Libby Robin
© all rights reserved
To facilitate downloading, II
Scientific and settlement frontiers in tension
View images relating to this essay.
Footnotes for Part Two
Paradox on the Queensland Frontier:
Part two
Platypus, lungfish and other vagaries
of nineteenth-century science
this paper has been divided
into parts one & two
There are two points to this story: the first is the
contingency of scientific discovery. Calwell was seeking
Ceratodus when confronted with the solution for the platypus
puzzle. The fact that both questions interested the
Cambridge embryological school made an opportunistic leap
possible, but the coincidence was not really predictable.
Caldwell was almost an accidental scientist, empowered and
burdened by a large purse and high expectations. When
Caldwell returned to Britain in 1887 with a Sydney-born
wife, he maintained his Fellowship at Caius College
Cambridge only nominally for a couple of years. He published
very little and made his way as a successful Scottish
paper-manufacturer in the family firm. It was left to others
to undertake the anatomical work on his huge
collections.
Richard Semon in 1891, realising that Caldwell had barely
begun the task, decided to make his own trip. By contrast,
the German analysed all his specimens and published several
important scientific papers as well as his popular
book.44 But he too had great
difficulties finding Ceratodus roe, because the part
of the river he had chosen lacked the weed where the spawn
is found. Semon's published work focused on the monotremes
and marsupials, because he had successfully collected
developmental series for these. There is no evidence that he
observed the stages of growth in the living lungfish that
Caldwell did when he bred and displayed a young lungfish to
the Royal Society of New South Wales in December 1884.
Neither man wrote about lungfish, the reason for the Burnett
River destination.
The second story relates to the emergence of an
opportunistic local Aboriginal science industry that
underpinned the success of both Caldwell and Semon.
Aboriginal collectors assisted many other scientific
travellers including George Bennett around Yass and the
Norwegian, Carl Lumholtz in Coomooboolaroo further west in
Queensland, but on nothing like the scale required by both
Caldwell and Semon. The demand for embryological series
(collections with representatives of all stages of the
growing animal) meant absolute carnage. For example, in a
single season Caldwell's team collected 1300-1400 echidnas
'from which a fairly complete series of stages was
obtained'.45 Such a vast exercise
demanded a whole economy. Caldwell's second season required
one hundred and fifty Aborigines working flat out for two
months: 'A skilful black, when he was hungry, generally
brought in one female Echidna together with several
males, every day… The blacks were paid half-a-crown for
every female, but the price of flour, tea and sugar, which I
sold to them, rose with the supply of Echidna. The
half-crowns were, therefore, always just enough to buy food
to keep the lazy blacks hungry'.46
Semon tried to set up a base close to Gayndah, like
Caldwell, but moved further upstream to a place outside
Mundubbera, to get away from the pressures of the town. By
contrast to Caldwell, Semon determined to pay his Aboriginal
collectors fairly in cash at the end of each week:
All this brought about a very lively competition during the
first week. I received material in such abundance that I had
difficulty in finishing its preparation during the day, in
dissecting the animals brought to me, conserving their
organs, eggs and young, and preparing them for a more
thorough examination which was to take place in
Europe…On settling my accounts on Saturday the 12th September, I found that every
black had to receive a considerable sum… and I began to
consider whether my means would suffice if things went on in
this style.47
They didn't. 'Never again in the whole of my campaign did I
attain the good results of the first week'.48 Semon
had reckoned without the opportunism of the frontier
settlers. Mrs Corry, in that same week, set up an illegal
operation to sell the cashed-up Aboriginal collectors booze.
Despite the fact that she told Semon she was 'very sorry and
promised never to do it again', he felt 'ethically obliged'
to prohibit intemperance 'at the cost of my own success, for
I should certainly have been more prosperous had I kept to
my first system of payment'.49
Semon's 'fear of getting involved in serious difficulties'
and unwillingness to risk the 'peaceable' temperament of his
Aboriginal team members, drove his decision to settle
accounts at the end of the season. This was hardly humane
concern for Aboriginal people, but rather a wish to protect
the good name of science, to keep science on the civil side
of the frontier. There is no doubt that both Caldwell and
Semon were well aware that the quality of their science
depended on the quality of their relations with the local
Aboriginal communities. George Bennett, too, whose relations
with his collectors in New South Wales were generally
cordial by his own account, was conscious that 'good
Aborigines' corresponded with good science. Bennett wrote
in frustration to Richard Owen about the success of
Caldwell, the young professional, in solving in a few months
the mystery to which he had devoted half his life. 'I had
only two lazy aborigines', Bennett complained 'and Caldwell
succeeds …encamped on the banks of the river …with
the aid of a large number of aborigines. It is certainly the
only way to insure success'.50 Bennett himself was
not to blame for coming up with the 'wrong answer', only his
'lazy' Aboriginals.
