrote that the exhibition showed what the various colonies contained in relative terms: “one colony possesses in abundance some necessary mining element of success which is lacking in another—­and this lacking colony likewise possesses some equally essential element lacking in the first.”62 If the New South Wales exhibits revealed abundant coal, the ones from Queensland displayed large gold deposits. Together, the colonies might form a grand mineral federation, providing for the “reciprocal wants” of each, as the individual American states appeared to do for the federally and economically viable United States. The display and study of the mineral resources of each colony at the Columbian Exposition were part of the larger federation process. Geological federation mirrored and engaged the movement for political federation, which 60

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had picked up considerable steam by the final decade of the century. Those were two different but linked, and not only complementary, ways to represent and think about federation. There were even demands at Chicago for an “Australian” building in which the different colonies might display together as a “Federation” their goods, both separated from other parts of the British Empire and as part of that larger entity. Federation was not independence, and the exhibition grounds and structures did not suggest anything of the sort. On the other hand, Queensland’s executive commissioner remarked that such a building would not only reduce costs but also show visitors “the spirit of [Australian] federation.”63 Carne breathed in and exhaled out that spirit. Part metaphoric vision, part material reality, his idealized articulation of Australian and American mineral wealth revealed the “possible political, social & moral advantage of Union” in contrast to intercolonial divisions, or “jealousies,” and excessive dependence on Britain as found in Australia.64 In keeping with such visions of Australian nationalism and federation, the government geologist thought that the key to the new nation becoming a great commercial and manufacturing country and a sustainable federal one would be the exploitation of “practically unlimited” fuel resources. American coal and its relationship to other minerals in the United States held out one model for federal, sustainable, and “unlimited” economic and political development for at least this Australian visitor. Coordinated mineral study, extraction, and exploitation was one vision for the Australian future, a vision grounded in and representative of public science made accessible at the international exhibitions. Carne, Liversidge, and many other local Australian scientists were rather busy before, during, and after the exhibitions at home and abroad. In retrospect, their impressive engagement appears dwarfed by that of Ferdinand von Mueller, the government botanist in Melbourne, from 1853 until his death in 1896. Mueller participated in one way or another, and sometimes in more than one way, at colonial and overseas shows between the mid-­1850s and the late 1880s. At various times and places, Mueller was active as exhibitor, judge, organizer of exchanges and purchases, and author of scientific essays. Mueller served as a member of the organizing committee (co-­responsible for Group III. Vegetable Products) at Melbourne’s first exhibition in 1854—­at which he also exhibited colonial woods and plants—­and participated in almost all of the exhibitions significant to Australians until nearly the final decade of the century, when he contributed ornamental ferns and “specimens of timber in book form” for the popular Paris Universal Exposition in 1889.65 Mueller often participated in his official capacity as Victoria’s government botanist and director of the public Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. He also engaged as a private citizen, independent scientist, or president of the Vic“Men Who Are an Ornament to Science”

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torian Philosophical Institute (the early Royal Society) of Victoria and of the Victorian Branch of the Geographical Society of Australia. Those different affiliations were sources of authority and avenues for resources, but they could also be reminders of the many controversies involving the botanist. His public life was hardly free of battles, and those sometimes colored his exhibition activities as well. The exhibitions were not islands unto themselves. Disagreements with the local Royal Society of Victoria and government officials had some effect on Mueller’s exhibition activities.66 References to the demands on his time and resources of those exhibition duties abound in Mueller’s personal and professional correspondence. In this regard, he does not sound unlike Hill, his fellow botanist and exhibition participant. There were moments when exhibitions represented for Mueller “extra-­duties,” rather than “normal” ones, as they had also seemed to the Queenslander, although they both were more often than not able to integrate such “duties” with their other scientific and professional activities and goals. The Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866–1867 and its successor, the Paris Universal Exposition of the later year, were notably demanding of Mueller’s time.67 His letters during those months refer to collecting exhibits, battling to overcome what he deemed to be insufficient funds and time, authoring various essays, and even designing a trophy to represent the colony of Victoria’s eucalyptus and timber resources. A few years later he claimed that “the extra duties for the International Exhibition” in Melbourne prevented him from completing his “extensive” list of Australia’s botanical species.68 The 1880s were filled with nearly annual international exhibitions in the colonies and overseas, adding to the sense of “extra work,” or in more exasperated terms, “lots of extra-­work.” That was a common refrain in Mueller’s writings during the decade, whether the international exhibitions were around the corner in Melbourne’s Exhibition Building or across the seas in Calcutta and London. As he wrote Johan Lange in 1885, “The successive ‘Exhibitions’ in various parts of the world gave much extra work for years; and in this pushing young country so much else is to be done also in my department, that little time is left to effect herbarium-­inter-­changes.”69 The results of such “extra work” were mixed. Mueller’s efforts at those Australian and overseas shows illustrated personal and public benefits, as well as liabilities and challenges. Among those was a disagreement about the precise relationship between the Intercolonial Exhibition essays and the more ambitious scientific “physiographical Atlas” of the colony, proposed at the time by Redmond Barry, the eminent local civic figure.70 Such benefits and challenges were perhaps inherent in public life at the time. Controversies and disagreements about how much money should be

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allotted for the exhibitions and how those funds should be spent, or about the appropriateness of particular exhibits, were not unique to Mueller’s exhibition labors or those of his fellow Australian scientists. It was relatively easy to claim that one was “taking stock in the colony” and “representing its resources.” It was not so easy to determine precisely how such objectives should be realized within the financial, spatial, political, and time constraints of the exhibition experience. Few disagreed with displaying their colony’s “intellectual progress.” What was “intellectual” and what was “progress” might not be so easily agreed upon. Participation, recognition, and awards did not shield Mueller and other scientists from those disagreements or from both public and official criticism. His expenditures and choices of exhibits were challenged, among such tensions. He always felt short of funds and time, while recognizing the importance of the exhibitions to many parties and the public itself. Mueller was eventually stripped of part of his official responsibilities. He was officially the first director of Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens and National Herbarium from 1857 to 1873, at which point the recreational gardens were officially taken from him and put under a different government employee’s control.71 Mueller had gained his laboratory in the mid-­1860s but also lost it with the gardens in 1873, much to his disappointment and anger. Strong reactions to those changes were expressed by Mueller and others in public and private, including in the local press and the botanist’s correspondence with overseas scientists.72 One of the apparently fundamental disagreements concerned whether Mueller’s expertise and approach were most appropriate for public gardens, particularly as those gardens were now intended to entertain as much as, if not more than, educate. The Age was direct with its editorial opinion: “Baron von Mueller was, no doubt, an excellent botanist, but he was not a gardener, and it had been considered desirable to appoint a practical gardener to take charge of the place [Botanic Gardens].”73 Mueller cited the loss of the laboratory and other public criticism as among the reasons for his seemingly incomplete exhibition displays and reports. He dramatically wrote Joseph Hooker in August 1879, “I shall not be able to do anything even for the Sydney or Melbourne great Exhibitions; as not even my laboratory has been restored to me, & I am provided with no means of any other kinds to share in the Exhibitions.”74 Inclined to exaggerate, Mueller repeated the next year to Asa Gray at Harvard University a similar excuse for not mounting effective exhibition displays. The loss of the laboratory and gardens had deprived him of the necessary “vitality.”75 Most if not nearly all contemporaries would have disagreed with that self-­serving hyperbole. His exhibition contributions before Sydney, at the pair of international exhibitions, and for nearly one decade afterward showed nearly limitless intellectual

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and physical “vitality.” That force was not exerted without controversy and cost, but it was exerted effectively, and it earned Mueller multiple awards and considerable public and private praise, both official and unofficial. The following chapter discusses the efforts and fruits of that exhibition “vitality” before the government botanist’s death in 1896. Such “vitality” contributed mightily to the growth of Australia’s public science at home and abroad. This was not only a matter of contributing time, exhibits, and written reports, although those contributions need not be diminished in any way. Ironically, it was also Mueller’s apparent failures or defeats that contributed to public science. They did so by helping to mark the publicly appropriate activities, expenditures, and objectives of science as part of social and political life. Exhibitions and botanical gardens proved to be spaces, events, and activities over which Mueller and others fought the existential and material battles about the nature of public science. The famous botanist was front and center in those battles. His allies and opponents included the other “ornaments” of science in the Victorian-­era Australian colonies.

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 three “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured” Ferdinand von Mueller and the Exhibitions

ferdinand von mueller was arguably the most active, famous, and

controversial scientist in nineteenth-­century Australia. That was the case almost from the very moment he was appointed government botanist in early 1853 with Governor La Trobe’s support, less than one year after he arrived in Melbourne with the intention of opening a pharmacy.1 William Howitt wrote at the time from the goldfields praising Mueller as “not only a gentleman of profound aquirement [sic] in his department of science, but of indefatigable energy and enthusiasm . . . ever ready to promote the moral and intellectual progress of the colony.”2 Such notoriety did not change with his various public labors at the Botanic Gardens and exhibitions, all of which served to advertise and encourage those well-­known energies, if not ambitions. It might be said that at times Mueller fueled that notoriety, or at least he was hardly bashful about his labors and fame or the many faces of his public science. The image captured in his carte de visite is not that of a bashful man (figure 3.1). Mueller held the official position in Melbourne as colonial botanist for the colony of Victoria; joined several expeditions, including the North Australian Exploring Expedition; corresponded with European and British scientists; published scientific articles, surveys, and the bold Flora Australiensis (seven volumes between 1863 and 1878); helped create and keep vital local learned

FIGURE 3.1.

Baron Ferdinand von Mueller (1825–1896), dated c. 1876–c. 1884. John William Lindt, photographer, albumen silver carte de visite, Accession No. H37475/24, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

societies and chapters for British organizations; and advocated for museums and other more permanent local public institutions. One would be remiss not to see him as one of the architects of Melbourne’s and Victoria’s public sphere, a role complementary to that of being a leading scientist and one that 66

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linked him to Sir Redmond Barry. That duality and connection meant that he inevitably generated dueling public approval and public criticism, much of which was expressed in the local press and the halls of government. The varied responses to his public activities, including participation at exhibitions, serve to remind us of the costs and benefits of promoting public science in the Australian colonies during the second half of the nineteenth century and that public science and scientists were not always popular.3 It would be hard to envision mid-­and later-­nineteenth-­century Melbourne and the colony of Victoria without the public projects and visions of Barry and Mueller. They helped define the public interest. Exhibitions were part of his larger vision, and a central part, without any doubt. Exhibitions along with scientific societies and institutions could help resolve economic and intellectual difficulties facing the settlers and, in doing so, help them claim the land not only by providing information but by the very object lesson of such public intercourse. Science, scientists, and the latter’s organization were, to some extent, living metaphors for federation, domination, and cooperation. Science provided the public legitimacy, language, experience, and structure for those political and social processes, as they did for science itself, in this mutual, symbiotic relationship. Here was a new trinity to be celebrated: science, society, and the public, not fixed but defined by their relationships one to the others. Such a trinity and the relevant networks were not without their fundamental tensions. In the end, Mueller was not able to resolve all of those. The colonial botanist’s many and varied exhibition activities were shaped in part by such tensions, including those between elite science and mass culture, personal advancement and professional alienation, utility and beauty, or instruction and entertainment. His engagement with exhibitions reflected and encouraged Mueller’s well-­known efforts to develop local science in a way that connected it with overseas complements. In this significant way, exhibitions were not for the government botanist exceptional, isolated, peripheral, or ephemeral events but central and long-­lasting, integral parts of his wider, often individually pursued yet integrated networks, visions, and projects. Exhibitions were complementary and connected to public institutions, whether governmental or not, as they were to Mueller’s other activities and his sense of himself as a public scientist and advocate of local economic development. Those goals were not incompatible with what Joseph Bosisto and other Australian public scientists pursued. Exhibitions were for Mueller an accessible and legitimate public forum to promote colonial “progress” in particular areas, such as forestry, as well as the personal “progress” of his own career objectives.4 He was engaged with nearly all of the intercolonial Australian exhibitions in the 1860s and 1870s, as well “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

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as the more ambitious international ones held in Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide between 1879 and 1888. For example, his botanical samples at the Sydney International earned the colonial botanist a “First Degree of Merit” for their scientific value and “instructive character”; the jurors reported that the value of his salt-­bush exhibits to pastoralists “cannot be over-­estimated.”5 Melbourne’s own International Exhibition the following year “demanded” his time “and activity for several months,” a period filled with the requirements of serving as an official commissioner and judge for three different “sections,” including chemistry.6 Six years later, jurors gave Mueller a first-­class award as an exhibitor for his botanical displays at Adelaide’s own Jubilee International.7 Their official report drew “attention to Baron von Mueller’s Herbarium of nine large volumes, containing numerous dried botanical specimens in excellent preservation and admirably arranged.” Other “educational” and “scientific” exhibits included an Atlas of Eucalypti, six volumes on Extra Tropical Plants, and a photographic album of Victorian trees. Not reluctant with praise, the official report concluded that those exhibits formed “a most valuable collection, and all the work of the eminent botanist of Victoria. We feel that each volume speaks more for the skill of the author than anything we can pen.”8 Mueller also wrote essays of various lengths and scientific depth for exhibition publications, publicly expressing a personal and national scientific, political, economic, and social vision. That was the case for most of the exhibitions in New South Wales and Victoria during the 1860s and 1870s. Those scientific essays—­most of which were published in the official exhibition reports and catalogues—­were more often than not solicited by executive commissioners, Sir Redmond Barry among them. Such sponsors intended those publications to demonstrate not only local scientific knowledge but also, in the language of the times, colonial “intellectual progress.” Such was the case for the London International at South Kensington in 1862, for which Barry, the colony of Victoria’s executive commissioner, turned to Mueller, Frederick McCoy, and Brough Smyth among local colonial scientists for official and expert essays on local natural history, geology, botany, and various other scientific subjects.9 Exhibition essays were one more way for Mueller to survey and take stock, to list and name trees, timber, plants, and other botanical resources in keeping with territorial distribution and claims, and to do so with the official scientific and public voice of the government botanist and the exhibition commission. A few years after the London show, Mueller’s “Essay on Australian Vegetation, Indigenous or Introduced” and “Notes on the Vegetable Products” for the 1866–1867 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition provided two extensive surveys of colonial plants, emphasizing their various economic potentials.10 68

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Mueller’s essays included the broad sweep of his colony’s vegetation and often called for the introduction of new economic products, such as tea and rice, and the more intensive yet reasoned development of existing ones, including tars and oils. Other sections and essays focused more specifically on timber sources and products. It was not only what the essays contained and claimed but also the fact of the essays themselves and the process by which they were authored that mattered during the exhibitions and then afterward as potential items for exchange. Mueller’s essays were often the result of his own labor and of correspondence with other scientists, including noted overseas experts, such as George Bentham at Kew, to whom Mueller wrote in 1866 for the Englishman’s “memorandum” on botanical species. In this way, the “national” text and its “table of all the species of trees in Australia” represented the product of local, intercolonial, imperial, and transnational scientific connections and contributions.11 Again, we notice that mutually reinforcing relationship of local and universal, as was noted by scholars of the history of nineteenth-­century science in British India as well.12 The Melbourne scientist seized the exhibition moments and the permanence of their publications to point out the necessity for and likelihood of particular scientific and commercial policies, such as afforestation, recognizing the nature of Australia’s flora. Mueller looked ahead to the possibility of irrigating the extensive dry lands impeding pastoralism and general agricultural production; this optimism was mirrored at, for one, the Sydney International Exhibition by the many and varied scientific and commercial exhibits testifying to the performance and promise of that vision.13 The botanist queried for his readers and the exhibition visitors whether irrigation might produce enough vegetation to mitigate droughts, reminding readers of the scientists’ role in claiming and developing this land and in creating a stable, sustainable social and economic order. That role crossed colonial borders to become, whether intended or not, an Australian project. In one case, Mueller assisted Western Australia’s “Exhibition Commissioners at Swan River” with procuring fresh vegetation for their court at the upcoming Colonial and Indian Exhibition.14 He had previously advised that colony’s representative to send to the Sydney International Exhibition a copy of “the W.A. forest-­report.”15 Mueller recommended the display for scientific reasons but also because the “Report ought to be a great help to the development of colonization in W.A.” Copies had already “gone to Italy, France & Prussia.” The colonial botanist’s advice about the scientific and socioeconomic advantages of participating in exhibitions was not reserved for Western Australia. Victoria’s leading scientist turned to exhibitions—­such as the one held in Melbourne in 1861 as a preliminary to the London International of the fol“From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

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lowing year—­to promote his vision for commercially developing Australia’s forests and woods, not only those in particular colonies. That development included marrying economic and scientific components, a convergence which Mueller could well engineer and manage as a juror, exhibitor, commissioner, and author.16 Here were public examples of how to study, develop, and publicize the Australian physical landscape and the settlers’ relationship to it, a position not unlike that expressed by William Caron during his exhibition-­ related tour in the mid-­1870s, as noted in chapter 2. Activities at the Victorian Exhibition also connected Mueller to Bosisto, whose interests tended to coincide with the former’s. Mueller joined scientists turning to exhibitions to share their views on managing the forests in the public interest, if not also to define that public interest as including the twin goals of preservation and profit, “conservation and maintenance.” Mueller concluded, “I regard the forests a gift, intrusted [sic] to any of us only for transient care during a short space of time, to be surrendered to posterity again as an unimpaired property, with increased riches and augmented blessings, to pass as a sacred patrimony from generation to generation.”17 This might include that sense of nostalgia or compulsion to preserve at least samples of the original flora and fauna. The colonial botanist clearly linked science and progress, wealth and order in this larger “civilizing” process. He also included managing natural resources, such as forests, for the future generations. Local forest boards might ensure that there was timber for the future. Mueller shared with Barry this modern trinity of science, wealth, and management, an understanding that the proper application of scientific knowledge would guarantee that this “new” settler society lasted and prospered. Mueller emphasized forests and timber, whereas Barry had focused on minerals in their colony of Victoria in the wake of the mineral rushes of the early 1850s.18 The enterprising and ambitious Mueller took on some of these exhibition endeavors without request, whether formal or informal. He often took his own initiative. On the other hand, the British imperial and more local colonial governments were often interested enough in officially participating at the shows that they made formal requests of Australian scientists, Mueller among them. That was certainly the case during the 1880s. Mueller wrote the colonial undersecretary that he would comply with the colonial secretary’s written request and “endeavour to bring together as many industrial articles, as may be within my reach departmentally or otherwise for the Calcutta Exhibition,” held in 1883–1884. Mueller contributed to Bosisto’s promise to “ensure a thorough representation of the indigenous products of Victoria” at the South Asian show. Among such “products” was “the large Todea-­fern,” commercial woods, and 70

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dried plants organized in one way or another by Mueller. In the case of the Todea-­fern exhibits, he was duplicating what had been successfully displayed the same year at the Horticultural Exhibition in St. Petersburg and at Amsterdam’s International Exhibition.19 Calcutta was neither the first nor last example of Mueller responding to and working with an official governmental inquiry or request. Victoria’s governor was anxious to make known local industries and resources at the time of the 1866–1867 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition and thus forwarded exhibits of paper manufactured by the government botanist from indigenous vegetable substances. “There can be no doubt that this and the neighboring Colonies can supply abundant materials for the manufacture of paper,” heralded the governor in one of several letters sent with the scientific and industrial samples to the secretary of state in London.20 Public tests of the colony’s paper would prove its commercial value, the urgency of which was provoked by realization that British India would exhibit and could thus provide to consumers its own “materials for the manufacture of paper.” Intra-­ imperial economic rivalries once again helped drive forward that project of applied botany, among other scientific or science-­related programs. In this case, public science included commercially relevant science. Mueller’s report on the popularity of eucalyptus oil samples at the 1862 London show urged that a small laboratory be built on the Botanic Gardens grounds in Melbourne to take advantage of such economic and scientific interest.21 The activities at London’s International Exhibition in 1862 were not exceptions but part of a longer-­term pattern of participating in domestic production and overseas, if not more likely imperial, trade. Bosisto’s and Mueller’s goals dovetailed. These were among many examples of the ways by which scientific exhibits might influence local economic developments and of how such exhibition activities were connected to Mueller’s and others’ wider ambitions concerning applied botany, a very public science “of our own.” It was to be commercial and local, but not isolated or parochial, and not money-­ making to the point of extinction. One might say a managed exploitation without biological exhaustion. Connections among scientists, scientific exhibits, and government officers were more often than not made with the goal of establishing new trade or increasing existing trade. Public science was married to public commerce, and the Calcutta International Exhibition was a moment of such matrimonial bliss. Visitors contemplated the purchase and use of Australian woods, boldly represented by timber trophies.22 Mueller had joined with T. Cosmo Newbery, scientific superintendent of Melbourne’s Industrial and Technological Museum, to organize that extensive display of “the timbers of the colony in various forms.”23 But such exhibits did not exhaust Mueller’s contributions. “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

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He also contributed an essay to the “carefully compiled” Handbook of Victoria and generally participated in many ways with Bosisto, by then a renowned chemist and their colony’s executive commissioner.24 The colonial botanist shared Bosisto’s success at Calcutta, earning awards for various exhibits, including those noted above that garnered commercial interest. The local Anglo-­Indian press was enthusiastic about Mueller and his botanical samples, praising the scientist as “one of the most eminent botanists in the world” and his exhibits for being “highly attractive, and ornamental, and useful.”25 Mueller’s displays were lauded not only for their economic and scientific value but also for their aesthetic quality. The botanist garnered two gold medals and other certificates.26 Public science defined in terms of the colony of Victoria made a mark at Calcutta. Those public activities were not inconsistent with Mueller’s personal advancement. Exhibitions puffed up the botanist’s own sense of self-­worth and his reputation at home and abroad with many contemporaries. Exhibition activities could be used in the service of self-­promotion, as well as in the promotion of transnational knowledge, national colonial science, and local social and economic development. In keeping with most, if not all, of his contemporaries (and successors), Mueller sought public and official recognition. His letter to the director of Kew Gardens seeking Australia’s first Royal Society medal at the time of Melbourne’s Centennial Exhibition included references to his work with exhibition committees as a sign of scientific and civic worth. The well-­known botanist wrote that “from the empire of plants I have always endeavoured to increase techno-­logic industries not only here but elsewhere, having been already one of the 12 local Commissioners for the first Paris Exhibition of 1855 here, the Right Hon. Mr. Childers, General Sir Andrew Clarke, and General Pasley being among my colleagues; I being again one of the Commissioners for the Melbourne Exhibition of 1888–89 now.”27 It is telling that Mueller considered such participation at the exhibitions to be so beneficial to his reputation and as a sign of his worthiness for the Royal Society medal. He was deemed worthy and received the honor. Association with fellow exhibition enthusiasts in this “empire of plants” did not hurt his cause either. References to his exhibition activities and contributions were testaments to how “he was a representative of science” in Australia and abroad, paralleling his scientific studies at the Botanic Gardens, explorations of the continent, and the naming of plants. While Mueller’s exhibition activities helped to define and bolster Australian, or at least Victoria’s, science and wealth, as well as claims for his own status, they did not shield him from controversy or prevent him from losing part of his portfolio in 1873.28 That year, he was stripped of his position as director of the government-­sponsored Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. 72

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In the confusing world of nineteenth-­century “rational recreation,” Mueller was too rational and not recreational enough at the gardens and exhibitions. Or, as the local press articulated the situation: Mueller was a botanist but not a gardener, although he stubbornly tried to be both.29 Looking back a few years, the Age was unsparing in its praise and its criticism: “Unfortunately the Baron, although admittedly one of the highest authorities of the age on botanical subjects, was utterly wanting in the knowledge of practical gardening.”30 As Mueller revealingly told his public audience in 1871, botanic gardens might serve entertainment and economic purposes but not to the detriment of their true objectives: “mainly scientific and pre-­ dominantly instructive.”31 His words came home to haunt him. Exhibitions served the same purposes in the same order for Mueller: instruction first, then recreation, “rational” science, then “irrational” entertainment. Exhibitions, like botanic gardens, allowed for the scientific comparison of many and varied samples brought from nearly all over the world. They were living taxonomies; object lessons in the scientific method that worked best when under the management of experts, men of science, an argument Mueller articulated in his capacity as government botanist, director of the Botanic Gardens, and active exhibition commissioner and exhibitor, but an argument which faced considerable and increasingly public, private, and official resistance. In a public life calling for flowers, Mueller provided shrubs, a tension not uncommon in the performative and consumer-­driven world of public and popular science. His arrogance probably did not help either. Mueller was a man of shrubs and not of flowers, and that professional distinction mirrored a more public one in the ways that the scientific enterprise was represented and integrated with other forms of material culture at Australian exhibitions and in Australian civil society. It was not as if Mueller stood alone. He had influential allies in this battle, including Andrew Clarke, surveyor-­general of Victoria, who told his audience at the Philosophical Institute in the 1850s that Australia’s young public institutions should not contain “merely ornamental specimens.”32 Ores, woods, and stones with practical applications might be displayed, but not “specimens that are interesting only because they are beautiful.”33 Perhaps this was sound and sensible policy as Clarke and the Philosophical Institute looked after and developed the colony of Victoria’s embryonic natural history museum, but perhaps not so politically sound and sensible once those institutions and collections were larger, permanent, and made accessible to the general public, a general public that had also significantly changed. Such was the ironic consequence of integration into society rather than isolation from it. What would be the role and status of Mueller’s applied botany research program as science itself and the roles and status of exhibitions “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

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in that program all became more public in a changing civil society? The Age provided one challenging, if not nearly impossible answer: the Botanic Gardens were to be “rendered useful, ornamental and instructive.”34 But who could devise and oversee such a plan? Whether Mueller or someone else was in charge, the Gardens (and thus the tax-­paying and visiting public) were at “the whim” of that director. Mueller well understood “useful” and “instructive.” It was the “ornamental” charge that was beyond his grasp. That was also the case with his exhibition work. Both were now in the public eye, and such science was judged by new criteria. With such issues and tensions in mind, exhibitions provided for Mueller and other local scientists ways to represent, possibly create, and negotiate such criteria underscoring an Australian science that was both public and national and, in doing so, acquire, not without controversy, some intellectual and social authority. Gardens and museums stood alongside exhibitions in that larger plan. One of the answers to achieve such grand objectives amid the scientific and larger uncertainties was expressed by Mueller in his lecture delivered in 1871 at the recently opened Technological and Industrial Museum in Melbourne. Exhibitions, libraries, museums, and gardens were all “centers” (and local centers at that), examples, in some cases, of permanent, national, seemingly at times self-­sufficient institutions which enabled Australian scientists to pursue scientific knowledge without always turning to Britain for resources, analysis, and authority.35 Those “centers,” or institutions, were part of local society. Here were local reference collections, some of which began as or were enlarged by exhibition displays, to which visitors and students could now conveniently turn for scientific knowledge. They were not overseas but quite local, such as the Ballarat School of Mines, praised for its “science education.”36 Their permanence, accessibility, and utility contrasted with the transitory beauty and amusement of local ornamental gardens and with the distant centers of learning. These local centers were social, intellectual, and institutional homes for formerly isolated, distant, and wandering scientists, but under whose control? Could they also achieve the justification demanded by the public? Legitimacy for and expressions of that control were among the reasons that Mueller and other Australian scientists continued to embrace participation at the exhibitions in the face of sometimes significant obstructions, financial and otherwise. That participation was one way to resolve (or at the very least address) on the local and Australian stages, if not to some degree imperial and global ones, those compelling colonial and settler anxieties about authority, control, or at least management of isolation, distance, and wandering. In doing so, Mueller could make a claim for the control and authority of public science, and also for some sort of public legitimacy. The colonial 74

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botanist and his Australian colleagues echoed the earlier optimism about exhibitions associated with Charles Babbage, the prominent English scientist and participant at the Great Exhibition in 1851. A reviewer of Babbage’s published reflections on the event concluded his review with that optimism: the Great Exhibition (and future such events) would enable “the scientific institutions of England [to] take their place beside the institutions of other lands—­her philosophers will appear, like theirs, in the positions which they merit, and with the decorations they have achieved.”37 Babbage’s work had not been without criticism of the Exhibition, but the reviewer noted its fundamental support for the mutually beneficial relationship between science and such public events. Mueller and many of his Australian colleagues thought that exhibitions would enable Australia’s scientific institutions and scientists themselves to “take their place” beside overseas scientists and institutions and within Australian society itself. Positioning, merit, and “decorations” were understood in light of not only overseas and imperial contexts but also, perhaps more urgently, the domestic and civic ones. Australian science was made local and national, as well as worldly and imperial, during and after the exhibitions. Mueller was at the front and center of that intellectual and social development. The botanist well knew that the creation of an effective “national” scientific community for the colony of Victoria, if not the larger Australia itself, depended upon the establishment of a permanent, well-­funded, and well-­ connected public science, a “scientific infrastructure” in Ian Inkster’s apt terms.38 That would be anchored in the mutually benevolent and reinforcing relationship among scientists, learned societies, exhibitions, colonial governments, and the public itself. Financial stability and intellectual independence without parochialism marked a true and legitimate public science in Australia. So did a scientifically inclined public sphere, although that objective might come at a price. That price included officially opening a new hall for the Philosophical Institute of Victoria, the forerunner of that colony’s own Royal Society.39 This was a historic moment orchestrated during his tenure as the institute’s president, and the government botanist took full rhetorical advantage of it.40 As Mueller repeatedly noted in his address delivered at the 1860 inauguration ceremony, science could serve and help define public policies and ideas, if not the more fundamental public interest itself, and most particularly a public science represented and encouraged by voluntary societies and exhibitions. Science as an intellectual practice and as a form of social behavior required permanent, fixed associations, or homes. Those existed for commercial, economic, and artistic objectives, so why not for scientific ones? Why not “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

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a public scientific institution to complement the many “social as well as political institutions,” such as chambers of commerce and literary societies? Fixed buildings and associations were not irrelevant, superfluous, or unnecessary, particularly in this “new” society; on the contrary, they provided “a home” within “the home,” an identifiable public presence for Australian scientists and science itself. They claimed and built that urban landscape. For Mueller, such venues also offered science as a bond to connect all intellectual disciples “in an harmonious and powerful communion,” as was the case less permanently, or less fixed, with exhibitions. Those were both essential for this vision of Australian society and the Australian nation, for science’s answer to the political and social queries of what is Australia and who is Australian. The opening of the Hall in Melbourne signified the “perpetual” existence of the scientific union, Mueller told his audience in words that later could be read in published form. That union’s labors were now consolidated for its members and others as well. “We have here early found a home, in which for centuries to come the philosopher, no longer a wanderer, may meet the man of kindred turn of mind—­an asylum where united work may strengthen the researches otherwise lost.” The use of the term “home” was particularly suggestive as a solution to the sense of wandering and exile, as much as to the twin tyrannies of isolation and distance, and prefigured Reverend Clarke’s later reference to finding for and by Australian scientists their own “spot of earth,” as discussed in the following chapter.41 The term “asylum” is notable as well, implying a home within a home, a separate sphere, isolated yet connected, respected and protected by and from the general public. There was a tension here between science as an elite practice for the public and science as a participatory practice by the public, between making science public and making it popular. Mueller was no democrat or populist; rather, he tended to fear at times the public’s threat to scientific practice and knowledge, if not also its predilection for ornamental flowers rather than taxonomic shrubs. Exhibitions and voluntary associations for Mueller were not unproblematic vehicles for the popularization of science or the construction of a public science. That being the case, Mueller recognized the essential links between scientists and the general community, as well as the material advantages to be gained from the very public roles that science and scientists might play in colonial civil society, a civil society in which the government took an active part by sponsoring science. He also understood the potential advantage of making science both public and popular. His address was not the only seed of the botanist’s rather ambitious public and private dreams for the society and its new Hall, an ambition imagining a future in which “other generations have extended this building to one of the more noble of the grandest southern 76

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City; when a long series of discoveries important in their bearings on Australia’s prosperity, will have been first enunciated at this forum.” In keeping with Redmond Barry’s contemporaneous cultural and intellectual plans for the city and colony, the Hall would “elevate the thoughts” of scientists and the public by hosting lectures, experiments, and a museum, displaying works from “every region of the globe,” as did the exhibitions.42 The Victorian scientist as overseas emigrant finally had a permanent structure, including library, museum, and lecture rooms. This was important not only for purposes of internal scientific contacts and interaction, of which there were significant yet limited ones in Melbourne itself during those days, but also, in a broader sense, for the anchoring of science and scientists within Victorian society, if not the wider and larger intercolonial Australian society itself. Here were echoes of the 1830 cry in Sydney for “a science of our own.” This was a national and civic institution, a scientific “association,” to which Mueller looked for future contributions to and from the city, colony, and wider world. The Council of Victoria’s Royal Society well understood those linkages and how they could be used. Its members voted to send a deputation in 1860 to the chief secretary, emphasizing “the importance of the” local Industrial Exhibition to be held the following year as preparation for the subsequent London International. The deputation was going to lobby for public funds, but the event was abruptly cancelled in the face of the secretary’s unexpected death.43 The discussions among Royal Society members at that time and their later interactions with future government officials were some of the growing signs of intellectual and scientific “progress” in the colonies and the connections between explicitly scientific activities, what was deemed to be in the public interest, and the exhibitions. Such colonial “progress,” both material and intellectual, mirrored the distribution during and after the exhibitions of Mueller’s official scientific exhibits and essays. The colonial botanist and others consistently turned to the exhibitions for materials for public display and private research at the colonies’ young institutions, including universities and museums. They exchanged during and after the shows local “national” or public scientific objects and scientific writings for those of other participating colonies and nations. The energetic Mueller used his official position as exhibition commissioner to secure both short-­ and longer-­term scientific contacts and exchanges between the colony of Victoria and Britain; in turn, such networks provided both personal and colonial advancement. In one case, the government botanist forwarded colonial timber to the London International Exhibition in 1862 to develop new and take advantage of existing “reciprocal interchanges” with English and other overseas scientific institutions.44 “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

