You don’t have to be crazy to be a writer (It does help, though.)

This is a resurrection of an article I wrote ten years back, because it says a few important things, and it had been locked away behind a paywall.

 

Biography

Peter Macinnis is a Sydney-based writer. Being no longer able to claim he is a New Kid, he blogs as Old Writer on the Block. He has two Australian history books at the printer, Not Your Usual Bushrangers and Not Your Usual Gold Stories, out through Five Mile Press, later this year. He usually works on four books at a time. Right now, he is working on just one thing, something he calls the Big New Project: currently at 400,000 words but likely to be larger than War and Peace, this is a collection of original Australian historical source material, gathered from the archives, and assembled into a logical order. Because of its size and the need for internal navigation, this will be released as an e-book.

This story began in a talk I gave at Birrong Girls High, when I used this shot of myself near a lava flow on Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. You could see from the photo that I was sweating profusely, but one of the girls asked about the heat, and I mentioned that it was sufficient to frizzle the hairs on my legs.

The girls were largely NESB, but with the bubbling confidence of young Australians. ‘You’re mad!’ one of them told me firmly. ‘You’d have to be!’

I told her of an old and probably apocryphal Chinese curse. ‘I’m not mad,’ I explained after explaining the curse. ‘I just like living in interesting times. Interesting is good.’

As a small boy, I knew I would write books one day. As a five-year-old early reader, any books within reach were fair game for me, but after tackling Salmond’s Law of Torts one morning, I learned to review the available data more closely before choosing my reading.

In the late 1940s, as we emerged from World War II austerity, most books had dust jackets, which contained enticing splashes of colour, and information about the book and its author. I read the blurbs and then, because I wanted to be a writer, I examined authors’ life stories.

I suspected that if a writer lacked a background of hair’s-breadth escapes, desperate acts of derring-do, like quelling a riot with a derringer and a solar topee, they never got published. As I approach advanced middle age, my cynical streak has expanded to a broad band, and I wonder if they made their adventures up, but that came too late to save me.

I just knew that I needed to live an interesting life. By the time I left school, I had mastered most of the skills of subterfuge that I might need to prosecute a guerrilla war after if I ever became an escaped prisoner-of-war.

Against that, I long ago placed a value on my pelt that ruled most of those plans out. I am a good shot with a rifle, but I only shoot at things that don’t bleed, scream, or shoot back. That’s quite proper for humans, but it might be problematic for guerrillas, so I dropped that idea.

In the early 1960s, my dreams included sailing a lakatoi from Port Moresby to Singapore, but that became submerged in a desire to be a pre- and post-Islamic mediaeval Javanese historian, and I set to work building a bank roll to pay for that.

The 1965 coup in Indonesia, and a consideration of the leftish politics of my Indonesian friends led me to conclude that perhaps this was an unwise ambition, given that leftists were dying on Java, so I made the obvious choice and started a science degree.

My thoughts of living an interesting life were put to one side as I threw myself into the riveting mysteries of apical meristems in plants and mesoderm in animals. To save my sanity, I started going bush, and became at least as much a naturalist, and the interesting life was suddenly back on the agenda.

Then one day, I realised that everybody has an interesting life. The difference is that authors make proper use of their interesting lives. My next task was to make the acquaintance of interesting people, and see where that led.

As a botanist, I got work tending the gardens of people who had ‘Australian native’ gardens, the idea being that I wouldn’t mistake the waratahs for onion weed. That gave me the time to tackle two key questions: what do we mean by interesting? and who should I respect?

In the end, my first answer came down to this: if anything makes me want to run and find out, like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, then it is interesting. That answered the respect question: anybody that knows more than I do about anything interesting is worthy of respect.

Given my highly-developed Rikki-Tikki- Tavi tendencies, that first answer meant that almost the whole world deserved my respect. Later, I discovered that philodopher Karl Popper went through a similar bout of introspection while working as a cabinet-maker, but he used his time far better.

Still, my two criteria for interesting and deserving of respect put me in the way of interesting ideas, and gave me a life rationale as a teacher and as a writer: provoke them to the point where they want to run and find out. And that, dear reader, is why I trot off out into the wilderness, seeking provocative things to share with my readers.

