Acclimatisation society

were established in several Australian colonies in the mid-nineteenth century to colonise the indigenous Australian environment with exotic flora and fauna. Advocates of acclimatisation believed themselves deprived of ‘useful’ birds, animals and plants, and regarded the native flora and fauna as ugly. Accordingly, they sought to create an ‘improved’ natural environment—ideally, one that was comparable with ‘home’. By setting free introduced species—traditional targets for hunting, such as rabbits, deer and foxes, and ‘singing’ birds, such as sparrows, thrushes and blackbirds—they could imitate familiar (European) modes of sport and forms of pleasure. Above all, they could obtain visual reassurance. The societies also built captive collections of exotic species in zoological gardens. Growing appreciation of indigenous flora and fauna in the 1890s, which coincided with a burst of popular nationalistic sentiment, led to a measure of protection of Australian plants and animals through the reservation of public lands as state and national parks. In his study of pests in Australia, They All Ran Wild (1969), Eric Rolls claimed ‘there was never a body of eminent men so foolishly, so vigorously, and so disastrously wrong’ as the members of acclimatisation societies.