National Library Of Australia: 10 books

In 1838, John Gould, the father of Australian ornithology visited Australia with the intention of gathering material for his great work on Australian birds. In the resulting publication, The Birds of Australia: In Seven Volumes (1848), and the accompanying Supplement (1869), Gould named, for the first...

What name could be a more apt description of Australia than The Land of Parrots, a name inspired by late sixteenth-century maps showing a southern region labelled Psittacorum regio? This beautiful book takes a close look at parrots in Australia, from the first published illustration of an Australian...

Asian Treasures: Gems of the Written Word showcases Asian writing, printing and books of beauty and historical significance that are housed in the National Library of Australia. Written by Andrew Gosling, former chief librarian for the Librarys Asian Collections, Asian Treasures provides a fascinating...

Curious Minds: The Discoveries of Australian Naturalists looks at the long line of naturalists who have traversed Australia in search of new plants and animals. Identifying and classifying the unfamiliar plants and animals was their biggest challenge—the early ones were frequently wrong but later naturalists...

Did you know that, in 1934, the ABC developed synthetic cricket, in which radio broadcasters gave a ball-by-ball description of the game, using sound effects to simulate the sound of bat on ball and the applause of the crowd? The Big Book of Australian History features stunning images from the collections...

Around 1870, Ferdinand von Mueller, the greatest Australian botanist of the nineteenth century, began to advertise in several newspapers across Australia for lady plant collectors. This was at a time when women typically had little recourse to science, or contact with men outside their circle of friends,...

The classic field guide What Bird Is That? has been known to bird enthusiasts throughout Australia for decades, ever since it was first published in 1931. It was written and illustrated by Neville William Cayley (18861950), son of artist Neville Henry Cayley (18541903) who, before him, had also had dreams...

To the first Europeans who came to Australia, everything seemed topsy turvy. Christmas was in the summer and trees shed their bark but not their leaves. And the animals were bizarre. There was a bird that laughed like a donkey and a type of greyhound that bound along on its hind legs like a hare. There...

Betty Temple Watts (19011992) developed an interest in birds in her early married life while living in Iran and Papua New Guinea. Although she had studied art formally as a nineteen year old, it was not until she was 48, and settled in Melbourne, that she decided to immerse herself in her bird art. Betty...

Australian aviators Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm made the first trans-Pacific flight in 1928 in an aircraft constructed largely of timber and fabric, the Southern Cross. With Americans Jim Warner as radio operator and Harry Lyon as navigator, they made the trip from Oakland, California, in...