(This month, I have met a 2-metre python and a 1.5 metre goanna.)

In the first years of this century, I got a bee in my bonnet about Australian exploration. My cohort were all taught that Lawson, Blaxland and Wentworth (that was the order in which Macquarie listed them) were the only ones wise enough to head ‘up the ridges’ (meaning the spurs) to get to the top. We were also taught that explorers went out into trackless wastes.

As any fule kno, walking up the spur is always the easiest route, and any bushwalker looking at a mountain always runs an eye up the spur. More to the point, any wilderness walker knows there are traces of past feet out there, pads and tracks that show the way. The explorers knew this and followed ‘native roads’, especially when they sought water in an arid zone.

Reading up on the old explorers, I came across Harry the Camel, who shot his owner, John Ainsworth Horrocks, and of course I had to Run and Find Out. In 1846, Horrocks had the only camel in Australia, and it looked as though Harry was badly managed, but the only way to test this was to go out with camels and learn the basics of camel management, how to make friends with them, how to hobble them, and so on.

(No, I won’t explain how Harry the Camel shot John Horrocks: look it up on Google, but as a side note, while checking that Google had the answers, I discovered that the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum had plagiarised seven pages on Horrocks from my Australia’s Pioneers, Heroes and Fools. I took two days off from writing the first draft of this to teach them a harsh lesson, and you may come across an account of that in my blog. I do pro bono stuff like this for free, and I happily give my text to worthy causes like museums, but I equally happily burn thieves.)

This article is a case in point: I gave it for free, but somehow, there is no public access to a journal called (ironically) Access. As I had lost my copy in a hard disc crash, I asked RMIT to deliver the text to me: they did so without demur, but I want it out there, in public. It is also pages 1 to 12 of the March 2015 issue of Access. Just as well they did deliver, as I had a burning plan ready to roll.

While studying camels, I learned that scorpions circle a camp fire at a distance determined by the heat of the fire. Sleep across that circle, and you may get stung, as I have noted in two books, but I don’t think I have yet used what happened later that night: it was a full moon, and a pale and ghostly dingo came to visit me as I lay in my swag. I would have used the story if I had been properly prepared.

You see, I should have had my digital camera on and ready, because the dingo had visited two others of the party in the previous 20 minutes, and I knew it would visit me. Instead, when the pale face loomed up, I said certain stern words of dismissal, and so missed taking the shot of a lifetime. I won’t make that mistake again.

With a science degree, I am always on the lookout for wildlife. I wear soft rubber shoes and walk silently, which can be alarming for the kangaroos I disturb, and not too good for my heart as they thump off into cover. That happened nine times, one day on Mount Exmouth in the Warrumbungles. None of them was a mean old man roo like this one: you need to know the difference!

Some might call my actions that day crazy. I was out on Mt Exmouth on my own, but I had survival gear, I was on a marked track, and I had filed a walk plan. Also, I expected other people to be on the mountain, but they weren’t out there.

All the same, there is crazy, and there is apparently crazy. If I wasn’t prepared for the dingo that came to visit, I am always prepared for troubles when I go bush, either on my own or in a small group. Like those writers of almost a century ago in their biographical notes, I work hard to deliver a good yarn, but I don’t really take risks.

While catching piranha in the headwaters of the Amazon, a few months ago, I proposed doing a Rex Hunt and kissing the fish before releasing it, and that thought may seep into my writing one day — but my blood never seeped into the Amazon. Look at the jaw on the right of the photo below, if you are wondering why. Equally, when I was swimming with hammerheads in the Galapagos, a week later, I stayed five metres above them.

On Thursday Island, we found ourselves in crocodile territory, where we had gone to examine a dugong jaw, because when William Dampier found one in a shark’s belly, he mistook it for a hippopotamus jaw.

Luckily, a saltwater crocodile cannot ‘gallop’ like the smaller and less aggressive freshwater crocodile. Salties can reach speeds of 10 or 11 km/h when they ‘belly run’. They go faster if sliding down muddy tidal riverbanks — a sort of a crocodilian toboggan with teeth, but that is downhill on mud.

