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

Australians have largely forgotten the acclimatisation movement. Briefly, acclimatisation was the practice of translocating animals and plants across the world (and sometimes also domesticating them) for a range of anthropocentric and often imperial or colonial purposes.¹ It achieved remarkable yet short-lived popularity within scientific circles in France, Britain and beyond in the mid-nineteenth century; it also gained favour among naturalists in Britain’s Australasian colonies.² Though acclimatisation societies were responsible for introducing many familiar animals to Australia, they do not take up much space in our historical imaginary, dwarfed by drovers and diggers, convicts and bushrangers, athletes and activists. When it has been remembered by historians and other scholars, acclimatisation as a concept and a practice has generally been denigrated.³ Biologist Tim Low has called acclimatisation ‘one of the most foolish and dangerous ideas ever to infect the thinking of nineteenth-century men’.⁴ Referring to acclimatisers, historian Eric Rolls declared that ‘there was never a body of eminent men so foolishly, so vigorously, and so disastrously wrong’.⁵

The story of how acclimatisation was condemned and then forgotten is long and complex, but in this article, I will attempt to outline one part of it. It is, of course, true that some ‘acclimatised’ animals and plants took a huge toll on agriculture: by the early 1870s, rabbits, hares, sparrows and mynas were despised by many farmers and gardeners in south-eastern Australia, shortly to be joined by starlings and foxes. From the 1960s to the 2010s, several historians have claimed that such pests spelled the end for acclimatisation, discrediting the movement entirely.⁶ It is true, too, that the acclimatisation movement in Australia reached its zenith in the early 1860s—the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria (ASV), founded in 1861, was one of the largest and wealthiest organisations of its kind in the world—and declined soon thereafter.⁷ But the role of introduced pests in this decline has been overstated. The reputation of acclimatisation as such proved surprisingly robust, even as particular species or particular organisations drew the scorn of the public. Indeed, acclimatisation societies formed or re-formed in South Australia (SA) in 1878, New South Wales (NSW) in 1879, Tasmania in 1895 and Western Australia (WA) in 1896.⁸ Slow and fitful indeed was the process by which naturalists agreed that introducing new wildlife species to Australia was inherently risky and otherwise undesirable.

In this article, I argue that organised, coherent and definitive opposition to acclimatisation in Australia came not in the 1870s but the 1930s, when a revival of acclimatisation raised alarm and disapproval among naturalists. I home in on two organisations that attempted to introduce new species of game bird to Australia in the late 1930s. The struggle to prevent this new wave of acclimatisation drew in several prominent naturalists, clarifying a hitherto inchoate belief that neobiota (that is, ‘biota redistributed via human agency’) were intrinsically problematic for Australian ecosystems.⁹ For simple reasons of scope, this article focuses on introduced wildlife and wild birds in particular, to the exclusion of domesticated animals and all manner of plants.

Before going further, I must define an unusual term used in the title. I take the term ‘anekeitaxonomy’ from the work of biologist and historian Matthew Chew. Anekeitaxonomy refers to the classification of organisms based on their biogeographical origins, the carving up of species into ‘native’ and ‘alien’. This is a surprisingly recent trend in conservation and the life sciences, and one that has come under sustained criticism in the twenty-first century.¹⁰ For my purposes here, anekeitaxonomy is a paradigm, in Thomas Kuhn’s sense.¹¹ Anekeitaxonomy entails a set of assumptions about species naturally and timelessly belonging to a given geographical range, or, to put it simply, to a given place.¹² Anekeitaxonomy also holds that when humans move species outside of their typical range, this is unnatural and potentially destructive. But, as Samir Okasha has put it, ‘a paradigm is an entire scientific outlook—a constellation of shared assumptions, beliefs, and values’.¹³ In the case of anekeitaxonomy, the nodes of the constellation extend beyond the realm of scientific research into environmentalist activism, land management, public policy and popular culture.

Determining the development of anekeitaxonomy in Australia is an important task for historians of science. Settler (non-Indigenous) Australians have always been hostile towards certain non-native species on particular grounds. The rats and mice that arrived on ships, for example, were loathed and persecuted, but this was rooted in a millennia-old sentiment common to agricultural societies all over the world. Similarly, Australian bird-lovers have long nurtured a grudge against introduced predators: foxes, cats and rats.¹⁴ But this did not necessarily mean that settlers hated all non-native species or hated them only because they were non-native. By re-thinking when and why acclimatisation in Australia came to an end, we can come to a better understanding of the appeal, the purpose and the underpinning values of anekeitaxonomy.

