Word: macleay
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Australia's early naturalists went to great lengths to get new specimens. For Robyn Stacey, shooting the wonders of the Macleay Museum's natural history collections took its own kind of intrepidity. She had to climb and re-climb the three flights of stairs to the museum's public gallery; crisscross Sydney to poke through storerooms; mount ladders to fetch preserving jars from high shelves; lie on floors to photograph specimens too fragile to be moved more than a meter from their cases. The sumptuous result, Museum (Cambridge University Press), provides the armchair-dwelling naturalist with a lift...
...True, the book - like the museum's public exhibits - represents a tiny fraction of the vast trove that Alexander Macleay and his son and nephew amassed in a century of obsessive collecting. But it will, Stacey hopes, give readers the kind of thrill she felt when she began opening the thin drawers of Macleay Snr's purpose-built cabinets, "and they're all full of butterflies. One's got all cream ones, the next is orange, then spotted ones, and you keep going, Wow. Oh, God. Look...
...Macleay and his fellow naturalists were just as excited when Australia's bizarre flora and fauna began arriving in London in the 1780s. The stunning variety, wrote a contemporary, "bursts upon our view at the first glance like a new creation." When Macleay agreed to go out to New South Wales as colonial secretary in 1826, his sole consolation for being sent to that era's equivalent of the moon was that he'd find it easier there to feed the addiction that threatened to ruin him: collecting insects from the antipodes. In an exquisite introductory essay, Ashley Hay tells...
...gifted, painstaking maker of books. After 20 novels, including Schindler's List and A Victim of the Aurora, a reader imagines him rummaging through his barn for old beams and bricks stored years before and never used. Stories, perhaps, told by his grandparents, who were storekeepers in Australia's Macleay River Valley. He sorts the tales, considers which can still bear weight, begins to sketch a plan for A River Town (Doubleday; 324 pages...
...yellow-bellied robin is always the first bird to wake in the mornings in the rainforests of northeastern Australia. Its singular call is soon echoed by a chorus of others--the screech of cat birds, the gunfire of Macleay's honeyeater and sometimes the eerie laugh of the kookaburra...