Uphill and on dry land, the saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus, has no chance of catching an active human. In water, it is another matter. The ‘salties’ can swim faster than us, at up to 15 km/hr, though they rely mainly on being able to surge out of hiding and to grab their prey on the water’s edge.

Anaconda at my feet

We stayed away from the water, and kept an eye on the sparse vegetation behind the mud, and I assured my wife that if your hand is already inside its jaws, the trick is to reach down for the palatal valve that stops water running into their throats and drowning them. Grabbing this floods their lungs and leaves them unable to continue the attack. She looked me in the eye. ‘I’d like to shake the remaining hand of whoever came up with that one!’ she told me, as we proceeded cautiously. 

Like me, she is a biologist, and she stands happily by, pulling ferns aside so I can get a better shot of a tarantula, or holds still as an anaconda slithers over our gum-boots. No, I am not willing to comment on the camera shake in the anaconda shot above.

She also wrangles leeches for me, but she drew the line once at poking a funnel-web with a stick to make it rear up and show its fangs, and she mostly leaves the mountains to me.

So back to my Warrumbungle mountain; a wedge-tailed eagle was there that day, and it swooped me repeatedly as I worked around a difficult rock face, and I elected not to get the camera out until I was safe.

As soon as I got past the hard bit, it moved away of course, but when I was on the peak, it circled me, always staying in the sun, casting its shadow near or over me and preventing a shot.

Animals are often uncooperative, so plants and rocks are often easier, though when the plants are poisonous, you can still get into trouble. London’s Chelsea Physic Garden has many poisonous plants, but I drew odd looks when I asked where they were in 2006.

I have written several books on poisons and poisoners and I have been translated into a number of other languages. When I explained my background as a poisons specialist, and mentioned how Jo in Little Women, while seeking material for stories ‘… excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons …’, the severe expressions eased. One of the crew that day knew my book.

Still, that required my looking affable and cuddly. As I get older and more sinister-looking, I have taken to hunting rocks. Pretty much by definition, rocks are out of doors, often in scenic places, and they don’t get you into trouble.

Rocks that float are fun, and for the past couple of years, the coasts of NSW have been littered with pumice that came from east of New Zealand, but by the time they washed up here, most of the larger pieces were inhabited.

Chasing those on Myrtle Beach, I recalled that the lowest level of the Sydney Basin was exposed in the cliff behind the beach, so of course we hunted that down. Below, you can see my wife’s hand spanning more than 100 million years.

One example is never enough, so my sons helped me traipse in, almost to another good exposure, 15 km from the road, in a place we had visited before, Christine and I before we had children, and then us with the kids.

We made good time on this trip, until the fog came in and we came to a patch that had been burned at the same time I was on Myrtle Beach.

The track sort of disappeared, and there were brown snakes about. This forced us to go slowly, and in the end, 1.5 km from our target, we reached our turn-around time, and not being crazy, we turned back

Some of my friends are a bit crazy, and when we went looking for alleged fossil trees near Box Head, one of them felt the need to get close to the ‘trees’ to act as a scale. I just took shots, angling them so as to make it look more dangerous than it was.

Basically, my geologising involves temporary obsessions, but tilted strata and folded rocks are always high on my agenda.

We went to Switzerland for several reasons, and the geology was high on the list, but I also needed to go to the Reichenbach Falls, because there is a comic fantasy novel lurking in the wings, and it opens when the hero is saved from drowning by Sherlock Holmes, returns to Australia and invents most of 20th century science.

Why would I do this? Well, at one stage in my mixed career, I conned some violent frauds into giving me the evidence I needed to convict them, after one colleague had been injured, and another had been shown a handgun.

(I have a strong concern about honesty: in December 2025, I am pursuing an insurance company that tried to rip me off for miserly sum. I suggested to them that they Google The Battle of The One-Armed Sculptress to see what level of determination I bring to bear: it isn't the money, it's the principle, you see.)