I argue that anekeitaxonomy served a cultural purpose for settler Australians in the 1930s that it could not have done in the 1870s. Just as acclimatisation was an expression of settler colonialism, opposition to acclimatisation was fuelled by settler nationalism. Inspired by settler-colonial theory, I understand settlers’ identification with native biota and their concomitant rejection of most neobiota as tactics of self-indigenisation, or in other words, settlers have used these sentiments to help justify their occupation of stolen land.¹⁵ I do not cover Indigenous perspectives on neobiota in this article, partly because they were scantly recorded in this period, and partly because there is good reason to think that many Indigenous cultures have often been accommodating of neobiota, evading the logic of anekeitaxonomy, which may indeed be seen as a settler-colonial imposition.¹⁶

Ornithologists and acclimatised birds

When the Australian colonies federated in 1901, a number of bird species had been introduced successfully from Eurasia: blackbirds, common mynas, goldfinches, greenfinches, house sparrows, laughing doves, skylarks, song thrushes, spotted doves and tree sparrows. Apart from seeing the founding of the Commonwealth of Australia, the year 1901 also saw the foundation of a somewhat humbler institution in Melbourne: the Royal Australasian Ornithologists’ Union (RAOU). The RAOU was one of several organisations formed since the 1880s that both reflected and encouraged the study of and identification with ‘Australian nature’. As Adrian Franklin, Libby Robin and others have argued, this was a form of settler nationalism or, I would put it, self-indigenisation: a way for settler Australians to feel more at home in, and to justify their possession of, a stolen land.¹⁷ By the early twentieth century, it was common enough for settler poets and naturalists to vaunt the majesty of native birds.¹⁸ However, this did not entail a rejection of the non-native: newly organised and eager to share knowledge, the writings of these ‘ornithologists’ (a label that then encompassed amateur birdwatchers) reveal that non-native birds were often cherished.

Many of the men at the core of the RAOU in its early days were avowed champions of non-native birds; some, such as the Le Souef brothers and their cousin Charles Ryan, had been involved in acclimatisation efforts themselves and defended the practice.¹⁹ In 1905, ornithologist A. G. Campbell, a founding member of the RAOU, discussed the ‘respective usefulness’ of ‘introduced birds’ at length, declaring ‘even the most unmitigated fruit destroyers have more points in their favour than against them’.²⁰ Goldfinches destroyed thistles; sparrows ate aphids; thrushes and blackbirds freed gardens of slugs, snails and caterpillars; while mynas and starlings were also important scavengers and eaters of insects.²¹ Australian ornithological books from the early decades of the twentieth century often contained sections on introduced birds that likewise emphasised their economic value; writers often noted the widespread esteem in which favoured species like blackbirds, goldfinches and thrushes were held, even while they acknowledged that further introductions were unlikely to be successful or worthwhile.²² Sometimes, the same author would heap praise upon one or two non-native species, framing them as welcome additions to Australia’s avifauna, before turning around a few pages later to condemn sparrows or starlings.²³ Throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s, naturalists continued to argue that non-native birds, as eaters of scraps and destroyers of pests, were a boon in cities and towns, where there was, putatively, little suitable habitat for native birds; some even advocated their legal protection.²⁴

Yet as early as 1908, the RAOU had taken a formal stance against further bird introductions. At an ‘Inter-State Bird Protection Conference’, delegates

moved that in view of the acclimatization from older civilized countries of birds that have proved to have abnormally increased in numbers and to be in many cases of doubtful utility … where valuable native birds have decreased[,] it is recommended that each State prevent the liberation therein of birds which are habitually wild in other countries, and that the Commonwealth Government be recommended to … check the importation of such birds, which may become additional pests.²⁵

Though none would ever approach the prestige of the ASV in the early 1860s, acclimatisation societies were still coming into (and out of) existence. James Sloane, a pastoralist and birdwatcher, wrote in the Emu in 1916: ‘Foxes have made great inroads into our native fauna, and they have certainly come to stay and be an everlasting curse.’²⁶ Thus far, it was typical farmer rhetoric – the fox did not just eat rainbow bee-eaters, the subject of the article, but lambs too. But Sloane did not abhor foxes only because they, literally, ate into his profits. ‘Some settlers from the Old Land are never happy till they surround themselves with the pests they were used to’, he wrote.

