For information : National Library exhibition on the Paradise Parrot, opening Friday 22 Jun

["Sandra Henderson" <>]

This exhibition is in the visitor centre - which is the display area between cloakroom and the entry to the main reading room.  Penny Olsen is the curator, and she wrote about her research on this topic when she was one of the Library's Harold White Fellows. See

http://www.nla.gov.au/grants/haroldwhite/biography/olsen.html for info about her fellowship, and http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2005/mar05/article1.html for an article that she wrote for the Library's newsletter at the time.

MR GILBERT'S BEAUTIFUL PARRAKEET
Friday, June 22, 2007 - Sunday, October 14, 2007
Visitor Centre
John Gilbert (1812–1845) was an English naturalist and explorer who was a taxidermist for the Zoological Society of London when he met John Gould and travelled to Australia with him in 1838. He spent the next few years collecting natural history specimens for Gould's planned publications about birds. He visited Tasmania and Western Australia as well as New South Wales and Queensland. It was there, on the Darling Downs, that he discovered a parrot, till then unknown, which he described in a letter to Gould as 'without exception the most beautiful of the whole tribe I have seen in Australia'. Shortly after he sent his latest collection of specimens to Gould, he joined an exploring party led by Ludwig Leichhardt and unfortunately died on the expedition after being speared during a night attack by a group of Aborigines.

Sadly, there have been no confirmed sightings of Gilbert's 'beautiful parrakeet', later known as the paradise parrot, since 1927. Most likely it became the victim of loss of habitat as the Darling Downs were cultivated and stocked with herds of cattle and mobs of sheep. Its use of termite mounds in which to build its nest also made it very vulnerable.

This display, curated by Dr Penny Olsen of the School of Botany and Zoology at the Australian National University, focuses on the, almost certainly extinct, paradise parrot as a symbol of all those birds and animals which have ceased to exist as they have been hunted for food, their feathers and fur, or had their habitat destroyed through human expansion. Visitors will have the opportunity to view some special items from the Library's collections such as the work of John Gould, Gregory Macalister Mathews and Gracius Broinowski and the watercolours of William Cooper, E.E. Gostelow and Neville Cayley.

Sandra Henderson
Executive Support Branch
National Library of Australia
CANBERRA  ACT 2600
Phone: +61 2 6262 1481
Fax: +61 2 6273 2545
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