Now back to the violent villains: I played the role of Mr Bean so well, they sniggered at me and handed over damning papers to the idiot they saw. I wrote a very interesting report.

Then again, I once spent three days displaying two savages in a cage as an art event/hoax. I write history most of the time, and all of the history will be good, but severely misrepresented and invaded by fictional characters.

The falls are close to the town of Meiringen, claimed to be the place where meringues were invented. People who know their Holmes canon will recall that Holmes staged his death at the top of the falls: anybody who visits Meiringen cannot avoid the connection because there are images, signs, statues and more, celebrating Holmes.

I concluded that I could rewrite the area’s geography to meet my needs, and I realised that after Holmes disappeared, he accompanied our Australian hero to his home and laboratory, somewhere on the NSW coast, and reverted to the geology. It remains a legitimate expense for taxation purposes!

We went up Mount Pilatus for the rocks, strayed into the wilderness of Heidiland, where I found a perfect setting for the Reichenbach Falls sequences. There was just one danger: the area was completely deserted, and the bus out had been empty, but when we went to board the last bus back, geriatric Switzerland had emerged from the woods and crammed the bus to overflowing. In the end, we fitted in, albeit poked by walking poles, but that was the closest we came to danger in Switzerland.

We came home, and for a while, we concentrated on rocks that push in, making dykes and sills. That isn’t too dangerous: you just have to clamber over them, but often the best exposures are on rocky seashores, and that means looking out for blue-ringed octopuses (or octopodes, if you must have a classically correct plural), gaps in the rocks, and waves (plus seals if one is in New Zealand).

It is a curious fact that in Scots English, a dyke can be either a wall or a ditch, but igneous dykes take both those forms, and we chase them. Only once have we found one where the weathering of the dyke had kept pace with the surrounding rock.

The other danger that I have faced in the quest for material is eating local foods. On one occasion, as a representative of the Australian government (long story), I was constrained to eat part of a dog that I had heard being killed while one of my colleagues made a speech. Diplomacy often adds challenges.

After that, it was a downhill run, and in the past two years, I have eaten foal steak, llama, alpaca and guinea pigs, but I will only be happy when I have tried camel, which is recommended by several early Australian travellers.

You don’t have to be crazy to be a writer, but having crazy temporary obsessions, pursuing crazy ideas, makes your writing more interesting.

 

Why the nature of North Head matters.

When the white invaders arrived in Australia in 1788, Manly was one of the first places they named. It already had a name (Kai'ymay), but impressed by the confidence of the Guringai men, who waded confidently out to greet their boat, Governor Arthur Phillip called the beach they were approaching Manly Cove. Invaders like to change the place names...

Before long, things went sour, as a disease that was identified by the invaders as smallpox (I take the view that it was not smallpox, but something else, just as harmful) hit the Guringai people. The original paradise was over, but Manly remains a pretty place, best approached by ferry, and offering a wealth beaches and walks.

I fled Queensland in 1944 at the ripe age of six months (I just knew Queensland and I would never get on), reached Manly, and I never left. In the welcoming spirit of the Guringai, I like to share some of its gems, ones the Guringai would have known, and that means North Head. It is a place of sandstone cliffs and deep sands, blown onto what is now the headland, way back in the last Ice Age.

Look closely at the ridge on the left, and find the sea eagle that photo-bombed the shot.
At the centre bottom, look for the site of  a rockfall, dubbed The Great North Head Calamity.

My favourite animal.

The sandstone is almost 250 million years old, Triassic rock with ever few fossils, and lacking most of the nutrients plants and animals need. It's a paradox, but places with depauperate (poor) soil are hotspots of biodiversity, and there are about 450 species of flowering plants there, birds, mammals, reptiles and a rich fauna of invertebrates.

Would you know this one?

Since I officially retired, I have worked on North Head as a volunteer, weeding, planting and doing other stuff to help maintain a fragile ecosystem, but I am also a lifelong educator, and wearing that hat, I decided to generate a web site about the place, and host it myself. It was to show the casual visitor just how much more was there to be seen.