Some want still more. Some time ago I was asked to join a society whose one object was to introduce more beasts and birds from oversea that might be acclimatized here. I have not again heard of this society, but if it exists—and it may—it should be hunted up by the proper authorities and brought to reason.

This anti-acclimatisation stance was never unanimous, however, and many naturalists continued to support the translocation of species. In 1920, the RAOU made inquiries into the possibility of acclimatising tick-eating egrets from Africa.²⁷ This proposal had a clear economic rationale—not so much the suggestion of South Australian naturalist (and future RAOU president) Edwin Ashby, who called for the acclimatisation of hummingbirds that same year.²⁸

Unease with the acclimatisation of birds and other animals seemed to grow after the First World War. This was likely fuelled by the discovery of populations of red-whiskered bulbuls in Melbourne and Sydney in the late 1910s.²⁹ Bulbuls were not deliberately introduced into the wild, but they were popular cage birds, and these populations were likely founded by aviary escapees. Red-whiskered bulbuls had and have a wide distribution across south-east Asia, and newspaper articles that covered their spread across the suburbs were published under headlines such as ‘Asiatic Settler’, ‘Asiatic Invader’, ‘Immigrant Bird’ or, in one memorable instance, ‘Mr. Bulbul: Asiatic Bird That Has Beaten the Migration Laws’.³⁰ By April 1923, the Minister for Trade and Customs banned the importation of ‘Chinese bul-buls’.³¹

Whether this growing hostility towards non-native birds was a direct result of xenophobia or simply running parallel to it, they could not be divorced. In 1922, Melbourne’s Herald published a piece by journalist and naturalist Charles Barrett.³² The article began dramatically with a call to ‘guard against animal aliens’: ‘The introduction of foreigners, in fur or feathers, may lead to a loss of millions of pounds through their depredations’. It seems likely that Barrett was deliberately tapping into settler Australians’ xenophobia when he wrote of these ‘undesirable aliens’, ‘foreigners’ and ‘immigrants’ becoming ‘ill neighbours’, ‘parasites’, ‘menaces’ and ‘depredators’ in their new country. Likewise, native birds were romanticised as innocent, defenceless victims, displaced and dispossessed. Using conservationist rhetoric that has changed little over the last century, Barrett claimed that many native animals were ‘on the verge of extinction’, ‘going the way of the Dodo’. He wrote that starlings were

ousting useful and beautiful native birds from nesting sites. Nowadays, respectable married couples, native to the soil, are hard put to it to find lodgings. But the starlings have cosy homes, and chatter and chuckle from the housetops over their victories.

Barrett regarded the bulbul as ‘another foreigner’; although this newcomer was ‘a songster and not unhandsome’, Barrett warned that ‘he’ may yet become a nuisance, and the same went for the ‘Java dove’ (spotted dove), another species with an Asian origin whose numbers in Melbourne had been on the rise. The final sentence was definitive: ‘We should guard our own and erect barriers against alien animals that… may be a menace to Australia.’ Later, Barrett’s stance on non-native birds would noticeably soften, but his disdain for acclimatisation, past and present, was a constant.³³

Barrett and likeminded Australian naturalists were in the van of an international scientific trend. After the First World War, a handful of scientists in the UK, the USA and Aotearoa New Zealand were beginning to investigate the human dispersal of plants and animals, trying to explain why some species thrived when transported to a new location while others perished without a fight.³⁴ But the influence of these works on Australian naturalists is unclear, seemingly indirect at best. The scientific underpinnings of acclimatisation had been occasionally called into question over the 1880s and 1890s, and naturalists had attempted to explain why introduced pests like rabbits and sparrows flourished in Australia.³⁵ But, unlike today, the history and impact of neobiota in Australia were not construed as major topics of scientific inquiry. Investigations of non-native pests, such as the famous case of the prickly pear around this time, were highly targeted and seeking particular results (typically eradication). The sub-discipline of ‘invasion ecology’ (also called ‘invasion biology’), that aims to give empirical basis to anekeitaxonomy, would not coalesce until the 1980s and 1990s.³⁶

