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Birds of Australia
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The Birds of Australia
John Gould; R. and J.E. Taylor; London, 1840 - 1848.
"The Birds of Australia" was completed in 36 parts between 1840 and 1848 and comprising nearly 700 hand-coloured lithographs, including the SUPPLEMENT of 1869. The work has been described as "undoubtedly the greatest of Gould's eighteen works" by A.H. Chisholm, Naturalist. Certainly these images have a deserved place in the front rank of ornithological prints. It is known that several people commissioned to conduct field work in the quest for undiscovered specimens for this ornithology met violent deaths in the pursuit of science.
The Birds of Australia captured the beauty of some of the most exquisite birds in the world and constituted Gould’s largest work with over 680 hand colored lithographed plates with the majority of the plates executed by his wife, Elizabeth Coxen. In later works Gould would collaborate with the likes of Wolf, Hart, Richter, and the talented Edward Lear.
John Gould is widely regarded as the father of ornithology in Australia, and with good reason. The Birds of Australia is generally acknowledged as the greatest of Gould’s eighteen major works. It depicts all the 681 bird varieties then known—many of them first recorded by Gould himself. 250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed, and even at the outset there were 160 subscribers. Later this number rose to nearly 250, with the edition almost fully subscribed despite the high price of £115 per set. This sum pales beside later prices commanded in the open market, with one set sold in 1989 for $495 000.
A number of books on Australian birds had been published since the establishment of the Colony of New South Wales in 1788, in particular John Lewin’s Birds of New Holland in 1808, reissued under the title Birds of New South Wales in 1813 and a new enlarged edition in 1822 as A Natural History of the Birds of New South Wales, Collected, Engraved and Faithfully Painted after Nature. None, however, was on the scale imagined by Gould and in 1836 he wrote to the Scottish naturalist Sir William Jardine ‘would not a work on the birds of Australia be interesting? I have a great number of new and interesting specimens to make known and have an idea of making it my next illustrative work.’
In 1837 Gould had begun to publish Synopsis of the Birds of Australia and the Adjacent Islands, but realised that he did not have enough material. Elizabeth’s two brothers, Charles and Stephen Coxen, had emigrated to Australia in the early 1830s, and their letters and the ‘strange and unusual’ specimens they sent back to England fired Gould with the desire to travel and obtain material himself.
In May 1838 John and Elizabeth Gould left England with their eldest child Henry, the collector John Gilbert, a nephew and two servants, arriving in Hobart that September. Their two youngest children were left with Elizabeth’s mother, while the four-year-old went to boarding school. Elizabeth was constantly occupied with doing the drawings for The Birds of Australia and caring for Henry and another son, Franklin Thomas, born in Hobart in 1839 and named for Sir John and Lady Franklin whose hospitality the Goulds enjoyed. Lady Franklin wrote that John Gould was ‘fully conscious of his importance as a [social] lion’ and that there was no reason why ‘a bird fancier should come all the way to the Antipodes in pursuit of his particular fame, and not think better of himself for it’.
With the aid of John Gilbert, who remained in Australia on a retainer of £100 plus expenses, and two local men, Natty and Jemmy, John Gould collected 800 bird specimens, 70 quadrupeds and the nests and eggs of more than 70 species of birds and the skeletons of all the principal forms, making notes on them and their habitat and incidentally discovering the budgerigar, both as a dinner dish (he was reputed to enjoy eating large numbers of them) and as a pet. He took several pairs back to England in 1840 where they became very popular.
Sources:
-Hetherington, Michelle. www.nla.gov.au/collect/treasures/apr_treasure.html
-Chisholm, A. H. (1944) The Story of Elizabeth Gould. Hawthorn Press, Melbourne.
-Datta, A (1997) John Gould in Australia: Letters and drawingswith a Catalogue of Manuscripts, Correspondence and Drawings Relating to the Birds and Mammals of Australia Held in the Natural History Museum, London. Melbourne University Press,
-London. Lambourne, M. (1987) John Gould: Bird Man. Osberton Productions, Milton
-Keynes. Sauer, G. C. (1982) John Gould The Bird Man: a chronology and bibliography.
-Sotheran, London. Sauer, G. C. and Datta, A. (1998-2001) John Gould The Bird Man: correspondence: with a chronology of his life and works. In 4 vols. Maurizio Martino Publisher: USA.
-Tree, I. (1991) The Ruling Passion of John Gould: a biography of the bird man. Barrie & Jenkins, London
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