Not all settler scientists shared Bennett’s angst. Liversidge, the chemistry professor who had aligned himself with the ‘right answer’ by mediating the famous telegram’s successful transmission to Canada, immediately seized on its value in attracting the attention of British science to Australia. In a letter published in the Sydney papers on 16 September 1884, and reproduced soon after in England and other colonial papers, Liversidge wrote:
During the past fortnight we have received several telegrams from London, respecting the late meeting of the British Association, at Montreal, and in some of them references are made to suggestions that a future meeting be held in Australia.
As far as one can judge, the idea seems to have been thrown out when Professor Moseley, FRS, announced Mr Caldwell’s discovery of the oviparous nature of the platypus and Australian porcupine. [footnote: sent from Sydney by cable]. The news seems to have created or rather reawakened interest in the peculiarities of Australian Natural History, and on the spur of the moment some of the more enthusiastic members appear to have proposed that a subsequent meeting of the British Association should be held in Australia.
The text of this letter was also reproduced in the proceedings of the first meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held in Sydney in 1888. It was the first salvo in Liversidge’s energetic campaign to bring the British Association to Australia, a campaign that was finally successful some thirty years later.[67] Perhaps the telegram’s most immediate contribution was to draw the leading evolutionist Walter Baldwin Spencer to Australia. Spencer, whilst in Britain in 1884, wrote the note in Nature about the significance of Caldwell’s work. Three years later he took up the Chair in Biology at the University of Melbourne.[68] Liversidge and Spencer, promoters of the monotreme mountain, both went on to be very significant in scientific affairs in Australia, especially the AAAS. But they also created closure – a sense that the platypus frontier had closed, and moved Australian science to focus on other things.