Meanwhile, acclimatisers went about their business, generally without interference. In 1927, the Commonwealth imposed a total ban on the importation of birds ‘unless the consent in writing of the Minister of State for Trade and Customs [had] first been obtained’, but obtaining such consent seems to have been easy enough, and regardless, enforcement seems to have been minimal.³⁷ In 1929, the West Australian published a glowing interview with Ernest Albert Le Souef, founding Director of the Perth Zoological Gardens and a scion of an acclimatisation dynasty; under the headline, ‘Animal Migrants’, the successes of local acclimatisers were celebrated.³⁸ WA was late to adopt acclimatisation, but, as the article explained, since the 1890s, Perth-based acclimatisers had successfully introduced the kookaburra, ‘Senegal turtledove’ (laughing dove), ‘Indian turtledove’ (spotted dove), mute swan and guinea fowl, although the latter two did not thrive in the long term.³⁹ They were also experimenting with various species of ducks, geese and deer. Farmers in WA suffered from rabbits and foxes—and the state went to great lengths to keep out sparrows (as it still does)—but there was still plenty of enthusiasm for acclimatisation. There was nothing paradoxical or hypocritical about this: it was simply the prevailing view that past mistakes and failures did not necessitate a wholesale prejudice against neobiota.

In the early 1930s, Victoria’s Fisheries and Game Department considered introducing pheasants and partridges from Europe, theoretically to ‘take the pressure off native game’.⁴⁰ A breeder in Beechworth shipped pheasants to French Island in 1932; another released non-native game birds into a ‘fauna park’ on the Mornington Peninsula the following year; both garnered favourable media coverage.⁴¹ This was perhaps motivated by interstate rivalry—Tasmanian authorities had successfully introduced a variety of game birds to King Island from 1910.⁴² These initiatives had been supported by revered nature writers such as Donald Macdonald and even Charles Barrett, though the latter expressed some reservations.⁴³ Yet another prominent naturalist, Alec Chisholm, took it upon himself to differ. In 1933, Chisholm wrote in objection to these proposals at least twice, opining: ‘This matter of introducing birds from other countries is not one to be treated lightly. A false move may cause much trouble.’⁴⁴

Crises global and local

In the mid-1930s, the world seemed a frightening place. A 1936 editorial in the Australian Worker summarised the geopolitical situation, juxtaposing suffering overseas with an idyllic suburban morning.⁴⁵ The editor recounted enjoying an ‘exquisite’ sunrise, while listening to the dawn chorus: ‘The bulbuls chatter joyfully. Willie Wagtail sounds his happy flute. The doves coo incessantly. The sparrows are bright and brisk’. Here, native and non-native birds were listed happily alongside one another. But the ‘sweetness and serenity’ of this moment were shattered by a glance at the newspaper. Unemployment remained high after the Depression, while ‘unrest and struggle’ were ubiquitous, from Spain to Abyssinia to China. ‘The nations watch one another suspiciously. Hastily they increase their armaments, in constant dread of another World War… the Fascists of Italy and the Nazis of Germany survey the scene like vultures in anticipation of a feast.’

This turmoil left many people fleeing their homes for a quieter part of the world. Immigration to Australia had dropped to miniscule levels from 1929 due to the Depression, that had affected Australia particularly badly.⁴⁶ But from 1936, both the economy and immigration rates were starting to recover.⁴⁷ Between 1936 and 1940, two-thirds of immigrants to Australia were from continental Europe.⁴⁸ At the same time, a trade diversion policy was implemented, encouraging trade with Britain and the other dominions while making the importation of goods from the USA and Japan difficult and expensive.⁴⁹ Australia had been in the process of negotiating a treaty with Japan, and this slight proved costly, igniting a brief trade war and longer-lasting diplomatic tension.⁵⁰ The outbreak of war between Japan and China in 1937 intensified fear of the increasingly militarised and authoritarian empire to Australia’s north.⁵¹ Australia also began accepting small numbers of refugees from Europe in this period, less than one hundred in 1935, but increasing to 1556 in 1938 and 5058 in 1939.⁵²

