J. A. Leach’s Australian Bird Book: at the interface of science and recreation
Russell McGregor
A *
A College of Arts, Society and Education, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld 4811, Australia.
Historical Records of Australian Science 33(2) 97-109 https://doi.org/10.1071/HR21010
Published: 30 May 2022
© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of Australian Academy of Science. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
An Australian Bird Book by J. A. Leach, published in 1911, was the first field guide to Australia’s avifauna. Unlike today’s field guides, it was not tightly focussed on identification, instead devoting more than half its words to an expansive dissertation on the natural history of birds. This article scrutinises and contextualises Leach’s Bird Book to illuminate some of the interconnections between science, birdwatching, recreation and conservation in early twentieth-century Australia. It shows how Leach’s heavy weighting on natural history was integral to his promotion of birdwatching as an edifying recreation that would lead people not merely to be able to name the birds they saw but also, more importantly, to understand, cherish and protect them.
Keywords: Australian nationalism, birdwatching, conservation, field guides, natural history, nature study, ornithology, popular science, recreation.
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