The Gympie gold rushes of 1867 attracted a large population of adventurers. ‘Gold upheaves everything, and its disruptions are like that of an earthquake’, wrote Anthony Trollope travelling in Queensland in 1873.[33] Trollope was as much concerned about the upheaval of morality, as of the Queensland soil. The attractions of what we might call now ‘boys’ own adventures’, were celebrated by the Englishman, Arthur Nicols in his fictionalised account Wild Life and Adventure in the Australian Bush: Four Years Personal Experience. Writing eloquently of the ‘noble territory of Queensland’, Nicols boosted the frontier as a place for personal and financial development. ‘These resources are waiting development at the hands of vigorous manhood which the upper and middle classes can contribute in abundance towards the making of this part of the Queen’s realm’.[34] His natural history observations were excellent and he displayed a high level of curiosity about the platypus and echidna specimens he shot (including dissecting them, preserving the skins – and eating them). Nicols’s hero, Harold, told a hunting story all about a man and his dog, Don. His prose captured the thrill of the hunt:
what was that strong boil of water just now near the lilies? … There it is again, and a strangely shaped animal crawls over the leaves, dives in and out among them with the easy gliding motion of an otter, and disappears … suddenly, the surface breaks into a turmoil … and two long brown bodies are seen rolling over and over, playing or fighting … showing beaver-like tails and duck-like bills … The hoarse roar of the gun breaks the stillness of the scene. He is stripped in a few moments and eagerly swimming around the spot where the charge rippled along the water … Don hearing the report, hurries up … [and] sees a dusky object crawling through the reeds, and secures it before it can regain the deep water; and Harold soon stands on the bank, triumphantly holding his first platypus.[35]
Because he is working within a particularly British sort of hunting ethic, Harold does not use Aboriginal collectors.[36] The heroics of catching the platypus made it a worthy ‘trophy’, despite the fact that its size was not as clearly respectable as a lion or an elephant. The platypus for Nicols is working as the drawcard for young men of the Empire with hunting aspirations. Australia’s kangaroos and other marsupials did not generally carry the excitement of the wild animals of Africa. Nicols is suggesting that here is one that might arouse the sort of excitement where ‘away flies conscience, philosophy and all such abstract considerations’, in short, a manly challenge for the imperial hunter.[37]