At the same time, naturalist organisations such as the RAOU and the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales (RZSNSW) were increasingly vocal in their opposition to acclimatisation.⁵³ As we historicise this, the geopolitical and demographic context is no less important than any ecological or scientific one. As Lorenzo Veracini has written, ‘the sustained presence of exogenous Others confirms the indigenisation of the settler collective’: in other words, the arrival of migrant groups who do not easily assimilate into the mainstream polity and culture of a settler colony can increase established settlers’ sense of their own belonging in place.⁵⁴ This was a time when the xenophobic anxieties of settler Australians—who at this point were overwhelmingly of British and/or Irish descent—were significantly heightened. The prospect of being uprooted and demographically over-run by unwelcome migrants, just as Australia’s Indigenous peoples had been, was the fundamental nightmare of the settler nation. And, as we have seen, neobiota were increasingly associated with and portrayed as migrants or invaders. This would not have made cultural sense in the 1860s and 1870s, when rabbits, sparrows and other non-native species were first recognised as pests. Most settlers, then, still saw themselves effectively as transplanted Britons, with shallow ties to the land: culturally and politically, demonising newcomers served no purpose when most settlers were newcomers themselves. Since then, however, settlers had come to see themselves as native to Australia and see their own fate tied to that of native biota. If native birds could be displaced by ‘more vigorous and efficient’ ‘aliens’ from Eurasia, what did that mean for settlers?⁵⁵ Opposition to acclimatisation could serve as an oblique outlet for such anxieties, a kind of ecological White Australia Policy. Framed in an ostensibly empirical and apolitical discourse of science and conservation, preventing the introduction of new species was a means for settlers to, metonymically, reject a frightening ‘outside world’ and reassure themselves about the strength of their ties to the land.

Amidst all this, the Australian Restoration and Acclimatisation Society (ARAS) formed in Sydney in 1936.⁵⁶ At face value, the ARAS was atavistic, a throw-back to the 1860s. Their official aims cohered closely to those of the ASV, albeit with one significant difference. Their first aim was to ‘import and propagate foreign game and fish’, but their second was to ‘restore and propagate indigenous game and fish and their natural habitats’.⁵⁷ The fact that even such an old-fashioned society would so concern itself with ‘indigenous’ biota demonstrates how pervasive the new eco-nationalist ethic had become.

On the other side of the continent, the Fish and Game Society of Western Australia (founded 1935) was proposing to introduce California quail, backed by Ernest Le Souef.⁵⁸ Dominic Serventy, a young lecturer at the University of Western Australia, was given the task of investigating whether the quail could become a pest.⁵⁹ The most important result of his inquiry was a galvanising paper. In late October, 1936, the RAOU held its annual congress in Adelaide. The editor of the Emu, Charles Bryant, read Serventy’s paper, entitled ‘The Menace of Acclimatization’.⁶⁰ It began:

It is a strange fact that Australian ornithologists, always to the fore with reasonable and unreasonable suggestions for the protection of the indigenous avifauna, have tended to overlook the important role played by acclimatized birds and their insidious undermining of the position of native species.⁶¹

Serventy argued that, while both ‘lay people’ and ‘naturalists’ recognised that some neobiota had become pests, few people fretted about the introduction of further new species.⁶² The Tasmanian branch of the RAOU, for example, had approved of attempts to introduce the Hungarian partridge to the state only the year before. Serventy did not believe in ‘so-called harmless or “beneficial” acclimatizations’: ‘any successful introduction, even if directly innocuous from the human standpoint, must, by very reason of the fact that it has obtained a foothold, disturb the balance that had existed, and therefore have repercussions detrimentally affecting the existing fauna’.⁶³

Serventy drew on scientific concepts still relatively new, such as that of the ecological niche; he cited a host of largely American ecologists, especially Joseph Grinnell. He also referenced George Thomson, whose book The Naturalisation of Animals and Plants in New Zealand, published the previous decade, was an early landmark in anekeitaxonomy.⁶⁴ In undisturbed, native ecosystems, Serventy explained, all available niches were totally filled. Abiotic resources were exploited to their sustainable limits: ‘The newcomer, to survive, can only do so by elbowing some-thing else out of its place’.⁶⁵ He made a typically Australian comparison: ‘Pastoralists are under no illusion, for instance, that their runs will carry the same number of sheep if an influx of kangaroos and rabbits compete for the herbage available’.⁶⁶ This was ecology ‘red in tooth and claw’, a Darwinian view of survival as a zero-sum game. A home could not be made on this continent without evicting the previous occupants: Serventy’s anekeitaxonomic arguments resonated with settlers’ understanding of their past and their fears for their future.

