Museum : the Macleays, their collections and the search for order
"Museum is a showcase of Australia's natural history. It tells of some of the remarkable people who collected and studied it, and of their legacy, the Macleay Museum." "When the first British visitors arrived on Australia's shores at the end of the eighteenth century, it was not only the potential of its space that tantalised them, but the extraordinary living things that they found there. Every European collector worth his salt desired a kangaroo, a parakeet, a waratah, and ship after ship sailed north loaded with Australia's remarkable natural history specimens. The most serious collector to make his own trip to the antipodes arrived in 1826. His name was Alexander Macleay, and over the next seven decades he and his family accumulated from Australia itself and beyond an unbelievably rich and diverse collection of specimens."--book jacket
Print Book, English, 2007
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007