The difficulty for scientists working in Queensland was, perhaps, to make it clear that their task was different from that of frontier-adventurers, morally more worthy and more important to the glory of empire. Whether they were visitors from Europe, or aspiring Australian scientists, they would have been largely sympathetic with the evocation of empire, class and gender portrayed by Nicols, but would have seen all of these as in service to science. The glory of Australia in empire through science was perhaps more important to locals, and the booty of Australia for a glorious scientific empire more the concern of visiting Europeans, not all of whom were British. The visitors, in particular, were clearly fearless about taking very large numbers of specimens. But the scientists’ virility was tied to hunting for knowledge rather than hunting for trophies. Such hunting demanded that they tap into the best local knowledge sources, including Aboriginal ones.
The young German embryologist, Richard Semon in his popular account of his travels in Queensland, goes out of his way to make it clear that the purposes of his journey are purely scientific:
In June 1891, when I set out on my scientific journey, nothing whatever had been recorded with regard to the development of Ceratodus. Concerning oviparous mammals [there were] no developmental facts but that of their laying eggs, and an interesting observation about the teeth of young Ornithorhynchus…Thus it was that I chose Australia as my first and my main field of action, and within Australia those quarters which harboured the animals chiefly exciting my interest.[38]
The book’s dedication to the eminent scientists Ernst Haeckel and Paul von Ritter, alerts us to the fact that it is an account of ‘an expedition’ [not for mere adventure but] ‘destined to bring some Phylogenetic Problems nearer their solution’. Semon’s geographical research was as thorough as his zoological. Before leaving Jena, he had precisely identified the Ceratodus territory where he would make his home in Australia:
[O]nly a brother naturalist will sympathise with me, when I own that an almost solemn feeling overcame me, on starting from the little station of Maryborough on the morning of 24th August, I began my pilgrimage to land sacred to the zoologist.[39]
W. H. Caldwell had made the scientific expedition internationally famous for this region, and Semon wasted no time in directing his attentions to the area where Caldwell’s collecting had been most successful.
I now want to turn to the central story of this scientific frontier, the Ceratodus-driven collecting expeditions of Caldwell and his Aboriginal companions in the 1880s, which resulted in the famous telegram to the British Association about the platypus. It is very difficult to infer the Aboriginal perspectives from Caldwell’s brief account alone. The fact that Semon went to precisely the same area only seven years later, however, and was introduced to Aboriginal collectors by the same squatter (W. F. McCord), allows us to draw on his much fuller account of the Aboriginal people to supplement Caldwell’s remarks.