Eminent RAOU members such as Samuel (‘Captain’) White and Neville Cayley praised the paper.⁶⁷ Cayley, the man behind What Bird Is That?, probably Australia’s most famous bird field guide, ‘stressed the extent to which native birds had been ousted by importations’, referring to the bulbul in particular.⁶⁸ On Serventy’s suggestion, Bryant moved:

That this meeting deprecates all attempts to introduce and naturalize wild animals and plants in countries where they are not native unless such introduction is urgently needed for economic reasons, and until a thorough study has been made of the local conditions and of the results that are likely to follow.⁶⁹

The motion confirmed the new consensus: non-native birds were no longer welcome in Australia, not only because they might cause harm to crops, but because of what they were—foreign—and what that meant for the survival and flourishing of native species. Henceforth, the influence of anekeitaxonomy in the Australian ornithological community and beyond would only increase.

Led by Serventy and entomologist C. F. H. Jenkins, the WA branch of the RAOU ‘strenuously opposed’ and ultimately thwarted the attempt to liberate California quail.⁷⁰ Proposals to acclimatise birds continued in WA, although these were quashed by the state government.⁷¹ All this turned out to be merely a prelude to a larger confrontation. In early 1937, the ARAS had been given approval from the NSW government to import 500 California quail.⁷² By April, an alliance led by the Wild Life Preservation Society and the RZSNSW, but encompassing the Gould League, Naturalists’ Society of Australia, Rangers’ League and RAOU, made a deputation to the Chief Secretary of NSW, asking him to withdraw permission for this endeavour.⁷³ This protest echoed the language of the RAOU resolution from their 1936 conference, urging ‘that no bird or animal should be introduced unless it can be shown… that it is necessary for some economic reason’. Ornithologists whipped up fears that the quail would eat grain and fruit and distribute weeds, causing consternation among the Fruitgrowers’ Federation, Graziers’ Association and Farmers and Settlers’ Association.⁷⁴ As unholy as this union between farmers and conservationists may seem, it reveals how much their values aligned when it came to controlling ‘pests’—and ‘pest’ was becoming interchangeable with ‘non-native’. The issue received nation-wide coverage. The Commonwealth shortly intervened to prevent the importation, and gestures towards lifting the ban in July were quickly hosed down by the ‘primary producers and naturalists’.⁷⁵

Among Australian ornithologists, Serventy had few companions in trying to explain the impact of neobiota with reference to rigorous ecological theories.⁷⁶ For decades to come, those who lamented the ecological impact of non-native birds in Australia argued primarily—often solely—from a combination of anecdote and conjecture, relying on the spectre of historical precedent and appealing to nationalist sentiment. When scientific opinion turned against acclimatisation, against neobiota in general, it was not because of cutting-edge theories or better data but because introducing new species to Australia no longer cohered with settlers’ image of themselves.

The long, slow death of acclimatisation

In late September 1937, the Sydney Sun reported, ‘Exotic birds from other lands may be given a Paterson dictation test, and banned from the country if lovers of Australian fauna succeed in inducing the State Government to make a black list of prohibited bird immigrants’.⁷⁷ For contemporary commentators, the resonance between racist immigration restriction and the desire to exclude non-native fauna was obvious. Once again, the RZSNSW led the effort. While importing birds for acclimatisation purposes was already banned, at least in theory, aviculturists were still importing ‘thousands of cage birds… every month’.⁷⁸ Again, the bulbul was invoked as an example of what could go wrong. This proposed ban does not seem to have eventuated, but another small victory soon followed: in February 1938, the WA government declared California quail, alongside bulbuls and mynas, to be vermin.⁷⁹

Naturalists of this era showed a marked ingratitude towards their acclimatising forebears.⁸⁰ Of particular note is a 1938 article by David Stead entitled ‘Tragedies of Australian Acclimatisation’.⁸¹ A leading conservationist, Stead was trained as a zoologist and at this time was serving as the President of the NSW Naturalists’ Society and as Honorary Secretary of the Wild Life Preservation Society, of which he was a founding member.⁸² His article began: ‘To most understanding Australians the very word acclimatisation is anathema. It is associated with many unwise, even utterly foolish and callous, introductions of exotic animals and plants.’ Stead celebrated the recent success in blocking the California quail in NSW, echoing the call of the RAOU to prevent any introductions without thorough scientific support. Contrary to the claims of Stead and many others since, it was not true that acclimatisation in its 1860s heyday was practiced ‘without any knowledge or expert insight’. At that time Australia’s foremost life scientists argued that acclimatisation was all but necessary,⁸³ but they had been working within paradigms that were outmoded by the 1930s. As a way of understanding biogeography and the value of human intervention in the distribution of species, acclimatisation no longer resonated with most settlers, but, increasingly, anekeitaxonomy did.