Once you know this is a spittle-
bug, you will be able to look it up.

Because I always travel with at least a phone and a camera, the web site was soon bloated with pics, so during one of our escape-from-lockdown rambles, I decided to do an e-book version that people could carry around. I added a great deal of extra information, even more images, and some internal navigation, and then, pushed by friends, I did the print version.

For a variety of reasons, the headland has retained many unusual like forms, and while I deliberately do not give detailed locations, the e-book and the print book help the visitor to understand what they are looking at, and provide some background.

A donkey orchid.

A dragon that like grapes.

Why no locations? Because some people cannot resist 'adopting' some of what they see.

If they had to work to find the unusual plant or animal, somewhere on our 250 hectares (that's a square mile for the old-fashioned and Americans), they will care more about it, take just a photo, and leave the plant or animal there...

Finding everything will take a very long time: in the past year, I have found my first North Head flatworm, and only my second centipede. There are things I have missed, but sooner or later, I will find them, just as I found a python.

I stopped the traffic for this one.

In the book, in all its versions, you get the geology, the history of the headland, the tracks that are worth following, and what to look for as you wander along them. I even tell you about these fig trees, and where to get the best views.

Where do you get the book? The cheapest way is as a $2 e-book from Google Play, and at the other end, a full-colour paperback will cost you $50 from Amazon. There is also a $4 e-book from Amazon, which is the lowest price they allow. Get the Google Play one, instead, because they are the same!

Post card from Norway #2

 This follows on from an earlier post, but it is a work in progress.

Up near the Russian border. there are signs in Cyrillic for the odd border-crosser. We saw a couple of mini-buses coming through, an a girl on  bicycle, who was apparently headed for Russia. Kirkenes was heavily swarmed by Germans and heavily bombed by the Russians, who then liberated it, and apparently behaved nicely enough. For me, the best thing was birch trees,  well north of the Arctic Circle, and more significantly, loads of mistletoe, the clumps in the tree here.

This is a novelty for Australian botanists, because we all know very well that the tree line cuts out where the snow line comes in, and we are far to the north of the snow line. There is even sea ice: not ice bergs as such, but floating lumps.

 

As we came into Kirkenes, we saw our first sea-ice. These are slim planes of frozen fresh water. At first, they were less than obvious, but then they were more numerous and thicker.

Once upon a time,  ports up here were blocked in winter, but this is growing rarer. We knew about this from complaints in Amsterdam that one could no longer skate on the canals. Shortly after, on Saaremaa, a sand island off the Estonian coast, we heard how the moose that bred on the island could no longer escape over the sea ice in winter. 

But climate change is, as we all know, a  myth.

I have been amusing myself catching snow flakes in my beard, and leaving tracks in the snow on the deck. After a first walk on snow, wearing spikes as overshoes, we have now mastered the art of spotting and avoiding slippery ice.

Skate-boarding and wheelchair work would be a challenge up here, but I was very much taken by this snow-ready version of a Zimmer frame, and I saw a man scurrying along on a ski-based push scooter.

Back at Kirkenes, I saw a snow cannon in action, and we asked why in such a place of deep snow, they needed to make more of it, but apparently there will be National championships in a ski-based motocross competition.

We nodded sagely, and went to get what we called a Norwegian hot chocolate. At least our sense of the ridiculous has not yet frozen solid.

Here is yet another port that we called into yesterday. Hurtigruten got started as transport for local people and freight up and down the coast, but now it is mainly for tourists. Even in the time we have known the service, the vessels have grown larger and more luxurious. It is no longer rough and scruffy, but that's the down-side of tourism.

That's enough: more later, perhaps. I thought these were puffins, but they weren't.

These sea eagles, on the other hand, near Finnkirk Rock, were the real McCoy: I will come to tge rock in #3

And that ends #2

I have already created the stub for #3, but nothing much there, just yet.

