Penny Olsen
Upside Down World
255 x 230mm, 268pp, Hardcover with printed dust jacket, colour illustrations
Book of the Month October 2010
Australian: $39.95 (Approx. US $42, Euro €32)
ISBN 9780642277060
Worldwide 7 - 10 days, Australia 3 - 7 business days
About the Book
In Upside Down World: Early European Impressions of Australia's Curious Animals, author Penny Olsen describes how this 'miscellany of the curious' fuelled the rage for Australian natural history amongst the upper classes of Europe, bringing income and, occasionally, fame to its collectors and documenters. In the colony itself, however, it contributed to wholesale destruction of animals and their habitats and, in some cases, led to their extinction. Upside Down World is lavishly illustrated with early European images, most held in the National Library of Australia collection and some of which have never before been reproduced. Scattered throughout are fascinating and colourful descriptions of species from collectors' and naturalists' journals, showing us how the scientific knowledge of Australian fauna evolved. Read about the koala that 'much resembles a sloth', the malleefowl which incubates its eggs in an 'oven' and a 'bird so very singular in its several characteristics ... the bill seems most allied to a hornbill, but the legs are those of a toucan, and the tongue is more like a crow than any other'. Plus, of course, the platypus which defied rational explanation, with its webbed feet and duck"s beak attached to a mammal"s body? surely it was a hoax on the part of those cheeky new colonials.