Attitudes had hardened considerably in the span of only a few years. The Commonwealth’s tough stance on importing non-native animals was increasingly praised in the late 1930s: a column in the Daily Telegraph in 1939 noted that while birds like the bulbul had already ‘over-run many parts of the country’, Australia would be still more plagued by ‘foreign birds and animals… were it not for strict Government supervision’.⁸⁴ The following year, RAOU stalwart Michael Sharland wrote for the Mercury, ‘Acclimatisation has more opponents than supporters today, and it is well that this should be so… Acclimatisation should no longer be permitted in any circumstances’.⁸⁵

Despite the blows struck against acclimatisation in the late 1930s, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that ‘introduced’ or ‘exotic’ species in general were consistently identified as a conservation problem in Australia.⁸⁶ The 1960s also saw the very last attempts to acclimatise birds in Australia. Renewed calls to introduce pheasants to Victoria were rebuffed by the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and the Field Naturalists’ Club of Victoria; similar efforts were defeated in NSW and SA, while WA’s branch of the RAOU thwarted a proposal to release non-native parrots on Rottnest Island.⁸⁷ Only in Tasmania had acclimatisation continued to receive support from the state: pheasants were liberated on the Tasmanian mainland in the 1940s and on Flinders Island as late as the 1960s.⁸⁸ In 1962, such practices were roundly condemned at the RAOU’s annual congress and at a national conference of state fauna authorities.⁸⁹ In express tribute to Serventy, the WA delegation to this latter conference submitted a paper entitled ‘The Menace of Acclimatization’; Serventy himself was present and advised ‘a complete ban on acclimatization’.⁹⁰ As one delegate put it, ‘There is enough evidence from past follies… to convince me to close our doors to all’.⁹¹ Subsequent policies against the liberation of non-native animals were articulated at the RAOU’s conference in 1964 and at a national meeting of wildlife conservation ministers in 1969.⁹² The view that acclimatisation was a ‘menace’, something to be ended without equivocation or delay, was now entrenched.

Neobiota and nationalism

From the first complaints about sparrows and mynas in the late 1860s, it took nearly a century for settler Australians, as a collective, to cease their attempts to introduce new species of bird to the continent. Of course, not only birds but all sorts of animals and plants were brought to Australia in that intervening century, prompting a range of responses. But we learn much about the overarching patterns from the few examples covered here. Neither popular nor expert opinion turned against neobiota in any immediate, total or straightforward way in the 1860s and 1870s, even after multiple acclimatised species were deemed to be pernicious pests. Nor can we turn to international science to explain why Australian naturalists opposed acclimatisation so vehemently and so successfully in the late 1930s: the science behind ‘bio-invasions’ would remain uncoordinated and driven by anecdote for decades to come. Given the discussion of non-native birds and other fauna in the inter-war period frequently bore xenophobic resonances, given the strong association between settler nationalism and an appreciation of native biota, a cultural explanation fits best. Colonial guilt and xenophobic anxiety have been played out in myriad aspects of settler-Australian life: conservation and ecology are not exceptions to this. Opposing acclimatisation was a way for settler Australians to re-establish the legitimacy of their position in the continent: excluding fauna from elsewhere was an expression of their ties to and reverence for the land and its ‘native’ organisms, all the while eclipsing and effacing the pre-existing relationships between Indigenous peoples and those very same landscapes and ecosystems.

In Australian society today—certainly in urban areas—the orthodoxy of anekeitaxonomy is ubiquitous and taken for granted. This paradigm has enormous material implications. In the 2011–2 financial year alone, $3.77billion were spent on the ‘management’ of non-native species in Australia.⁹³ Rather than glibly accepting these contested categories, this must prompt curiosity and further investigation among historians of science. If the rising prevalence of anekeitaxonomy in Australia cannot be explained simply with reference to the spread of pests or a growing body of rigorous, empirical evidence—if our hostility towards neobiota really does have a xenophobic impetus—then that raises significant and troubling questions about the ways settlers study and manage ecosystems in Australia today. It may be that anekeitaxonomy gained a foothold in Australia in the late 1930s, but tracing its overall trajectory is a much greater task—and an urgent one.