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Mueller selected scientific samples for that show with the express purpose of opening up and facilitating scientific inquiries “of the highest importance to the Country.”45 He intended that those specimens of “Victorian timber” and ores, minerals, and rocks offering apparent geological “peculiarities” would capture the attention of British scientists, such as the Hookers at Kew Gardens, as well as that of manufacturers and businessmen in Britain, other overseas polities, and the Australian colonies themselves.46 The exchanges and purchases consummated in London often took advantage of previous communications and exchanges between scientists and scientific institutions in the colony of Victoria and their complements in other British colonies, Britain, France, and the United States.47 The botanist had proposed a regular exchange of specimens with Kew under the directorship of William Jackson Hooker as early as 1853. His own prestige at home and abroad was enhanced by such revived and new exchanges with prominent overseas figures and institutions of birds, trees, and minerals, among other scientific samples, the resulting acquisitions often on public display at Melbourne’s various institutions of art, science, and industry. Exchanges and correspondence continued during Joseph Dalton Hooker’s tenure at Kew between 1865 and 1885. Those and similar efforts were not without problems. To some degree, they were part of negotiating the public personalities, roles, nature, resources, and authority of science and scientists as the century progressed, a negotiation that some might say was particularly challenging in a colonial context. It was also true, though, that Mueller was rarely above and beyond controversy, whether related to the goals of science, scientific taxonomies, and exhibition displays or not. A. M. Lucas reminded his readers about such controversies in his informative essay on the botanist published during the Australian bicentenary.48 Lucas hints rather briefly that in one of those moments of controversy Mueller could not resolve the tensions between education and entertainment at the colony’s Botanic Gardens; that is, while Mueller was seen to be tending to the “shrubs” and economic plants, he was apparently ignoring the “flowers,” or recreational ones. The medal of botany had two faces and Mueller chose to exhibit and polish the wrong or unpopular one, at least wrong and unpopular to some influential contemporaries, among whom were his official superiors. That is not to say that he never made efforts more acceptable to those others—­such as the displays at the Calcutta International Exhibition recognized for their utility and beauty—­but perhaps such examples were insufficient. William Westgarth had earlier praised the colonial botanist in the early 1860s for promoting “the cause of the ornamental in and around Melbourne . . . [by] adorning the banks of the Yarra with many specimens of select and suitable exotic timber, such as cedars.”49 Ornamental and practical were at that 78

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moment married and equally emphasized on “the banks of the Yarra,” but that relationship seems to have been the exception rather than the rule and not often the case with Mueller’s exhibition displays. “Rational recreation” in nineteenth-­century Australia was to be both rational and recreational, after all, and whether the scientist exhibited plants at botanic gardens or timber at exhibitions, he was held accountable to that dual objective. The visiting Englishman Anthony Trollope articulated Mueller’s dilemma: by 1873 the botanist had made the Melbourne “gardens a perfect paradise of science for those who are given to botany rather than beauty.”50 In doing so, he had eliminated the attraction and educational value for “ninety-­nine in every hundred” visitors. Mueller was praised as a “learned curator,” but one who had sacrificed charm and beauty for utility and science, a sacrifice noticeable when the English visitor compared gardens in several Australian capital cities. “In Melbourne the gardens are more scientific, but the world at large cares but little for science. In Sydney, the public gardens charm as poetry charms. At Adelaide, they please like a well-­told tale.” Not content with that implied criticism of Mueller and his gardens, Trollope concluded, “The gardens at Melbourne are as a long sermon from a great divine [Mueller],—­ whose theology is unanswerable, but his language tedious.”51 Trollope’s was by no means the only public view about Mueller’s work at the Gardens and its relationship to public science. One visitor contradicted it by suggesting at least the “promise” of beauty. But Trollope’s view was shared by many, at least in spirit if not always in tone and wording.52 Public science, including the study of trees and plants, required charm and utility, aesthetics and taxonomy, whether at gardens or exhibitions or both, as the colonial botanist’s colleagues were discovering. The same might be increasingly said of museum collections as well. Trollope echoed the common criticism that some public institutions and events incorrectly “sacrificed beauty to science,” or to economic utility, thereby depriving the public of its gratifying spectacle and, it was hinted, its money’s worth. It might be that either charm or utility would have to be sacrificed, but, if that were the case, to his critics Mueller had sacrificed the wrong one. Were entertainment and education, pleasure and knowledge, compatible in Australia’s growing public sphere? Could its public science contain in equal measures “the charm of flowers” and the “production of scarce shrubs”? That dualism, or tension, had been present since the first Australasian Botanic Gardens in Sydney in the early nineteenth century. It was apparent to at least one early visitor to the capital city, who remarked that the public gardens included “specimens of the vegetable productions of almost every part of the globe . . . assembled for the study of the scientific, and the instruction and wonderment of the uninitiated.”53 That traveler perceived in the “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

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early 1850s the dual purposes of laying out the Gardens as one of the “healthy outlets from Sydney dust and heat” at the very same time that it was also intended to promote the scientific study and comparison of “the floral produce of many widely distant lands.” Here were plants from the Cape, China, Peru, Japan, India, New Zealand, and the Canary Isles. It was “a very useful establishment” and a “pleasant place of public resort.” Not unlike later exhibitions themselves, one section of the Gardens was for education and the other for entertainment, the twain rarely meeting. The visitor also noted, however, that the local legislature was not always eager to fund the Gardens.54 By 1870, the Illustrated Sydney News remarked that visitors to the lower Botanic Gardens in Sydney could enjoy “romantic walks, grass plots, fish ponds and arbors,” all part of an accessible and liberating “attraction to the dwellers in the dusty city and its suburbs.”55 The accompanying engraving of a “Scene in the Lower Botanic Gardens, Sydney” included the expected significant vegetation but emphasized the leisure walking and the shaded retreat (figure 3.2). The “cool sea-­breeze rippling” in the nooks and banks provided the necessary respite from urban life. It was almost an afterthought that such a retreat included “trees, shrubs, and flowers, mostly indigenous to the Australian colonies.” Natural history was here in the forms of ponds and aviaries, but it was recreation that mattered, and not education, a point brought home to readers (and future visitors) by the inclusion of the “ornamental pavilions.” From London, the Graphic recommended visiting for pleasure the Gardens in its special supplement at the time of Sydney’s International Exhibition.56 Mueller inherited across time and borders in mid-­and late-­century Melbourne both the tensions inherent in “rational recreation” and the funding uncertainties inherent in public gardens. He struggled with limited monies to make his Gardens and exhibition displays more decorative, as Westgarth noted, but there is little doubt that Mueller’s heart, mind, and budget were devoted to the scientific and commercial objectives—­that is, making his Gardens more “useful” and less “recreational” as part of his research program in applied botany. The same could be said of his approach to the development of Victoria’s “forest culture,” which included distilling and exhibiting oils from eucalyptus trees for the Melbourne Exhibition in 1854 and the London International eight years later. He was clear about such views and goals in his respectful and practical 1871 public lecture on “Forest Culture in Its Relation to Industrial Pursuits.”57 This should not have surprised the audience or readers of the subsequently published text. Since the later 1850s, Mueller’s official reports had recognized the Gardens as a “place of recreation,” but his policies of cultivation, exchange, and study had been driven by economic, medicinal, commercial, and 80

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FIGURE 3.2.

“Scene in the Lower Botanic Gardens, Sydney.” Illustrated Sydney News, October 26, 1870, 76, used with the permission of the National Library of Australia

other “scientific” objectives.58 In selecting plants to display and study, he looked for “beauty combined with utility,” but the latter trumped the former if they could not coexist equally. Or, perhaps, one might suggest that beauty was in the eyes of the beholder and that Mueller’s distinctive eyes were out of focus for his time and place. If nothing else, Mueller was consistent; it was the world around him—­particularly the public sphere of Australian leisure and culture—­that was changing. His was the school of shrubs embattled by the school of flowers. Trollope hoped that “the flowers may carry the day against the shrubs,” and, in many ways at most times, they did. A later visitor to Melbourne’s “Botanic Gardens, just outside the town,” proclaimed with delight that “they have no great scientific pretensions, as their name would imply, but are merely pleasure-­gardens, decked with all of the variety of flowers which this land . . . produces in abundance.”59 He later praised as “the prettiest garden in the world” the Botanic Garden in Adelaide.60 Charles Moore, Mueller’s fellow botanist and exhibition participant across the border in New South Wales, was celebrated at the time by Richard Twopeny, the influential Australian journalist, for creating the opposite of the Melbourne Gardens. That is, the popular Botanic Gardens in Sydney, which was “primarily a place of popular resort, and . . . not encumbered with too “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

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many strange plants at work.”61 The rather polite essay concluded with a rather nasty gesture to its readers that “Baron von Mueller has not been at work here.” It is quite possible that Mueller and his Gardens were caught in the crossfire of a colonial political battle. One would hesitate to ignore the significance of political motivations and party machinations in such matters, including the sharp reduction in Mueller’s budget. Perhaps, though, more was at stake here? Did Twopeny favorably compare Moore to Mueller not only because the latter seemed to be either constantly bringing grievances against the colonial government or constantly responding to those brought against him, but also because Moore catered to the recreation side of rational recreation, or the entertainment side of science, in the forms of gardens and plants, rather than the experimental and commercial side, as did Mueller? Exotic plants were popular when considered as a backdrop or setting for bands and cricket, rather than as the essential subjects themselves of the public gardens. This was part of the change in attitudes toward popular culture and mass entertainment, including science as part of that duo. Advocates for public recreation moved away from the earlier Benthamite and Evangelical notions of “improvement” via reform-­directed entertainment and toward ideas of “civilizing” by calling upon bread and circuses, or spectacle, and the beautiful. Exhibitions replaced churches in that discussion. At the very least, the balance between the two views shifted with increasing emphasis on the showmanship value. Might science become too embedded in civil society and public culture, losing its distinctive identity, authority, vision, and place? Were exhibition categories and garden displays blended together in one massive public display, rather than a taxonomy of distinctive yet complementary parts? Here were “nearly all possible and impossible things under the sun,” but how was one to separate and evaluate, think about each—­the flea and the tree—­in a different way? Perhaps that distinction was irrelevant in the larger “cosmos” of public culture and its representative examples: exhibitions and gardens. Mueller’s public statements about the objects of government botanic gardens were clear and consistent, although many others’ objectives for such gardens changed over time. His lecture on that topic in 1871 suggested that the objects of such institutions were the advancement of local research and knowledge, according to “a real spirit of science,” by which local industries could be encouraged.62 The Gardens were to demonstrate the practical connection between the botanical sciences and commerce. “All other objects were secondary, or the institution ceases to be a real garden of science.” It is not a strenuous stretch to see that exhibitions consistently served for Mueller the same fundamental scientific purposes, and not recreational ones. Both were “a vivid and powerful influence” in and for the colony, but had the botanist’s 82

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embracing of “utilitarian commerce” helped to seal the fate of his beloved, nearly sacred scientific independence? The powers that be disagreed with Mueller. After debate in Melbourne’s halls of power, the positions of government botanist and director of the Botanic Garden were separated. The “real” scientific work would be undertaken by Mueller as government botanist; the Gardens would appeal to the recreational needs of the colony’s growing populace and number of visitors under the tutelage of W. R. Guilfoyle. Mueller mocked him in a letter to Joseph Hooker in 1873 as a “nurseryman [with] no claims to scientific knowledge whatever,” who got his position because he was the “nonscientific cousin of the wife of the Minister responsible.”63 The division of titles, labor, and authority was confirmed by the government in 1873.64 Melbourne’s City Council had already intervened the previous year, removing some of the land from Mueller’s Gardens and using it as general public parkland. Scientific culture in the colony had battled the compulsion to find for land and collections a social utility or a recreational one, if not necessarily an economic or analytical one. Perhaps Mueller was an early warrior and victim of “two cultures” at war, as well as of his own quest for independence, utility, legitimation, and acceptance. Did public science become less scientific as it became more public? As Graham Burnett wrote several years ago, “Science is indeed in culture, just as it is in history.”65 Mueller’s career suggests that it is also in society, and the scientific enterprise ironically lost its soul by connecting itself so successfully with public life. The answers to those concerns remained somewhat ambiguous during the later years of the century. The Gardens became more and more “beautiful” but less scientific, according to Mueller’s definition of that term. He continued his own “real” scientific work there and at exhibitions, as visitors to the Gardens attended “moonlight” concerts. Those summer gatherings “possess[ed] every element of beauty”: rich foliage, fragrant air, “brightly dressed promenaders” strolling about, shade, and music from “the fine band.”66 This was beauty within a scientific context, but not Mueller’s scientific beauty. A later visitor confirmed the apparent success of the professional and cultural division, noting that the Gardens “are prettily laid out, and nicely kept,” not a common description of Mueller’s scientific and commercial Gardens.67 By the mid-­1880s, Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens were “civilizing” by appealing to a sense of beauty and leisure, rather than to one of reason and utility. That was the result of Guilfoyle’s “nursery” touch, as opposed to Mueller’s laboratory one.68 That did not mean there was no criticism, as Guilfoyle was also mocked by the local press. The Age noted “a monstrous outrage on common sense and good taste . . . in the shape of a huge heap of stones, intended as a specimen of rockwork!”69 One would have presumed “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

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that this was precisely the type of non-­scientific but aesthetic contribution that Guilfoyle could make but Mueller would not. Alas, the contributor was not impressed. “Evidently rockwork is not Mr. Guilfoyles forte.” Bushes and flowers had been divided, but the latter still required the appropriate touch. For some contemporaries, that touch was beyond both Guilfoyle and Mueller. On the other hand, it is safe to say that the general public reactions to the Gardens improved under Guilfoyle’s tenure. Visitors to the Sydney Gardens at the same time praised their particular recreational and aesthetic qualities, one noting that they were “most picturesquely situated overlooking & bordering on the Harbour.”70 Eager to be seen as advanced and civilized, the Australians now displayed such characteristics increasingly according to desires of popular beauty, rather than professional utility, the sign of progress commonly seen in the size and ornamentation of exhibition halls and botanic gardens, rather than with the focus upon the usefulness and commercial value of scientific societies and economic timbers, attributes which might be celebrated elsewhere. The executive commissioner for the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition echoed those sentiments about public life in general, claiming that his ambitious show “has done good educational service to the masses of the people by placing before them works of art of the highest character, and in this propagating sound principles of taste and awakening a love for the beautiful.”71 This is not to argue that Mueller did not have a sense of the beautiful, or that he did not understand that there could be an aesthetic and tasteful side to science. Rather, his sense of the beautiful in science did not coincide with how others perceived beauty and its purpose in public displays, whether at the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne or the Garden Palace in Sydney. Taxonomic order and economic utility were the government botanist’s criteria for beauty, not the transcendent and emotive sense of the visual and fine arts at the International Exhibition, or the recreational and ornamental sense of the landscape and gardening at the Gardens after 1873. “What can be more instructive,” Mueller queried his audience in 1871, “than to compare allied species, from often widely distant parts of the globe, when placed in culture side by side,” as he reiterated his commitment to utility before ornamentation, shrubs before flowers, or the beauty of science on his own terms, and perhaps the terms he shared with many other colonial scientists?72 Was that not also the purpose, strength, and attraction of exhibitions? Mueller’s was hardly a popular position as the century moved toward its concluding years, although there were still some in governmental circles who supported it. On the other hand, those who agreed with Mueller were fewer and fewer among the colony’s influential public decision-­makers and its general public.73 84

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One might note, though, that the local press and Mueller agreed on one point: the botanic gardens and their accompanying activities served a public interest. The Age interpreted this public interest as not bound to “the whim of the director, curator or Minister” but, rather, embodied by a trust.74 By 1880, there was a “Harbor Trust and other trusts,” so why not create one for another institution tied to the public, the Gardens? The paper’s editors recommended that the interests of utility, ornament or beauty, and instruction would be best served if the government botanist and gardener would “hand over the garden to a Trust, with an annual allowance for its maintenance and improvement.” This was a rather direct marriage of science and the public interest. Without ignoring or downplaying the controversies and failures, Mueller’s publications, exchanges, lectures, displays, and jury analyses remind us that he and other Australian scientists assumed active and creative roles at the exhibitions as part of increasingly interactive and collaborative public national and imperial scientific systems, or networks. Exhibition collections and publications underscored Australian contributions to creating, defining, and maintaining not only a civic or more local national and public scientific enterprise and network, but the imperial and worldly ones as well. Not many at the time publicly doubted the importance of generating local scientific knowledge in the form of publications, displays, and exchanges at the many exhibitions in the colonies and abroad. Both public gardens and popular exhibitions brought within grasp of the colony of Victoria and their visitors a comprehensive and systematic organization of the globe, or, locally, an Australian-­orchestrated taxonomy and comparison, whether permanently (as with the Botanic Gardens) or temporarily (as with the exhibitions). That was the case for the Gardens when they were under Mueller’s control. Mueller’s Herbarium remained part of his portfolio as colonial botanist and it thus remained such a place of scientific study. To Mueller such a local site reduced the necessity of constant long-­distance reference, or even travel, to an overseas “central institution for phytologic” or other scientific information.75 Most local and some “distant” scientific queries could now be answered more often than before by reference to Melbourne’s comparative collections, a more permanent contribution than the seemingly transitory one of landscaped beauty and a more locally, Australia-­focused or Australia-­oriented nationalist one than the deferential bow toward overseas or imperial experts and institutions. The collections in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Melbourne were strengthened by acquisitions via purchase or exchange at the exhibitions. They were local but not isolated, local and global rather than parochial—­the exhibition activities among others linking them in active networks of scientific experts, collections, publications, and ideas. Those networks connected before, “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

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during, and after exhibitions the “distant” Australian scientist and public with wider worlds near and far. Exhibitions defined and placed “public culture,” including science, from the colonies and then the world side by side for comparison and study. The power and benefits of comparing samples and therefore, to some degree, of competition and connections were essential to Mueller’s understanding of scientific value and truth. Perhaps one did not need to defer to the spectacle of visual beauty? Comparisons and competition among specimens were ways to find the truth and generate more accurate taxa, whether at the gardens or exhibition, and not truly possible without a home, or center, to end the sense of wandering. The same could be said of the various permanent, interconnected scientific “centers” resulting from the early exhibitions and stimuli for later ones. They were also institutions to compare and contrast both allied and non-­allied species from an ever-­expanding source of materials. Here was a metaphor for and a working object lesson in one type of federation. The scientific federation as a way of doing science, generating public good, and envisioning Australian society and the nation across colonial borders preceded the constitutional federation of 1901. Joseph Carne noted it eight years before at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. The congresses and public activities of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (founded in 1888 and renamed in 1930 as the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science) drew upon and, as places of serious public science in the name of the nation and the public, complemented, if not in some ways supplanted, the exhibitions. They fulfilled much of Babbage’s and Mueller’s dreams of what scientists could achieve at and gain from exhibitions and from a direct engagement with public life. Science was made more accessible not only to Australian scientists but also to the Australian public, placing science and scientists within civil society—­ not isolated on its edges, not outside of it, and not entirely separated in disconnected pockets within that growing public sphere. Mueller’s reference to an “asylum” and Clarke’s to a “dwelling place” were intended to envision a node in a larger social network rather than to isolate science. Without strong, long-­term, local scientific and professional traditions to call upon, those savants complemented other Australian groups, such as pastoralists and merchants, who also struggled to naturalize their presence and authority in this seemingly new and strange land and to tame within that increasingly complex society the settler tyrannies of isolation, wandering, and distance. Mueller and Clarke were well aware of such predicaments and opportunities, and the way by which participation at popular exhibitions on a regular basis provided significant resolution of such professional, intellectual, and social dilemmas.

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  four “Dwellers in the Desert Living in Tents” Exhibitions and Overcoming Scientific Distance, Isolation, and Wandering

conditions and experiences of distance, isolation, and wandering were 1

particularly pressing for emigrant scientists in nineteenth-­century Australia. The scientists’ predicament was part of the oft-­cited “tyranny of distance,” Geoffrey Blainey’s bold and controversial hypothesis articulated over fifty years ago, as well as of the uncertainties, discontinuities, and isolation of intellectual life in Australasia, all made even more so by “distance” in its many forms.2 Blainey argued that “distance was a central and unifying factor in Australia’s history” and that Australia developed in response to this “tyranny of distance.” That is, Australians in all walks of life struggled to tame distance, whether measured in geographical, political, social, or intellectual terms or some combination thereof. Distance in its various forms between Australia and the outside world and within Australian itself was the most compelling force shaping Australian history and identity: exile and isolation molded the Australian response to political, social, and economic issues as they created both disabilities and opportunities. Distance and isolation, not proximity and integration, defined the Australian and Australia itself. They also defined and shaped the development of science in the Australian colonies and how scientists from those polities and societies participated at the many local and overseas exhibitions. Even when

praising Australian successes at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, one Department of Mines official noted, “There was only one point which was universally regretted, viz., the great distance which separates Australia from the rest of the world, and which renders it possible to a limited number of favoured ones only to make a professional use of the abundant scientific treasures.”3 Distance was to be “regretted,” yes, but it was not an insurmountable challenge to Australian science and scientists. The careers of Ferdinand von Mueller, Rev. W. B. Clarke, and Brough Smyth, among others, include meaningful connections with the overseas professional scientific community. That trio participated as members of learned societies in Britain, exchanged samples and published papers, and corresponded with colleagues. William John Hooker, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and Mueller were linked, as were Smyth and the Linnean Society of London. The Philosophical Society of Victoria echoed Smyth’s activities and forwarded its publications to that same society in the British metropole.4 Those were not insignificant ways to address distance and isolation. This chapter recognizes those and discusses the many different ways that participation at exhibitions also provided opportunities to overcome such “tyrannies,” making them at least manageable and sometimes even exploiting them. What first appears as a liability could be a benefit. Australian scientists appeared to suffer because of their geographical isolation from the seeming “centers” of scientific study in London and Paris, but they also benefited from the social distance from the established and orthodox practices and ideas of a scientific ancien régime. While Australian scientists often longed for access to the libraries and collections found in Europe and Britain, Jan Todd argues that their isolation induced them to focus on “location-­specific” data and problems.5 This enabled local scientists to exploit the distance from an older scientific culture, which often challenged the rise of new professions and ideas in the nineteenth century, and to address local matters without the overriding sense that they were less compelling and significant than were British ones. Science was a vehicle to confront and address questions of collective and individual inferiority. Bernard Bailyn, the prominent historian of colonial America and the American Revolution, has suggested that, contrary to assumptions, distance and a sense of provincialism might encourage meaningful and substantial intellectual independence from the cultural and political center: hence intellectual creativity and innovation.6 Might not nineteenth-­century Australian scientists have shared the American Founding Fathers’ ability to think differently about public problems in a context in which they knew quite well the distant center’s answers but were not bound by them? This could be a selective isolation and a managed distance, which Bailyn considers critical for 88

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explaining the creative political imagination of figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Such a distance might also help explain some of the more creative and innovative developments within nineteenth-­ century Australian science, developments possible because of, not in spite of, living and working on the periphery. Participation at the exhibitions provided examples of the managed and often fruitful “distant” relationship between the imperial state and its scientists, and among the Australian scientists themselves, reminding them of the absence of formalized, older forms of intellectual authority in Australia. Networks running to, through, and from the exhibitions allowed, if not encouraged, such scientists to gain and exploit proximity when helpful and to preserve distance when proximity was not so helpful, or a liability. At other times, exhibitions forced proximity upon them, as networks worked in various directions, not always to the benefit of Australian scientists. Newness, distance, and isolation were sometimes not liabilities, but most agreed that the sense of internal wandering and instability was.7 Where could those wanderers find a home? How could scientists position themselves to enjoy a relatively fixed and secure position of authority within Australian society? Exhibitions were one answer—­certainly not the only one but one that was popular and recognized at home and abroad. The shows were significant within their own more immediate context and also within the larger contexts of global affairs and connections. This answer made sense by itself as a specific experience and made even more sense when that specific experience was connected to learned societies, public lectures, the government, and other examples of public science. Mueller and Reverend Clarke recognized that reality, or at least opportunity. They also recognized that the sense of wandering, migration, and isolation was essential to nineteenth-­ century Australian identity, including that of scientists living and working in the colonies. Clarke tended to be more poetic than Mueller. One might speculate that condition was in part a result of his experiences in the pulpit. The geologist expressed his views about science and scientists in lyrical terms at the annual meeting of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1875. He turned philosophical after expected comments about minerals, continuing explorations, and recent learned papers. Those were achievements that Mueller and other colleagues would have applauded. Clarke continued, suggesting that Australian scientists were sojourners, or “dwellers in the desert living in tents, without a spot of earth to call [their] own.”8 In response, Australian science needed “her temples and her worshipers,” best represented by permanent institutions and their visitors, fixed locales where men and women could view scientific experiments and collections, read “Dwellers in the Desert Living in Tents”

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scientific literature, and hear scientific lectures.9 Mechanics’ institutes and local chapters of the Royal Society, as well as the growing museums, were examples of such fruitful locales. Such centers could also help “connect the sciences with the practical business of life,” in the terms of one of the presidents of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria, but not only in the material sense of contributing to economic and commercial development.10 Contemporaries appreciated these developments, understanding a mutually beneficial relationship between temporary exhibitions and permanent voluntary societies. The Royal Society of Victoria was praised by the local press in 1873 for bringing “scientific men together,” and they congregated in ways that complemented and were connected to the exhibitions.11 They both supplied “a want in the community.” Scientists, audiences, and material culture congregated for a few months within the exhibition halls and gained a sense of permanence with institutions. This was in the spirit of both Redmond Barry and Mueller in neighboring Victoria. Exhibitions additionally offered Australian scientists various ways to tame and manage, if not take advantage of, distance and to address their sense of wandering exile and isolation: scientific exchanges and purchases, publication and distribution of scientific literature, construction of permanent structures and public collections, and other means by which they could participate from their own “spots on earth” in the vast networks of experts not only connecting the Australian colonies with one another and with other parts of the vast British Empire, but also nearly encircling the globe by the end of the century. Here were connected and not isolated “spots” to call and try to make their own, both within and beyond Australian society itself. Exhibitions also encouraged the normalization and expansion of existing practices, such as exchanges. Exhibitions did not necessarily create all of them anew. Geographic distance from scientific collections, for example, might be tamed by bringing the collections to Australia or Australians to the collections. Australian commissioners visited foreign courts at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and as early as the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition exchanged their colonial scientific displays for overseas ones. A “very valuable” collection of antediluvian fossils was solicited at the later show from, among others, the Paris Museum and Sir William Hooker at Kew Gardens, in exchange for quartz, maps and pictures, and zoological and botanical samples from Victoria. The foreign fossils were bound for the growing public museum in Melbourne.12 Such interactions reveal the duality and interactive structure of the imperial, international, and Australian scientific networks. On the one hand, the relationship among commissioners at the exhibitions appeared to be hierarchical, reinforcing by means of exchanges and other interactions Britain’s and 90

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Europe’s seeming dominance and centrality. Raw data and novelties generally traveled to the center for their evaluation, labeling, and transformation into useful knowledge after the shows. Among other notable and influential metropolitan scientists, Richard Owen expressed keen interest in studying, duplicating, and naming fossils displayed by the colony of Queensland at the 1871 International Exhibition in South Kensington.13 This post-­exhibition process at South Kensington, the British Museum, and Kew Gardens provided a scientific identity for and validated the name, value, and uses of such objects. This was one of many examples of what we might consider the imperial center’s expertise and system of knowledge importing scientific samples to study, claim, name, and evaluate. Such knowledge then could move out from that center to new locales and back the initial one of the colonies. That was not an unusual process, though hardly the only directional one. Exhibitions generated local centers of knowledge in the colonies themselves and provided opportunities for those centers to connect with others on mutual terms. It was also not the case that the seemingly normal center-­periphery relationship of, for example, London and Melbourne, proceeded without contest and negotiation. Contests between Australian and British scientists and scientific institutions included a “four-­year wrangle over [the] ownership” of a large meteorite.14 In that case, both Melbourne and London made claims as scientific centers. This “wrangling” revealed the types of tensions that could develop at exhibitions without careful negotiations and also how science outside of the exhibitions registered and interacted with civil society. There were battles among proponents of international science, English “imperial” desire for specimens, and local Australian civic pride, sometimes of the host city or colony itself. Who could claim and name the meteorite (and by implication other scientific samples) and with what authority and purpose? Exhibitions often provided an opportunity for the three parties to find an amicable resolution, the connected exchanges satisfying their different appetites. Not so in the case of the meteorite, which was the largest known sample at the time. Smyth understood the public significance of the meteorite and its location, writing an Australian colleague about how “great anxiety was felt at the proposal of this natural curiosity being removed from the colony.”15 Public science was not without its public tussles. Such negotiations and “wranglings” at the exhibitions enabled Australian scientists and scientific institutions to acquire valuable materials in exchange and to take advantage of the events to take stock of their own scientific resources. The Australians could at least make pretensions to being scientific centers in social, political, and intellectual terms. Taking such stock and assuming the role of scientific centers included soliciting locally produced “Special Papers,” maps, and diagrams expressing the scientific faces of “Dwellers in the Desert Living in Tents”

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colonial “progress,” such as those requested for and distributed at Sydney’s Intercolonial Exhibition in 1870. Those and accompanying materials were published in The Industrial Progress of New South Wales: Being a Report on the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1870 at Sydney; Together with a Variety of Papers Illustrative of the Industrial Resources of the Colony.16 That publication resulted from the determination among Australian exhibition advocates and officials that “an Official Report, presenting a comprehensive view of the Industrial Progress and Products in that year, should be prepared by some competent hand, so as to form a fitting memorial of an event that would otherwise fade away.”17 The text would self-­consciously note “progress” and do so in a permanent form. Among the “Part III.—­Special Papers” were scientific ones on “Sedimentary Formations of New South Wales,” “Coal-­Fields,” “Progress and Present State of Astronomical Science in New South Wales,” and “Australian Vertebrata—­Fossil and Recent.”18 The editors noted, “It was felt by the promoters . . . that the opportunity should not be lost of taking a general survey of the material development and resources of the Colony.” Such a survey included at its core scientific “development” and “resources,” issues of significant public interest. In this way, distance encouraged self-­reflection, stock-­taking, and a sense of independence—­or at the least, interdependence—­as exhibition commissioners from New South Wales and Victoria catalogued, shared, and exploited their colonies’ perhaps unique scientific materials, including essays on local topics and natural history specimens. Taking stock also included collecting samples for exchange and then housing the new acquisitions. Kangaroos, eucalyptus oils, and Aboriginal implements were among the unique Australian scientific exhibits exchanged for European ones. After the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, in one among many examples, the superintendent of the local Industrial and Technological Museum exchanged for German scientific exhibits copies of Brough Smyth’s Aborigines of Australia, “native plants,” and various publications by Mueller, the colonial botanist in Melbourne.19 Colonial scientists were not always in subordinate, or inferior, positions at the exhibitions, although at first glance the exhibition experience might appear to be one more example of the sometimes “irksome and demeaning” relationship between the imperial center and the colonial periphery.20 The Australians often held an equal hand in exchanges with English and other overseas scientists and officials. The exhibitions also revealed that the British and European centers’ exercise of intellectual and social power might create new centers in the colonies and support colonial and intercolonial proximity, not distance, and thus integration, not isolation. This was an increasingly

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multilevel, polycentric, interactive network of institutions and infrastructures. British and European officials cultivated exchanges with the Australians, and the latter commonly returned home with objects for their own study and display at local societies and museums. Australians struggling to tame distance and to create on their own terms both national institutions and a sense of scientific public culture benefited greatly from this relationship with Britain, among others, one of many two-­ way links requiring the active participation at the exhibitions of British and Australian scientists, both of whom were at times simultaneously civic, national, and imperial, if not also international. In all cases, they were public scientists, a positioning in light of public life and civil society as much as in relationship to a set of polities. Empire did not monopolize the language, process, and objectives of science; neither did the colonial nation or politics itself. That is not to argue that the results were not imperial, or national, or political. They often were, whether or not intended by scientists to be so. The exhibition experience tended at times to blur the distinctions between empire and nation, and sometimes the public provided such labels and not the scientists themselves. That was a not unexpected part of generating a public science. Imperial science was not necessarily not national science, and vice versa. Local or regional structures and conditions often determined the nature and impact of the scientific enterprise, including what contemporaries might have labeled it, and science was fundamentally understood in relationships with other public institutions, activities, and groups.21 This is a claim about the social positioning of science and scientists, not exclusive of a political positioning. Their positioning within local Australian society, which could be quite local in some cases, helped address some of the isolation and alienation. A political economy of scientific material culture developed at the exhibitions through which Australians could bridge, or tame, the distance from the Old World’s scientific establishment and their own internal distances. It should be noted, though, that what in hindsight appears to be a well-­regulated, orderly system of exchange actually at times developed through trial and error after a series of miscommunications and rejections. Melbourne’s chief commissioner found it very difficult to acquire exhibits equivalent to his own after the 1855 Paris show, and he either exchanged or disposed of many items without any advice from his superiors back in the colony. In practical terms, the sale or exchange of displays saved the cost of transporting them back to Australia. Sometimes there might be no interest in Australian exhibits. They were then left unsold and un-­exchanged, destined to be abandoned or, at considerable expense, returned to their colony of origin.

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Scholars have also importantly argued that “distance” was understood and measured not only by geography but also by social status, intellectual connections, and professional relationships of dependence.22 One could be near but far, or far but near. Australia’s physical distance from Europe and the vast physical space between its own cities does not explain everything. It does help, though. For Australian scientists undertaking practical matters, such as forwarding scientific collections or awaiting publications, geographical distance did matter and was only at least partially tamed with efficient, fast, and safe transportation systems. As with all myths, the “myth of Australian isolation” contains a kernel of truth and usefulness: just ask (if we could) the Victorian commissioners whose exhibits went down to the bottom of the sea with the wreck of the Colima en route to the “distant” Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876.23 Richard Daintree, Queensland’s agent-­general, had no better maritime luck, having lost in a shipwreck off of the coast of South Africa five years earlier his geological and fossil exhibits bound for London’s 1871 London International at South Kensington. The agent-­general wrote Reverend Clarke, “I lost all my collection of specimens in the wreck, and have not a single fossil to put my hands on. My fine collection of Clarke and Cape River lepidodendra, sigillaria, stigmaria, etc. are all at the bottom of the sea, together with the favorites from the Devonian limestones of the Upper Clarke.”24 Daintree had, though, saved all of his photographic negatives and displayed an impressive series of colored photographs at the London exhibition. Those included many images of scientific life in the colonies. As noted above, Owen was one of the local British scientists intrigued by the exhibited Australian, or Queensland, science and its samples. Regardless of the label, exhibitions helped reduce or manage that “distant” science and its “distant” samples. Most Australian exhibits arrived safely—­if not always on time—­in London, Philadelphia, and other overseas host cities. The American show was a particularly welcomed opportunity for acquiring samples and publications, including those scientific in nature and content, from the host country’s public institutions. Enthusiasm was shared by scientists and officials on both sides of the Pacific, including Joseph Henry, director of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The prominent American scientist expressed “much satisfaction” in a letter to Redmond Barry concerning the Victorian exhibits and promised to provide “duplicates” of American exhibits and additional woods, grains, and fibers from the US Department of Agriculture.25 Henry was pleased not only at the quality and quantity of Australian exhibits available for his acquisition, but also because he was able to overcome his previous difficulty in securing Australian samples for his collection.