The truth about kookaburras

This began when my mate Luke sent me a link to a laughing bird, asking if it was a kookaburra. I’m not a birder, but it was pretty obvious what this was, so I said yes. Then I added:

These two had just finished a long call on a
street light on the same level as my upper deck

You rarely get a single kookaburra calling, but they do so in small gangs, often from several sites at once. I'm not sure if the calling is from one gang staking a claim, or two gangs "beating the bounds". One of my incomplete studies is on introduced species in Australia, and colonists blamed the kookaburras for killing snakes, and exported them to the island colony of Tasmania and to Western Australia.

The research is all done: I might just do that this afternoon. One surprise: it took us 80+ years to stop calling them "laughing jackasses".

So here’s the lowdown on what my granddaughters call “kookas”.

The white invaders first noticed one of these birds in April 1788, when surgeon John White travelled with the governor, several officers, three soldiers and two seamen, to Manly Cove, not far from where I live. They headed north, their path was blocked by swamps and thick bush, probably where Manly Golf Club is now.

Going along the coast they went north to a “small salt-water lagoon, about two miles [3 km] away”, where they saw black swans. 

Black swans, Narrabeen Lake.

This sighting was probably on Curl Curl Lagoon, usually called Queenscliff Lagoon now. Then they saw a kookaburra which White correctly recognised as a kingfisher. But what did the Indigenous Australians call it? The earliest hint comes in 1829:

In the valley beneath on the other side is a large verandah cottage with dormer windows, and a row of Norfolk Island pines, each exactly tapering as if cut to resemble a pyramid and in front, is the little bay, called by the blacks Woolamoola. The aboriginal language is certainly beautiful and highly expressive, much, more so, we conceive, than an European tongue. Where did they get it? Gogaga is their name of the bird we call the Laughing Jackass, and Gogaga repeated quick is part of the chuckling notes, which distinguish that ludicrous forester. Here we have several public buildings close at hand. The Prisoners' Barracks, called by courtesy Hyde-Park Barracks, a neat brick building, in which are lodged and fed five and six hundred men, and in Macquarie's time double that number. [1]

George Bennett was for many years Sydney’s leading naturalist, and he encountered the bird in the 1830s:

19th century propaganda shot (NLA)

The natives at Yas called the bird ''Gogera,'' or ''Gogobera,'' probably from its peculiar note, which has some resemblance to the sound of the word. It is said that one seldom laughs without being accompanied by a second, forming a very harmonious duet.

This bird, from its devouring mice and venomous reptiles, deserves protection…A gentleman told me that he was perfectly aware of the birds destroying snakes, as he had often seen them carry the reptiles to a tree, and break their heads to pieces with their strong sharp beaks; he also said that he had known them destroy chickens…[2]

 

Two honey-eaters confronting a kookaburra
at dawn. The honey-eaters protect their chicks.

Around 1860, Bennett was calling it the “laughing kingfisher”. His ‘Mountain Pheasant’ is what we now call a lyre-bird.

The Mountain Pheasant is a good mocking-bird, for it imitates the notes of the more pleasing songsters, as well as the loud gurgling laugh of the Dacelo, or Laughing Kingfisher. The elegant tail-feathers, detached in their complete form, are sought after by collectors, and are sold in the shops; the natives also use the feathers, as well as those of the Emeu, as ornaments in their hair. [3]

We might note here that the “kangaroo feathers” worn in the hats of the Australian light horse were, in fact emu feathers. The practice and term “kangaroo feathers” date back to the Boer War, but that’s another story, told elsewhere. [4] It was only some years later, around 1871, that we suddenly began calling our national bird a kookaburra. [5]

Around Australia, only a few local species were thought to be worth shifting. Snake-killing kookaburras were sent to both Tasmania and WA. The alien birds took the hollow trees used by other birds, and while kookaburras may have killed some snakes, they also preyed on small mammals and lizards. It seems that the idea of introducing kookaburras to Tasmania is older than people realise, going back at least to 1848:

SNAKE KILLERS.—Can you inform me, Sir, if there are any birds or animals in this country which have the habit of killing snakes. I suppose eagles may kill a few, but should think not many; besides them, I cannot think of anything else, and I should like if anybody could inform me whether the Sydney laughing jackass would be likely to live in this colony, for they kill snakes commonly, and are very amusing.
—A COLONIST. [6]

