A history of zoological acclimatisation in Victoria, 1858-1900

© 2014 Dr. Peter MinardZoological acclimatisation in Victoria between 1858 and 1900 was an attempt to restore, understand and improve the distribution of animals in the colony. Studying it provides a deepened scholarly understanding of colonial science, Australian and transnational environmental history, and the world-wide nineteenth-century acclimatisation network. The actions of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria (ASV) and its successor organisations, the regional fish acclimatisation societies and the Fisheries and Game branch of the Department of Agriculture, can be best explained by an evolving combination of scientific, aesthetic, utilitarian and political conceptualisations of the Victorian landscape and its flora and fauna. In part, the importation of exotic organisms and translocation of native organisms was an attempt to address and repair post-colonisation ecological damage. Furthermore, zoological acclimatisation was conditioned by disputed and changing notions of evolution, biogeographic distribution and climate both within the ASV and in broader colonial Victorian society. These arguments are substantiated by combining the techniques and scholarship of environmental history and the history of science. This combination allows for sophisticated analysis of zoological acclimatisation as a process of introducing exotic species and managing both introduced and native species. Zoological acclimatisation in Victoria, seen in these expansive terms, was more complex, contradictory, long-lasting and influential than previously realised