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The history of science, pure and applied, in Australia, New Zealand and the southwest Pacific
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RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)
Online Early

‘The Menace of Acclimatization’: the advent of ‘anekeitaxonomy’ in Australia

Simon Farley https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6909-6077 A *
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic, Australia.

* Correspondence to: sjfarley@unimelb.edu.au

Historical Records of Australian Science https://doi.org/10.1071/HR24019
Published online: 9 October 2024

© 2024 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the 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

Acclimatisation has been a profoundly important force in Australia’s history, yet scholars have routinely ignored or denigrated it, leaving it under-studied and misunderstood. Most accounts frame acclimatisation as a fad, briefly flourishing around the 1860s; scholars typically blame the spread of animal pests such as the rabbit for the sudden loss of interest in this branch of science. This article attempts to revise such accounts, demonstrating, on the contrary, that settler Australians continued to exhibit favourable attitudes towards acclimatisation and acclimatised wildlife well into the twentieth century. Focusing on wild birds, the article argues that acclimatisation was not consistently opposed by Australian naturalists until the second half of the 1930s, and indeed, that attempts to acclimatise non-native birds continued into the 1960s. Settler nationalism and xenophobia—rather than improved ecological theories or field data—are identified as the underlying motivation for the opponents of acclimatisation. The implications for present-day research into and management of non-native wildlife species are briefly considered.

Keywords: acclimatisation, acclimatization, Australia, birds, conservation, ecology, history of science, invasive species, ornithology, settler colonialism, xenophobia.

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