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The Philadelphia show enabled the American scientist to succeed when other opportunities and venues had ended in failure. A “very considerable” collection of American exhibits and samples was sent to Melbourne via a “safer and more expeditious method,” particularly in light of the recent shipwreck. Those efforts were in response to Henry’s interest on the American side of the exchange and also the very active engagement from the Australian side. For the colony of Victoria alone, Barry was joined by the directors of Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens and the colony’s Agricultural Department in providing local exhibits and samples to their American colleagues with the understanding that they would receive American exhibits and samples in exchange.26 The Smithsonian remained an active participant in cross-­Pacific exchanges with Australian scientists and institutions, although not all Australian scientists found its role satisfactory. Mueller was among those critical of the Smithsonian, writing that it was “by no means a vehicle of all Government publications” and that those transacting business with the American institution experienced “often long delays.”27 That being noted, the Smithsonian was an important part of a widespread network and as such was also part of the successful longer-­term Australian efforts to establish and gain materials, respect, authority, and visitors for permanent scientific “centers” in their growing cities. The scientific collections in Melbourne benefited from the colony’s aggressive participation in overseas exhibitions and its regular hosting of shows. Victoria’s visiting special commissioner at the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition took advantage of Mueller’s steady flow of correspondence with William Joseph Hooker at Kew Gardens, and both Australians organized a return voyage to Australia filled with British botanical samples and learned volumes bound for the museum and Botanic Gardens after their exchange for various scientific exhibits from Victoria.28 The acquisition of exhibition displays for permanent collections continued to be among the top priorities of the scientists from Victoria and her sister colonies serving on exhibition committees. Scientific exchanges continued, often strengthening relationships within the British Empire, such as that between officials at Kew Gardens and the official government botanists at public gardens in Sydney and Melbourne and between the latter and their complements in British India. Australian scientists and politicians generally agreed that public collections should emphasize the useful, if not also the ornamental and beautiful. This objective shaped exhibition exchanges and purchases. Local scientists and public officials were particularly interested in acquiring and displaying objects of applied science at museums, where, in the words of one Queenslander in the early 1860s, “our young men must seek the rudiments of the science

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before they can go out into the world and collect additions to that stock of knowledge which ages have already gathered in.”29 Victoria’s surveyor-­general also urged that the local government and commissioners purchase exhibits to create practical museums, rather than form “a mere collection of curiosities, serving . . . to bewilder [rather] than to instruct.”30 That objective was particularly relevant, if not seemingly urgent, for colonies and cities addressing concerns about labor shortages, disorder, and mobility, notably in the wake of the midcentury mineral rushes. Redmond Barry’s addresses officially opening Victorian public institutions, including the School for Mines, articulated similar concerns and solutions.31 Those and complementary efforts to “connect the science with the practical business of life” encouraged participation in exhibitions, the funding of cultural centers, social order, and economic growth, but they also created the perception overseas of utilitarian colonial societies. Australian scientists battled those assumptions without ignoring the strong practical impulses in their own backyards. Additions to existing collections in colonial cities, such as Melbourne, made for larger and more diverse public displays and also strengthened the objectives of those collections’ permanence and importance for the growing sense of the Australian public and a public interest. Barry received a letter from one Melbourne citizen requesting the purchase of the phytological collection shown at the 1870 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition “in order that the people who have paid for it may have the same satisfaction” as the show’s visitors and thus improve the colony’s “industrial knowledge.”32 Two years later, local experts turned to the Victorian Exhibition in 1872 to acquire mineralogical samples and thus augment the collection at the local Industrial and Technological Museum. That would be accomplished by either purchasing outright exhibits on display or exchanging with Europeans examples of copper, bismuth, antinomy, and other ores generally “rare” in Europe but plentiful in the colonies.33 Those permanent collections were most scientifically and intellectually valuable when they contained duplicates or at least unique Australian scientific samples that could be replaced. Museum and exhibition officials could then use those local objects as currency for exchanges with other institutions, as well as for local analysis and application. After all, scientists and curators nearly everywhere asked the same question: What was the most efficient way to acquire such samples? A common answer: exhibitions. They provided a sensible, regular, and more often than not predictable venue for such acquisitions and did so in a way which involved the most parties and thus the most varied range of objects, as early as the 1850s. Sydney’s successful 1854 metropolitan exhibition encouraged the museum trustees in the host city to organize an exchange with the Royal Museum of 96

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Copenhagen. The Danish museum officers were particularly interested in Australian and Polynesian ethnographic articles; other overseas scientific bodies and experts requested Australian birds and flora. Sydney’s officials offered stuffed kangaroos, Aboriginal skulls, and auriferous rocks and, in return, received samples of fish from various Scandinavian rivers.34 The Australian Museum also developed a stronger relationship after the 1854 show with scientists in British India, notably those in Madras. By the early 1860s, the Sydney institution was exchanging scientific specimens with the Madras government and its Central Museum. The Australians forwarded samples of auriferous rocks to an eager curator and local geologists. In return, the Madras officials sent for study and display in Sydney Indian timbers, mammals, reptiles, and birds.35 The above is not intended to conflate or confuse museum exchanges with either museum participation at exhibitions or exhibition exchanges among non-­museum officials and scientists. It is rather to suggest that exhibitions drew upon, institutionalized, and encouraged in many ways previous exchanges. They could be complementary and mutually supportive. They could also establish new relationships. The Australian Museum continued throughout the century to take advantage of the exhibitions to broker exchanges that would enhance the collection back in Sydney and, at the same time, enhance its overseas reputation. Enhancement could be measured by the quantity, quality, and diversity of holdings and exhibits. Officials organized a series of exchanges with, among others, Dutch, Belgian, and Japanese institutions after the Sydney and Melbourne International Exhibitions in 1879 to 1881, building upon exchanges secured during the show. Australian scientists and curators provided a wide variety of indigenous birds and mammals. In turn, for example, the Nagasaki Museum sent a “general collection of the Japanese zoology” and fish shells.36 Such scientific exchanges often included prominent overseas scientists and officials, including T. H. Huxley in England and D. Charnay, the French Minister of Public Instruction. Over twelve samples of Australian fish were sent to Huxley after the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition, and the museum authorities presented Charnay with New Guinea birds and various fossils collected by the New South Wales Department of Mines. The French scientist’s interests often moved in the ethnographic direction, so, not surprisingly, he received for the Jardin des Plantes three skulls from New Guinea.37 Parties at and after the exhibitions also drew upon earlier transactions. As early as the late 1840s, Calcutta’s museum curator attempted to use exchanges with the Australian Museum to develop a complete representation of Australian vertebrata. Anglo-­Indians and government officials were later intrigued by rocks and other minerals from Australia’s gold fields after the rushes “Dwellers in the Desert Living in Tents”

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of the early 1850s.38 Australians continued to exchange zoological, geological, and ethnographic samples with the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal and government museums in both Calcutta and Madras during the last half of the century. Australian birds, for example, were exchanged for models of large Indian mammals, such as tigers and elephants. Exhibitions did not always give birth to such exchanges, for clearly there was interest in them before the shows. Exhibitions did, though, provide a venue to publicly regularize, advertise, and institutionalize—­if not expand—­intellectual and professional connections between and among colonial polities, often without the intervention of British officials, although sometimes with their assistance. The shows built upon earlier guidelines for regularized intra-­imperial exchanges and distribution of museum duplicates.39 Those and other exchanges became increasingly direct between colonial or national scientists and institutions, bypassing the British imperial ones with greater frequency, as the Australians negotiated and participated in that locality and network as nearly equals with others. In practical terms, the presence of so many museum officials (or their representatives) and displays made the exhibitions a relatively easy place to do the practical scientific and museum business of exchanges increasingly independent of British “imperial” approval and management. The same could be said about the outright purchase at exhibitions of scientific displays. In some case, funds were used to acquire directly, without exchanging Australian exhibits, significant objects bound for local public institutions. Such was the case at Melbourne’s International Exhibition in 1880, at which public monies were used to purchase for the host city’s “national” museum an extensive list of fossils, casts, shells, and flora from the other colonies’ commissioners and representatives of the American exhibits.40 Those and other Australian and overseas scientific objects obtained via exchanges and purchases at the exhibitions were also distributed among the colonies’ provincial institutions and societies. The curator of the museum at the Ballarat School of Mines in Victoria exhibited technological and scientific exhibits from various foreign courts at the Sydney and Melbourne International Exhibitions. Among those were exhibits and publications from the Syrian, Belgian, Scottish, Westphalian, and Straits Settlements courts, supplementing an already impressive collection.41 The Australian Sketcher was enthusiastic about the museum’s collections and concluded that the school was “doing good and useful work” in the pursuit of local science and science education.42 This centrifugal development out from the center followed the South Kensington precedent in the British Isles of circulating displays among

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Britain’s provincial areas, and, as was the case there, such Australian policies also generally enhanced the reputation and cultural authority of the local centers and their experts. Melbourne’s national museum, library, and art gallery encouraged its own little brothers and sisters, as had the South Kensington complex its own provincial institutional kin and offspring. The development of permanent colonial collections and networks thus further reduced the sense of distance and isolation between Australian cities and their outlying areas, as well as between Australia and Britain, by creating a local center or focal point for public science. A mini-­or sub-­hierarchy and network of scientists and institutions within Australia mirrored to some degree the hierarchies and networks within Britain and between Britain and its colonies. Simultaneously, the contributions of scientists to exhibitions helped connect such foci among and within the colonies, as well as between the colonies and the overseas world, thus further reducing the apparent dependence on the imperial scientific center and creating a focal point in capital cities for a radiating public science. In this case, perhaps the distance from Great Britain enabled cities such as Melbourne and Sydney to establish their own colonial museums and a relatively independent relationship with the smaller local satellite institutions within their own colony, as well as among and between the larger institutions in differing colonies.43 Distance was measured in material, political, social, and cultural terms. Those were among the challenges facing Australians wishing to create “a national museum,” as was proposed as early as the mid-­1850s in colonial Australian cities, Hobart and Melbourne among them. After public and private discussions, collecting expeditions, and government support, Melbourne’s Industrial and Technological Museum opened as the city’s and colony’s first public institution for educating the people in applied science and for fostering popular scientific and technological learning.44 By the 1860s, the museum’s staff and collections were connected to exhibitions in various ways. Officials participated as commissioners, exhibitors, and judges. The museum loaned and received exhibits. Those actions were in keeping with the earlier studies and recommendations about the various scientific and public roles museums and their staff could play. Students and advocates of the public significance of “national museums” in the colony of Victoria included Professor Frederick McCoy, an active exhibition participant, as well. He told his audience at the Philosophical Institute that “national museums” in Melbourne should, among other goals, serve “as a means of conveying valuable practical information to the masses of the public.”45 Exhibitions did so, as well, and they also contributed to a further goal expressed by the authors of the Reports of the Museum Committee of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria: “conveying valuable practical information to “Dwellers in the Desert Living in Tents”

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the masses of the public.”46 In the cases of the colony’s participation at exhibitions, that “public” included both those at home in Melbourne and those abroad in the overseas host city that could observe and enjoy the colonial displays. There were other noteworthy public connections among museums, exhibitions, and science. Government surveys and expeditions collected specimens intended for both museums and exhibitions. An early example of such an expedition was William Blandowski’s in the Darling and Murray River district. He was directed to make “investigations on the natural history for that district, and also, with a view of collecting as many specimens as possible for the National Museum.”47 That charge was shared by colonial botanists in Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales, as noted in chapter 2. Participation in exhibitions both at home and abroad also generally tended to articulate, address, and, in some cases, help resolve the challenges connected to establishing Melbourne’s “National Museum” and other such central colonial collections. That was most apparent when there was a consensus about what should be collected, displayed, and studied, a consensus which more often than not focused on the practical sciences connected to woods, minerals, and mining. Victoria’s surveyor-­general emphasized collecting and displaying the “rocks and fossils illustrative of the formations which occur in a gold-­ producing land.” He added, though, that the “nucleus” of a national museum might also include timber, plants, and other natural resources “useful in the arts and in medicine.”48 McCoy also discussed the importance of zoological and botanical collections in such museums.49 There might have been a general consensus about what to exhibit and study but less of one on questions of access, location, and the intended audience. In this way, also, exhibitions provided a complementary example, one that could be used by those advocating central, truly public and open museums, but also ones used by those fearful of, or at the very least anxious about, such democratic access to science and culture. Sometimes this was a matter of precisely who would control the institutions (and the exhibitions)—­for example, a local learned society, such as the Philosophical Societies found in major cities—­and from where the funding would come: private donors and/ or the government. Most contemporaries agreed on the idea of central, “national” museums and exhibitions, but not surprisingly they disagreed on precisely what those terms meant in practice, as all tried to come to terms with, tame, and perhaps even exploit their social, physical, and intellectual “distance.” Across the Tasman Sea, Hobart was an example of a private Royal Society’s “guardian-­ship” of the Museum of Natural History assisted by an

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annual government grant and the use of public land for the accompanying gardens. On the Australian mainland, among the first items on the agenda for the newly amalgamated Victorian Institute and Philosophical Society was the future of the colony’s Museum of Natural History. Might the government not be able to “maintain” the collection? In that case, the newly merged Royal Society would take “custody.”50 Members convened a special Museum Committee to consider the establishment of out of that museum a permanent, national collection, and they turned to developments in Hobart as a precedent for their efforts. There were debates about moving the collection to the University of Melbourne. Where should one find sufficient funding? The answers at the exhibitions and museums were a combination of private and public resources, a convergence that answered some (not all) queries but, in doing so, raised new ones about sustaining central, national, and public science.51 Many of those asking and answering those public queries about the new central museums were also active in the world of exhibitions. In quite practical terms, their concerns about both institutions included the need for a “suitable building,” whether an exhibition hall or a museum, and the necessity of hiring a “Director,” preferably an expert in one of the major scientific fields. McCoy, as a professor, museum advocate, and exhibition participant, understood the significance of such basic yet often controversial components of a successful exhibition and museum.52 Twenty years later and across the border in New South Wales, Prof. Archibald Liversidge was one such figure who connected museums and exhibitions. He was active at overseas and Australian exhibitions and at the University of Sydney in the ambitious project to establish a central, public, national, and complete “collection of specimens illustrating the Geology & Mineralogy of New South Wales.”53 In some ways, Liversidge’s efforts during the 1870s and 1880s echoed the earlier projects in Melbourne, but he also faced a problem that earlier generation did not. By the time Liversidge undertook this project, there were dispersed collections and institutions in Sydney. His difficulty was less in establishing those, as was the case in the 1850s, than in trying to work out a system whereby duplication was minimized, researchers and visitors could engage collections relatively near one another, and new and compelling scientific, technological, and economic issues might be addressed. Exhibitions proved useful to both Liversidge and the Royal Society of Victoria as they sought answers to those rather significant practical questions concerning public institutions. Exhibitions were also helpful points of reference to the broader, perhaps more existentialist questions, those addressing what might be the appropriate relationship between science and the public “Dwellers in the Desert Living in Tents”

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interest. Again, exhibitions were “public” experiences, or at least self-­ consciously intended to be so, and in ways that included not only reflecting or representing the public but also shaping it. Exhibition literature played a role in such matters. The Australian scientists’ duties before, during, and after the shows included participation in the explosion of official and private exhibition publications, an important brick in the edifice of such a public science. Among those texts were catalogues, visitors’ guidebooks, jurors’ reports, and formal scientific essays. Some listed the “dry details of goods exhibited and lists of exhibitors”; others described the scientific and commercial uses of exhibits or were more in keeping with formal scientific surveys and papers.54 Sir Henry Cole was quite explicit back in England about his ideal exhibition catalogues, a status sometimes only achieved after delays and errors: “The Catalogues described objects, or groups of objects, together with the names of the artist, proprietor, or producer of each.”55 Readers should be able to follow the entries in the same order as the exhibits were displayed, and some catalogues might include prices and commentary “by experts in the several classes.” In a representative case, exhibition commissioners for the colony of New South Wales and both its Fisheries and Surveyor-­General’s Offices forwarded for display at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition at South Kensington a series of government reports, descriptive catalogues, and publications of scientific societies. Among the latter were texts from the Linnean Society of New South Wales.56 Whether standing on their own or as part of a larger publication, such scientific writings served a variety of personal, professional, and perhaps even national and imperial purposes, not the least of which were publicly taking stock of scientific resources and knowledge and leaving a more permanent record than the seemingly ephemeral experience of working at and visiting the exhibitions. Some scientific publications also made claims in the name of seemingly apolitical universal knowledge or internationalist authority at the very same time that local Australian commissioners used their publications as currency in exchange for other countries’ scientific works and exhibits. George Collins Levey, the active and seemingly ubiquitous exhibition commission secretary, proposed exchanging for “any works published under the auspices” of France’s Ministre de l’Instruction et des Beaux Arts a handful of local scientific publications on Australian exploration and Aboriginals, as well as the official Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria.57 Others requested that locally written and locally published scientific texts be understood and received as exhibits in and of themselves, evidence of the progress in scientific knowledge and “in the art of bookbinding.” That was the case when the chairman of Queensland’s commission to the International Exhibition of 1871 requested 102

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“an exhibit, consisting of a copy of Mr. Sylvester Diggles’ work on Australian birds, suitably bound.”58 For the scientists themselves, exhibition publications provided the opportunity to enhance their own authority and position, discuss and evaluate selected displays among the vast ocean of exhibits, and attract the interest and attention of their colleagues in Australia and abroad. By generating knowledge and provoking interpretations, such writings also served as weapons in the public battle for cultural and intellectual authority, if not influence and legitimacy.59 For commissioners and other official sponsors, the inclusion of scientific writings provided signs of “intellectual progress” to accompany signs of economic progress, and in doing so served to display and take stock of Australia’s expertise and resources. That stock-­taking could present a less mercantile face to those gazing upon the colonies. We might consider exhibition publications as a further means to connect and situate the Australian colonies and their scientists in the worldwide and imperial webs of science at the very same time that they did so for the more local or national webs. The audiences were both near and far for such publications. Those permanent records allowed Australian scientists to address the general public and other scientists, increasingly and with greater authority on their own terms. At the time of the London International in 1862, Barry (the colony of Victoria’s executive commissioner) turned to Melbourne’s own scientists, including Mueller, Frederick McCoy, and Smyth, for official and expert essays on the colony’s natural history, geology, botany, mining, and social statistics.60 Those local professionals provided in their own terms “the most interesting particulars connected with the physical, Scientific, and Social History and condition of this Country.” Bound copies of the essays were distributed at the exhibition, thereby, in Barry’s words, presenting “in a simple, concise, and striking form, at once authentic and authoritative,” the advancement of Victoria’s science. The underlying and not insignificant claim was that the colony could understand itself and be understood by others by the writing and reading of such local expert and scientific reports. Barry envisioned “a physical atlas” developed from local scientific and statistical collections, compiled, analyzed, and written by local experts in the pay of the colonial government. What audiences were intended? One gets the sense that there was a local audience, perhaps within the colony, but also within the Australian colonies at large and Britain. Barry further suggested publication for European audiences.61 Thus, Australian science was made comprehensible in terms understood locally and abroad, the colonies themselves considered significant in the wider world of science not only as sources of material culture to be studied but also in the studying of such material culture. Additionally, these exhibition texts gave science authority in local life, “Dwellers in the Desert Living in Tents”

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linking the many audiences at home and overseas for science and the many uses at home and overseas for science. Publication efforts and goals were not reserved for Barry and his colony or for the London International Exhibition. Five years later, the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition provided the opportunity for the rival colony of New South Wales to show that its population also “numbers several gentlemen who are prominent in letters and sciences.”62 Reverend Clarke led a group of scientists, some of whom worked for the colonial government or local museums, in contributing essays on geology, fossils, woods, and, among other topics, the cultivation of oranges. Here was intellectual wealth, or “maturity,” in the words of the editor, and not only wool and pastoral wealth. Those signs of intellectual progress, scientific exhibits and publications among them, addressed the constant Australian concern with its overseas image. Australians self-­consciously battled the popular impressions of the colonies as crude frontier or strictly utilitarian societies, images which gained currency from the continent’s vast geographical distance from England and Europe and from the many overseas economic reports, museum and theater displays, newspaper accounts, and literary works about Australia and the Australians.63 At a more scientifically profound level, intellectual progress, or maturity, was revealed and prejudices challenged in exhibition publications by the public expression of scientific resources and knowledge, as well as by the expression of disagreements among Australian scientists within their bound pages. In one noteworthy example, McCoy, William Keene, and Reverend Clarke continued their debate about Australasian geology, fossils, and mineral fields in the pages of various New South Wales exhibition catalogues. Clarke and Keene, in particular, battled in printed words about the nature and dating of local geological formations and their possible economic applications.64 Clarke referred to his debate about the origins of “the coal now supplying the market” with McCoy during his official address to the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1873. The leading NSW geologist disagreed with McCoy’s conclusion that the coal was from the Mesozoic era. The reverend and geologist claimed it was Paleozoic in a public conversation, echoing similar claims in the wider scientific world.65 Exhibition publications were not always perfect and accurate. The haste and limited funding plaguing exhibition displays also reduced the quality of official reports, essays, and guidebooks. The colonial botanist Charles Moore’s personal copy of the New South Wales catalogue for the Sydney and Paris exhibitions held in 1854–1855 reveals nearly fifty marginal corrections for the colony’s wood samples alone. Those concerned scientific names, locations, and uses. In many cases, the wrong names had been printed next to the 104

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sample’s description, an error which could at least temporarily derail the scientific and commercial purposes of the publication and exhibit.66 Those and other errors could also undermine Australian scientists’ attempts to be taken seriously. Such errors were more common in the early days of exhibitions, the period in which many Australians were still unsure of the utility and worth of participating in such shows. Later, with more funding and more time, as well as more scientific information and staffing, the quality and accuracy of the publications increased. What might the scientists such as Mueller, Clarke, and their successors do now that they no longer struggled “like dwellers in the desert” but had found their homes, their “spot on earth”? The options were many. One project was to discover and articulate a human past for that “spot,” and the exhibitions provided the venues and opportunities to do that, to make public and accessible “the sciences of man” and their explanation of an Australian past that was also scientific. Exhibitions made public the effort to overcome the tyranny of time—­or, in the peculiar Australian predicament, the tyranny of not having a sense of human time before 1770 or 1788—­and to exhibit that human history as part of the “physical, social, and moral conditions of man.”

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  five “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man” Scientists, the “Sciences of Man,” and the Australian Aboriginal Past

the previous chapters focused on the contributions to australian

public science at exhibitions of well-­known botanists, chemists, and geologists. Ferdinand von Mueller was certainly part of that fraternity, as were Joseph Bosisto and Rev. W. B. Clarke. Their exhibits and reports more often than not considered minerals, timbers, and oils, studied and presented as scientific and commercial subjects. There was little doubt that the land was filled with economically viable resources and that it was an old land. Reverend Clarke had noted at the time of the 1854 Sydney Metropolitan Exhibition that the displays of rocks, fossils, and ores revealed “the high antiquity” of the continent’s geology.1 Australia’s natural history was a long story, but what about its human history? Where were the continent’s pre-­settler inhabitants, the Australian Aboriginals? A common and perhaps necessary myth shaping the answer to that question during the early years was that this was a “blank” or empty continent, not in terms of nature but in terms of humanity. Visiting at midcentury, Godfrey Charles Mundy remarked that Australia was “a country without a yesterday; without a single link, moral or material, connecting the Present and the Past with anything like pleasing retrospection.”2 Some nineteenth-­century countries, peoples, and lands seemed “new,” others “old,” that distinction often

made in reference to the presence or absence of both tangible and less material “links” to and from the past: a landed aristocracy, ruins, relics, graveyards, battlefields, and monuments among them. To the Victorians at home and abroad, India, China, France, and England could boast of such and overflowed with provocations for Mundy’s “pleasing [or in some cases and to some rather ‘unpleasing’] retrospection,” whereas sub-­Saharan Africa and the Australian colonies could not boast of those “links” or such retrospection. This apparent emptiness did not prevent private citizens, government officials, and scientists in the Australian colonies from seeking to plant such a soil, to claim the land and the past with historical markers such as those filling the landscapes, museums, and homes in India and England. They used the “sciences of man” to create an Australian history and display at exhibitions the material culture that accompanied it. The exhibitions provided Mundy’s “pleasing retrospection” of a past documented by the sciences of archaeology, ethnography, and linguistics, or a public science of the human past. The Aboriginal past was made accessible and comprehensible at those shows with the assistance of scientific reports and comparisons, as had been Australian minerals and plants, evidence of a “natural history.” One among many scientists, Mueller expressed on occasion an interest in what Australian Aboriginals might contribute to science, what one might call an applied and accessible “natural history.” That was particularly the case when studying the Aboriginals’ relationships to soils and plants. The colonial botanist and his science colleagues uncovered the indigenous names and uses of vegetable products. Perhaps most importantly, though, or at least as a foundation for additional scientific knowledge, those scientists recognized the existence of the Aboriginals. Their lives had not changed, as if frozen in the Stone Age, but when Mueller wrote about Aboriginals it became difficult to see Australia as an empty continent and the white settlers as the first or only human inhabitants. Mueller publicly compared the Aboriginals with the inhabitants of “the great interior of Africa,” who, he wrote, also claimed and defended their land.3 Science was part of repossessing this land, no longer unclaimed, and in that process providing a scientific foundation for a sense of the past necessary for white settler Australian nationalism and its vision of society. Mueller’s interest in the Aboriginal Australians included their naming and uses of local flora. Among the specimens catching Mueller’s attention was “the Gunyang,” which he recommended for cultivation as an indigenous fruit in a paper published by the Victorian Institute for the Advancement of Science in the 1850s.4 This was not an isolated or unique scientific investigation. The pursuit of potential foodstuffs also drove other scientists in the direction of the Aboriginals. Years after Mueller’s report, scientists at the South “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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Australian School of Mines analyzed “a sample of Earth used by the Aborigines of Roebuck Bay, Western Australia to allay the pangs of hunger.”5 In that case, scientific knowledge was also quite practical, as the objective was to determine previously unknown organic components which might prove beneficiary for whites desperate for food in the Outback. There had been similar interest expressed at the time of the Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition in 1870, as noted in the introduction. Mueller and his colleagues were interested in studying, preserving, and, at times, exploiting such knowledge about the human past. Exhibiting the “sciences of man” contributed to the development of that scientific understanding of the Australian past and made science an engaging public enterprise in several different ways. For example, diverse parties provided samples and data to scientists. Understanding that unfolding public process requires addressing not only displays, writings, and exchanges but also the larger social and cultural project of discovering and representing the previously unrecognized Australian past as a scientific project. That was a “past in the present” in many ways, and a frozen past, but still recognized as distinct from the present and future. Those distinctions could be understood and represented by the “sciences of man” and made public by inclusion in the exhibitions at home and abroad. The “sciences of man” helped change the narrative about Australia’s human past, and exhibitions were one of the key localities for that transformation. Australian scientists organized ethnographic, linguistic, and archaeological displays and included information from those scientific pursuits in their official and unofficial exhibition writings. Such was the case at the Amsterdam International Exhibition in 1883, at which New South Wales displayed fossils and “ethnological exhibits.”6 There were almost 300 clubs, shields, boomerangs, and other Aboriginal items. Exhibition participation at Amsterdam and elsewhere not only encouraged Australians to develop a scientific sense of their own past but also provided additional human material culture for exchanges along the growing scientific networks. Australian Aboriginal tools, wares, and skulls were currency in that political economy. That treatment sometimes included conflating Australian Aboriginals and natural history specimens, the sense of the past studied as such, whether those objects were geological or human relics. Were Australian Aboriginal exhibits to be categorized as examples of the “Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man” or as examples of natural history? Quite often, tools, weapons, and other Aboriginal items were included as natural history exhibits. For example, Section K. at the Calcutta International Exhibition in 1883–1884 comprised the following subcategories of exhibits: “144. Ethnological Collection; 145. Archaeological Collection; 146. Weapons and Implements of the Chase; 147. 108

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Implements connected with fishery; 148. Collections of Animals Stuffed, etc. and 149. Other Natural History Specimens.”7 Australian and host commissioners catalogued Aboriginal tools, weapons, and other wares in that last section. The series of Paris Universal Expositions held nearly every eleven years after 1855 into the twentieth century displayed Aboriginal human skulls alongside animal bones. New South Wales commissioners at the Paris Universal in 1878 listed as “Casts of Fossil remains” Australian Aboriginal skulls and animal bones as exhibits for Class 45: “Natural History, etc.” The trustees of the Australian Museum forwarded skulls from Cape York and New South Wales, the former “showing peculiarity of orbital ridge and superior maxillaries.”8 Closer to home, the Queensland Court at the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880–1881 included “Aboriginal Curios” and “Aboriginal Weapons and Utensils” alongside shells, furs, and animals from the Queensland Museum. The catalogue category under which the displays fell included machines and products for hunting and fishing, natural history collections, and “vegetable products of the Earth, obtained without culture.”9 Scientific human exhibits were examples of, perhaps, the indigenous or original man, as synonymous with the indigenous or original flora and fauna, and it does not seem as if Mueller would have disagreed. He intended his scientific exhibits and other collections to represent in the face of change the “original vegetation,” or the natural history of the Australian continent. As the botanist wrote Mary Kennedy in 1885, “the plants will continue in my Museum for ages to come the testimony of the original vegetation of each district,” a scientific collection that preserved those original samples “after changes through culture and settlement will have obliterated many of the indigenous plants largely and even in some cases entirely.”10 A few years before, the colonial botanist had advised a collector to separate “introduced species” from “indigenous plants,” so that the latter could be rightly appreciated and so as “not to distort the[ir] image.”11 Mueller contributed a sense of history to the land and its landscape, a sense of history linked to science and white settlement. Without such settlers, presumably the original vegetation and the original humans would be as they were at their birth and remain part of what David Lowenthal calls “the mythical past” of the Australian landscape.12 Perhaps the land was not so timeless, mundane, and inhospitable, neither in the past nor the future. Mueller was addressing one of the intriguing scientific relationships in nineteenth-­century Australia among man, land, and the past, relationships that often concerned the age of the local physical environment. Claims of the aged condition of Australia’s land and natural phenomena furthered the “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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importance of not finding relics or fragments from the human past. Writing in the mid-­1860s, Berthold Seemann informed his readers that Australia “must not be regarded as a newly-­born island, but, on the contrary as a country in its senility, which from time immemorial had retained its character unchanged.”13 He likened the land “to an old man, rather than to a child,” a further rethinking of the Australian Aboriginal not as a primitive child of the neoclassical age but as an aged atavism in the Victorian social schema, an aged, old people who left no historical markers. The land and people were “tottering towards the grave,” the former without “the newer formations” of flora, fauna, and geology as found in Europe, the people as a result of natural selection. Seemann argued that Australia and Europe had once been combined as one continent, and that the separation was to the southern continent’s detriment. It did not enjoy the changes of the younger Europe, changes in nature that had their social complement in the actions and ideas of the settlers themselves. Isolation had frozen the rocks and plants, as isolation had frozen the Australian Aboriginals. Exhibitions at home and abroad were effective venues for Mueller and other scientists to represent in public such scientific matters, questions that combined with geology and botany their scientific interests in Australian Aboriginals. Quite often, the exhibitions provided large-­scale public venues to consider the same questions pondered within the walls of their laboratories and voluntary societies. One such occasion was Melbourne’s Intercolonial Exhibition in 1866, for which Mueller expressed his interest in cataloguing and using Aboriginal names for local flora and other resources. The colonial botanist provided a lengthy list of the “Names of Different Woods, etc., Used by the Yarra Natives for Weapons and Implements.”14 Nearly twenty names were provided for overseas and local readers of the official record and essay, many of those accompanied by the local Aboriginal names for the final product, such as “Goyjums,” or spears, made from Dargoyne, a type of eucalyptus. A colleague had “ascertained” the names and Mueller had “identified” the corresponding “Material” and its Latin and English names. Readers of the official report could thus get a strong sense of what the Australian Aboriginals used for a particular weapon, implement, and natural resources, as well as its name(s) as used by scientists, common settlers, and the Aboriginals themselves. Mueller’s various exhibits, samples, and reports explored the many allegedly unchanging interactions between Australian Aboriginals and the recognized natural material world. Those and complementary interests and projects suggested that the Australian Aboriginals and thus the Australian past had arrived as scientific subjects worthy of their own names, study, and application, not without the potential, if not at times likely limitations or other influences, of overseas 110

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imperial and international reference and learning. Buttressed by respect for philology from abroad and experienced at home, scientists of language, for example, generated information that traveled the imperial networks of ideas, texts, and careers. The Australian colonies and British India were connected in that network, as were both connected to Britain itself, providing a wider picture of indigenous and Aboriginal histories and peoples. Exhibitions proved helpful to generating that picture, whether in the forms of displays and photographs or of the development of extensive reports and catalogues. In contrast to local and imperial scientific self-­awareness in British India, though, there were no calls, whether heeded or not, to think of Aboriginal men and women as an audience for this public science or as able to be employed as scientists. As in British India, though, local settler scientists were sometimes keen on better understanding the ways that non-­white inhabitants of the land exploited and managed natural resources. The approach was public and scientific in both sets of British colonies, where exhibitions were notably present in this construction of a scientific and public understanding of the past and the land. Australian Aboriginals had three complements in the natural and social sciences of British India: “the hill tribes,” Andaman Islanders, and “the village communities,” all seen as relics from the past, the first two known for their enduring “savagery” and the other for its timeless institutions, such as caste.15 Mueller was hardly alone at the exhibitions in the scientific project to understand the Australian Aboriginals, their relationship to natural resources, and those resources themselves. Exhibitions proved useful to scientific colleagues pursuing similar interests, sometimes with admittedly commercial goals, as well as scientific and intellectual ones. F. M. Bailey participated as Queensland’s colonial botanist in the efforts to study what we might call Aboriginal “natural history,” or a type of Aboriginal science concerning the natural world. Bailey identified indigenous medicinal plants for Walter E. Roth’s North Queensland Ethnography Bulletin, as part of the latter’s charge by the home secretary to collect “scientific material” on the languages, diet, games, and manufactures of the Aboriginal communities. The exhibitions provided opportunities both to collect and to exhibit such information and materials, and Bailey took full advantage of the popular Centennial International Exhibition in Melbourne in 1888 to do so. His exhibition pamphlet emphasized the role of the government in those scientific and research projects, a role that included governmental financial support for exhibitions.16 R. Brough Smyth (1830–1889) was among other local scientists with far-­ ranging reputations turning to the exhibitions to present information about and interpretations of Australian Aboriginals. Well-­known at home in Victoria and abroad as a geologist and meteorologist, Smyth contributed pamphlets “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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and reports as parts of the official exhibition reports and catalogues. He also collected and oversaw geological exhibits at various shows. The 1860s was a particularly active period for his contributions to science at exhibitions in London, Melbourne, and Paris. The Age boasted about his “1811 specimens of mineral rocks and fossils in the colony, auriferous quartz, foreign minerals and rocks” on display at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition in 1866– 1867. The collection’s usefulness was enhanced by the careful numbering and information provided in the accompanying “catalogue, which has been prepared for circulation.”17 Some of those local efforts were duplicated for the upcoming Paris Universal Exposition. Those and other scientific efforts at exhibitions were often included as part of Smyth’s portfolio as secretary to the Department of Mines for the colony of Victoria and strengthened by his status as a fellow of the Geological Society of London.18 Geological fieldwork in keeping with his official capacity dovetailed with a growing interest in the Australian Aboriginals. He became the Honorary Secretary for the Protection of Aborigines and later a voting member in the early 1860s. Smyth was among a handful of experts compiling and publishing “scientific” studies of Aboriginal life, customs, culture, and tools. His two volumes of The Aborigines of Victoria were published in 1878 and presented as the official governmental record of Victoria’s Aboriginals.19 As will be discussed later, those texts complemented his ambitious efforts to collect Aboriginal material culture for exhibitions and to eventually find a single permanent institution in which to house an extensive collection of such “relics” and “wares.” Many of those efforts paired him with Sir Redmond Barry, one of the leading public figures within the same colony of Victoria. Barry served as a judge and a major advocate for Melbourne’s new public library, museum, and gallery. The duo’s scientific interest in the Aboriginals at exhibitions overflowed the colonial borders and was also commonly expressed by the colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, and South Australia. Their contributions included the display of ethnographic tools and wares and, on some occasions, the inclusion of life-­sized models of Aboriginals. Such wax figures were displayed by South Australia at a series of exhibitions in the 1880s, including those held in Melbourne, Amsterdam, London, and Adelaide. Among the models commented upon at the time were a family group and August Saupe’s “two life-­size and life-­like models,” one a standing spear-­fisherman (figure 5.1) and the other a seated fire-­maker.20 The models “attracted so much attention and won so much praise” at the time in part because of their apparently realistic and scientific nature, in contrast to the previous depictions of Australian Aboriginals in neoclassical terms, and because they were included in tableaux and dioramas.21 They were not 112

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FIGURE 5.1.

