After the Caldwell era, the platypus was neglected for many decades by mainstream science. It was energetic natural history amateurs of independent means who pressed on with platypus studies – the most notable being Harry Burrell, whose twenty years’ research resulted in the publication of The Platypus in 1927, in which he speculated that the platypus had a ‘sixth sense’. Burrell was known affectionately as ‘Duckbill Dave’. He was responsible for designing the platypussary that took five platypuses to the New York Zoo in 1922. Charles Barrett’s popular book of 1944, also titled The Platypus, included summaries of Burrell’s work and the work of the other Platypus Man, Robert Eadie, who kept platypuses at Healesville, near Melbourne. Perhaps it was Barrett who kept alive the ‘platypus frontier’, by reminding scientists that the ‘cairn of knowledge that they commenced to build with small pebbles [was] … still uncompleted, but high and firm now, because of the work of such patient, masterly observers as Robert Eadie and Harry Burrell’.^[69] Science did return to the platypus, in the 1960s, with some CSIRO studies of their milk glands confirming the similarity of the monotremes to other marsupials.^[70] In the 1980s and 1990s, confirmation was found for Burrell’s ‘sixth’ – electromagnetic – sense.^[71]

The local Aboriginal communities were not the only beneficiaries of scientific (later eco-) tourism. In the upper Burnett River area over a hundred years later, there is great pride in the local curiosity and active conservation work towards the preservation of the slow-moving lungfish.^[72] In a quaint tribute to the old scientific frontier, there is still a railway siding called ‘Ceratodus’.