Russell McGregor

Early on in Russell McGregor’s new book on the history of birdwatching in Australia, he highlights the importance of the initial epiphany most birdwatchers experience when their interest first sparks. This moment of what Julian Huxley called ‘sudden glory’ can happen anywhere and at any time, city or country, day or night, and often fans out into an obsession, sometimes a profession, that endures through a lifetime.

Australian nature writing has come a long way in recent years. Not only do we have an abundance of contemporary nature writers, but we are also rediscovering the ones we have forgotten. The neglect of Australia’s nature writing history, with its contributions to science, literature, and conservation, is happily being redressed with recent biographies of Jean Galbraith, Rica Erickson, Edith Coleman, and now a new biography of Alec Chisholm.

In Queensland, as in the other Australian colonies in the nineteenth century, European settlers wrested control of the land from its indigenous owners by force and the threat of force. All colonies used police for this purpose, but Queensland went further than any other in creating a police corps specifically for the subjugation and dispossession of the Aborigines. Queensland’s Native Police comprised small units of indigenous troopers, commanded by European officers. These were moved around the colony to wherever on the leading edges of European expansion the Aborigines were most ‘troublesome’. Their tactics were simple and brutal. Whether the targets were entire Aboriginal groups or individual suspects, their standard strategy was lethal force in engagements that were known euphemistically as ‘dispersals’.