The Launceston Examiner responded that there would be few more welcome visitors than “…the veritable laughing jackass, who is a universal favorite in the sister colony.” The paper hoped that some naturalist would take the matter up. All the same, it would take half a century, soon after kookaburras were introduced into Western Australia, going on this 1902 report:

By arrangement with Mr. D. Le Souef, director of the Melbourne Zoological Gardens, a shipment of 40 laughing jackasses has been obtained for introduction in Tasmania. Last year 50 of these useful reptile-destroyers were liberated in various parts of the island, with results so satisfactory that the “new importations are in great request, and applications have been sent in for a bird or two from so far afield as the Straits Islands. The curator of the City Park Gardens has charge of the birds, which it is proposed to sell at a cost calculated to defray expenses. [7]

Now back to the Western Australian introduction: in the 1860s, luminaries like Ferdinand von Mueller, George Bennett and Edward Wilson were collecting kookaburras for introduction into Britain, [8] but nothing seems to have come of this scheme. Then in 1897, with Western Australia oozing with gold wealth, a new plan emerged.

Mr W. E. Learoyd, was commissioned by the Acclimatisation Committee of Western Australia to proceed to the Eastern colonies to obtain a supply of oysters for laying down at Albany, and also some birds. He headed for Victoria, hoping to get birds, but a bird catcher there told him they were protected.

Checking with the chief clerk in the Colonial Secretary’s office, he learned that an Act of Parliament held the birds absolutely protected until 1899, and that a permit could not be given in the face of the Act. The helpful chief clerk suggested that he apply to the authorities in Sydney, where he could probably get 100 or 200 birds.

In the end, he got 40, 16 old ones and 24 young ones, but only three of the young ones survived. “On the other hand, the old ones carry well under the most trying circumstances”, Learoyd reported in 1897. [9]

In May 1898, the streamer Rockton delivered thirty kookaburras from Victoria to Fremantle, from there they were sent to settle in at the Zoological Gardens at South Perth. [10] Eighteen months later, they were doing well:

The committee intend introducing more of these interesting and useful birds, which not only relieve the monotony of the bush silence by their laughing note, but are also good friends to the agriculturist as they devour, besides snakes, numbers of noxious insects. [11]

In 1901, came a request to the citizens of Guildford that they stop shooting these “useful and interesting birds”. [12] In 1910, the West Australian offered a detailed report on the work of the Acclimatisation Committee in “correcting Western Australia’s deficiency”, a project which was praised.

A bit more about Bennett, though. In July 1860, he attended a council meeting in London of the Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals in the United Kingdom, where he was elected as a corresponding member. He then

… promised to present to the society a cage which he had invented for the transmission of birds across sea, and also to bring to the next council meeting some specimens of the "laughing jackass" in his possession. [13]

There is no trace of those British kookaburras today, but Bennett returned home, inspired and ready to work again in December. I’ll come back to Bennett some other time. He now rates of one of my slightly expired temporary obsessions, but I still have all the notes, and in lockdown time, they help the sanity.

It’s either that or the mad sheep. Yes, I'm back working on them.

---

[1] The Sydney Monitor, 9/3/1829, 2,  https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/31761614

[2] George Bennett, Wanderings in New South Wales, vol. 1, London: Richard Bentley, 1834, 222.

[3] George Bennett, Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australasia, 179 – 80.

[4] http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/writing/early-language.htm

[5] Ibid.

[6] Launceston Examiner, 2 February 1848, 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/36253996

[7] The Advertiser (Adelaide), 10 December 1902, 6, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/4905467

[8] The Argus, 22 August 1860, 8, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5688402

[9] The West Australian (Perth), 7 January 1897, 2, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/3105197

[10] The West Australian (Perth), 6 May 1898, 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/3209194/762803

[11] The West Australian (Perth), 2 December 1899, 60, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/33185281

[12] The West Australian (Perth), 23 August 1901, 4, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/24757708

[13] 'Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals &c.', The Argus, Tuesday 9 October 1860, p. 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5691233