“Herr Saupe’s Aboriginal Wax Figure and Diorama.” Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition, 1887, Image B 10212/8, courtesy of the State Library of South Australia, Adelaide

isolated figures as if medical samples but men, women, and children placed in a seemingly authentic context, a legitimate natural scene. The casts were taken by Saupe from Harry Hewitt, an Aboriginal gentleman sent to the sculptor by a Point McLeay missionary. The local Old Colonist Association of white settlers praised the casts as a public sign of the “Foundation of South Australia” serving scientific, social, and historical purposes.22 It was not uncommon, as well, for visitors to observe at local Australian exhibitions either Aboriginals tossing boomerangs or modestly dressed Mission Station Aboriginals. Visits were tightly managed by government officials and station officers. Those “human displays” were not included in Australian displays at overseas exhibitions and, in general, were less common than the participation of living indigenous men and women found in exhibition courts at American expositions, and also less common than the South Asian artisans in British Indian courts at French and British shows.23 Comparison of Native American and Australian Aboriginal participation at their respective domestic exhibitions might prove a fruitful one. It is beyond the scope of this study, though. “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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The presence of Aboriginals themselves and their tools, or weapons, suggests that exhibitions played a role in establishing a public science that included linguistics, archaeology, and ethnography. Scientists and the sciences documented and provided a past for the allegedly blank land without a past, thereby contributing to the ways by which settlers claimed the continent and Australians participated in additional networks of scientific knowledge. Scientists at the exhibitions “discovered,” explained, and represented an Australian past. This was public science harnessed to public history. It was a science and history with both local and universal characteristics. Those efforts were part of the rather widespread and popular “antiquarian imagination,” shaping public consciousness about the Australian past. That phrase is from Tom Griffith’s superb study of often amateur fossil hunters and collectors, cartographers, ethnographers, and other men and women seeking to inscribe a past upon this land and landscape seemingly without one.24 The exhibitions were an appropriate and effective venue to make such claims, and the public nature of those claims was not only intellectual and performative, in the sense of scientific and historical ideas and displays. The process was also public because of those who participated in it in addition to the scientists who organized and explained. Scientific interest in the Australian past was embedded in wider society and public culture, involving the participation of a wide spectrum of Australians. Public officials, scientists, and common men and women collected and observed historical displays. In two representative cases, private collectors contributed Aboriginal pearl shell ornaments, strings, and nets to Western Australia’s court at the Melbourne Intercolonial in 1866–1867 and the Board for the Protection of Aborigines, a public agency in Victoria, contributed to the Calcutta International Exhibition in 1883–1884 a “complete collection of weapons used by the Victorian natives.”25 Across the border in New South Wales, private parties from the Clarence River and Bowenfels districts in New South Wales forwarded to the Melbourne Intercolonial and then the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibitions in the mid-­1870s several “Weapons for War and Hunting.”26 Those Aboriginal boomerangs, nulla-­nullas, and “stone hatchets in various stages of manufacture and wear” had been turned up by individuals using their plough or shovel in old camping places. The up-­country accidental archaeologists discovered what scientists transformed into public relics. It was the scientists’ roles to identify such implements and provide at the exhibitions a short description of the stones used, processes of manufacture and sharpening, and applications. Local ethnographic information included commentary on the replacement by iron of formerly stone tools and their display with other “primitive weapons.” That suggested similarities and differences among the histories of participating 114

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nations at the Philadelphia exposition, contributing in active and representational ways to the development of public science. Members of Australian voluntary societies also contributed to this public science of the past at exhibitions. In the colony of South Australia alone, there were various such efforts to scientifically discover and chronicle the Australian past. The Geographical Society and David Lindsay, an official and a local collector, provided Aboriginal exhibits for a series of exhibitions during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Lindsay loaned the society’s “valuable and interesting collection of aboriginal weapons, utensils, and products from the interior of the Northern Territory” to the colony’s courts at the overseas 1886 Colonial and Indian in South Kensington and the following year’s Adelaide International Exhibition. Additionally, individual members contributed their own boomerangs and other wares, earning the society a series of diplomas and medals.27 Those collections, their public recognition, and the increasing interest in articulating a national past helped drive the Geographical Society in South Australia to create a special history and ethnology subsection by 1890. That scientifically grounded subsection retained the “original” Aboriginal names for various locations in the colony. Members suggested a “Native name,” for example, for the new town near Salisbury and for any locale of historical and commemorative significance, such as “the scene of the sad tragedy connected with the Burke and Wills Expedition.” The Geographical Society complemented the efforts of the colony’s Adelaide Philosophical Society, whose members were encouraging papers on Australian Aborigines and the collection of “typical specimens of native weapons, utensils, and manufactures” by the 1870s.28 The formal collection, display, and discussion of such Aboriginal relics, tools, and languages—­exhibits of public science and history at exhibitions—­ began as early as the Australian metropolitan exhibitions of the mid-­1850s. Displays were driven by and expressed local public interest in connecting the ethnographic sciences to a sense of place, claiming that place and its past. The first Australian exhibitions in 1854 shows included a variety of scientific exhibits, as described in previous chapters, such as coal and other minerals, as well as various local timbers and other plant products. Melbourne’s organizers also specifically solicited “Weapons and Implements.—­Every variety of boomerang, club, shield, spear, net, yam-­stick, etc.,” along with “Native food.”29 We have noted the focused scientific and practical interest in local and indigenous foods, an interest Mueller shared with many other scientists and members of learned societies. Local commissioners intended the Australian Aboriginal to be represented but not present in person. That was a different matter and one that would be “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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resolved with Aboriginal visitors at subsequent Australian exhibitions. The 1887 Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition was one event hosting a group of Aboriginals from mission stations. In 1854, though, the interest was in soliciting and displaying Aboriginal material culture as part of local science and culture, whether that be weapons or “specimens of grubs, used as food by the natives.” Some of those exhibits would be classified with “Natural History” displays at the Melbourne and Sydney Metropolitan Exhibitions. By the time those early shows opened, the Australian Aboriginal exhibits included “several native spears and waddies,” other weapons, and baskets. Visitors to Sydney’s first exhibition in the Australian Museum could also see and consider “Seeds of a Grass called by the Aborigines ‘Cola,’ occasionally made into Bread,” and a “Grammar of the Aboriginal Language” and “Key to Structure of the Language.” The latter were printed and bound in the colony in the mid-­1830s.30 Thus began the filling in at exhibitions of Australia’s allegedly empty past and historical landscape, a development appealing to different specific interests about that past, some intellectual and others quite practical. Either way, the Aboriginal past was in the present. Visitors to the exhibitions observed and read about various public science matters: grasses which had been used to cook for an apparently long time, as well as about the continuities in a seemingly timeless language and in apparently equally timeless tool-­making and tool use. Scientific exhibition displays about the Australian past after the initial ones in 1854 in Sydney and Melbourne included over forty Aboriginal weapons supplied by the Australian Museum in Sydney for the New South Wales Court at a New Zealand exhibition in the late 1880s.31 Aboriginal wood boxes, nulla-­ nullas, shields, boomerangs, and stone implements were considered “very difficult to obtain,” and the commissioners were warned that some of the relics “cannot be replaced,” since the indigenous Australians were disappearing and those remaining were either using iron for their tools or converting to European technologies. Aboriginal spears and shields might also provide ornamentation for Australian exhibition courts, such as those occupied by Western Australia at Melbourne’s 1866–1867 Intercolonial and by both that colony and Tasmania at the city’s 1880–1881 International Exhibitions.32 Colonial courts were filled with raw materials and manufactured goods, a claim for their economic wealth and importance, and the walls and pillars commonly adorned with Aboriginal wares. Visitors at the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879 collected and read a pamphlet from Western Australia on Aboriginal “Character, Manners, and Customs,” written to accompany the weapons, implements, and ornaments on display.33 Those suggested not an empty land without a human past but a land without history in the formal sense other than settler “antiquities.” This 116

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pamphlet included scientific information about the location, physical characteristics, and culture of “the aboriginal inhabitants of the Colony.” Readers could learn about laws, marriage ceremonies, and corroborrees. There continued to be references to cannibalism, although those were fewer than in early publications and far less common than references to cannibalism by other Pacific Islanders, as well as inclusion of T. H. Huxley’s forearm, hand, leg, and foot measurements of his Aboriginal subjects, thereby placing Australia in a world scientific taxonomy. Exhibits from Western Australia tribes included spears, shields, boomerangs, digging sticks, feathers, and fur necklaces, noteworthy not only for their numbers but also their variety. They were made and used by different Aboriginal tribes. The pamphlet pointed out the notable regional differences among the exhibits. For example, the exhibition display and the written text suggested that “the spears used in the North are longer and heavier than those of the South.” Although frozen in time as the past in the present, the Australian Aboriginals were thus not all alike. An admission of such diversity was a contribution by the end of the century to the more scientific, dynamic, and complex settler vision of what and who were the continent’s original and continuing human inhabitants. That did not translate necessarily into a more liberal political position. The “sciences of man” had publicly contributed to that changed vision. Among those participants at the exhibitions to change that vision were Barry, executive commissioner for the colony of Victoria at numerous shows, and the geologist Smyth, secretary to the Department of Mines for the same colony. The pair took advantage of the Australian exhibitions—­the 1866–1867 Melbourne Intercolonial and 1879 Sydney International Exhibitions, among other shows—­to publicly solicit, study, catalogue, and display scientific information about and examples of Aboriginal customs, weapons, wares, and dialects.34 In turn, Victoria’s expanded and new public ethnographic collections resulted from their efforts to create exhibits and purchase those of other colonies for permanent display at museums in Melbourne and her outlying towns.35 Anxious to build collections before Aboriginals and their products allegedly became extinct, Victoria’s exhibition commissioners turned to colonial exhibitions and exhibitors. Barry pursued “rare & good specimens of weapons, Implements & ornaments” from the Pacific Islands exhibited in various colonial courts at the Sydney International.36 He and Smyth also organized a “very large and valuable addition” of Australian, Polynesian, and Melanesian articles to the Melbourne Museum’s ethnological collection the following year.37 Finding “no money available” to purchase original Tasmanian objects for the subsequent 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition and permanent “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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display at the gallery, Barry asked E. L. Montefiore for a loan of those displayed at the Sydney show.38 Barry also reviewed several private collections of “weapons, implements, or armaments, clothing, etc. of any of the inhabitants of the Islands in the Southern Ocean” for the Melbourne Exhibition courts and permanent institutions. “The difficulty of obtaining such objects becomes greater every year,” wrote the prominent Melbourne official, recognizing that the “elaborately carved” knives and their particular form of craftsmanship were giving way before “apathy” and “indolence” on the part of Aboriginals and settlers. Among the objects not purchased were native canoes and preserved human heads.39 Indigenous tools and Smyth’s Aborigines of Victoria, one of the earliest Australian ethnographic studies, were exchanged for overseas economic, commercial, and scientific exhibits as part of the general system of material exchanges at the exhibitions. Australian officials also took casts and created models of local Aborigines for this interactive political economy of physical culture. Barry solicited lifelike casts taken of the heads of local inhabitants from J. Thomas, the colony’s Protector of Aborigines, and from prominent artists. Melbourne’s executive commissioner turned to Thomas in 1861 because he was “best acquainted with the means of inducing some of those people to submit themselves to the sculptor who will undertake the task.”40 Barry was interested in Aboriginal men and women in “Childhood, Youth and Middle Age” and requested that they represent “the best marked types of the race procured,” rather than the earlier neoclassical stereotypes. That change was part of the self-­conscious effort to be scientific about Australian Aboriginals and the Australian past. The popularity of the casts moved John H. Knight, one of Barry’s fellow exhibition commissioners, to pursue additional phrenological samples from New South Wales and New Zealand for other shows during the 1860s. Those included the Melbourne Intercolonial in 1866–1867 and the following Paris Universal Exposition. Knight admitted that such specimens had “no prominent place in the prospectus of exhibits” but that the contributions of “some specimens of Skulls of the Victorian Native Tribes would be of great interest in Paris.” He sought casts of both men and women in different “periods of life” and advertised for such in the Australian and New Zealand press.41 Those and similar plaster casts of various heads were also displayed at later exhibitions in London and Vienna during the 1870s and subsequently exchanged for European and English artistic, scientific, and industrial objects. One exchanged set was exhibited in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.42

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Barry was again at the front and center of those exchanges, suggesting in correspondence with Australian, English, and French officials what might be gained in return for the colony of Victoria offering up a set of casts. Perhaps a series of illustrations of architectural orders and styles from Sir Henry Cole and England’s South Kensington Department of Science and Art? Perhaps a set of historical “seals” from the British Museum? Perhaps “instructive” and “interesting” models of Grecian, Roman, Byzantine, Saracenic, and Gothic architecture from various British and European museums and other cultural institutions? Barry was pursuing “an equivalent in exchange” for the casts, a seemingly innocuous and noble pursuit not intended, as he wrote the South Kensington directors, in “a mercenary spirit.” One wonders about the equivalency of books, glass, seals, and models for casts taken from “a type of portion of the human family fast disappearing from the face of the earth.”43 What made for the equivalency in Barry’s vision: The sense of antiquity and disappearance? The seeming uniqueness of each nation’s “equivalent” contributions? The power to scientifically capture and represent the past, or what would quickly become the past? The apparent need of each host collection? Barry also oversaw an ambitious project to create a dictionary of Aboriginal languages for presentation at the 1866–1867 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition.44 Generally more sympathetic to Aboriginals than most of his prominent contemporaries, Barry (the chief justice and public library trustee) sought to collect linguistic information about local dialects and called for the use of the latter in naming towns, roads, and other markers on the new landscape.45 This was part of what he perceived white settlers owed to the original inhabitants of the continent. As one scholar has suggested, Barry’s exhibition projects were part of “redeeming” that sincere sense of a moral “obligation.”46 Without their own “Australian,” hence indigenous, or nationalist non-­British language, the settlers called upon the Aboriginal one, but on the settlers’ own terms. There was no better moment to collect such information than the Intercolonial Exhibition, a position expressed by Barry in his Circular Letter requesting assistance. The upcoming show was “a favourable opportunity for collecting materials relating to the history, traditions, customs and languages of the aboriginal natives of Australasia.”47 Perhaps it was the most favorable “opportunity”? That scientific information and material culture could be collected and then displayed, temporarily and then permanently, under the umbrella of this ambitious public project. This was not only a question of taking stock of the colony itself and highlighting the contrasts between the settlers and the Aboriginals. At least for Barry, this was also an effort to improve the conditions in which the Aboriginals lived, or at least white attitudes toward those

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conditions, thereby partially satisfying some of those “obligations” owed by the white settlers and their government to “the primitive possessors of the soil.” We can appreciate the complex and contradictory, if not ironic, impulses driving forward Barry’s scientific preservationist and reform efforts. They might not always be inherently consistent or shared by his contemporaries and subordinates, but one finds them to be sincere and authentic in his case.48 As the executive commissioner and organizer of the project, Barry turned to local and overseas linguists and scientists, agricultural and philosophical societies, and government officers who had direct contact with Aboriginals. They were among those receiving in 1866 the official circular looking for those “who by education & intelligence are competent” to carefully translate local Aboriginal dialects. The circular advertised the effort “to procure by simultaneous and independent efforts, governed by systematic and uniform rules, as large a body of evidence as is possible respecting the history, traditions, custom and languages of the Aboriginal Natives of the Continent.” Nouns, adjectives, and verbs from each informant were to be noted, all organized in an alphabetical arrangement, or “classified so that the words follow in sequence of relation.” How were those collecting to comprehend the sequence and to avoid the perplexity of “sudden transitions from one subject to another unconnected and dissimilar one,” a problem presumably not for “civilized” cultures but common among “uncivilized” ones? The answers, or the advice, included recommendations about philology and the collection of data from notable figures, Sir John Herschel among them. His “remarks” reproduced and circulated suggested that verbal reproductions must be understood by a third party, that phonetic alphabets and terms should correspond to native languages, and that there should be a set of letters to express “a distinct, recognized, and as nearly as possible, invariable sound.” Herschel’s scientific advice—­endorsed by Barry—­was to create a grammar and vocabulary of “simple” sentences. Those could include: “The sun shines” and “I saw three kangaroos.” One might thus compile a vocabulary from the mouths of Australian Aboriginals as one would “from the mouths of natives, whether of written or unwritten languages,” regardless of their location. The Australian experience was both unique and universal, local and global.49 Evidence of the Aboriginal language was to be exhibited as the “authentic testimony” for a people facing extinction, echoing the local acceptance of philology as a science.50 There was a sense of urgency in Barry’s request and an ambition to provide philologists, ethnographers, and government officials with information that could be used to compare linguistic developments in other parts of the world, once again placing Australian (or the colony of Victoria’s) history in a larger world scientific narrative, a narrative which 120

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included “progress” and “disappearance.” This meant reconciling the expected uniqueness of the Aboriginal language with its equally expected universal characteristics—­part of the fusion of local and global, past and present, invited by the “sciences of man,” philology among them. Barry’s efforts were both rewarding and disappointing. Barry had set out to compile a complete vocabulary “of the aboriginal inhabitants of Australasia,” an ambitious undertaking to say the least. In retrospect, one might conclude that all things considered, the ambitions were realized, at least in the sense that there was a considerable collection on display in Melbourne of the material culture from those “inhabitants.” More than fourteen “tribes” were surveyed in Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and New Caledonia. The dictionary project had resulted in the listing of over thirty regional vocabularies, covering areas such as Tasmania, “Middle Australia,” and the “Murray River.” Here was a collection of over 750 terms for objects such as fruits, flowers, and body parts, as well as more abstract terms for geographic directions and familial distinctions. On the other hand, Barry expressed keen disappointment in letters to Herschel and Mueller written after the exhibition had closed. The evidence was the result of only 13 responses from the 300 circulars sent throughout Australia and to the consuls of various European powers in the Pacific region. Barry admitted that the only foreign contribution was from “a French missionary Priest, a gentleman” from New Caledonia. Thus, there was great regret at the passing of an opportunity (perhaps in Barry’s mind, the last such opportunity) to report on original Aboriginal languages and their purer relationship to European languages—­before the indigenous ones became extinct or bastardized by the introduction of European ones.51 The confirmation of an Aboriginal language or group of languages also threatened to at least challenge the assumptions that the earlier occupiers of the continent had no culture and were nearly on a level with primates. The presence of a language, even a relatively simple one, suggested otherwise.52 There were other advantages to be gained from the collection. Information about the languages was forwarded to Australian, British, and European centers, Paris included. The Australian language chart could be exchanged for other objects, some of which were of scientific interest. Those included foreign exhibition catalogues and photographs. Copies were forwarded to museums in Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig after display at the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition.53 This project would then bring recognition and material culture to the colony of Victoria—­if perhaps also not a bit of status to Barry—­and simultaneously suggest a picture of colonial science and history far different from that created by the mineral rushes, tales of “Wild Australia,” and the generally utilitarian exhibits. The dictionaries and other ethnographic “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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displays were signs of a “modern” and “civilized” Australia, one that could scientifically claim and represent its own past and future, differentiating itself from that apparently disappearing or “doomed” Aboriginal past. In doing so, that “Australia,” or at least Victoria, was legitimating itself as being a modern society and nation with a recognized, studied, classified, and comprehensible “Stone Age” past. Here was the power to claim, define, and represent one’s own past as public history. Perhaps that past might be understood in national or local terms, as well as more global ones. The language charts enabled Australians and others to integrate the Aboriginals into a wider, transcontinental narrative of human history and taxonomy of human types. The charts were evidence not only of Australia’s own more local and transcontinental history but also of Australia’s place in the world, a sense of legitimacy relying upon the authority and legitimacy both of local scientific experts and of the exhibition experience. Barry’s and Smyth’s ethnographic exhibition projects provided credence to the colonial governor’s claim at the time of the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition that Victoria “has done far more than the Government of any other Australian colony . . . to collect and place on record reliable information respecting the languages, character, and modes of life” of the vastly diminished and perhaps disappearing Aboriginal communities.54 However, Victoria was not alone in this antiquarian, preservationist, ethnographic, and historical effort. The New South Wales government also participated in formal studies of Aboriginal languages. The colonial secretary’s office for New South Wales was an intermediary between various religious and scientific groups designing a dictionary of local dialects in the 1870s. Participants in this effort included rather well-­known public figures: Andrew MacKenzie and Rev. W. Ridley, who revised Rev. James Gunther’s dictionary from 1839.55 The curator of natural history for the British Museum wrote his colleague in New South Wales to support the colony’s new “Ethnological Museum” in the late 1880s and concluded, “I hardly know any more valuable work just now than collecting together for future preservation the objects [he originally used the term “works” rather than “objects”] which illustrate the manner and customs of all the native races who are in part disappearing from the face of the Earth.”56 That science of the past balanced the drive to find local particularities, if not uniqueness, and to claim a place in the wider common narratives about the past. Archaeology, ethnography, and linguistics could represent what was unusual about Australia and, in doing so, also what Australia shared with other parts of the world. Among the narratives shared with other societies was that of having a “Stone Age.” Australia’s “Stone Age” seemed to be in the present with the unchanging Australian Aboriginal, a contrast to the Stone Age of Europe, for example, 122

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which was apparently a very long time ago. Australians made in many cases a social or racial claim about their “Stone Age,” and less of a chronological one, as could be found among the French or British at the time. Scientific exchanges of “Stone Age” tools and other forms of material culture drew public attention to the seeming equality of or symmetry among national pasts. The Australians participated in those exchanges, whether during or outside of the exhibitions, although the shows provided relatively less challenging arrangements. The exchanges included both key local scientists and institutions, many of whom reached out to American, Russian, Scandinavian, and other European partners. In one documented case, the National Museum of Victoria exchanged tools and costumes with the Imperial Academy of Science, St. Petersburg.57 The influential New South Wales scientist Archibald Liversidge corresponded with German officials at the time of Sydney’s International Exhibition concerning exchanges of European tools and weapons for stone axes, bark paintings, and idols from New Britain and New Caledonia. Berlin’s museum discerned an equivalency in the old and new “Stone Age” exhibits.58 “Crude” tools marked for archaeologists “Stone Age,” although one included examples from contemporary society while the other was in the chronologically distant past. Those activities also were influenced by and raised questions about “doomed peoples” and race. With such concerns in mind, historians can at least see that the Australians joined the nineteenth-­ century obsession with the past. The creation and exchange of such relics transformed or contrasted former “silences” about the Aboriginal Australians and the Australian terra nullius.59 They provided an alternative historical record, one that was “scientific” and public. Exhibition organizers suggested such interests, similarities, and differences by exhibiting Australian Aboriginal displays alongside those of other non-­ modern cultures. These might result in exchanges like the ones above; if not, at the very least they provided a way for visitors and scientists to compare and contrast the many tools, wares, and other ethnographic items and thereby place each culture—­including the Australian Aboriginal one—­in a larger world-­picture of the “Stone Age” and its more localized national picture. Those comparisons were in two cases notably advertised as “scientific”: the many “primitive weapons” from nearly around the globe on display at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and the “Ethnological Court” at the Sydney International Exhibition three years later, which boasted a global reach but emphasized Oceania. The tools and other relics displayed in Philadelphia included the Aboriginal boomerangs, nulla-­nullas, and “stone hatchets” collected from the Clarence River and Bowenfels districts. They were exhibited in Philadelphia alongside “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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similar Aboriginal tools and weapons from other regions in Australasia. Such ethnographic exhibits from Australia and elsewhere at the Centennial show revealed similar developments unfolding around the world in which modern nationalists were defining, studying, collecting, and preserving their own national pasts; in doing so, they were defining their own society against not only foreigners but also their own indigenous cultures, their own “Iron” and “Stone Ages.” That contrast was a common cultural and intellectual component of nineteenth-­century nation-­building. National pasts could be celebrated for their uniqueness and universality, both part of larger narratives, which also included a vision for society and the social order. The collection, display, and exchanges of indigenous objects as “Native Weapons” at the Centennial Exposition represented this commonality among all modernizing industrial nations, not just white settler societies, and the allegedly sharp, yet shared, breaks between their past and present, even if the past remained in the present. That was a common experience and understanding for the Japanese, Australians, and Americans. Nation-­building required negotiating such internal social, cultural, and racial distinctions, as well as the more commonly recognized external political ones. That was the case for “new” nations such as Australia and for “old” ones, including England. The Smithsonian Institution’s Annual Report for 1879 included an extensive discussion of those “Native Weapons” displayed at Philadelphia, in which its author, Edward H. Knight, articulated connections in the histories of the participating nations and cultures.60 That took some effort, though, as Knight admitted that indigenous (in his terms, “savage”) weapons and tools were more often than not “treated as casual objects thrown in as curiosities” by exhibitors and commissioners. Those “curiosities,” such as Australian Aboriginal boomerangs and nulla-­nullas, often decorated exhibition courts; they were almost ornaments for the “modern” settler and other displays. That did not deter Knight, who flung his own scientific and organizational nets wide to create an international taxonomy across time and space according to type, function, and materials used for such “curiosities.” They had not been arranged that way by commissioners and exhibitors, who had included them in “national” courts alongside other types of displays. Knight was offering a different yet complementary way to represent and understand those objects, one that would have been common in museums of the period influenced by Augustus Pitt Rivers.61 The “Native Weapons” at the Philadelphia Centennial signified the old and the authentic, or the “savage,” within each modern nation, the shared sense of national or internal social and historical distance to complement the geographical distance from other nations. Global and local characteristics 124

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might be highlighted and linked among the many clubs, spears, and shields, not to mention other displays. Explicit connections were made between Australian and American exhibits, for example, axes from Victoria, South Australia, and the Missouri Valley. Rather than only elaborating upon distinctions among those, Knight and his report drew the readers’ attention to the ways that such exhibits commonly mirrored and contrasted with the “European-­type . . . savage” weapons from Norway, Japan, and China or the “European antiquities” from England and Sweden. All modern nations contained within them some atavistic communities and relics, but they did so according to an evolutionary pattern of increasing complexity. America and Australia represented the lowest stage in this taxonomy of savagery, nationalism, and history; Europe, the highest. If in the eighteenth century modern proto-­nationalists had “discovered” their own peasants and farm laborers in the countryside—­“far from the madding crowd” and London, or Paris, as the case might have been—­then their nineteenth-­century heirs “discovered” their own “distant,” yet proximate, Stone and Iron Age “savages,” or “early men,” sometimes in their own or in colonial backyards. Cases abounded in the British Isles, where the press reported discoveries of relics, such as “the ancient runic stone, recently found in the Isle of Man” in 1855 and those discussed at the meetings of voluntary and learned societies, including the Geological Society.62 Those discussions included the reading of papers “relating to the antiquity of man.” One in 1866 considered flint implements found in England.63 That scientific narrative reached its Victorian apex with Sir John Lubbock’s Ancient Monuments Bill in the 1870s, intended to protect among other relics stone-­rings, barrows, and parchments.64 The efforts to scientifically document Aboriginal languages and preserve weapons and tools was part of this general later-­nineteenth-­century antiquarian and preservationist impulse, if not an almost archaeological attitude toward all aspects of that indigenous past. As noted, it could be found in Britain itself and throughout much of the empire. Those efforts included the excavation and classification of animal fossils, human tools, and languages.65 To some degree, it was a pursuit of indigeneity, or nativism, in which scientific claims could be made about being of the land and thus indigenous, even if not necessarily the first of that land and nation, simultaneously with claims about difference, “civilization,” and “progress.”66 Such claims were increasingly made in modern, scientific, and nationalist terms. The material and linguistic pasts were to be excavated, preserved, and used to craft a national history and its complementary social and historical landscape for Australia. The “savage” weapon was relegated to the past, in contrast to “the results of modern art and industry,” also on display in Philadelphia, “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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although such savage weapons were still manufactured and used in the present, even if “doomed,” as were their producers. They were part of the past in the present, living examples of the atavisms that so fascinated at home and abroad the late Victorians and Edwardians. The display or discussion of Australian “primitive weapons”—­“Native Axes,” among many examples—­ alongside those crafted by other groups, such as Native Americans, suggested strong similarities and some differences among the histories of participating nations.67 For example, America’s past and present—­and thus, perhaps, its future—­were closer to Australia’s than were Britain’s. The British, Pitt Rivers among them, excavated and pondered tools of their own “racial” forefathers, whereas Americans and Australians contended that they dug up those of existing “primitive” races, distinct from the current white settler communities struggling to claim these new lands.68 Visitors could discern those transpacific historical patterns among others in those usable national pasts. Commissioners and other officials from the participating countries engaged the exhibitions to make available to a wider audience Aboriginal and other “savage” tools and weapons and their place in local and national histories, as well as local public science. The New South Wales ethnographic displays, among other ones at the Philadelphia show, illustrated an Australian colonial settler continuity with commonly accepted “Western” narrative structures of history and, in an important way, local discontinuity with earlier periods in each colony. Stone Aboriginal tools represented a prehistorical stage of cultural development, as might be found in the writings and displays of European and English anthropologists, who were also turning up tools and relics in the ancient monuments of former inhabitants or in the activities of indigenous peoples in North America and Southern Africa. This symmetry among “Iron Ages” was part of public science both outside of and during the exhibitions, a symmetry often represented and confirmed by the exchange of “prehistorical” tools and weapons, as discussed above. That obsession with the past was a social and political claim. And it was a claim made in similar ways by all peoples desiring to be seen as “modern.” In some cases, the modern was contrasted with a distant past; in other cases, with the proximate present. The British had their ancient Britons and Celts; the Australians had their existing Australian Aboriginals, as the Japanese had their contemporary Ainu Islanders. The public scientific narrative in Australia eventually included the Australian Aboriginal, recognizing the conflation of human and natural history. The same could be said of Meiji Japan and its Ainu. But inclusion was and is not equality. It is also not invisibility. The “sciences of man” at the exhibitions helped Australians come to terms in public life with their past by negotiating the apparently universal social Darwinism 126

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of “doomed peoples” and the local particularities of life and nature in New South Wales, Victoria, and the other Australian colonies. The rich history of exhibition displays helps us understand that process and its various enduring intertwined narratives of race, biology, fate, nature, and science. The global and regional comparisons were compelling and informative, but, perhaps to many visitors, the inclusion of relics at national celebrations for white settler nations added an additional point of interest. Part of the dynamic process of inventing and re-­inventing white settler polities and settler societies, such as the Australian colonies and the United States, was the silence toward and then recognition of indigenous or native peoples in public history, the alternating, competing, and sometimes coexisting discourses of a land without people and one with a “doomed” people. One response to the recognition of indigenous peoples of a different race was that white Australians and Americans during the last quarter of the nineteenth century began to include Aboriginal and indigenous models and tools in their own exhibition courts and public collections as examples of living museum cultures, but not as dynamic, growing ones. This was buttressed by the increasingly “scientific” attempts to chronicle the ethnographic past and nature of their societies.69 Thus, they could scientifically distinguish their “native” settler history, present, and future from a “native” Aboriginal past, now represented by allegedly prehistorical artifacts and relics. Visitors in Philadelphia could directly compare American and Australian relics. Men, women, and children walking through the Ethnological Court at Sydney’s International Exhibition (figure 5.2) three years after the Philadelphia Centennial could also draw such significant comparisons among the Australian Aboriginal material culture and that of other Pacific and overseas peoples. Those included “implements, weapons, and adornments of the various races and tribes” from the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, New Hebrides, New Zealand, and Fiji.70 Professor Liversidge was among the scientists on the Ethnological Committee responsible for soliciting such exhibits. He joined his colleagues in claiming that “the attempt [was] made . . . to form a collection of articles once belonging to the original inhabitants of Australasia.” That attempt proved popular and noteworthy, recognized as “a special feature” of the show.71 As was the case with the earlier American exposition, there were also opportunities to compare Aboriginal articles with the flints and stone implements from “the kitchen-­middens and lake-­dwellings of various countries in Europe” and the “antiquities left by the mound-­builder of America.”72 The total number of exhibits at the court exceeded 5,000, a rather considerable number for its time, if not for more recent times as well. Visitors could compare specific types of weapons and of domestic wares. Human skulls, mats, “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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FIGURE 5.2.