There is almost an intriguing suggestion here that where the
scientific and settler frontiers coincide, the quality of
the European observer is second in importance to the quality
of Aboriginal assistance. This contradicts Kathleen Dugan's
contention that 'the system of colonial science left
scientists unable to collect biological information from the
people best qualified to provide it'.51 The system veritably
depended upon such people. The problem was the credibility
of the brokers of the information, the settler naturalists.
European science before Caldwell disbelieved Aboriginal and
settler Australian voices alike. Settler Australian
naturalists were deeply discomfited to find that their
observations were worth no more than an Aboriginal's. The
fact that Caldwell fresh from Cambridge with his well-paid
Aboriginal team established the 'right answer' without
assistance from colonial scientists added to settler
anxiety. This anxiety is manifest in the strategy of blaming
Aboriginal assistants for wrong answers. Settler naturalists
wanted to be with civilisation, on the side of empire and
new knowledge, not with the colony, in error, and
degenerating.
The telegram that closed a frontier
Not all settler scientists shared Bennett's angst.
Liversidge, the Chemistry professor who had aligned himself
with the 'right answer' by mediating the famous telegram's
successful transmission to Canada, immediately seized on its
value in attracting the attention of British science to
Australia. In a letter published in the Sydney papers on 16
September 1884, and reproduced soon after in England and
other colonial papers Liversidge wrote:
During the past fortnight we have received several telegrams
from London, respecting the late meeting of the British
Association, at Montreal, and in some of them references are
made to suggestions that a future meeting be held in
Australia.
As far as one can judge, the idea seems to have
been thrown out when Professor Moselle, FRS, announced Mr
Caldwell's discovery of the oviparous nature of the platypus
and Australian porcupine. The news seems to have created or
rather reawakened interest in the peculiarities of
Australian Natural History, and on the spur of the moment
some of the more enthusiastic members appear to have
proposed that a subsequent meeting of the British
Association should be held in Australia.
The text of this letter was also reproduced in the
Proceedings of the first meeting of the
Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS), held in Sydney in 1888. It was the first salvo in
Liversidge's energetic campaign to bring the British
Association to Australia, a campaign that was finally
successful some thirty years later.52 Perhaps the
telegram's most immediate contribution was to draw
evolutionist Walter Baldwin Spencer to Australia. Spencer,
whilst in Britain in 1884, wrote the note in Nature
about the significance of Caldwell's work. Three years
later he took up the Chair in Biology at the University of
Melbourne.53 Liversidge and
Spencer both went on to be very significant in scientific
affairs in Australia, especially the AAAS. But they also
moved Australian science to focus on other things. The
platypus frontier had closed.
Libby
Robin is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Resource
and Environmental Studies at the Australian National
University, Canberra. She is author ofDefending the
Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in
Australia(Melbourne University Press, 1998) and
co-editor ofEcology and Empire: Environmental History of
Settler Societies (Keele University Press, 1997). She is
currently completing a history of ornithology in Australia,
entitledThe Flight of the Emu (forthcoming 2001).
Libby's PhD is in History and Philosophy of Science, and she
has worked as a Curator in the National Museum of Australia
as well as in various universities. The National Museum of Australia, due to open in Canberra in March 2001,
will include material about platypuses and their social history.
44 Semon's studies are published
in F. Romer (ed.) Monotremate und Marsupialia, Jena:
Gustav Fischer 1894.The National Library of Australia copy
is the one from the library of the SS Discovery of
the Antarctic Expedition of 1901-4. The adventures of Semon
thus went far south with other adventurers.
45 Caldwell, 'Embryology of
Monotremata and Marsupialia', p. 466
46 Ibid,p. 466
47 Semon, In the Australian
Bush, pp. 46-7
48 Ibid.p. 56
49 Loc cit.
50 Bennett to Owen 1888, quoted
in Gruber, 'Does the Platypus lay Eggs?' p. 51.
51 Dugan, 'The Zoological
Exploration of the Australian Region', p. 92.
52 Appendix to President's
Address, Proceedings AAAS, Sydney, 1888, p. 15. The
BAAS came to Australia finally in 1914.
53'Walter Baldwin Spencer, 'The eggs of monotremes'. Nature,
31, 1884, pp 132-5; See also Mulvaney and Calaby, 'So Much
that is New', esp. pp.143-5.
Return to part one of this essay.
Also in Australian Humanities Reviewsee:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |