Curious Minds
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Writing history: The idea was conceived in the second half of 2010, inspired (in a sense) by some of the stuff I had that wasn't going to be accessible or interesting to the younger readers of Australian Backyard Naturalist, the first draft was completed on January 27, 2011. By June 26, 2011: all writing was complete and the ms was submitted. On January 27, 2012, the first draft of the edited ms with all the design in place arrived, and on February 27, a cleaned-up third draft was in my hands. I had my first copy in August, and it was published on October 1, 2012. Now I just need to clean this messy page up!
It is the story for some of the curious minds who came to Australia, or in a few cases were born here, people who cared about the natural history of the place. Some were artists, some scientists, some collectors, some explorers, and some just enjoyed natural history.
ISBN 9780642277541, written by Peter Macinnis, to be published October 2012 by the National Library of Australia, released October 2012.
Thanks, people!
This is me, and yes, I'm looking pleased, because that thing on the right is a beautiful book.I'm allowed to say that, because while I wrote the words, Jo Karmel, Susan Shortridge and Emma Gregory did the editing and Philip Banks and Natalie Webb did the design work, while Felicity Harmey and Jemma Posch sorted the images and it's that largely uncredited hard yakka that makes a book beautiful.
Yes, I found them lots of nice pictures to use from the National Library of Australia's collections,but that was just the start.
Anyhow, I want to thank those seven—and Susan Hall at the National Library of Australia for taking my nebulous idea for the book and then believing in it through all my stumbles.
Find it on Amazon (NOT YET--this is a reminder to me!!)
Who is it for?
This book is written for a general readership, and it will be lavishly illustrated, using the publisher's magnificent collections and other stuff like the pics above. There are bunyips, Australian hippos, Sydney alligators and more. (In fact, the bunyip is shown below, though in the end, one clever chap realised it wasn't a bunyip, the teeth tell us what the hippo really was, and the alligator was almost certainly a lace monitor.)
Hint: the photograph on the far right was taken on Thursday Island. It shows the jaw of a "hippo". This one is devoid of teeth, alas, but it is still clearly a dugong, caught and butchered on the shore. Middle and left: two views of the alleged "bunyip" that William Sharp Macleay showed was really a deformed foal. The drawing is from the Sydney Morning Herald, while the photo was taken in the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney.
Dramatis personae
In the end, the people covered include:
- William Dampier;
- Willem de Vlamingh;
- Jacques-Julienne La Billardière;
- Charles-Alexandre Le Sueur;
- François Péron;
- Joseph Banks;
- Charles Darwin;
- Ferdinand Bauer;
- Robert Brown;
- Amalie Dietrich;
- Georgiana Molloy;
- George Bennett;
- John White;
- Thomas Watling;
- T. H. Huxley;
- John Macgillivray;
- Richard Cunningham;
- Allan Cunningham;
- Sir Thomas Mitchell;
- William Blandowski;
- Gerard Krefft;
- Ludwig Leichhardt;
- John Gilbert;
- Ferdinand von Mueller;
- Louisa Anne Meredith (aka Mrs Charles Meredith);
- Harriet and Helena Scott (Harriet Scott was sometimes identified as Harriet Forde, her married name);
- Louisa Atkinson;
- Ellis Rowan;
- William Sharp Macleay;
- John Lewin;
- John and Elizabeth Gould;
- George French Angas and
- William Hay Caldwell.
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