“Ethnological Court at the Garden Palace Exhibition, Sydney, 1879–80.” Charles Turner, photographer, Image AMS 351/V11460, used with the permission of the Australian Museum Archives, Sydney

spears, knives, and canoes were only part of this regional Pacific ethnographic “cabinet of curiosities.” Comparisons yielded similarities but also differences among the exhibits and, by implication, the creators and users represented in those exhibits. “Each country represented in the collection has very marked characteristics,” noted one local newspaper.73 The writer continued that visitors could compare Australian boomerangs, bird of paradise plumes and dresses from neighboring New Guinea, and “massive clubs” from Fiji and “carved boxes” from New Zealand. Among the visitors noting and comparing such exhibits were Australian Aboriginals, “who on request being made on their behalf, were admitted free of charge to the Garden Palace.”74 Similar visits took place at other Australian exhibitions, including Adelaide’s International Exhibition in 1887. These visits were about the Aboriginals presenting themselves as exhibits and not about such men, women, and children studying exhibits. Science was rarely staged for Australian Aboriginals as it was being staged for Britain’s South Asian subjects in venues such as the Calcutta International Exhibition and that host city’s museum. The court in Sydney appealed to a strong local impulse to compare Australian Aboriginals with other Australasian and Oceanic indigenous 128

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peoples—­and, in doing so, being able to generate some scientific notes about what was shared, or not, among such non-­white peoples. This effort generated “national,” as well as anthropological conclusions. Local cultural experts, such as Joseph Anderson Panton, studied bark, wood, and rock paintings and personal ornamentations to document and preserve “a distinct characteristic style” of Australian Aboriginal culture.75 This was part of the effort to distinguish the relics and origins of a national Australian past from those of “other savage races” in the Pacific region.76 That particular past as a source of scientific knowledge was also represented in the series of public lectures, including Liversidge’s reading of a paper written by Mueller. Sydney’s Ethnological Court served such purposes not only for commissioners, scientists, and visitors but also for those local men and women driven to find and preserve tools and other forms of material culture, which they thought were disappearing along with their creators and users, and to subsequently exhibit them in one central public location. This was preservation and not restoration. Smyth and Barry, among others, pursued this collection, preservation, study, and exhibition through the 1870s and beyond. Smyth’s efforts had begun in earnest in the 1870s as he attempted to expand by purchasing Aboriginal wares from private collectors and other parties for the ethnographic collection in Melbourne’s National Gallery. Loans from other institutions would assist that project, but better to purchase from the “numerous small collections in private hands in Melbourne,” examples of Tom Griffith’s “antiquarian imagination” in practice.77 Perhaps the owners would exchange for “minerals, etc.” their “weapons and implements of the natives of Australia and other parts”? If not, perhaps the government could purchase the tools and weapons? The trustees of the Melbourne Public Library, Museum, and Gallery would then oversee their housing, study, and preservation.78 The collection of such “curios” among other “Weapons, Implements, Armaments, Clothing, etc. of any of the inhabitants of the Islands in the Southern Ocean” remained of interest to Melbourne officials, particularly with the possibility of acquiring such objects at the end of the Sydney International Exhibition.79 At the same time, Barry was actively pursuing “rare & good specimens” for the Melbourne institutions, as noted above.80 The narratives at both the Philadelphia and Sydney exhibitions made claims about the Australian past: the first in light of other modern, and sometimes similar, nations and societies, while the other generated a regional comparison among “primitive” Pacific Islanders. The Australian Aboriginals and Australia’s past could be understood in both transnational and regional scientific and comparative terms. The Aboriginal exhibition displays continued to mark an Australian distinctiveness but also provided the common “Stone “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

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Age” cultures necessary to define by contrast a “modern” society. That modernity included a convergence of race, technology, capitalism, social Darwinism, and representative government, a familiar one that contrasted with an equally familiar premodern, but “doomed,” society. The local press accompanied such scientific exhibits with extensive discussions of “The Aboriginal Race,” both its characteristics and fate. For example, the Illustrated Sydney News discussed during the year of the Sydney International Exhibition Aboriginal tools, hunting, and languages, concluding, though, that “the Australian native . . . will become extinct or but occasionally heard of in the far interior and unsettled districts.”81 “Ethnological courts” were constructed for overseas exhibitions as well, and those also more often than not included Australian Aboriginal exhibits. The colony of Victoria officially contributed to such a court at South Kensington as part of the London International Exhibitions during the early 1870s, three of its residents forwarding Aboriginal vocabularies and samples of local dialects from Sawn Hill and Bairnsdale. Those displays included words written phonetically for the visitors to pronounce. Prof. Frederick McCoy oversaw the collection of “manufactures, implements and weapons,” which the Melbourne National Gallery provided, along with the casts of several Aboriginal skulls. McCoy’s participation provided the scientific authority and gravitas. The Aboriginal presence at South Kensington could also be found in the art manufactures section, which included the display of Alfred Priest’s “stone sculpture, representing black-­fellow spearing a kangaroo.”82 In this case, the Aboriginal was present in an artistic representation crafted by a non-­Aboriginal. Exhibitions proved to be effective and popular venues for the representation and diffusion of the “sciences of man.” Temporary displays often became more permanent museum ones. Australians sought both continuity and discontinuity with the past, to be both “new” and “old”—­or at the very least, a “new” society and nation in an “old” land, which could make some claims to legitimacy from and connections to that past. Exhibitions were generally helpful experiences and events at the time and in later reflections, whether in the form of personal and collective memory or as the printed text of the many exhibition volumes. Australians and Australia could be articulated and understood during and after the exhibitions in light of that past and not only ahistorical universal principles, such as race. Here were scientific challenges to relying solely on race and “Britishness,” two seemingly ahistorical sources of identity. The display of Aboriginal artifacts and relics at Australian and overseas exhibitions was part of the much larger project to discover, define, and exhibit a national past at late nineteenth-­ century museums and exhibitions, both in Australia and overseas. Intellectually, 130

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the Aboriginal past was not a distant time and society, but ones persistent and present. In other words, the Aboriginal past was in the present. This was a frozen culture and a “doomed” one, as well, whether it was dying out as a result of what contemporaries considered human, divine, or biological intervention, or some combination of that devastating trio.83 The creation of ethnographic exhibits, dictionaries, and relics was part of a widespread sea change in the sense of the Australian past and ways in which that understanding was represented, institutionalized, and made part of public life. At least two components of that change were the recognition of an Aboriginal presence, perhaps relegating it in existentialist terms to a past-­in-­ the-­present status, and the central public role that the “sciences of man” played in rethinking the sense of the past. Exhibition displays and the participation of scientists at such shows were part of that wider movement, as were key political figures, learned societies, public museums, and formal ethnographic studies. Those rose to some prominence and authority during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, usually complementing and sometimes directly contributing to the linguistic and other exhibition projects describe above. The work of collectors and scientists, both professional and amateur, captured significant public attention at home in the colonies and abroad in places such as Great Britain, France, and the United States. The Aboriginal artifacts in their various display modes and venues were significant components in the process of rewriting a public national and social narrative, a narrative in which the contours and participants in the current and future Australian nation and society were understood as such because of their connections to that past, connections which mirrored those in other nations. Those connections were scientific ones, situating the local settler claims to the land and its past within larger, nearly universal claims about “Stone Ages,” language, and tools. The “sciences of man” were made useful and public at exhibitions at home and abroad. In doing so, their representative scientists and exhibits contributed as public science to local society, the nation, and the sense of a past necessary for both.

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Conclusions Theoretical and Historiographic Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Australian Science and Exhibitions

i have tried to locate science in society or public life as much as in a

particular polity or political relationship, thereby attempting to define science and Australia in social as well as political terms. Those are not mutually exclusive, as is shown by the self-­conscious Australian project to create “a science of our own.” The public figure coining that phrase in the early 1830s well knew that claiming science was more than a political claim and that it was one articulated with the understanding of living in a colonial society—­not an exact mirroring of Europe, or Britain in this case, but also not entirely distinctive and separate. Notable among the scholarly studies most helpful for this book are the ones that emphasize (as did that early settler in Sydney) the intellectual, social, and institutional contexts in which scientists, the scientific community, scientific knowledge, and the practice of science developed in the British, French, and Dutch domestic and colonial worlds.1 Over the years, the suggestive scholarship on science in overseas European colonies by George Basalla, Donald Fleming, and Ian Inkster, among others, has considered the relative influences of local and overseas factors in the seeming “spread” of European or Western science.2 The early model of hegemonic diffusion and three-­step marching toward independent science in the colonies has given way to more nuanced considerations of local conditions

and the ways in which the overseas scientific enterprises resulted from a not always harmonious fusion of peripheral and metropolitan individuals, institutions, activities, and ideas on one hand and very specific local ones on the other.3 “Locality,” whether in geographical, political, social, or institutional terms, remains an important context and perspective, perhaps trumping, if not working with, the paradigms of indigenous-­foreign or center-­periphery.4 Again, for me, “locality” is a social term as well as a geographical and political one, and thus I add to the above scholarship the works that ponder the social contexts in which science developed and how that development was affected by the nature of public life. Richard Yeo’s work has been very helpful in an attempt to better understand public debates about what constitutes science and scientific knowledge and how those debates are also inherently about the nature of public life itself.5 Studying Australian public science during the Victorian era suggests how both science and the public interest were connected and mutually transformative. Years ago, Thomas Kuhn also asked historians of science to query how “external” forces and “internalities” alike shaped the development of the scientific disciplinary communities, and my sense is that the multitude of “internalities,” in particular, are found within science and within public life. In fact, the relationships among such “internalities” is a dynamic and formative one, as the history of scientists and science itself at exhibitions suggests.6 Far more recently, as both Yeo and Kuhn guide from a previous generation, the paradigm of networks has taken center analytical stage, a stage that it can most certainly share with “locality,” notably if “locality” includes the nodal points connecting various strands of a network. Exhibitions might be among those nodal points, a set which has included colonies and nations, but also the more specific scientific infrastructure. Exhibitions were part of the circulation of science in its many forms—­material, intellectual, and professional, among others—­and also part of networks in the sense of collaboration or intersection. If museums are part of the discussions about “locality” and “networks,” then why not exhibitions?7 Why not consider the exhibition experience as part of the many networks and localities connecting nineteenth-­ century groups, interests, regions, and other historical or contextual factors? Studying exhibitions and the participation of scientists at such events provides an opportunity to further consider the creative tensions within such networks, notably those of scientific information and material culture, professional and personal contacts, and both voluntary associations and governmental institutions. Those crossed and connected the various Australian colonies, as well as connected those colonies with other recognized polities: Britain, its other colonies, and other nation-­states and their own colonies. Exhibitions Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Australian Science and Exhibitions 133

were important nodal points for networks within the colony of New South Wales, as well as between New South Wales and its neighbor Victoria, Britain, British India, the United States, and France. Exhibitions connected science in Sydney with that in the provincial towns dotting New South Wales, and Sydney with London, Paris, Calcutta, and other scientific centers. In this way, colonial provincial towns enjoyed an unexpected, if somewhat indirect, scientific connection with major overseas capital cities. Science as a practice, form of knowledge, and community of practitioners—­ that is, a network of knowledge generation and reception—­was represented, debated, extolled, and experienced at the exhibitions. Our understanding of the architecture and flow of science as it informed public life can be more fully developed by considering the roles that science and scientists played at those popular spectacles. Such events were essential to the generation, distribution, reception, and legitimacy of scientific knowledge and approaches and to the application of both to more general political, social, cultural, and economic life. Exhibitions connected important institutions, associations, and individuals. The popular shows offered opportunities for them to develop “social capital” and to achieve professional access, thus empowering and drawing near the participating scientists. Exhibitions were part of the many links connecting science within Britain, the British Empire, and particular colonies. Among other prominent scientists, Joseph Dalton Hooker took advantage of correspondence with and exchanges to and from Kew Gardens at the metropolitan center. That network included connections with Australia and New Zealand.8 Public science at the exhibitions was thus not only about a public presence for scientists and science; it was also about shaping the public (that is, city, colony, nation, and society) according to the rules, practices, ideas, institutions, and individuals within the scientific community. As science became more public, it was clear that some wanted public life to become more scientific. Articulating and representing local scientific knowledge, applying such knowledge for local commercial and other purposes, and suggesting such applications at exhibitions—­whether local, intercolonial, or international, in the colonies or overseas—­contributed to those developments and the ways that Australian men and women answered larger public questions at the time about Australian society and the Australian nation. Many scientists turned to the exhibitions to provide a scientific and public answer to the local articulations of the nineteenth century’s fundamental “questions”: the “national question” and the “social question.” That is, science and scientists at the exhibitions held both in Australia and overseas helped ask and answer queries about who was an Australian and what was Australia, that public articulation consistent with more practical scientific 134

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matters, such as chemical processes, ethnographic displays, and botanical taxonomies. The “national” answers might be more local and not always transcontinental, a nationalism associated with the colony of New South Wales or the city of Melbourne as much as the commonwealth of Australia; they and it could also be all of those. The answers also required establishing a sense of the human past for the continent, even if part of that narrative was conflated with the “natural” past. ———————— Struggling to secure support and authority within a colonial society, scientists—­ Rev. W.B. Clarke and Ferdinand von Mueller prominent among them—­and scientific associations turned to the exhibitions for elusive social status and a publicly useful image and role for scientists and for their scientific enterprise. This was similar to but not an identical mirroring of the reform and professionalization processes within British society, when during the previous generation scientific groups and practices were being opened up, as well as new sciences becoming institutionalized; in the case of Australia, these were generally being created after 1850.9 The Benthamite ideas reforming English science and society at midcentury were present in colonial Australia, where there was nearly always a close relationship among government, science, and learned societies, as well as a compelling interest in scientific utility. As a “new” society, though, there were fewer “gentlemen scientists” in the popular or accepted sense of that term to exploit or attack, no deep-­seated (or only a very limited) scientific patronage that was attached to the aristocracy. Rather, in the Australian colonies, patronage was more often attached to the state and government, whether in London or more locally in the colonial capitals. When the South Australian Acclimatization Society sought funds and land, its members did not turn to individuals in the community but to the local government, requesting of the chief secretary government farm and park land areas and monies to study and promote the introduction of overseas flora and fauna. Such proposals in 1864 seemed normal, if not to be expected.10 The meetings and projects of those acclimatization societies were of keen interest across the colonial borders, the press coverage revealing a public engagement with the acclimatization of plants and animals. Scientists responsible for exhibition activities and collections exploited existing and at times constructed new intellectual and social bridges linking Australian public and private scientific organizations and institutions with one another and with their complements overseas in places such as Britain and British India. In this way, the Australian scientists at the exhibitions contributed to what one scholar has termed “a delicate network” connecting voluntary societies and administrative bodies throughout the British Empire, and Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Australian Science and Exhibitions 135

also within Australia itself, where the scientists’ actions contributed to the idea, language, and sinews of the evolving nation-­state and its civil society, as well as their own positions within that polity and its public sphere.11 There was most certainly a scientific “network,” although one might perceive its strength and endurance as much as, if not more than, its vulnerability and delicateness. Public science and public scientists at the exhibitions contributed to that strength and endurance in both material and more abstract terms: that is, both the material culture of objects and texts and the non-­material culture of ideas and relationships. Australian scientists also contributed at the exhibitions to the nearly global grasp of that network. As exhibitors, commissioners, and judges, Australian scientists organized knowledge and collections—­or, in other terms, they were responsible at the shows for the ways of doing and displaying science. Local scientific knowledge and authority resulted when the exhibitions demanded the establishment of an Australian political economy of science by the classification, organization, and exchange of unique or commercial Australian material culture for overseas objects or for their complements from a neighboring colony. It was also the case that local scientific knowledge and authority shaped the exhibition experience, displays, and literature, as Australian scientists created their own intellectual grids and surveys while preparing for exhibitions. Overseas and colonial exhibition committees solicited scientific reports and samples to represent the colonies and generate their own forms of usable local knowledge. Exhibitions provided a way for Britain to know its colonies, but also for the latter to know themselves, to construct their identity out of the unique or representative nature and practical applications of this “Australian” scientific knowledge. Australian scientists at the expositions crafted and sustained such scientific connections and networks in Australia and overseas by direct contact during the shows and with the constant exchanges of information and materials before and after them. Much of the nineteenth century’s superhighway of material culture ran through the exhibitions. Shared participation at the exhibitions provided colonial, imperial, and other overseas scientists with a sense of professional identity and continuity, although that most certainly did not preclude competition and disagreement, nor prevent appeals to nationality. George W. Stocking Jr. concludes that scientists forged lasting intellectual and material connections across national borders at exhibitions as early as the Great Exhibition in 1851.12 We might add to that helpful insight that such borders in the cases of Australian scientists were not only with foreign countries but also with neighboring Australian colonies, and that such intercolonial connections could be as creative and competitive as international ones. That competition and creativity were sources of scientific progress and a reminder of the advantages 136

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to be gained by direct comparison and competition in public life itself. It is also a reminder that scientists at the expositions could negotiate and reconcile multiple identities, professional and national, and that their achievements were not secured without costs. Those could be personal, collective, or both. This book has tried to tell the story of Australian scientists and scientific displays at exhibitions, including those held in colonial cities, and how that participation contributed to the rise of public science—­that is, a scientific practice and set of ideas and institutions which are not distinct from colonial, or national, or imperial science, but ones that suggest a strong relationship with civil society and the roles of science and scientists in social life, not only according to political definitions and relationships. Creating “a science of our own,” in the words articulated at the official opening of the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts in the 1830s suggested a more local claim to authority and knowledge and also the place of those in colonial social life. It was eventually not an isolated or parochial “science”; rather it was connected to and influenced by other scientific and non-­scientific institutions and practices at home and abroad. Australian public life and the Australian scientific enterprise developed together from interactions within each Australian colony, among the various colonies, and with Britain and the wider world. Among the locations where development of public science occurred were the nineteenth-­century exhibitions, both those held in Australian cities and those overseas at which the Australians participated. Such popular and influential events were only one of the many vehicles contributing to the development of public science in the Australian colonies, “a science of our own.” That was a social as well as a political statement. Archibald Liversidge, Ferdinand von Mueller, Reverend Clarke, Joseph Bosisto, and the other scientists discussed in this volume were not exceptional but representative of those goals and interactions and their results. They were joined by many fellow travelers in various personal, institutional, and material culture networks in, through, and outside of the exhibitions. The participation of local scientists at the nodal point of the exhibitions balanced and mediated the relations of status and access, or power and control, between the various centers and peripheries both within the colonies and between those communities and overseas ones.13 As John Eddy suggests in his work on nineteenth-­century administrative history, imperial and colonial expertise might converge by symbiosis and osmosis.14 Imperial and colonial, overseas and local, scientific practice and knowledge converged at the exhibitions as a particular public “locality” within civic society to create an Australian public science within the context of Australian society, or the Australian Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Australian Science and Exhibitions 137

public itself. Exhibitions were not outside of that society or sense of the public but instead central to them. Increasingly, the participation of Australian scientists at the exhibitions made both imperial and national systems of knowledge more interactive, less hegemonic. This did not mean the end of the Royal Botanic Garden’s authority in questions of taxonomy, for example, but it did mean the coexistence of different classifications, names, and scientific knowledge. Kew was not the only player on the scientific fields. The local and the international converged, forming a public science, a term perhaps as revealing as colonial, or imperial, or national science. Public science suggested a positioning within society as much as a political location. Exhibition displays, jurors’ reports, and popular guidebooks at Australian and overseas shows introduced colonial products as part of this public science, influencing their study in far-­flung locales, such as England, where P.S. Simmonds included many Australian scientific exhibits and products in his popular official South Kensington Museum guidebooks.15 Simmonds was praised at the time “for the careful and scientific manner in which he classed the numerous and varied products confided to his care” from Australia and other British colonies. Such measures were “tending in no small degree to advance the interests of the Colonies,” including the development by Australians of their own science and an appreciation by others of that science.16 Simmonds published works that appealed to experts and the general public, interesting and revealing ways by which scientific knowledge, including that about and from Australia, could be made popular, driven by some sort of consumer market, and yet not devoid of intellectual integrity. That was the goal for science at the exhibitions as well: to combine entertainment and education, not to have to choose one or the other. In that way, public science at the shows could attract with “entertaining and instructive spectacles,” although those need not necessarily be large in scope and scale. They had to attract attention in a cosmos of many attractions and, if possible, hold that attention. All of the senses mattered, including vision.17 Small spectacles proved useful for advertising science, as they did for advertising smaller capital machines. “Wonder” was not limited to the gargantuan ones, such as the massive Corliss engine. Exhibitions encouraged the formation of colonial scientific institutions, collections, literature, and intellectual communities—­or the “scientific superstructure”—­as well as Ian Inkster’s “infrastructure,” necessary to sustain and legitimize science and scientists but also to embed science and scientists in Australian society. In many ways, the shows helped define the Australian scientist and his authority, practice, and identity. A new class of public scientific 138

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expert arose during this period of imperial expansion, national consolidation, and social change. The exhibitions helped establish such a community of experts in the Australian colonies and connect them not only to each other and to other Australians, as Australians, but also with their overseas complements. Those and associated developments transformed the scientific enterprise and, in doing so, revealed the costs and benefits, gains and losses, of creating a public science. Colonial scientists used exhibitions to promote their own personal and professional identity, in addition to early forms of Australian social order and national identity. Those coexisted and competed with alternative Australian visions as much as, if not more than, they did with imperial designs. For example, “national” science might at times mean both Victorian and Australian in the wider geographical and political sense of that term, or it might mean one or the other. The acquisition, display, and evaluation of scientific objects provided a foundation for local, colonial, and Australian economic and intellectual life during the nineteenth century, but also for a particular “society,” or understanding of social structure, authority, and relations, not only a political arrangement. Would this be an aristocracy of merit, or of birth, an authority grounded in professional and social caste, or in the demos?18 The scientific vision for Australia’s future held by prominent figures such as Reverend Clarke and Mueller competed with others for the hearts and minds of emigrants, settlers, and the new generation of Australian-­born citizens, as well as for the approval of the imperial overlords in Britain and others whose overseas opinions mattered to the Australians. Increasingly among those was the American opinion. The public science advocated by Australian scientists and learned societies echoed the calls for such science on the part of some American and British scientists and politicians. What was the role of science in Australian public life amid debates about federation, economic development, and colonial society at the end of the nineteenth century? That question unfolded at the exhibitions, as it did during other nodal points of the many webs and networks connecting the distant and proximate parts of the colonies, region, and empire; those were moments and events; they were also institutions and organizations. Driven by tensions between colonial pride and doubt, requirements for utility, knowledge, and beauty, Melbourne’s commissioners intended their 1888 Centennial Exhibition as such a moment. It was not “simply a show of material products” but an opportunity to strengthen the “intellectual” progress of the colonies and form “an epoch in the mental history of many Australians.”19 Scientific exhibits were understood for a variety of reasons to be vital signs and agents of that progress, marking and creating an intellectual “epoch,” if not a political and social one as well. That had also been the case eighteen Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Australian Science and Exhibitions 139

years before, when commissioners at the Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition included astronomical and surveying instruments, alongside geological maps and models, to both reflect and stimulate intellectual and industrial “progress” for local visitors and those attending the following year’s South Kensington exhibition, to which the displays were forwarded.20 Science was a measure of man, society, and the nation, and an increasing number of Australians were ready and willing to be so measured by the end of the nineteenth century. They were also enthusiastic about the opportunities to do the measuring. In many ways, such later-­Victorian scientists and their associates were drawing upon the mid-­Victorian connections between science and society made in the Australian colonies by Sir Redmond Barry and others. Those were articulated in the context of the mineral rushes of the early 1850s, a period in which Barry contended that “the events crowded into the last three years have wrought a change, not merely in the actual condition, but in the immediate prospects of the community.” In other words, the rushes generated considerable social, political, and economic change, challenge, and opportunity. Gold and silver “must inspire consolation, confidence, and hope,” Barry concluded, although he might also have added “uncertainty” and “disorder.” Much of that could be addressed by the “scientific application to economise labour and time,” to civilize and shape Australian society in the name of science—­a science of philosophers, mechanics, miners, and capitalists.21 That effort to connect the sciences and the scientific approach with the practical business of life and society was echoed at the time by Andrew Clarke, the surveyor-­general of Victoria, who reminded his audience that such a union was of particular importance in a society founded upon manufacturing and mining, rather than agriculture. This was also a social, political, and intellectual vision, as much as a scientific one. Science, “national industry and steady endeavour” were required to discover and exploit the colony’s resources in a lasting and significant way. Coal and ores could be excavated, studied, and applied to railroads and manufacturing, two sturdier and longer-­term pillars for wealth than gold and silver. Local museums and exhibitions could assist with that larger public project with “a complete collection of all ores that are useful,” as well as of woods that are appropriate for shipbuilding, roads, and tramways. This was public science connected to the very practical concerns of wealth and labor, but it had a particular vision of how to generate and use that labor and wealth—­and their resulting society.22 Colonial national identity and its complementary social vision during the second half of that century required the reconciliation of competing local political allegiances and visions of civil society, as well as the resolution of imperial-­colonial and internal economic tensions. An important part of the process of inventing and re-­inventing or imagining and re-­imagining colonial 140

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nations and societies was the effort by scientists to address and resolve those tensions at Australian and overseas exhibitions and in doing so to position both themselves and science itself at the center of Australian identity and public life. Barry, Mueller, and Reverend Clarke did so for the mid-­Victorian generation; Liversidge and his colleagues continued to do so as the new century beckoned. Joseph Carne, the visiting New South Wales geologist, discerned at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 a powerful connection between minerals and federation—­for both the host country and his own polity and society. Australian scientists and scientific exhibits were present at major early twentieth-­century exhibitions, most notably those in Britain and France, as science contributed to the idea and practice of the Australian commonwealth. Science also contained a socioeconomic component or vision, reminding us of the class-­based nature or social foundation of national visions. Mueller and his Australian contemporaries envisioned an urban, commercial, propertied future for their settler colony, and one that used science to address and resolve the cultural and intellectual tensions of disorder, distance, newness, exile, and wandering, as well as the more explicit political and social ones. That was notably the case at certain historical moments and at particular exhibitions, among which were those held immediately after the mineral rushes of the early 1850s and the bolder international exhibitions scheduled during the later epoch of both explicit colonial nationalism and the “new imperialism.” Science and scientists were agents and guarantors of this particular Australian modernity at those revealing and transforming moments. Australian scientists merged local and overseas developments to articulate and legitimate at the exhibitions an Australian public scientific enterprise. Scientific ideas and practices—­that is, the Australian public scientific enterprise—­were not only, or even fundamentally, a re-­creation or diffusion of European or British structures and values; they were an integration of periphery and center developments naturalizing at once the presence and authority of scientists, their vision of Australian society, the dominance of settlers, and the role of science in that domination. This community was marginal, different, and dominating—­both European and colonial, colonized and colonizer, “new” and “old.” The same could be said of its scientists and their visions for Australia’s future: its polity, society, public science, and modernity. That future often included a role for the display of science at annual international exhibitions. Late-­Victorian fascination with electricity at the shows was soon replaced by the novelties of flight, which, in turn, gave way to the attractions of the computer. That future has also come to include what we call “science museums” and “science centers.” Much of the exhibition idea and vision for public science remains alive under the management and Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Australian Science and Exhibitions 141

imagination of those venues’ officers and staff. They, too, face surprisingly similar challenges and opportunities, financial and otherwise, in seeking to ensure the authority of the public for science and in the effort to make public life more scientific. The Reverend W.B. Clarke in New South Wales and Ferdinand von Mueller across the border in Victoria might be surprised at computer-­ generated displays and the racial variety of visitors, but they would not be surprised that making scientific exhibitions both entertaining and educational and, in doing so, trying to make science alive, accessible, and meaningful for the public remain efforts relevant to this day. Public science is still negotiated in the dynamic definitions of and relationships between what we consider science and what we consider the public.

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 Notes

INTRODUCTION

Parts of this introduction were originally published in a revised and different form as “‘A Science of Our Own’: Nineteenth-­Century Exhibitions, Australians and the History of Science,” in Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800–1970, edited by Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 110–139. Reprinted in this revised form with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan. 1. John Allwood, “General Notes: International Exhibitions and the Classification of Their Exhibits,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 128 (1980): 450–451. Early French shows are discussed in Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 3–24. 2. Illustrated London News, January 4, 1851, 9. 3. Illustrated London News, July 5, 1851, 35 with illustration. 4. Richard Bellow, “Science at the Crystal Focus of the World,” in Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-­Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 324–325. 5. Please see “Professor Owen, F.R.S,” Illustrated London News, January 13, 1872, 47. The contributor informed readers that Owen held many other prominent public titles and positions, including superintendent of the Department of Zoology, Geology, and Minerology at the British Museum and professor of physiology at the Royal Institution. 6. “Bombay Manufactures Court. Class XV.—­Scientific Instruments,” Official Report of the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–1884, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885), 99. 7. For additional helpful discussion of “public science,” please see Roy MacLeod, Public Science and Public Policy in Victorian Britain (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Variorum, 1995). 8. “Introductory Discourse Delivered at the Opening of the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, April 25, 1833, by the Rev. Henry Carmichael, A.M. Vice-­President of That Institution,” New South Wales Magazine 1 (1833): 78–79.

9. “Introductory Discourse Delivered at the Opening of the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts,” 213–214. 10. F. Gerstaecker, Narrative of a Journey Round the World: Comprising a Winter-­Passage across the Andes to Chili; with a Visit to the Gold Regions of California and Australia, the South Sea Islands, Java, etc. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), 389. 11. Sydney Morning Herald, October 21, 1879, 6. 12. The Illawarra Horticultural and Agricultural Society, 1844–1861, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 3217; and Ballarat Mechanics’ Institute, Catalogue of Exhibition of Science and Art, Opened on Thursday, Aug. 6, 1863 (Ballarat, Victoria: Charles Boyd, 1863). 13. “Mechanics’ Institute, Ballarat, Victoria,” Illustrated Sydney News, July 8, 1869, 226. 14. Ballarat Mechanics’ Institute, Catalogue of Exhibition of Science and Art. 15. Australasian Sketcher, June 13, 1874, 42–43. 16. Australasian Sketcher, June 13, 1874, 42; July 11, 1874, 52; and December 26, 1874, 156. 17. Age, August 9, 1872, 3. Controversies continued about the gardens. Please see “The Botanic Garden,” Age, December 18, 1880, 6. 18. Australasian Sketcher, March 21, 1874, 210; and Age, February 1, 1875, 3. 19. Illustrated London News, August 20, 1866, 195. 20. Express and Telegraph (Adelaide, South Australia), January 27, 1886, 6. 21. Australasian Sketcher, September 6, 1873, 98. 22. Please see “Inaugural Conversazione, September 22, 1854, at the Mechanics’ Institute,” Transactions and Proceedings of the Victorian Institute for the Advancement of Science, 1854–1855, ix–x; and Conversazione Given by the Royal Society of New South Wales in the Masonic Hall, May 16th, 1877 (Sydney: St. Leigh, 1877). 23. Conversazione Held at the Exhibition Building: Prince Alfred Park, 28th June 1883 (Sydney: John Woods, 1883). The official program was prepared by the Engineering Association of New South Wales. 24. Portland Guardian (Victoria), August 29, 1876, 2. 25. Sydney Daily Telegraph, October 6, 1878, 4. 26. “Inaugural Address, Delivered by Mr. Justice Barry, President of the Institute, at the Opening Conversazione, 22nd September 1854,” Transactions and Proceedings of the Victorian Institute for the Advancement of Science, 1854–55 (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1855). 27. For a recent reflection on the “spread of Western science” and the debates around that question, please see Warwick Anderson, “Remembering the Spread of Western Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science 29 (2018): 73–81. Anderson’s consideration of the historiography on the globalization of science is particularly helpful, as is his call for understanding and modeling the “plurality of knowledge making” (80). 144

Notes to Pages 8–11

28. Rod W. Home, “Australian Science and Its Public,” Australian Cultural History 7 (1988): 86–103. 29. Australasian Sketcher, September 29, 1877, 8. 30. Australasian Sketcher, January 23, 1875, 168. 31. The nature and consequence of such networks are helpfully considered in Sanjeev Goyal, Connections: An Introduction to the Economics of Networks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Thinking in terms of networks can help us more fully understand the envisioned and realized roles of science and scientists within the social order, contributing to the important arguments put forth in Joseph Ben-­David, The Scientist’s Role in Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), and Miriam R. Levin, “Center and Periphery in the History of Science,” in Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society, ed. Elizabeth Fox-­Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-­ Quinn (New York: Routledge, 1999), 322–345. Levin’s study of female scientists suggests the significance of social centers, peripheries, and zones. 32. Australasian Sketcher, September 6, 1873, 98. 33. Zoe Laidlaw discusses the importance for colonial governance of overlapping networks of patronage and information in Colonial Connections, 1815–1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (New York: Manchester University Press, 2005). The imperial circulation and networks of expertise and experts are also considered in Roy MacLeod, ed., Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, 1860–1919 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Simon Potter, “Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth-­ and Twentieth-­Century British Empire,” Journal of British Studies 46 (2007): 621–646. Warwick Anderson expresses some skepticism about “gestures towards networks, circulation, flow, or diffusion,” and my intention is to take seriously the nineteenth-­century idea and practice of networks. See Anderson, “Remembering the Spread of Western Science,” 80. 34. For scholarly considerations of “public science,” please see Joe Kember, John Plunkett, and Jill A. Sullivan, eds., Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840– 1910 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), number 16 of the Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century Series; Andreas W. Daum, “Varieties of Popular Science and the Transformation of Public Knowledge: Some Historical Reflections,” Isis 100 (2009): 319–332; and Peter J. Bowler, “Popular Science,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 6, The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, ed. Peter J. Bowler and John V. Pickstone (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 622–632. 35. Illustrated Sydney News and New South Wales Agriculturalist and Grazier, May 26, 1877, 14. 36. Paris Universal Exposition, 1889: Official Catalogue of the British Section (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1889), 134 and 137. 37. That memorable phrase is from Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966). Notes to Pages 12–16

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38. Roy M. MacLeod, ed., The Commonwealth of Science: ANZAAS and the Scientific Enterprise in Australasia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 39. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 40. Lindy A. Orthia, “‘Laudably Communicating to the World’: Science in Sydney’s Public Culture, 1788–1821,” Historical Records of Australian Science 27 (2016): 1–12. Science as a relationship to the natural world in early colonial Australia was also represented by the ideas and experiences of the Australian Aboriginals, including their intentional use of soils and fire, and by studying what scientists were doing in other settler colonies, such as New Zealand. For the pre-­1900 history of science in that colony, please see “From Mātauranga Māori to Augustus Hamilton,” Finding New Zealand’s Scientific Heritage, Part I, special issue of The Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 47 (2017): 1–144. 41. “Introductory Discourse Delivered at the Opening of the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts,” 79; and Kerry Heckenberg, “Thomas Mitchell and the Wellington Caves: The Relationship Among Science, Religion, and Aesthetics in Early-­ Nineteenth-­Century Australia,” Victorian Literature and Culture 33 (2005): 203–218. 42. Australasian Sketcher, June 13, 1874, 34. 43. Louise Mikskell, Meeting Places: Scientific Congresses and Urban Identity in Victorian Britain (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). 44. Charles Eden, Australia’s Heroes (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1883). Stories persisted about what “really happened” to such missing explorers. Were they dead? Did they survive? The Australasian Sketcher headline for February 1, 1874, exploded with “Reported Discovery of One of the Survivors of the Leichardt Expedition,” who was allegedly living with Australian Aboriginals (207). 45. Dane Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 46. “Introductory Discourse Delivered at the Opening of the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts,” 78–79. 47. For consideration of the relationship between elite scientific culture and mass public culture, including exhibitions, please see Fyfe and Lightman, Science in the Marketplace; Joseph P. Cusker, “The World of Tomorrow: Science, Culture, and Community at the New York World’s Fair,” in Dawn of a New Day: The New York World’s Fair, 1939/40, ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 3–15; Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-­of-­Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Brigitte Schroeder-­Gudehus and David Cloutier, “Popularizing Science and Technology During the Cold War: Brussels 1958,” in Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World, edited by Robert Rydell and Nancy Gwinn (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), 157–180. For a more recent discussion of the “wide spectrum of practices of popularization,” including public lectures, printed media, events and institutions, and newspaper coverage, please see Faidra Papanel 146

Notes to Pages 16–19

opoulou, Agusti Nieto-­Galan, and Enrique Perdiguero, eds., Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). 48. Russell Dionne and Roy M. MacLeod, “Science and Policy in British India, 1858–1914: Perspectives on a Persisting Belief,” Proceedings of the Sixth European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies (Paris: CNRS, 1979), 55–68; later republished in S. Irfan Habib and Dhurv Raina, eds., Social History of Science in Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 159–195. 49. A collection of scholars points to the connections between practicing and theoretical scientists and specific public policies and offices in Roy M. MacLeod, ed., Public Science and Public Policy in Victorian England (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1996). These essays chart the contributions of scientists to public policy about salmon, lighthouses, rewards, and endowed research. I need to further research this point regarding local scientists active in similar projects in the Australian colonies. Some of their exhibition activities might very well have been connected to such public efforts, in addition to the botanical, timber, mineralogical, museum, and ethnographic ones described in the following chapters. 50. Gyan Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India,” Representations 40 (1992): 152–178. As Dionne and MacLeod suggested, science in British India was an “administrative method and . . . instrument of knowledge, . . . providing solutions to the practical problems of empire.” Some of the distinctions between science in British India and the Australian colonies, then, are the result of different “practical problems,” as well as the distinctions drawing upon race, indigenous and local science, government’s roles, and other contextual factors. Please see Dionne and MacLeod, “Science and Policy in British India, 1858–1914,” 160. The government of India debated the “employment of natives in scientific investigation,” and both public and private authorities suggested “the desirability of [the] cultivation of the sciences by the natives of India” and its teaching in local schools. Please see Dr. Mahendralal Sircar, “On the Desirability of Cultivation of the Sciences by the Natives of India,” Calcutta Journal of Medicine 2 (1869): 286–291; and Sir Edward C. Buck, Secretary to the Government of India, Department of Revenue and Agriculture, “No. III.—­Employment of Natives in Scientific Investigation,” Historical Summaries of Administrative Measures in the Several Branches of the Public Business Administered in the Department of Revenue & Agriculture, Drawn up in 1896 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1897). The scheme to employ “natives” for the investigation of Indian geology engendered considerable opposition; it remains of interest not only because of its failure but also because of its conception and discussion. 51. “Aerolites in India,” Illustrated London News, December 13, 1851, 699. A captain “engaged in the revenue survey” found one aerolite “on the banks of the Ganges,” while the other was discovered by a district magistrate in Bengal, about “ten miles from Bancoorah.” 52. J. Forbes Royle, “V. Observations on Provincial Exhibitions and the ImproveNotes to Pages 19–22

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ment of the Resources of the Several Districts of the Madras Presidency; By J. Forbes Royle, M.D.,” Madras Journal of Literature and Science, n.s., 3 (1857): 64–79 and 171–172. 53. Proceedings of the Agri-­Horticultural Society of the Punjab, Lahore (Lahore: Chronicle Press, 1852), 1–8. 54. Please see the editors’ introduction and articles in Gareth Curless, Stacey Hynd, Temilola Alanamu, and Katherine Roscoe, eds., “The British World as World History: Networks in Imperial and Global History,” special issue, Journal of World History 26, no. 4 (2016). ONE: “Nearly All Possible and Impossible Things Under the Sun”

Parts of this chapter were originally published in a different form as “‘A Science of Our Own’: Nineteenth-­Century Exhibitions, Australians and the History of Science,” in Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800–1970, ed. Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 110–139. Reprinted in this revised form with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan. 1. Illustrated Weekly News, October 12, 1862, 2. 2. Horace Greeley, Glances at Europe: In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, etc. During the Summer of 1851, Including Notices of the Great Exhibition, or World’s Fair (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1851), 21. 3. “Social Aspects of the Exhibition,” Australasian Sketcher, October 30, 1875, 118– 119 and 121–122. Nineteenth-­century American and British science museums also in some cases offered their visitors such heterogeneity. Victorians commonly differentiated exhibitions from museums, while recognizing some similarities and significant connections. Exhibitions were considered ephemeral, while museums were understood as permanent institutions. Exhibitions emphasized consumption, entertainment, and participation. Science museums tended in most cases to replicate art museums, substituting, for example, minerals and fossils for pottery and painting. Please see Carin Berkowitz and Bernard Lightman, eds., Science Museums in Transition: Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-­Century Britain and America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). 4. The scientific displays at the Great Exhibition are discussed in Jim Bennett, Science at the Great Exhibition (Cambridge, UK: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 1983), and Bellow, “Science at the Crystal Focus of the World.” 5. “Lecture IX. Philosophical Instruments and Processes, as Represented in the Great Exhibition. By James Glaisher, Esq., F.R.S.,” in Lectures on the Progress of Arts and Science, Resulting from the Great Exhibition in London, Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at the Suggestion of H.R.H. Prince Albert (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1854), 300–301. 6. Illustrated London News, July 5, 1851, 35, and September 6, 1851, 301. 7. Maria Zytaruk, “Preserved in Print: Victorian Books with Mounted Natural History Specimens,” Victorian Studies 60 (2018): 185–186. 148

Notes to Pages 22–24

8. Prospectus of Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition, 1875, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, MS 11308/MSB 401. 9. Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876: Victoria, Australia; Official Catalogue of Exhibits, Essays, etc. (Melbourne: M’Carron, Bird, and Co., 1876). 10. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 17–48, and “Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India,” Representations 49 (1992): 153–178, special issue “Seeing Science.” 11. Abstracts of the Papers Communicated to the Royal Society of London 6 (1850–1854): 239. 12. Bernard Lightman, “Mid-­Victorian Science Museums and Exhibitions: ‘The Industrial Amusement and Instruction of the People,’” Endeavour: Review of the Progress of Science 37 (2013): 82–93. 13. “Opening Address,” Transactions of the Royal Society of New South Wales 2 (1868): 2–4. 14. Charles Babbage, The Exposition of 1851; or, Views of the Industry, the Science, and the Government of England, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1851), 12. 15. Please see Joseph Henry, “On the Crystal Palace,” in A Scientist in American Life: Essays and Lectures of Joseph Henry, ed. Arthur P. Molella, Nathan Reingold, Marc Rothenberg, Joan F. Steiner, and Kathleen Waldenfels (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980), 51–53. For scholarship on science at American expositions, please see Robert Rydell, “Fan Dance of Science: American World’s Fairs in the Great Depression,” Isis 76 (1985): 525–542; and Joseph Cusker, “The World of Tomorrow: Science, Culture, and Community at the New York World’s Fair,” in Dawn of a New Day: The New York World’s Fair, 1939–40, ed. Helen Harrison (New York: Queens Museum, 1980), 2–15. 16. Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales Exhibited in the Australian Museum by the Paris Exhibition Commissioners, Sydney, November 1854 (Sydney: Reading and Wellbank, 1854), 6–7. 17. Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales Exhibited in the Australian Museum, 41–70. 18. Exhibition, Melbourne, 1854–Paris, 1855: Special Instructions for the Guidance of Local Committees and Intending Exhibitors (Melbourne: Office of the Commission, 1854), 10–16. 19. “Paris Exhibition of Arts, Industry, and Science of All Nations,” Argus, January 8, 1856, 6. 20. Official Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales, Forwarded to the Universal Exposition of 1878, at Paris (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1878), 61–78. 21. Eugene Rimmel, Recollections of the Paris Exhibition of 1867 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1867), 331–332. The author and/or his editor was a bit confused, as Smyth was secretary to the Department of Mines in the colony of Victoria. 22. The London International Exhibition of 1873: The Victorian Exhibition, Official Catalogue of Exhibits (Melbourne: Francis A. Masterman, 1873), 32–33. Notes to Pages 24–31

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23. “The Victorian Court at the Vienna Exhibition,” Australasian Sketcher, October 4, 1873, 119 (text) and 125 (illustration). 24. “The Queensland Annex at the London Industrial Exhibition,” Australasian Sketcher, April 15, 1873, 3 (text) and 8 (illustration). 25. “Address of the Rev. W. B. Clarke to the Royal Society of New South Wales,” as transcribed in Empire (Sydney), July 1, 1873, 4. 26. Patrick Geddes, “Chapter X. Exhibitions and Social Progress,” in Industrial Exhibitions and Modern Progress (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887), 53–56. 27. Sydney Morning Herald, September 25, 1882, 5. 28. New South Wales, Its Progress and Resources; and Official Catalogue of Exhibits from the Colony Forwarded to the International, Colonial, and Export Trade Exhibitions of 1883 at Amsterdam (Sydney: Government Printer, 1883), 6, 16–18, and 28–38. 29. Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney), August 18, 1883, 11. 30. The South Kensington thematic shows included the International Fisheries (1883), Health (1884), and Inventions (1885) exhibitions. 31. New South Wales: Official Catalogue of Exhibits from the Colony, Forwarded to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London, 1886 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1886), 74–75 and 348. 32. Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition, 1879 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1881), 1027–1028. 33. By Authority of the Commissioners: The London International Exhibition of 1873; The Victorian Exhibition, Official Catalogue of Exhibits (Melbourne: Francis A. Masterman, 1873), 11, 35, and 41. 34. “Interior of the Exhibition Building—­Comprehensive Views of the Exhibits,” Illustrated Sydney News, September 29, 1870, 3. 35. Paris Universal International Exhibition, 1878: Catalogue of the South Australia Court, 1st ed. (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1878). 36. “Trustee Meetings,” Mount Gambier Institute Minute Book, vol. 1, 1873–1887, Public Record Office of South Australia, GRG 58/142/1, 3, 7, 21, 24, 29, 225, 258, and 499; and vol. 2, 1887–1893, GRG 58/142/2, 80, 141, and 343. 37. October 31, November 6, and December 4, 1872, Royal Society of Victoria Minutes, vol. 1, 1854–1888, State Library of Victoria. 38. “Preface,” Sydney Magazine of Science and Art 2 (1859): iii–iv. 39. “Preface,” Sydney Magazine of Science and Art, 105–106. 40. Suggestions for the Establishment of a School of Industrial Arts at Lahore, Prepared at the Request of His Excellency Sir Robert Montgomery, K.C.B., Lieut.-­Governor of the Punjab, 1863 and Report of the School of Industrial Arts, Madras, 1862, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library TR 633. 41. “Preface,” Sydney Magazine of Science and Art, iii–iv. 42. Please see Dyer’s “Letter to the Editor,” Sydney Morning Herald, October 27, 1868, 3. 150

Notes to Pages 31–37

43. “Report from the Committee on Mineral Products and Report from the Committee on Vegetable Products, 25 and 26 August 1875, Philadelphia and Melbourne Exhibitions Committee,” State Records NSW: Colonial Secretary; Special Bundles, Philadelphia Exhibition, 1875–76 [4/799.2]. 44. The Industrial Progress of New South Wales, Being a Report of the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1870, at Sydney; Together with a Variety of Papers Illustrative of the Industrial Resources of the Colony (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1871). 45. Over twenty years later, the South Australian School of Mines pursued similar “survival” information from the Australian Aboriginal community by analyzing a “sample of Earth used by the Aborigines of Roebuck Bay, Western Australia to ally the pangs of hunger.” October 12, 1894, Adelaide Philosophical Society Council Papers, Mortlock Library of South Australiana, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, SRG 10/6/1894. 46. Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition, 1879, clxxiv–clxxv and 363. For a comprehensive description and commentary, please see “General Report. Classes 300–329.—­Education and Science,” 361–366. 47. South Australia: Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition, 1887; Reports of Juries and Official List of Awards (Adelaide: H. F. Leader, Government Printer, 1888), 29–33 and 43–44. 48. South Australia in 1887: A Handbook for the Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition; With Introduction by Sir Samuel Davenport, K.C.M.G., LL.D. Compiled by J. J. Scott (Adelaide: E. Spiller, Government Printer, 1887), 252–255. 49. Reports of the United States Commissioners of the Centennial International Exhibition at Melbourne, 1888 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 41–42 and 121. 50. Frederick Manson Bailey, Queensland Commission: Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1888; A Sketch of the Economic Plants of Queensland (Brisbane: James C. Beal, 1888). 51. The Industrial Progress of New South Wales, Being a Report of the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1870, 42–43. 52. The Industrial Progress of New South Wales, Being a Report of the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1870, 44, 374, and “Part III. Special Papers. Sedimentary Formations of New South Wales,” 505–532. Exhibitions officials in other colonies, including British India, experienced similar difficulties in guaranteeing the appropriate number of judges, or jurors, and to “invest them with an air of representation,” in the terms of the Statesman and Friend of India, one of the leading English-­language newspapers in Calcutta. Please see January 4, 1884, 2. 53. “Paris Exhibition of Arts, Industry, and Science of All Nations,” Empire, December 28, 1855, 2. 54. H. C. Russell, “Anniversary Address,” Royal Society of New South Wales Journal (1877): 6–7. 55. Eugene Hilgard wrote Ferdinand Mueller that “Germany was pre-­eminent in Notes to Pages 38–41

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the industrial exhibits—­renewing the impression I received when there.” October 16, 1893, in R. W. Home, A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D. M. Sinkora, J. H. Voigt, and Monika Wells, eds., Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, vol. 3, 1876–1896 (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 656. 56. Exhibition: Melbourne, 1854–Paris, 1855; Special Instructions for the Guidance of Local Committees and Intending Exhibitors, 10–16. 57. Industrial Museum and Library Letter Book, 1870–1879, National Museum of Victoria Archives, Melbourne, 11–13. For a helpful discussion of local Australian antiquarianism, please see Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 58. Industrial Museum and Library Letter Book, 1870–1879, 11–13. 59. “Australian Vegetation, Indigenous or Introduced, Considered Especially in Its Bearings on the Occupations of the Territory, and with a View of Unfolding Its Resources,” Intercolonial Exhibition Essays, 1866, Australian Pamphlets, No. 11, 38 pp. Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library, London. 60. Mueller to Joseph Hooker, October 1, 1882, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:289. 61. Some of the benefits and costs of such long-­distance networks and connections are considered in A. M. Lucas, “Assistance at a Distance: George Bentham, Ferdinand von Mueller and the Production of Flora Australiensis,” Archives of Natural History 30 (2003): 255–281. TWO: “Men Who Are an Ornament to Science”

1. David Wade Chambers, “Does Distance Tyrannize Science,” in International Science and National Scientific Identity: Australia between Britain and America, ed. Rod W. Home and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (Boston: Kluwer, 1991), 32. 2. Complementary questions about public science in Victorian England are addressed in Fyfe and Lightman, Science in the Marketplace. 3. Similar issues are considered in Roy M. MacLeod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science 5 (1982): 1–16. 4. Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, “Debates and Controversies: Why Public Culture?” Public Culture Bulletin 1 (1998): 6–9. 5. Illustrated Sydney News and New South Wales Agriculturalist and Grazier, May 26, 1877, 14. 6. S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina, “Introduction,” in Social History of Science in Colonial India: Themes in Indian History, ed. S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), xvi. 7. Sir Redmond Barry, Exhibition Correspondence, La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Box 122/2, 151.

152

Notes to Pages 41–46

8. Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition, 1879 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1881), 363. 9. Age, January 29, 1879, 3. 10. Charles Babbage, The Exposition of 1851; or, Views of the Industry, the Science, and the Government of England, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1851); and “The Address of the Prince Consort on Opening as President the Fourth Session of the International Statistical Congress,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 23 (1860): 278. 11. Everett Mendelsohn, “The Emergence of Science as a Profession in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe,” in The Management of Scientists, ed. Karl Hill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 3–48; and Ruth Barton, “‘Men of Science’: Language, Identity and Professionalization in the Mid-­Victorian Scientific Community,” History of Science 41 (2003): 73–120. 12. Babbage, The Exposition of 1851, 190–201. 13. Lionel A. Gilbert, “Plants, Politics and Personalities in Nineteenth-­Century New South Wales,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 56 (1970): 5–35. 14. H. H. G. McKern, “The Volatile Oils of the Australian Flora,” in A Century of Scientific Progress: The Centenary Volume of the Royal Society of N.S.W. (Sydney: Australasian Medical Publishing Company, 1968), 312–317. 15. “1. Bosisto, Joseph, Richmond, Melbourne.—­Chemical and pharmaceutical preparations obtained from the eucalyptus or gum trees of Australia, and other indigenous vegetation.” Please see “Department II. Manufactures. Victoria. Chemical Manufactures,” United States Centennial Commission: International Exhibition; 1876 Official Catalogue; Part I. Main Building and Annexes (Philadelphia: John R. Nagle, 1876), 160. 16. “George Collins Levey to the Honorable Commissioners,” July 13, 1877, International Exhibition at Philadelphia, 1876: Final Report of the Commissioners for Victoria (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1877), 3. 17. Please see “Botanist Biography File,” La Trobe Library, Melbourne; and “Official List of the Exhibitors from Victoria to Whom Awards Have Been Decreed . . . ,” in International Exhibition at Philadelphia, 1876: Report of the Commissioners for Victoria to His Excellency the Governor (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1877). 18. “Report of the Executive Commissioner,” in Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1885–1886: Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1885–1886 (Melbourne: Robert S. Brain, Government Printer, 1886). 19. James Thomson, secretary to the Victorian Commission for the Calcutta International Exhibition, to Graham Berry, chief secretary, April 28, 1883, as cited in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:313n1. 20. Proceedings of the Revenue and Agriculture Department, Part B, January 1884, Serial No. 169, Oriental and India Collection P2280, British Library. 21. “Appendix A: Awards to Victorian Exhibitors at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–4” and “Appendix C,” in Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria

Notes to Pages 46–51

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at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–84 (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1884), 36 and 48. 22. Statesman and Friend of India (Calcutta), November 2, 1883, 3, and January 17, 1884, 2; and “Appendix B,” in Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 40–47. 23. “Art. VII.—­The Colonies in the Calcutta Exhibition,” Calcutta Review 78 (1884): 354. The possibility “that Australia will enable a retired official to eke out his pension” did not escape the local Anglo-­Indian press, one of whose members called upon the Australian commissioners to “deliver each a lecture upon their respective colonies.” Please see Statesman and Friend of India, January 4, 1884, 2. 24. Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 34– 35 and 48–49. 25. Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 34. 26. Elaine Grainger, The Remarkable Reverend Clarke: The Life and Times of the Father of Australian Geology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 27. Among many examples, please see Remarks on the Sedimentary Formation of New South Wales: Illustrated by References to Other Provinces of Australasia, by Rev. W. B. Clarke (Sydney: Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition, 1877); and Queensland Minerals: Catalogue of the Minerals Exhibited in the Queensland Court, Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, with Abbreviated Notes on the Various Mineral Fields Extracted from the Annual Reports of the Department of Mines and the Reports of the Government Geologists and Other Explorers of Queensland, by A. W. Clarke (Brisbane: James C. Beal, Government Printer, 1886). 28. For example, please see “Remarks on the Sedimentary Formations of New South Wales: Illustrated by Reference to Other Provinces of Australia, by Rev. W. B. Clarke,” in The Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition of 1870: The Industrial Progress of New South Wales (Sydney: Government Printer, 1870). 29. “Address of the Rev. W. B. Clarke to the Royal Society of New South Wales,” as reported in Empire, July 1, 1873, 4. 30. For information about Clarke’s career and life, please see Grainger, Remarkable Reverend Clarke, and Robert Young, This Wonderfully Strange Country, Rev. W. B. Clarke Colonial Scientist (Thirroul, NSW: Robert Young, 2015). 31. “Inaugural Address, Delivered by Mr. Justice Barry, President of the Institute, at the Opening Conversazione, 22nd September 1854,” in Transactions and Proceedings of the Victorian Institute for the Advancement of Science, 1854–55 (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1855). 32. Paul Fox, “The State Library of Victoria: Science and Civilisation,” Transition 26 (1988): 14–21. 33. A similar argument is made about the social and cultural influence of science in provincial eighteenth-­century England in Paul Elliott, “The Birth of Public Science in the English Provinces: Natural Philosophy in Derby, c. 1690–1760,” Annals of Science 57 (2000): 61–100. Elliott shows how Newtonian philosophy connected science and 154

Notes to Pages 51–53

scientific theory to industrial and technological endeavors, thereby influencing the English public sphere. In that way, science as a body of ideas and actions was not only part of civil society or a product of it, but it also helped shape it. The relationships of science, public life, and the market in Victorian England are considered in Fyfe and Lightman, Science in the Marketplace. 34. Charles Moore to Ferdinand von Mueller, September 20, 1879, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:160–161. 35. Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales Exhibited in the Australian Museum by the Paris Exhibition Commissioners: Sydney, November 1854 (Sydney: Reading and Wellbank, 1854), 7. 36. State Records NSW: Colonial Secretary; NRS 906, Special Bundles, Dublin Exhibition, 1865 [4/750.2]. 37. “Annual Address, by Mr. Charles Moore, Vice-­President and Director of the Botanic Gardens, Delivered to the Royal Society of New South Wales, 12 May 1880,” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales 14 (1880): 4–6. 38. 1867–1868 Session of the Assembly, vol. 15. There are several pages concerning the appointment, removal, and then reversal of the removal. 39. Lionel A. Gilbert, Biography of William Carron (1821–1876): Botanist and Explorer, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ML B 1427. 40. William Carron Fieldbooks, August–September 1875, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ML B 1426. 41. Eric Kaufmann, “‘Naturalizing the Nation’: The Rise of Naturalistic Nationalism in the United States and Canada,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998): 666–695. For a discussion of the roles of “nature” in New Zealand nationalism, please see Franklin Ginn, “Extension, Subversion, Containment: Eco-­Nationalism and (Post) Colonial Nature in Aotearoa New Zealand,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2008): 335–353. 42. The history of resource management and land development in Australia is considered in J. M. Powell, An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and J. M. Powell and M. Williams, eds., Australian Space/Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). For consideration of economic development, settler colonialism, and environmental history, please see J. M. Powell, “Historical Geography and Environmental History: An Australian Interface,” Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996): 253–273; Thomas Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Thomas Dunlap, “Australian Nature, European Culture: Anglo Settlers in Australia,” Environmental History Review 17 (1993): 25–48. 43. For more information about Bailey and his exhibition activities, please see C. T. White, “Memorial Address: F. M. Bailey: His Life and Work,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland 61 (1950): 104–114. Notes to Pages 54–56

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44. Bailey, Queensland Commission: Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1888; A Sketch of the Economic Plants of Queensland. 45. Illustrated Sydney News, August 30, 1870, 3. 46. “Queensland Court,” in Notes on the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879, with Photo-­Type Illustrations (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1880), 268. Official botanical samples included oils, sugar cane, and maize, exhibits of both commercial and scientific interest. 47. Report on the Brisbane Botanic Garden, Presented to Both Houses by Command (Brisbane: James C. Beal, Government Printer, 1874), 1–4. 48. Queensland Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly, vol. 2, 1881. 49. “The Queensland Annex at the London Industrial Exhibition,” Australian Sketcher, April 15, 1873, 3 (text) and 8 (illustration); and “Mr. R. Daintree,” Australasian Sketcher, May 7, 1873, frontispiece (illustration) and 19 (text). 50. “The Victorian Court at the Vienna Exhibition,” Australasian Sketcher, October 4, 1873, 119 (text) and 125 (illustration). 51. Whether as a result of his expertise or of the lack of available experts—­or perhaps both—­Liversidge participated as a member of four very different exhibition committees at some shows: Animal Products, Vegetable Products, Mineral Products, and Arts, Manufactures, and Miscellaneous. The last included at one show in the 1870s wines, candles, pictures and drawings, and “objects of Natural History.” 52. Those exhibition duties are discussed in the series of letters and memoranda collected in the Papers of Prof. Archibald Liversidge, University of Sydney Archives, Box 19: Correspondence, Folder I (July 31, 1878), Folder II (July 12, 1879, and July 24, 1879), and Folder IV (January 3, 1878, and January 7, 1881). For a helpful biography, please see Roy MacLeod, Archibald Liversidge: Imperial Science Under the Southern Cross (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013). MacLeod notes that the prewar exhibitions were the last times that Liversidge exhibited as a public or private scientist (389 and 397). 53. New South Wales: Official Catalogue of Exhibits from the Colony Forwarded to the International Exhibition of 1883–84 at Calcutta (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1883), 33. 54. Liversidge to Augustus Morris, October 27, 1879, Archibald Liversidge Papers, University of Sydney Archives, Folder VIII. 55. Report from the Committee on Mineral Products and Report from the Committee on Vegetable Products, August 25 and 26, 1875, Philadelphia and Melbourne Exhibitions Commission, State Records NSW: Colonial Secretary; Special Bundles, Philadelphia Exhibition, 1875–76, [4/799.2]. 56. Frederick Watts to Joseph Henry, June 22, 1876; Frederick Watts to Redmond Barry, June 22, 1876; and Joseph Henry to Sir Redmond Barry, September 27, 1876, Redmond Barry Collection, La Trobe Manuscripts, State Library of Victoria, MS 8380, Box 600/4(G). 57. Joseph Henry to Samuel Davenport, November 27, 1876, “Colonial and In 156

Notes to Pages 56–59

ternational Exhibitions Scrapbook, 1876–1880,” Sir Samuel Davenport Papers, Mortlock Library, Adelaide, PRG 40/61. 58. Redmond Barry to Prof. Joseph Henry, September 27, 1876, Redmond Barry Collection, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, MS 8380, Box 600/4(B). 59. “September 1882,” Technological and Industrial Museum Letter Book, 1, 1882–1883, Power House Museum Archives MA 4/1, 19–20. 60. Joseph E. Carne, Curator, Report on Museum in Annual Report of the Department of Mines, New South Wales, for the Year 1887 (Sydney: Charles Potter, 1888); Department of Mines Out-­Letters: 1888–1893, State Records NSW, 3/16092, 80–100; and “Temporary Museum, for Display of Mineral Exhibits from the Centennial Exhibition,” Department of Mines Out-­Letters: 1888–1893, March 11, 1889, and June 16, 1890, 351–354 and 487. 61. Joseph E. Carne, “Notebooks from Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893,” Papers of Joseph E. Carne, 1888–1919, Mitchell Library, Sydney, ML A3979. 62. Carne, “Notebooks from Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893.” 63. January 20, 1892, Correspondence and Papers Relating to the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1891–1892, Queensland State Archives, PRE/137. 64. Carne, “Notebooks from Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893.” 65. Exhibition: Melbourne, 1854–Paris, 1855; Special Instructions for the Guidance of Local Committees and Intending Exhibitors (Melbourne: Office of the Commission, 1854), 3; and British Section Handbook and Catalogue, Paris Universal Exposition, 1889 (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1889), 134 and 137. 66. Mueller’s rocky relationships with members of the Royal Society of Victoria are discussed in Rod W. Home, “Ferdinand Mueller and the Royal Society of Victoria,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 127 (2015): 105–109. 67. Mueller to Thomas Anderson, February 24, 1866, and July 28, 1866; Mueller to Joseph Hooker, July 28, 1866, in R. W. Home, A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D. M. Sinkora, and J. H. Voigt, eds., Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, vol. 2, 1860–1875 (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 339–340 and 368–371. 68. Mueller to William Mitten, February 13, 1882, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:252. 69. Mueller to Johan Lange, July 11, 1885, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:406. 70. In Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:371. 71. Helen M. Cohn and Sara Maroske, “Relief from Duties of Minor Importance: The Removal of Baron von Mueller from the Directorship of the Melbourne Botanic Garden,” Victorian Historical Journal 67 (1996): 103–127. 72. Please see J. M. Powell, “Exiled from the Garden: Von Mueller’s Correspondence with Kew, 1871–1881,” Victorian Historical Journal 48 (1977): 313–320. 73. Age, August 9, 1872, 3. 74. Mueller to Joseph Hooker, August 16, 1879, Regardfully Yours, 3:157. 75. Mueller to Asa Gray, February 21, 1880, Regardfully Yours, 3:180–185.

Notes to Pages 59–63

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THREE: “From the Empire of Plants I Have Always Endeavoured”

1. The Argus (Melbourne) announced Mueller’s appointment as “Government Botanist” on February 3, 1853, 5. The official announcement was made in the previous day’s Government Gazette. 2. William Howitt, Land, Labour and Gold: or, Two Years in Victoria with Visits to Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land (Kilmore, Victoria: Lowden Publishing, 1972), 398. 3. This focus on Mueller’s scientific exhibition activities draws upon the extensive helpful scholarship concerning his roles as scientist, collector, government official, and savant. That vast scholarship includes A. M. Lucas, “Baron von Mueller: Protégé Turned Patron,” in Australian Science in the Making, ed. Rod W. Home (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 133–152; Rod W. Home, ed., “The Scientific Savant in Nineteenth-­Century Australia,” special issue, Historical Records of Australian Science 11 (1997); “Melbourne’s Pride and Glory: 150 Years at the Royal Botanic Gardens,” special issue, Victorian Historical Journal 67 (1996); Edward Kynaston, A Man on Edge: A Life of Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1981); A. H. Chisholm, Ferdinand von Mueller, Great Australians Series (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962); and the very helpful discussion of Mueller’s career in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, vol. 2, 1860–1875, esp. “The Botanic Garden” (8–16), “Dismissal” (16–26), “A Global Correspondence” (26–33), and “Exchanges and Acclimatization” (33–36). 4. J. M. Powell contends that Mueller was driven by his “early interests and training,” family background as “a devout Lutheran” who “welcomed the opportunity to render dutiful service to the community,” and desire to secure “a senior scientific appointment” and both its status and salary. Those inspirations drove not only his public labors but also the devotion to finding practical applications for his scientific discoveries, research, and experiments. Please see “Conservation and Resource Management in Australia, 1788–1860,” in Australian Space/Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives, ed. J. M. Powell and M. Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 53–54. 5. Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition, 1879 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer), 1030–1032. 6. Mueller to Lajos Haynald, November 22, 1882, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:302. 7. South Australia: Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition, 1887; Reports of Juries and Official List of Awards (Adelaide: H. F. Leader, Government Printer, 1889), 43. 8. South Australia: Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition, 1887, 32–33. 9. Victorian Exhibition Commissioners Correspondence, 1861–1862, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, Box 122/2, 149–150; and Paul Fox, “The State Library of Victoria: Science and Civilisation,” Transition 26 (1988): 20–21. 10. Ferdinand von Mueller, “Australian Vegetation, Indigenous or Introduced, Considered Especially in Its Bearings on Occupations of the Territory, with a View of Unfolding Its Resources,” Intercolonial Exhibition Essays, 1866 (Melbourne, 1867), 158

Notes to Pages 65–68

Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library, London, Australia Pamphlets, no. 11, 38 pp.; and “Notes on the Vegetable Products in the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866: By Ferdinand Mueller, PhD, MD, FRS, etc.,” Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia, Melbourne, 1866–67: Official Record, Containing Introduction, Catalogues, Reports an Awards of the Jurors, Essays, and Statistics on the Social and Economic Resources of the Australasian Colonies (Melbourne: Blundell, 1867). 11. Mueller to George Bentham, February 5, 1866, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 2:335–338; emphasis in the original. Bentham and Mueller’s scientific projects are also discussed in A. M. Lucas, “Assistance at a Distance: George Bentham, Ferdinand von Mueller and the Production of Flora Australiensis,” Archives of Natural History 30 (2003): 255–281. Lucas considers the ways by which this relationship influenced the resulting taxa and “the power over Australian plant systematics.” Mueller’s association with Bentham and the project was not without controversy and disagreement, but, as Lucas notes, the “assistance” provided a source of authority and esteem, if not recognition, particularly after he was stripped of his post as director of Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens. 12. Kapil Raj, “Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850,” in Habib and Raina, Social History of Science in Colonial India, 96–97. Raj discusses how calibrations and measurements helped make local techniques and tools in India more universal. There was a powerful link between the “two aspects of science . . . material and social practices on one hand, and the knowledge to which they give rise on the other.” 13. Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition, 1030–1032. 14. Mueller to William Thiselton-­Dyer, May 25, 1885, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:389. 15. Mueller to John Forrest, September 11, 1879, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:159. 16. Mueller’s many contributions to forestry at the 1861 exhibition are considered in Linden Gillbank, “Nineteenth-­Century Perceptions of Victorian Forests: Ideas and Concerns of Ferdinand Mueller,” in Australia’s Ever-­Changing Forests II: Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Australian Forest History, ed. John Dargavel and Sue Feary (Canberra, Australia: Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, 1993), 7–8; and Linden Gillbank, “Scientific and Public Duties: Ferdinand Mueller’s Forest Contributions to Exhibitions and a Museum,” in Seize the Day: Exhibitions, Australia and the World, ed. Kate Darian-­Smith, Richard Gillespie, Caroline Jordan, and Elizabeth Willis (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University ePress, 2008), 7.1–7.18. 17. Mueller also expressed such views in his correspondence and public lectures. For example, please see his thoughts in a private letter about “the importance of forest culture and forest-­conservancy” in Mueller to William Branwhite Clarke, December 25, 1876, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:83–86. He also presented a broad scheme to develop forest resources, schools, and boards in one of his letters to Graham Berry. Notes to Pages 69–70

159

Mueller considered part of his “duty as director of the botanic gardens” the preparation from trees and other forest vegetation of tars, oils, dyes, and so forth, whether or not the originating plants were indigenous to Australia or from abroad. Please see Mueller to Berry, August 7, 1877, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:100–106. Among the examples of his public lectures on the topic of forests, please see Forest Culture in Its Relation to Industrial Pursuits: A Lecture Delivered by Baron Ferdinand Von Mueller, C.M.G., M.D., Ph.D., F.R.S., Government Botanist for Victoria, and Director of the Botanical Gardens of Melbourne, on 22nd June 1871 (Melbourne: Mason, Firth, and M’Cutcheon, 1871), esp. 48–52. 18. For example, please see “Inaugural Address, Delivered by Mr. Justice Barry, President of the Institute, at the Opening Conversazione, 22nd September 1854,” Transactions and Proceedings of the Victorian Institute for the Advancement of Science, 1854–55 (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1855), 1–15. 19. Mueller to Messrs. Watson & Scull, February 28, 1883, and Mueller to T. R. Wilson, Esqr, Under-­secretary, May 7, 1883, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:309– 310 and 3:313–314. 20. No. 39, December 18, 1866, and No. 41, December 20, 1866, Despatches from the Governor to the Secretary of State, vol. 6, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 1084, 307–309. 21. “Notes on the Vegetable Products,” 221. 22. Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–84: Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria, at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–84 (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1884), 27. 23. Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria, at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 11–12. 24. Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–84: Catalogue of Exhibits in the Victorian Court (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1883), 44, 47, and 68. 25. “Calcutta International Exhibition: The Victorian Court,” Statesman and Friend of India, November 6, 1883, 2. 26. Mueller earned a “Certificate of Merit of the First Class, with Gold Medal” for “specimens of Australian woods” and “collection of Australian flowers not yet introduced into horticulture, preserved in an album,” and a “Certificate of Merit of the Third Class” for “Victorian silk and cocoons, prepared by Mrs. Timbrell.” “Appendix A,” Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria, at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 36 and 39. 27. Mueller to Philip Sclater, December 1887, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:484–488; and J. M. Powell, “A Letter from the Baron: Von Mueller’s Royal Medal, 1888,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 63 (1978): 272–273. 28. For discussion of some of the controversy swirling around Mueller, please see J. M. Powell, “‘A Baron under Siege’: Von Mueller and the Press in the 1870s,” Victorian Historical Journal 50 (1979): 18–35; and Helen Cohn and Sara Maroske, “Relief from 160

Notes to Pages 70–72

Duties of Minor Importance—­The Removal of Baron von Mueller from the Directorship of the Royal Botanic Gardens,” Victorian Historical Journal 67 (1996): 103–127. 29. Age, August 9, 1872, 3; and December 18, 1880, 6. 30. Age, December 18, 1880, 6. 31. The Objects of a Botanic Garden in Relation to Industries: A Lecture Delivered at the Industrial and Technological Museum, Melbourne, by Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, on 23rd November 1871 (Melbourne: Mason, Firth, and McCutcheon, 1871), 6. 32. Andrew Clarke, “Anniversary Address of the President,” Transactions of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria 1 (1855–56): 8. 33. Clarke, “Anniversary Address of the President,” 10. 34. “The Botanic Garden,” Age, December 18, 1880, 6. 35. The Objects of a Botanic Garden in Relation to Industries, 30. 36. “Science Education and the Ballarat School of Mines,” Australasian Sketcher, June 13, 1874, 42. 37. Sir David Brewster, “Art. IX—­The Exposition of 1851; or Views of the Industry, the Science, and Government of England. By Charles Babbage, Esq., Corresponding Member of the Academy of Moral Sciences of the Institute of France. London, 1851, Second Edition,” North British Review 15 (1851): 566. 38. Ian Inkster, “Scientific Enterprise and the Colonial ‘Model’: Observations on Australian Experience in Historical Context,” Social Studies of Science 15 (1985): 677–704. 39. “Anniversary Address, Delivered 12th May, 1875, by Rev. W. B. Clarke, M.A., F.G.S., etc., Vice-­President,” Transactions of the Royal Society of New South Wales 9 (1875): 1–56. 40. Address of the President, Ferdinand Mueller, M.D., Ph.D., delivered to the Members of the Institute at the Inauguration of the Hall, January 23, 1860 (Melbourne: Mason and Firth, 1860), 3–4. The Philosophical Society of Victoria and the Victorian Institute for the Advancement of Science were both established in Melbourne in 1854. They amalgamated to form the Philosophical Institute of Victoria one year later. The Philosophical Society had been modeled on London’s Royal Society. Some of the earlier activities of those groups and their members are discussed in Rod W. Home, “Ferdinand Mueller and the Royal Social of Victoria,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 127 (2015): 105–109; Ian Wilkinson, “The Battle for the Museum: Frederick McCoy and the Establishment of the National Museum of Victoria at the University of Melbourne,” Historical Records of Australian Science 11 (1996): 1–11; and Fox, “The State Library of Victoria,” 14–16. 41. Rod Home has made a similar suggestion about the importance to Mueller’s identity of his experiences as a migrant from Germany to Australia. Home argues in his essay, “Ferdinand Mueller: Migration and the Sense of Self,” that science gave the Baron an alternative basis for his identity, as did his commitment to Australia (in Home, “Scientific Savant,” 311–324). My discussion conceives of wandering as a poNotes to Pages 73–76

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litical and social phenomenon within a society. Mueller and other scientists wandered without a sense of place and legitimacy, a “home,” in a more institutional and social sense, as well as the nationalist and psychological senses importantly articulated by Professor Home. 42. For Barry’s ambitious plans for a second-­generation central public cultural center, please see his Address to the Workmen Employed in Building the Great Hall of the Melbourne Public Library and Museum, in Melbourne, Victoria: Delivered by Sir Redmond Barry, on Saturday, September 8, A.D. 1866 (Melbourne: Wilson and MacKinnon, 1866). Advocates of the earliest version of the permanent building suggested “a suitable Central Hall, capable of serving as a Meeting Room, and at [the] same time as a temporary Museum, and lighted from the roof or near the roof.” All other “portions” had to wait until further funding at a future date. The first Hall opened in late December 1859 and included “books on scientific subjects” and “specimens of Natural History.” Please see Royal Society of Victoria Correspondence and Reports, 1856–1888, Part II, La Trobe Library, MS 11663; Royal Society of Victoria General Correspondence, 1864–1918, MS 11663; and Royal Society of Victoria, Victorian Philosophical and Literary Society Minute Book, 1854–1888, vols. 1 and 2, MS 11663. 43. “Annual Report for 1860,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria 5 (1860): xxix. 44. “Annual Report of the Government Botanist and Director of the Botanical and Zoological Garden,” Victoria Parliamentary Papers, 1860–1861, 441–458. 45. Ferdinand von Mueller to Chief Secretary, July 4, 1861, Chief Secretary’s Office: Registered Inward Correspondence, Exhibitions, 1856–8 and 1860–63, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 1189/750. 46. The International Exhibition of 1862: The Illustrated Catalogue of the Industrial Department, vol. 3, Colonial and Foreign Divisions (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1862), 52. 47. “Annual Report of the Government Botanist and Director of the Botanical and Zoological Garden,” Victoria Parliamentary Papers, 1860–1861, 441–458. 48. Lucas, “Baron von Mueller: Protégé Turned Patron,” 133–152. 49. William Westgarth, The Colony of Victoria: Its History, Commerce and Gold Mining; Its Social and Political Institutions; Down to the End of 1863; With Remarks, Incidental and Comparative, Upon the Other Australian Colonies (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1864), 83. 50. Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968), 392–393, originally published in 1873. 51. Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968), 180. Sydney gardens also earned favorable coverage from the Graphic, its special “Sydney Illustrated” supplement at the time of the Sydney International Exhibition highlighting it among various public institutions. Please see December 6, 1879, 567.

162

Notes to Pages 77–79

52. “In walking out to Russell’s House yesterday R. Sellar & I went through the Botanical Gardens, which promises to be really very pretty. They are building a House for the Governor overlooking them.” John Cross to Anna Cross, April 13, 1872, in The Oxford Book of Australian Letters, ed. Brenda Niall and John Thompson, with Pamela Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 89. Many thanks to Rod Home, professor emeritus, University of Melbourne, for this specific reference and suggesting this valuable volume of letters. 53. Godfrey Charles Mundy, Our Antipodes; or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies; With a Glimpse of the Gold Fields, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), 39, 70, and 73. 54. Frederick Mackie also visited Sydney and its Botanic Gardens in the early 1850s, including in his travel journals several passages about the botanic collections. For example, he wrote that the Botanic Garden “contains many plants of interest from various parts of the world, but I should have liked to have seen more of the native plants.” Australasian trees and ferns caught his attention. His later entries point to the dualism of the Gardens, as he often visited to walk and “enjoy the quiet,” and he appreciated that “a few plants are arranged according to the Natural orders and in the Botanic Garden the Linnaean system is illustrated by living specimens.” In mid-­ Victorian Sydney, if not also Melbourne, it was possible to practice “rational recreation” without separating education and entertainment. Here were “the advantages of beautiful public walks, extensive gardens and grounds.” Please see Mary Nicholls, ed., Traveller Under Concern: The Quaker Journals of Frederick Mackie on His Tour of the Australasian Colonies, 1852–1855 (Hobart: University of Tasmania, 1973), 133, 137, and 236. 55. “Scene in the Lower Botanic Gardens, Sydney,” Illustrated Sydney News, October 26, 1870, 11. 56. Graphic, December 6, 1879, 567. 57. Forest Culture in Its Relation to Industrial Pursuits, 35–36; and Gillbank, “Scientific and Public Duties.” 58. For example, please see “Report of the Botanic Garden, Melbourne: By Dr. Ferdinand von Mueller,” Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly for Victoria, 1856– 57, Report Number 81. 59. R. E. N. Twopeny, “A Walk Round Melbourne,” in Town Life in Australia (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1973), 11. 60. Twopeny, “Adelaide,” in Town Life in Australia, 28. 61. R. E. N. Twopeny, “In the Botanic Gardens,” in The Vagabond Papers: Sketches in New South Wales and Queensland, 5th series (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1878), 87–95. 62. That encouragement included private and public support, a partnership at the center of which would be the scientific Botanic Gardens. Please see The Objects of a Botanic Garden in Relation to Industries, 5.

Notes to Pages 79–82

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63. Cited in Lucas, “Baron von Mueller: Protégé Turned Patron,” 141. 64. Cohn and Maroske, “Relief from Duties of Minor Importance,” 103–127. 65. Graham Burnett, “A View from the Bridge: The Two Cultures Debate, Its Legacy, and the History of Science,” Daedalus 128 (1999): 215. 66. Australasian Sketcher, January 23, 1875, 166. 67. Harold Finch-­Hatton, Advance Australia! An Account of Eight Years’ Work, Wandering, and Amusement in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1885), 341. 68. Guilfoyle also participated at various overseas and Australian exhibitions in his official capacity as director of the Botanic Gardens. For example, his “ferns and todeas in cases and tubs” won a “Certificate of Merit of the First Class, with Silver Medal” at the 1883–1884 Calcutta International Exhibition and he contributed to shows in Brisbane his “unique collection of Fibres.” Please see Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria, at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 37, and “Minute Book, 1875–1878,” National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland Papers, John Oxley Library Manuscripts, OM AB/1/1, 78. 69. “The Botanic Garden,” Age, December 18, 1880, 6. 70. Diary of Sam Churchward, vol. 2, Mortlock Library, Adelaide, South Australia, PRG 452/1/2, and 3. 71. P. A. Jennings, “Report of the Executive Commissioner,” Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition, 1879, cviii. 72. The Objects of a Botanic Garden in Relation to Industries, 7. 73. E. A. Heaman makes the provocative argument in her study of Canadian exhibitions that it was the audience, or the visitors themselves, who transformed the exhibitions away from instruction and toward amusement. This was not a matter of social control by elites. Rather, she points to the decline in interest among visitors in seeing agricultural machinery and the complementary increase in their embracing more “fair-­like” amusements. Please see “Exhibition Culture,” in The Inglorious Arts of Peace: Exhibitions in Canadian Society during the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 106–138. 74. Age, December 18, 1880, 6. 75. The Objects of a Botanic Garden in Relation to Industries, 30. FOUR: “Dwellers in the Desert Living in Tents”

Parts of this chapter were originally published in a different form as “Nineteenth-­ Century Australian Scientists and the Unholy Trinity: Overcoming Distance, Exile and Wanderings at Exhibitions,” British Scholar 2 (2010): 227–253. Reprinted in this revised form with the permission of Edinburgh University Press. 1. Home, “Ferdinand Mueller: Migration and the Sense of Self.” 2. Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966). 164

Notes to Pages 83–87

3. Illustrated Sydney News and New South Wales Agriculturalist and Grazier, May 26, 1877, 14. 4. “Monthly Meeting: July 10, 1855,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 1 (1855): xxv. 5. Jan Todd, “Colonial Science: The Intellectual Bridge,” in Colonial Technology: Science and the Transfer of Innovation to Australia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 220–230. 6. Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and the Creative Imagination,” in To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 3–36. 7. Rod W. Home, “The Problem of Intellectual Isolation in Scientific Life: W. H. Bragg and the Australian Scientific Community, 1886–1909,” Historical Records of Australian Science 6 (1984): 19–30. The definition of what constituted a “home” for Australian scientists was fluid and varied. Some defined “home” in political terms, such as where they lived and worked or where their intellectual contacts were located, and others in more psychological and social terms about their relationships to others within Australian itself. Mueller’s use of the term “asylum” reveals one understanding of the need for and definition of “home.” 8. W. B. Clarke, “Anniversary Address, Delivered 12th May, 1875, by Rev. W. B. Clarke, M.A., F.G.S., etc., Vice-­President,” Transactions of the Royal Society of New South Wales 9 (1875): 2. 9. W. B. Clarke, “Anniversary Address, Delivered 12th May, 1875,” 6. 10. Andrew Clarke, “Anniversary Address of the President,” Transactions of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria 1 (1855–1856): 8. 11. Australasian Sketcher, September 6, 1873, 98. Topics of conversation included the recent transit of Venus. 12. December 12, 1855, Chief Secretary’s Office, Inward Correspondence: Exhibitions, 1856–58 and 1860–63, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS, 1189/P, Unit 750. 13. “Geology of Queensland as Represented at London Exhibition, 1871,” Queensland Votes and Proceedings, 1871–1872, 1st Session, 4. For Owen’s relationship to the Australian colonies, please see David Branagan, “Richard Owen in the Antipodean Context,” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales 125 (1992): 95–102. 14. A. M. Lucas, P. J. Lucas, Thomas A. Darragh, and Sara Maroske, “Colonial Pride and Metropolitan Expectations: The British Museum and Melbourne’s Meteorites,” British Journal of the History of Science 27 (1994): 65–87. 15. Lucas et al., “Colonial Pride and Metropolitan Expectations,” 73. 16. The Industrial Progress of New South Wales: Being a Report on the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1870 at Sydney; Together with a Variety of Papers Illustrative of the Industrial Resources of the Colony (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1871). 17. The Industrial Progress of New South Wales, 1. Notes to Pages 88–92

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18. The Industrial Progress of New South Wales, 505–792. 19. May 23, 1881, Melbourne International Exhibition, 1880: Correspondence, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS, 4363/12, Letter no. 39. 20. Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg, “Introduction,” in Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-­Cultural Comparison, ed. Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), xi. 21. The questions of regional, national, and imperial science are considered in the public discussion among Paolo Palladino, Michael Worboys, and Lewis Pyenson in the pages of Isis. What began as an inquiry about the relationships between imperialism and science continued to include differences among the sciences, connections between metropoles and peripheries, and, among other important issues, the possible local or indigenous responses to outside science. Please see Palladino and Worboys, “Science and Imperialism,” Isis 84 (1993): 91–102, and Pyenson, “Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences Revisited,” Isis 84 (1993): 103–108. 22. David Wade Chambers, “Does Distance Tyrannize Science,” and David Knight, “Tyrannies of Distance in British Science,” in Home and Kohlstedt, International Science and National Scientific Identity, 19–38 and 39–53, respectively; and Home, “The Problem of Intellectual Isolation in Scientific Life.” 23. Argus, April 5, 1876, 5. 24. G. C. Bolton, Richard Daintree: A Photographic Memoir (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1965), 22–23. For a contemporary account of Daintree’s professional activities as agent-­general, please see “Our Agents-­General—­No II: Mister R. Daintree, Agent-­ General for Queensland,” Australasian Sketcher, May 17, 1873, 19. 25. Joseph Henry to Redmond Barry, September 27, 1876, Redmond Barry Collection, La Trobe Manuscripts, State Library of Victoria, MS 8380/Box 600/4 (F). 26. Frederick Watts to Joseph Henry, June 22, 1876, and Frederick Watts to Redmond Barry, June 22, 1876, Redmond Barry Collection, MS 8380/Box 600/4 (G). 27. Please see Mueller to T. R. Wilson, September 6, 1884, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:367–368. 28. December 12, 1857, Chief Secretary’s Office, Registered Inward Correspondence: “Exhibitions, 1856–58 and 1860–63,” Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS, 1189/P, Unit 750. 29. Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Queensland, November 1863. 30. Andrew Clarke, “Anniversary Address of the President,” 6–10. 31. Address on the Opening of the School of Mines, Ballarat, Victoria (Melbourne: Mason, Firth, and M’Cutcheon, General Printers, 1870). 32. Industrial Museum and Library Letterbook, 1870–1879, National Museum of Victoria Archives, Melbourne, 42–43. 33. George Ulrich to Chairman of the Committee, August 15, 1872, Industrial and Technological Museum Reports and Papers, 1872, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS, 5837/P, Unit 1, 1–4.

166

Notes to Pages 92–96

34. Australian Museum Outward Letter Books, 1861–1868, series 6, vol. 2, Australian Museum Archives, Sydney, 126–127. 35. Australian Museum Outward Letter Books, 1861–1868, 44 and 107; “Annual Report of the Australian Museum,” New South Wales Votes and Proceedings, Legislative Assembly, vol. 4, 1863–1864, 643; and “Annual Report of the Australian Museum,” New South Wales Journal of the Legislative Council, vol. 2, 1864, 105. 36. Australian Museum Archives, Sydney, Box 7/4, C.20.80.8. 37. Australian Museum Archives, Sydney, Box 7/4, C.20.79.2 and C.20.79.13. For the general importance of such international exchanges to nineteenth-­century museums, please see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, “International Exchanges in the Natural History Enterprise: Museums in Australia and the United States,” in Home and Kohlstedt, International Science and National Scientific Identity, 121–149. 38. Australian Museum Outward Letter Books, 1837–1861, series 6, vol. 1, Australian Museum Archives, Sydney, 128 and 142. 39. Australian Museum Correspondence, 1846, Australian Museum Archives, Sydney, Box 7/4, C.20.46.1. 40. Chief Secretary’s Office to the President of the Trustees, Public Library, Museum and Gallery, Melbourne, March 26, 1881, Melbourne International Exhibition, 1880, Correspondence on Subject of Presentations Made by Trustees, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 4346/P, Unit 12. Among many purchases were those made from Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia, and “Mr. Ward,” the well-­known taxidermist. 41. “The Museum and Library Report,” The School of Mines, Ballarat, Annual Report Presented at the Meeting of Governors, Held January 24, 1882 (Ballarat: Charles Boyd, 1882), 22–27. 42. Australian Sketcher, June 13, 1874, 42–43. 43. For the development of colonial natural history and science museums in nineteenth-­century Australia, please see Kathleen Fennessy, “‘Industrial Instruction’ for the ‘Industrious Classes’: Founding the Industrial and Technological Museum, Melbourne,” Historical Records of Australian Science 16 (2005): 45–64; Fennessy, A People Learning: Colonial Victorians and Their Public Museums, 1860–1880 (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Press, 2007); Ian Wilkinson, “The Battle for the Museum: Frederick McCoy and the Establishment of the National Museum of Victoria at the University of Melbourne,” Historical Records of Australian Science 11 (1996): 1–11; Susan Sheets-­ Pyenson, “Civilizing by Nature’s Example: The Development of Colonial Museums of Natural History, 1850–1900,” in Reingold and Rothenberg, Scientific Colonialism, 351–377; Sheets-­Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Natural History Museums during the Late Nineteenth Century (Kingston: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1988); Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, “Australian Museums of Natural History: Public Priorities and Scientific Initiatives in the 19th Century,” Historical Records of Australian Science 5

Notes to Pages 97–99

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(1983): 1–29; and Kohlstedt, “Natural Heritage: Securing Australian Materials in 19th Century Museums,” Museums Australia (1984): 15–22. 44. Fennessy, “‘Industrial Instruction’ for the ‘Industrious Classes.’” 45. Frederick McCoy, “On Museums in Victoria,” Transactions of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria 1 (1855): 127. 46. “Reports of the Museum Committee of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria,” Proceedings of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria 1 (1855): iii. 47. William Blandowski, “Recent Discoveries in Natural History on the Lower Murray,” Transactions of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria,2 (1958): 125. 48. Andrew Clarke, “Anniversary Address of the President,” 1–10. 49. McCoy, “On Museums in Victoria,” 131–134. 50. “Monthly Meeting. March 13, 1855,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 1 (1855): xiii. 51. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 1 (1855): xvii; “Correspondence,” Papers of Prof. Archibald Liversidge, Box 19, Folders 1 and 2, University of Sydney Archives, e.g., Liversidge to Minister for Mines, November 3, 1874, and Wilkinson, “The Battle for the Museum.” For a contemporary reflection on the relationships and distinctions among museums and exhibitions, please see On the Measures Required for the Efficient Working of the India Museum and Library, with Suggestions for the Foundation, in Connection with Them, of an Indian Institute for Enquiry, Lecture, and Teaching: By J. Forbes Watson, M.A., M.D., Etc. Reporter on the Products of India (London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1875). 52. McCoy, “On Museums in Victoria,” 127–134. 53. Liversidge to Minister for Mines, November 3, 1874, “Correspondence,” Papers of Prof. Archibald Liversidge. 54. “Art. VIII.—­Madras Exhibition,” Calcutta Review 26 (1856): 270. 55. “Catalogues,” A Special Report on the Annual International Exhibitions of the Years 1871, 1872, 1873, and 1874, by Sir Henry Cole, C.B., Acting Commissioner in 1873–1874, Presented by the Board of Management to Her Majesty’s Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851 (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1875), xxvi–xxvii. 56. New South Wales: Official Catalogue of Exhibits from the Colony, Forwarded to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London, 1886 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1886), 74–75. 57. George Collins Levey to Chief Secretary, May 7, 1881, Melbourne International Exhibition, 1880, Correspondence on Subject of Presentations Made by Trustees, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 4346/P, Unit 12. 58. Lewis A. Bernays to A. H. Palmer, Colonial Secretary, June 29, 1870, “Papers Connected with the Representation of Queensland at the London International Exhibition of 1871,” Votes and Proceedings of the Queensland Legislative Assembly, 1871, 2nd session, 5. 59. Published works were part of the larger public battle for authority on the part 168

Notes to Pages 99–103

of both individual scientists and science in general. For a British example, please see Richard Yeo, “Science and Intellectual Authority in Mid-­Nineteenth-­Century Britain: Robert Chambers and Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,” Victorian Studies 28 (1984): 5–31. 60. Victorian Exhibition Commissioners Correspondence, 1861–1862, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, Box 122/2, 149–150; and Fox, “The State Library of Victoria: Science and Civilisation,” 20–21. 61. Catalogue of the Victorian Exhibition, 1861, with Prefatory Essays Indicating the Progress, Resources and Physical Characteristics of the Colony (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1861), and “Correspondence,” Victorian Exhibition Commissioners, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, Box 122/2. 62. Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales Forwarded to the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867, by the New South Wales Exhibition Commissioners (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1867). 63. Patrick Brantlinger, “Black Swans; or, Botany Bay Eclogues,” Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 109–133; Crauford D. W. Goodwin, The Image of Australia: British Perception of the Australian Economy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974); Alan Beever, “From a Place of ‘Horrible Destitution’ to a Paradise of the Working Class: The Transformation of British Working Class Attitudes to Australia, 1841–1851,” Labour History (Australia) 40 (1981): 1–15; and Keith D. Lilley, “‘One Immense Gold Field!’: British Imaginings of the Australian Gold Rushes, 1851–59,” Landscape Research 27 (2002): 67–80. 64. T. G. Vallance and D. F. Branagan, “Chapter 9. New South Wales Geology—­ Its Origins and Growth,” in A Century of Scientific Progress: The Centenary Volume of the Royal Society of New South Wales (Sydney: Australasian Medical Publishing Co., 1968), 269–273; and Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales Forwarded to the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867, 3–8. 65. Please see transcript of Clarke’s Annual Address before the Royal Society of New South Wales for 1873 in Empire, July 1, 1873, 4. 66. Please see the copy of Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales Exhibited in the Australian Museum by the Paris Exhibition Commissioners marked “Copy to preserve with Mr. Moore’s List” in The Macarthur Papers, Pamphlets: Misc. Australian, 1834–1895, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A4364/Item 3. FIVE: “The Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man”

1. Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales Exhibited in the Australian Museum by the Paris Exhibition Commissioners: Sydney, November 1854 (Sydney: Reading and Wellbank, 1854), 41–70. 2. Our Antipodes; or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies, with a Glimpse of the Gold Fields, vol. 3, 2nd ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), 409. Notes to Pages 103–106

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3. Ferdinand von Mueller, “Australian Vegetation, Indigenous or Introduced, Considered Especially in Its Bearings on the Occupations of the Territory, and with a View of Unfolding Its Resources,” Intercolonial Exhibition Essays, 1866, Australian Pamphlets, no. 11, 38 pp., Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library, London, p. 20. 4. “Account of the Gunyang: A New Indigenous Fruit of Victoria,” Transactions and Proceedings of the Victorian Institute for the Advancement of Science, 1854–55 (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1855), 67–70. 5. October 12, 1894, Adelaide Philosophical Society Council Papers, Mortlock Library, State Library of South Australia, SRG 10/6/1894. The sample contained “too small” an amount of organic material to be considered to “have any effect as food,” although the scientists admitted that they could not identify the specific organic materials which might have served as a food source. 6. New South Wales, Its Progress and Resources; and Official Catalogue of Exhibits from the Colony Forwarded to the International, Colonial, and Export Trade Exhibition of 1883 at Amsterdam (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1883), 28–38. 7. Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–84: Catalogue of Exhibits in the Victorian Court (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1883), 6. 8. Official Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales, Forwarded to the Universal Exposition of 1878, at Paris (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1878), 61–78. 9. Queensland, Australia: Catalogue of the Queensland Court of the International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1880 (Brisbane: n.p., 1880), 50–55. 10. Mueller to Mary Kennedy, December 12, 1885, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:421. Similar mythic, nationalist, and historical—­if not religious—­ideas about trees were also expressed in mid-century California concerning the giant redwoods. Please see Simon Schama, “The Verdant Cross,” in Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 185–242. 11. Ferdinand Mueller to Otta Tepper, July 10, 1879, in Home et al., Regardfully Yours, 3:163. 12. David Lowenthal, “Australian Images: The Unique Present, The Mythical Past,” in Readings in Australian Arts: Papers from the 1976 Exeter Symposium, Exeter, ed. Peter Quartermaine (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1978), 84–93. Judith Wright also helpfully discusses the changing perceptions and uses of the Australian landscape in “Landscape and Dreaming,” Daedalus 114 (1985): 29–56. Wright notes that the historical and scientific understanding of that “landscape” now includes recognition of the ways in which Australian Aboriginals used “fire” as “the most powerful and virtually the[ir] only tool” to change the physical environment, providing it with a human and natural history. 13. Berthold Seemann, “Australia and Europe: Formerly One Continent,” Popular Science Review 5 (1866): 25. 14. Ferdinand von Mueller, “Names of Different Woods etc., Used by the Yarra 170

Notes to Pages 107–110

Natives for Weapons and Implements,” in Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia, Melbourne, 1866–67: Official Record, 225–226; and Gillbank, “Scientific and Public Duties,” 7.1– 7.18. For additional references to Mueller’s scientific interest in the Australian Aboriginals, please see The Objects of a Botanic Garden in Relation to Industries: A Lecture Delivered at the Industrial and Technological Museum, Melbourne, by Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, on 23rd November 1871 (Melbourne: Mason, Firth, and McCutcheon, 1871). 15. John W. Burrow, “‘The Village Community’ and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth Century England,” in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (London: Europa Publications, 1974), 255–298; and Minutes of the British Museum Trustees Board Meetings, December 4, 1886, p. 17, 458, Department of Ethnography, Museum of Mankind, London, re. “the ethnographical specimens of the wild tribes of India, now or lately at the Colonial & Indian Exhibition . . . special thanks of the Trustees be returned to . . . Mr. M V Portman, a resident in the Andaman Islands, for a valuable collection of Andamese objects recently exhibited at the Colonial & Indian Exhibition.” The Indian hill tribes and Andaman Islanders were represented at the exhibitions by models, weapons, tools, and photographs. The communities were frozen, atavistic ideal types, exhibited in contrast to the transforming influences of cities, machines, the market, and “civilized” races, whether biologically white or not. 16. “Domestic Implements, Arts and Manufactures,” Bulletin 7 (1904), in Walter E. Roth Letters, 1915–1919, John Oxley Library, Brisbane, Queensland, OM 87–12/1; and Frederick Manson Bailey, Queensland Commission: Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1888; A Sketch of the Economic Plants of Queensland (Brisbane: James C. Beal, 1888). 17. October 27, 1866, 11. 18. Rimmel, Recollections of the Paris Exhibition of 1867, 331–332. 19. R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria: With Notes Relating to the Habits of the Natives of Other Parts of Australia and Tasmania, Compiled from Various Sources for the Government of Victoria, 2 vols. (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1878). 20. For background information about Saupe and the casts, including the efforts of Sir William Davenport, a leading South Australian exhibitions commissioner, please see Philip Jones, “Plaster Figures of an Aboriginal Spear-­Fisherman and a Fire-­Maker, by the Adelaide German Sculptor, August Saupe,” in Adelaide’s Jubilee International Exhibition, 1887–1888: The Event, the Building, the Legacy, ed. Christine Garnaut, Julie Collins, and Bridget Jolly (Darlinghurst, NSW: Crossing Press, 2016). Many thanks to the staff at the Mortlock Library of South Australiana, State Library of South Australia, for providing this source. 21. The Old Colonists’ Association Jubilee Commemoration Catalogue (Adelaide: Burden and Bonython, 1887). 22. Information about the casts came from Dr. Philip Jones, South Australia Museum, Adelaide, to whom I extend my gratitude for his generosity. For correspondence concerning the models, please see “Casts of Aboriginals in South Australia Museum,” Notes to Pages 111–113

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Index to Dockets, 1907–1940, Public Record Office of South Australia, GRG 19/54, Box 4, File 261/1923. 23. “Native Types” on display and sometimes seen working at traditional crafts included South Asians, Native Americans, West Africans, Filipinos, and Scottish Highlanders, among others. For scholarly reflections on such displays and exhibits, please see Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 82–111; E. A. Heaman, “Making a Spectacle: Exhibitions of the First Nations,” in The Inglorious Arts of Peace: Exhibitions in Canadian Society during the Nineteenth Century (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 285–310; Saloni Mathur, “Living Ethnological Exhibits: The Case of 1886,” Cultural Anthropology 15 (2000): 492–524; Raymond Corbey, “Ethnographic Showcases, 1870–1930,” in The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, ed. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1985), 57–80; Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exhibitions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1887); and Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 24. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 25. Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria, at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–84 (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1884), 39; and “Class IV– Native Workmanship,” in Western Australia: Descriptive Catalogue of the Collection of Products Contributed by that Colony to the Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia, Held at Melbourne in 1866 (Melbourne: Blundell and Ford, 1866), 25–26. 26. Official Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales, Forwarded to the International Exhibition of 1876, at Philadelphia (Sydney: Thomas Richards, 1876), 41–43. 27. “Minute Book, 1885–1910,” Papers of the Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Mortlock Library, Adelaide, 11–12, 43, 45, 78, and 92. 28. December 18, 1878, “The Aborigines of Australia,” Papers of the Adelaide Philosophical Society Council, Mortlock Library, State Library of South Australia, SRG 10/6/1878–1879. 29. Exhibition: Melbourne, 1854–Paris, 1855; Special Instructions for the Guidance of Local Committees and Intending Exhibitors (Melbourne: Office of the Commission, 1854), 24. 30. Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales Exhibited in the Australian Museum by the Paris Exhibition Commissioners, 72 and 80–82. 31. July 9 and 29, 1889, Letterbook 12, 1889–1890, Australian Museum Archives, Sydney 6/12, 232–233 and 251. 32. “The Melbourne Exhibition: The Western Australian Court,” Australasian Sketcher (Queensland edition), February 5, 1881, 38. 33. A Brief Account of the Natives of Western Australia, Their Character, Manners and Cus 172

Notes to Pages 113–116

toms: Prepared Under the Instructions from His Excellency Major-­General Sir H. St. George Ord, K. C. M. G., C. B., Governor of the Colony, to Illustrate the Collection of Weapons, Implements, etc., Sent to the Exhibition at Sydney, N. S. W., A. D. 1879 (Perth: Richard Pether, Government Printer, 1879). 34. Des Cowley, “Redeeming an Obligation: Aboriginal Culture at the 1866 Exhibition,” La Trobe Journal 73 (2004): 112–120; Elizabeth Willis, “‘The Productions of Aboriginal States’: Australian Aboriginal and Settler Exhibits at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855,” in Darian-­Smith et al., Seize the Day, 2.1–2.19; Emily Harris, “Race and Australian National Identity at the 1866–67 Intercolonial Exhibition,” in Darian-­Smith et al., Seize the Day, 3.1–3.16; Penelope Edmonds, “’We Think that This Subject of the Native Races Should be Thoroughly Gone into at the Forthcoming Exhibition: The 1866–67 Intercolonial Exhibition,” in Darian-­Smith et al., Seize the Day, 4.1–4.21; and Penelope Edmonds, “The Le Souef Box: Reflections on Imperial Nostalgia, Material Culture, and Exhibitionary Practice in Colonial Victoria,” Australian Historical Studies 37 (2006): 117–139. 35. Report of the Trustees for the Melbourne Public Library, Museum and National Gallery, 1877, 73; and Report of the Trustees for the Melbourne Public Library, Museum and National Gallery, 1879, 54–57. 36. August 15, 1879, Melbourne Public Library, Museum and Art Gallery: Board of Trustees Miscellaneous Letters, Inward, vol. 8, 1878–1879, Public Record Office Victoria, no. 144. 37. Australasian Sketcher, August 14, 1880, 133. 38. Redmond Barry to E. L. Montefiore, March 1, 1879, Redmond Barry Correspondence, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, MS 8380, Box 599/2 (K). 39. Native Curiosities from Sydney, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 4363/10. 40. Redmond Barry to J. Thomas, April 5, 1861, Correspondence Regarding Victorian Exhibition, 1861, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, Box 122/2, 93–94. 41. July 12, 1866, Exhibition Trustees Letterbook, Paris International Exhibition, 1867, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS/927/6, 15. 42. Christine Downer, “Noble Savages or Ourselves Writ Strange? Idealism and Empiricism in the Aboriginal Sculpture of Charles Summers,” La Trobe Library Journal 11 (1989): 27–29. 43. Redmond Barry to Charles Summers, Redmond Barry to South Kensington Directors, and Redmond Barry to Mr. Sinacre, November 10, 1868, Public Library Letter Book, 1866–69, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 4366/3, 278–280 and 285. 44. Exhibition Trustees Letterbook for Inter-­Colonial Exhibition, 1866–1867, Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 927/6, 1–11, 22–23, 28, and 37; Intercolonial Exhibition, 1866: Vocabulary of Dialects Spoken by Aboriginal Natives of Australia (Melbourne: Masterman Printer, 1867); and Sir Redmond Barry to Sir John Herschel, December 10, 1868, and Sir Redmond Barry to Max Muller, December 10, 1868, Melbourne Public Library Letter Book, 1866–1869, Public Record Office Victoria, 4366/3, 286–289. 45. Peter Ryan, Redmond Barry, A Colonial Life, 1813–1880 (Melbourne: Melbourne Notes to Pages 117–119

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University Press, 1980); and Redmond Barry, “Notes on Aboriginal Language and Nomenclature of Towns, Parishes, and Counties in the Colonies,” Redmond Barry Papers, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, MS 8380, Box 602/2. John MacPherson, the Department of Crown Lands and Survey director in Victoria, received Barry’s proposal for using Aboriginal names and solicited his district surveyors’ assistance in providing names and meanings to the land being charted. MacPherson requested such officers consult with local Aboriginal leaders to determine the proper and traditional nomenclature and interpretations. Sir Redmond Barry to John MacPherson, May 1, 1871, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, MS 12161, 2781/2 (A). 46. Cowley, “Redeeming an Obligation.” 47. Intercolonial Exhibition, 1866: Vocabulary of Dialects Spoken by Aboriginal Natives of Australia, v. 48. Barry, “Notes on Aboriginal Language and Nomenclature of Towns, Parishes, and Counties in the Colonies.” 49. Sir Redmond Barry Papers, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria MS 8380, Box 602/2; and “Sir John Hershel’s Suggestions,” Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia, Melbourne, 1866–67: Official Record. Sir Redmond Barry, ed., Vocabulary of Dialects Spoken by Aboriginal Natives (Melbourne: Masterman, Printer, 1867), ix–xii. 50. “Literature: Science of Language,” Australasian, September 29, 1877, 8. The article concluded, “And is not this in itself a fresh and brilliant proof of the truth, discussed at the opening of this work, that philology is above all a natural science?” It was a “natural science” applied to human evolution and history. 51. Barry to Sir John Herschel, December 10, 1868, and Barry to Max Mueller, December 10, 1886, Public Library Letter Book, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 4366/3, 286–289. 52. Norbert Finzsch, “‘It Is Scarcely Possible to Conceive that Human Beings Could Be So Hideous and Loathsome’: Discourses of Genocide in Eighteenth-­and Nineteenth-­Century America and Australia,” Patterns of Prejudice 39 (2005): 97–115. “Their [Australian Aboriginals] lack of a proper language with a developed vocabulary made them less than human, almost on a level with primates” (97). 53. “Note to A. Michie, Agent-­General, London, December 19, 1873,” Correspondence Re. Miscellaneous Exhibitions, Board of Trustees, Melbourne Public Library, Public Record Office Victoria, 4363/2. 54. No. 12: August 18, 1878, Despatches: Governor to Secretary of State, vol. 9, Public Record Office Victoria 1084, 234–235. Bain Attwood concludes that Victoria was the Australasian colony that gave Aborigines “the most sustained political attention” during the nineteenth century. Please see Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 81. 55. Colonial Secretary Letters to Clergy, 1868–1872, Archives Office of New South

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Wales, Sydney, 4/3627, 216, 220–221 and 266–267; and Colonial Secretary Letters to Clergy, 1873–1879, Archives Office of New South Wales, Sydney, 4/3628, 281–282. 56. W. H. Flower to E. P. Ramsay, December 3, 1888, Correspondence, Volume 3, 1886–1893, E. P. Ramsay Papers, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ML MSS 1370/3, 129–134. 57. “File: Imperial Academy of Science, Petrograd Museum, St. Petersburg 1908– 1915,” National Museum of Victoria Correspondence, 1854–1931: Other Museums and Overseas, Box C, National Museum of Victoria Archives, Melbourne. 58. “Correspondence with A. Bastian,” Archibald Liversidge Papers, Correspondence, Folder 5, University of Sydney Archives, Sydney, New South Wales. 59. Tom Griffiths, “Past Silences: Aborigines and Convicts in Our History-­ Making,” Australian Cultural History 6 (1987): 18–32. 60. Edward H. Knight, “A Study of the Savage Weapons at the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876,” Smithsonian Institution Annual Report, 1879, 213–297; and Knight, A Study of the Savage Weapons at the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880). The artifacts exhibited were not inconsiderable: official records reported that, for example, the colonies of Victoria, New South Wales, and Tasmania each sent over 160 such exhibits; the same was true for the Cape of Good Hope and the Gold Coast. Please see “Subject Index, National Exhibits,” in United States Centennial Commission: International Exhibition, 1876: Official Catalogue. 61. Mark Bowden, Pitt Rivers: The Life and Archaeological Work of Lieutenant-­General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, DCL, FRS, FSA (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. “Inspector of Ancient Monuments” (95–102) and “Cranborne Chase Excavations” (103–140); David K. Van Keuren, “Museums and Ideology: Augustus Pitt-­Rivers, Anthropological Museums, and Social Change in Later Victorian Britain,” Victorian Studies 28 (1984): 171–189; William Ryan Chapman, “Arranging Ethnology: A.H.L.F. Pitt Rivers and the Typological Tradition,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 15–48, esp. “Primitive Warfare and the Evolution of Culture,” 30–33. 62. Illustrated London News, December 8, 1855, 685. 63. Illustrated London News, July 7, 1866, 10. 64. In both cases, arguments to preserve specific physical locations were sometimes met with the criticism that such protections prevented the more commercial use of the land. That point was often made by advocates of mining and agriculture. Respect for Australian Aboriginal “monuments” or physical memorials, whether natural or human-­made, was rare during the nineteenth century, but legal protections increased during the twentieth century. For discussion of Lubbock’s bill’s “interference” with farming and mining, please see columns about “Ancient Monuments” in the Graphic during the 1870s (e.g., March 15, 1873, 238). The editors generally supported the measure but argued that perhaps too many “monuments” were being protected and

Notes to Pages 122–125

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that antiquarian interests were not the same as general public, or common, interests. Perhaps not everything deemed “a monument” needed to be preserved and protected? 65. For the Victorian craze over prehistorical geological and fossil discoveries in England itself, please see A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men Among the Mammals: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Michael Freeman, The Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 66. Bruce Buchan, The Empire of Political Thought: Indigenous Australians and the Language of Colonial Government (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). 67. “Class 268.—­Knives, Swords, Spears, and Dirks. 1305. Aboriginal Weapon. Native Axe. 1306. Victorian Aboriginal Implements and Weapons,” Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876: Victoria, Australia; Official Catalogue of Exhibits, Essays, etc. (Melbourne: M’Carron, Bird & Co., 1876); and “Weapons, etc.,” United States Centennial Commission: International Exhibition, 1876: Official Catalogue; Part I: Main Building and Annexes, 161. These exhibits were organized by the official commissioners for the colony of Victoria. 68. For example, Pitt-­Rivers Sketch Books for Ancient Monuments Inspectorate: Bath, Scotland, Brittany, and Wales, 1878–1890, WORK/39, Public Record Office, Kew, England. Compiled by Pitt Rivers, these sketchbooks contain a variety of drawings, measurements, and comments. Scottish stone structures were among the “ancient monuments” capturing his attention. 69. American and Australian antiquarians, ethnographers, and curators often asked similar questions, whether the authors of such queries were professionals or amateurs. George Gibbs’s early efforts to complete the Smithsonian Institution’s “collections of facts and material relative to the Ethnology, Archaeology, and Philology of the races of mankind inhabiting, either now or at any previous period, the continent of America” mirror those of many Australian contemporaries, such as Smyth. Gibbs’s instructions to governmental and private collectors also bear a striking similarity in tone, urgency, and provisions to Barry’s memoranda requesting assistance with Australian Aboriginal languages and other indigenous materials on the eve of the 1866–1867 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. Both turned to officers and travelers in the field to collect evidence in the face of extinction. Please see Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 160: Instructions for Research Relative to the Ethnology and Philology of America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1863). 70. “The Ethnological Court,” Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, November 15, 1879, 846. 71. Notes on the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879, with Photo-­Type Illustrations (Sydney: Government Printing Office, 1880), 143–167; and Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition, 1879 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1881), 364–366.

176

Notes to Pages 125–127

72. “The Ethnological Court,” Notes on the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879, with Photo-­Type Illustrations, 144–145. 73. “Ethnological Court,” Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney), November 8, 1879, 9. 74. Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition, 1879, 171. 75. May 25, 1887, Joseph Anderson Panton, Aborigines in Northern Territory, Victorian Historical Society Archives, Melbourne, MS 000327, Box 118/3. 76. For example, contrast Panton’s views with those of Patrick Just in Australia; or, Notes Taken During a Residence in the Colonies from the Gold Discovery in 1851 till 1857 (Dundee, Scotland: Durham and Thompson, 1859). Just repeats the alleged inability of Aboriginals to ornament their canoes, weapons, and tools, contending that the apparent lack of design and creativity was a sign of their “savagery.” He contrasted their products with settlers’ manufactures and the “decorated” works of other South Pacific indigenous peoples. 77. Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors. 78. Mr. R. Brough Smyth and Ethnological Objects, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 4363/9, Packet Number 9, esp. September 15, 1877. 79. R. Bannister to Sir Redmond Barry, January 20, 1880, Native Curiosities from Sydney, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 4363/10. 80. R. Bannister to Sir Redmond Barry, August 15, 1879, Board of Trustees Miscellaneous Letters Inwards, 1878–1879, vol. 8, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 5831, Number 144. 81. Illustrated Sydney News, October 4, 1879, 6. 82. The London International Exhibition of 1873 and the Victorian Exhibition, Opened 6th November 1872: Official Catalogue of Exhibits (Melbourne: Mason, Firth, and M’Cutcheon, 1872). 83. For scholarly discussion of the “doomed race theory” and its applications, please see Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Brantlinger, “‘Dying Races’: Rationalizing Genocide in the Nineteenth Century,” in Pieterse and Parekh, Decolonization of Imagination, 43–56; and Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998). CONCLUSIONS

1. Reingold and Rothenberg, “Introduction,” in Scientific Colonialism, vii–xiii; and Rod W. Home and Sally Kohlstedt, “Introduction,” in Home and Kohlstedt, International Science and National Scientific Identity, 1–17. 2. Inkster, “Scientific Enterprise and the Colonial ‘Model’”; Donald Fleming, “Science in Australia, Canada, and the United States: Some Comparative Remarks,” Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference of the History of Science, 1962 1 (1964): 179–196; and George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (1967): 611–622. Notes to Pages 127–132

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3. Warwick Anderson provides a very helpful discussion of Basalla’s scholarship and many of the responses to it. Please see “Remembering the Spread of Western Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science 29 (2018): 73–81, an early printing of which was kindly provided by the author. 4. For consideration and review of various paradigms, or “perspectives,” for studying and making sense of science in European colonies, please see Roy MacLeod, “Introduction,” in Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, volume 15, Osiris, 2nd ed., ed. Roy M. MacLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–13. The place of science in the context of modern European imperialism is also considered in Benedikt Stuchtey, ed., Science Across the European Empires, 1800–1950, Studies of the German Historical Institute of London, Number 5 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Miriam R. Levin offers a suggestive linking of social contextualization and centers and peripheries in her study of female scientists: “Center and Periphery in the History of Science.” 5. For example, please see Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 6. Thomas Kuhn, “The Relations Between History and History of Science,” Daedalus 100, no. 2 (1971): 299–300. 7. David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie, “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Techno-­science, and Indigenous Knowledge,” in MacLeod, Nature and Empire, 221–240. 8. Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 9. Roy M. MacLeod, “Whigs and Savants: Reflections on the Reform Movement in the Royal Society, 1830–1848,” in Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850, ed. Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 55–90; and Ben-­David, The Scientist’s Role in Society. 10. South Australian Acclimatization Society Correspondence, 1864, Mortlock Library of South Australiana, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, V56, 373. 11. John Eddy, “The Technique of Government: Governing Mid-­Victorian Australia,” in Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, 1860–1919, ed. Roy M. MacLeod (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 166–184. 12. George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 239. 13. David Wade Chambers, “Period and Process in Colonial and National Science,” in Reingold and Rothenberg, Scientific Colonialism, 314–315; and MacLeod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis.’” 14. Eddy, “The Technique of Government,” 166–184. 15. P. L. Simmonds, The Commercial Products of the Sea; or, Marine Contributions to Food, Industry and Art, 2nd ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1883); and P. L. Simmonds, South

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Notes to Pages 133–138

Kensington Museum Science Handbooks: Branch Museum, Bethnal Green; Animal Products, Their Preparation, Commercial Uses and Value (London: Chapman and Hall, 1877). 16. Rimmel, Recollections of the Paris Exhibition of 1867, 334. 17. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, “Science in the Marketplace: An Introduction,” in Fyfe and Lightman, Science in the Marketplace, 1 and 11; and Faidra Papanelopoulou, Agusti Nieto-­Galan, and Enrique Perdiguero, “Concluding Remarks,” in Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000, ed. Faidra Papanelopoulou, Agusti Nieto-­Galan, and Enrique Perdiguero (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 240. 18. Redmond Barry’s stewardship, if not control, of cultural and educational institutions, including their collections, might be understood in light of this discussion of social and political authority. Please see Paul Fox, “The State Library of Victoria: Science and Civilisation,” Transition 26 (1988): 26. 19. A Memoir of George Higinbotham: An Australian Politician and Chief Justice of Victoria, ed. Edward E. Morris (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 282–284. 20. The Industrial Progress of New South Wales: Being a Report of the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1870, at Sydney; Together with a Variety of Papers Illustrative of the Industrial Resources of the Colony (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1871), 42–44. 21. “Inaugural Address, Delivered by Mr. Justice Barry, President of the Institute, at the Opening Conversazione, 22nd September 1854,” in Transactions and Proceedings of the Victorian Institute for the Advancement of Science, 1854–55 (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1855), 4–5. 22. Andrew Clarke, “Anniversary Address of the President,” 6–10.

Notes to Pages 138–140

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics denote illustrative material. Aborigines of Victoria (Smyth), 92, 112, 118

Babbage, Charles, 27, 47–48, 75

acclimatization societies, 34, 135

Bailey, Frederick Manson, 56, 111

Adelaide Botanic Gardens, 9, 81

Bailyn, Bernard, 88–89

Adelaide International Exhibition (1887),

Ballarat Mechanics’ Institute, 8–9

38–39, 50, 68, 128 American science, similarities with Australian, 58–59 Amsterdam International Exhibition (1883), 33, 108

Barry, Redmond: compared to Mueller, 67; compilation of scientific essays, 68, 103; interest in Aboriginals, 112, 117–22, 129, 176n69; interest in minerals, 70, 140; interest in practical science, 96; involve-

Anderson, Warwick, 144n27, 145n33

ment in exchange of scientific materials,

archaeological displays, 114–15, 116,

58–59, 94, 95; proposal for physiograph-

117–18, 122–23

ical atlas, 62

Attwood, Bain, 174n54

Basalla, George, 132

Australian Aboriginal displays: Aboriginal

Bentham, George, 69, 159n11

visitors at, 115–16, 128; archaeological,

Blainey, Geoffrey, 87

114–15, 116, 117–18, 122–23; confla-

Blandowski, William, 100

tion with natural history, 107–12, 116;

Board for the Protection of Aborigines, 50,

ethnographic, 112–13, 113, 116–17, 118,

114

127–29; linguistic, 116, 119–22, 174n45;

Bosisto, Joseph, 48, 49, 49–52, 70, 71, 72

and monument protection, 125, 175n64;

botanical gardens, and educational-­

and obsession with the past and comparative studies, 106–7, 123–31, 177n76 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS), 16, 86 Australian Museum (Sydney), 57–58, 97

entertainment duality, 73–74, 78–84 Botanic Gardens (Adelaide), 9, 81 Botanic Gardens (Brisbane), 56 Botanic Gardens (Melbourne), 9, 61, 63, 71, 72–74, 78–84, 163n52 Botanic Gardens (Sydney), 54–55, 79–80, 81, 81–82, 84, 162n51, 163n54

botany: and Aboriginal studies, 107–8, 109,

Daintree, Richard, 57, 94

110, 111; exhibition publications, 104;

Diggles, Sylvester, 102

and pharmaceutical chemistry, 49–51;

Dionne, Russell, 19, 147n50

promoting value of, 54, 55–57, 68–71,

distance and isolation of Australian scientists:

159n17. See also Mueller, Ferdinand von

advantages of, 88–89; as concept, 87–88;

Bray, James S., 33

mitigated by establishing permanent

Brisbane Botanic Gardens, 56

institutions, 89–90, 98–101; mitigated by

British colonial identity. See national and

exchanging scientific materials, 51–52,

imperial identity British Indian science: vs. Australian science,

58–60, 78, 85–86, 90–98, 118–19, 123; mitigated by scientific publications,

20–22, 45, 147n50; and exchange of

68–69, 91–92, 102–5; wandering scientist

scientific materials, 97; and indigenous

concept, 76, 161n41, 165n7

histories, 111; universal application,

Dublin International Exhibition (1865), 54

159n12

Dyer, Joseph, 36–37

Burnett, Graham, 83 economic interests, 49–51, 53, 55–57, 60–61, Calcutta International Exhibition (1883– 1884), 51, 58, 70–72, 114 Carmichael, Henry, 7

68–71, 140 Eddy, John, 137 educational displays: and educational-­

Carne, Joseph E., 59–61, 86

entertainment duality, 13, 27, 73–74,

Carron, William, 54–55, 70

78–84, 138, 164n73; goals for, 38–39,

Charnay, D., 97 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 28, 41, 59–61

151n45; models for, 58 elite vs. popular science, 7, 19–20, 36, 76, 78–84

Clarke, Andrew, 73, 140

Elliott, Paul, 154–55n33

Clarke, William B.: official scientific and

ethnographic displays, 112–13, 113, 116–17,

administrative positions, 48; overseas

118, 127–29. See also Australian Aborigi-

connections, 88; publications, 36, 48,

nal displays

104; roles at exhibitions, 29, 30, 52–53;

exhibition displays: approaches for local and

as specialist in gold and coal, 48, 52;

international exhibitions, 29–31; educa-

on value of Australian science, 31–32,

tional goals, 38–39, 151n45; institutional

33, 76, 106; on value of institutions for

and professional involvement, 34–38;

wandering scientists, 89–90

national vs. imperial themes, 26, 29, 30,

Cole, Henry, 30–31, 57, 102

33–34, 41–43, 93; popularity of, over-

Colonial and Indian Exhibition at South

view, 23–28; promise vs. performance,

Kensington (1886), 29, 33–34, 50, 56, 102 colonial identity. See national and imperial identity commercial interests, 49–51, 53, 55–57, 60–61, 68–71, 140 192

39–40. See also Australian Aboriginal displays exhibition roles and activities: commercial, 48–51; controversies and disagreements over, 46–47, 62–63; educational, 58; exchange of scientific materials, 51–52, A Science of Our Own

58–60, 78, 85–86, 90–98, 118–19, 123; promotion of national interests through, 50–52, 53, 55–57, 59–61; variety of, 46 exile. See distance and isolation of Australian scientists explorers and explorations, 17, 18, 146n44

Illawarra Horticultural and Agricultural Society, 8 imperial identity. See national and imperial identity Industrial and Technological Museum (Melbourne), 99 The Industrial Progress of New South Wales: Being

Ferrier, Claude-­Marie, 4

a Report on the Intercolonial Exhibition of

Fleming, Donald, 132

1870 at Sydney; Together with a Variety of

Forbes, Edward, 5

Papers Illustrative of the Industrial Resources of

forestry, 55, 69–70, 159n17

the Colony, 92 Inkster, Ian, 75, 132, 138

Geddes, Patrick, 33 Geographical Society in South Australia, 115

isolation. See distance and isolation of Australian scientists

geology and mineralogy: and Aboriginal studies, 111–12; exhibition publications,

Just, Patrick, 177n76

104; promoting value of, 29, 31, 33, 52–53, 60–61, 140

Kapil Raj, 159n12

German science, 40–41, 151n55

Keene, William, 104

Gibbs, George, 176n69

Knight, Edward H., 124

Gillbank, Linden, 42

Knight, John H., 118

Great Exhibition (1851), 4, 5, 8, 12, 23, 26,

Kreft, Gerard, 30

27, 47–48, 75, 90

Kuhn, Thomas, 133

The Great Melbourne Telescope, 9 Greeley, Horace, 23

Levey, George Collins, 102

Griffith, Tom, 114, 129

Lindsay, David, 115

Guilfoyle, W. R., 83–84, 164n68

linguistic displays, 116, 119–22, 174n45

Gunther, James, 122

Liversidge, Archibald, 57–58, 101, 123, 129,

Heaman, E. A., 164n73

London International Exhibition (1862), 42,

156nn51–52 Henry, Joseph, 27, 94–95 Herschel, John, 120 Hewitt, Harry, 113

54, 71, 77, 103 London International Exhibition (1873), 30–31, 34

Hilgard, Eugene, 151n55

Lowenthal, David, 109

Hill, Walter, 56–57, 62

Lubbock, John, 125

Home, R. W., 12, 161n41

Lucas, A. M., 78, 159n11

Hooker, Dalton Joseph, 5, 78, 134 Hooker, William Jackson, 78, 90, 95

MacKenzie, Andrew, 122

Howitt, William, 65

Mackie, Frederick, 163n54

Hunter, Alexander, 37

MacLeod, Roy M., 19, 147n50, 156n52

Huxley, Thomas, 58, 97, 117

MacPherson, John, 174n45

Index

193

McCoy, Frederick, 68, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 130 medical science, 49–51, 71

museums: exchange of scientific materials, 94–98; vs. exhibitions, 101, 148n3; public significance of, 99–101

Melbourne Botanic Gardens, 9, 61, 63, 71, 72–74, 78–84, 163n52 Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition (1888), 12, 39, 56, 111, 139

Nagasaki Museum, 97 national and imperial identity: in Australia vs. British India, 45–46; and authority of

Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition (1866-­

Australian science, 74–75, 89, 103, 104,

1867), 25, 37, 42, 55, 62, 110, 112, 114,

122, 135–36, 139–41 (see also Australian

116, 117, 118, 119 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition (1873), 36 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition (1875), 23, 24 Melbourne International Exhibition (1880-­ 1881), 42, 68, 98, 109, 116 Melbourne Metropolitan Exhibition (1854), 30, 61 mineralogy. See geology and mineralogy Mitchell, Thomas, 17

Aboriginal displays; distance and isolation of Australian scientists); in exhibition display themes, 26, 29, 30, 33–34, 41–43, 93; local and global approaches to public history, 41–42, 69, 74–77, 85–86, 110–11, 137–38; obsession with the past and comparative studies, 106–7, 123–31, 177n76; and ownership of specimens, 91; tensions in identifying, 46–47 network analysis, 22, 133–34, 145n31, 145n33

Montefiore, E. L., 118

Newbery, T. Cosmo, 71

Moore, Charles, 47, 54, 81–82, 104

New South Wales: Australian Museum,

Mount Gambier Institute (South Australia), 35–36 Mueller, Ferdinand von, 65–86, 66; awards,

57–58, 97; interest in Aboriginal history, 108, 109, 112, 114, 122–23; interest in non-­Australian displays, 38; interests pro-

68, 72, 160n26; background, 48, 158n4,

moted at exhibitions, 52–53, 54, 55–56,

161n41; criticism of Smithsonian, 95; in-

58, 59–60; Mechanics’ School of Arts,

terest in Aboriginals, 107–8, 109, 110; lo-

7–8; regional displays at international

cal and global approach to public science,

exhibits, 30, 33–34; Royal Society, 48;

41–42, 69, 74–77, 85–86, 110–11; official

Sydney Botanic Gardens, 54–55, 79–80,

scientific and administrative positions, 48,

81, 81–82, 84, 162n51, 163n54; Sydney

61–62, 65–66; overseas connections, 88;

Intercolonial Exhibition (1870), 38, 40,

promotion of botany’s commercial value,

56; Sydney International Exhibition

69–72, 159n17; publications, 48, 68–69,

(1879), 12, 34, 38, 46, 54, 56, 84, 116,

72, 103, 129; relationship with Bentham,

117, 123, 127–30; Sydney Metropolitan

69, 159n11; relationship with Bosisto,

Exhibition (1854), 29, 54

49–50, 70, 72; roles at exhibitions, 61,

Northern Territory, 39, 115

62–64, 68–72, 77–78, 95; tension with educational-­entertainment duality, 13,

Orthia, Lindy A., 17

63, 72–74, 78–84

Owen, Hugh, 4

Mundy, Godfrey Charles, 106, 107 194

Owen, Richard, 5, 6, 30, 91, 94, 143n5 A Science of Our Own

Palladino, Paolo, 166n21

Ridley, W., 122

Panton, Joseph Anderson, 129

Ross, Alexander, 24

Paris Universal Exposition (1855), 29, 30, 40,

Roth, Walter E., 111

90, 109 Paris Universal Exposition (1867), 25, 30, 47, 54, 62, 104, 118 Paris Universal Exposition (1878), 30, 35, 52, 57

Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 98 Royal Geographical Society (Victorian Branch), 48, 62 Royal Museum of Copenhagen, 96–97 Royal Panopticon (London), 27

pharmaceutical chemistry, 49–51, 71

Royal Polytechnic Institution (London), 27

Pharmaceutical Society of Victoria, 50

Royal Society (New South Wales), 48

Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1876),

Royal Society/Philosophical Institute (Vic-

14, 24–25, 26, 35, 50, 55, 58–59, 94–95, 123–27, 175n60 Philosophical Institute/Royal Society of Victoria, 36, 48, 62, 73, 75–77, 90, 99,

toria), 36, 48, 62, 73, 75–77, 90, 99, 101, 161n40, 162n42 Royle, J. Forbes, 22 Russell, H. C., 41

101, 161n40, 162n42 Pitt Rivers, Augustus, 124, 126, 176n68

Sandhurst School of Mines (Bendigo), 50

Playfair, Lyon, 5

Saupe, August, 112–13

popular vs. elite science, 7, 19–20, 36, 76,

sciences of man. See Australian Aboriginal

78–84 Powell, J. M., 158n4

displays scientific institutions and societies: legiti-

Prakash, Gyan, 20, 26

mizing role of, 10, 74–77; participation

Priest, Alfred, 130

in exhibitions, 10, 34–38, 74, 115; and

publications, scientific, 36–37, 48, 68–69,

patronage, 135; as solution to Australian

91–92, 102–5, 112, 116–17 public policy, 19–20, 147n49 public science: and network analysis, 22,

isolation, 76, 89–90, 98–101 scientific publications, 36–37, 48, 68–69, 91–92, 102–5, 112, 116–17

133–34, 145n31, 145n33; as term and

Sedgwick, Adam, 52

concept, 6–11. See also Australian Aborig-

Seemann, Berthold, 110

inal displays; distance and isolation of

Simmonds, P. S., 138

Australian scientists; exhibition displays;

Smithsonian Institution, 94–95, 124, 176n69

exhibition roles and activities; national

Smyth, R. Brough: as geologist, 30, 50,

and imperial identity

149n21; interest in Aboriginals, 111–12,

Pyenson, Lewis, 166n21

117–18, 129; on Melbourne meteorite,

Queensland: Brisbane Botanic Gardens, 56;

tions, 68, 92, 103, 112, 118

91; overseas connections, 88; publicainterest in Aboriginal history, 109, 111, 112; interests promoted at exhibitions, 56–57, 60–61; regional displays at international exhibits, 31, 34

societies. See scientific institutions and societies South Australia: Adelaide Botanic Gardens, 9, 81; Adelaide International Exhibition (1887), 38–39, 50, 68, 128;

Index

195

South Australia (cont.): interest in Aborigi-

Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition

nal history, 112, 115; Mount Gambier

(1873), 36; Melbourne Intercolonial

Institute, 35–36; regional displays at

Exhibition (1875), 23, 24; Melbourne

international exhibits, 59; territorial

International Exhibition (1880-­1881), 42,

ambitions, 39

68, 98, 109, 116; Melbourne Metropol-

South Australia Museum (Adelaide), 35

itan Exhibition (1854), 30, 61; mete-

South Kensington Colonial and Indian Exhi-

orite in Melbourne, 91; Philosophical

bition (1886), 29, 33–34, 50, 56, 102

Institute/Royal Society, 36, 48, 62, 73,

staging science, 20, 26–27

75–77, 90, 99, 101, 161n40, 162n42;

Sydney Botanic Gardens, 54–55, 79–80, 81,

regional displays at international exhibits,

81–82, 84, 162n51, 163n54 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition (1870), 38, 40, 56 Sydney International Exhibition (1879), 12, 34, 38, 46, 54, 56, 84, 116, 117, 123, 127–30

30–31, 34 Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition (1875), 25 Vienna International Exhibition (1873), 26, 31, 32, 57 voluntary societies. See scientific institutions and societies

Sydney Magazine of Science and Art, 36 Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, 7–8 Sydney Metropolitan Exhibition (1854), 29, 54

wandering scientist, as concept, 76, 161n41, 165n7. See also distance and isolation of Australian scientists Western Australia, 69, 114, 116–17

territorial ambitions, 39

Westgarth, William, 78

Thomas, J., 118

Worboys, Michael, 166n21

Todd, Jan, 88

Wright, Judith, 170n12

Transactions of the Victorian Institute for the Ad-

Wyld’s Globe (London), 27

vancement of Science, 48 Trollope, Anthony, 79

Yeo, Richard, 133

Twopeny, Richard, 81–82 Victoria: establishment of national museum, 99–101; Industrial and Technological Museum, 99; interest in Aboriginal history, 111–12, 114, 117–22, 123, 130, 174n54; interests promoted at exhibitions, 50–52, 58–59, 62; Melbourne Botanic Gardens, 9, 61, 63, 71, 72–74, 78–84, 163n52; Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition (1888), 12, 39, 56, 111, 139; Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition (1866-­1867), 25, 37, 42, 55, 62, 110, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119; 196

A Science of Our Own