The First Oolong Oologist

  Lost in Gunning's Wild and Mountainous Murriongs

Sir Charles Belcher OBE 1876-1970. Know nothing about him? He certainly knew Gunning as a youngster; and remembered it fondly despite being at risk of death from thirst and exposure when lost in our “wild and mountainous Murriongs” in 1888. Photo: Wikipedia

 Over the last few months I have spent too much of my life in pursuit of Sir Charles Belcher. I blame it all on Trove where I chanced upon this January 1888 report by the Gunning correspondent of the Goulburn Evening and Penny Post:

“On New Year’s Eve a boy named Belcher was reported to be missing. It would seem that the lad, in the company of two or three others, went for a bird’s nest ramble in the bush. By some means the boy got so far from his companions as to be out of sight and hearing. The lad wandered through the bush until he came upon the homestead of Mr T Mooney. A search party had been organised in the meantime who were pleased to learn that the object of their search was in safe keeping. The boy is a relative of Mr Thorne, the manager of the Commercial Bank, and was in the company of the sons of this gentleman prior to being lost. The country around the Murriongs, where the boy was lost, is wild and mountainous”

The Gunning Bank Manager’s residence from which the young Thornes and their cousin
Charles set off for their bird nesting adventure 130 years ago. Photo: Author

 A simple enough story it seemed – wimpy city kid visiting rugged country cousins gets left behind in the bush but happily restored to his aunt and uncle unharmed. But, I wondered, what birds might the young Belcher and his Thorne cousins have seen on their ramble? Did they go on with their interest in birding later in life? Where were these inhospitable Murriongs?  

Thus began a journey through the history of Australian ornithology and environmental management. Sir Charles, I learned, was a prominent and important ornithologist in Australia as well as publishing books on the birds of Nyasaland and Cyprus. His life is a good lens through which we can see how Australians’ relationship with our birdlife and environment has changed since late colonial times. So, let me introduce you to Sir Charles Belcher, the first of three Oolong oologists I hope to feature in a series of GDHS articles.

Oolong and Oology

Oolong lies just to the south west of the village of Gunning. It’s name, according to the Geographical Names Board of NSW, is an aboriginal word meaning “place of native companions” or brolgas. Mt Merryong, the main feature of the “Murriongs” where young Belcher almost came to grief, is about 7 kms from Gunning by the shortest direct route.

The Murriongs today. Nothing remains of Mr Mooney’s Oolong farm where young Belcher fetched up in 1888. This photo, taken from where his house once stood, is on the south western side of the Bassnett family's property Nerragundah.
Mt Merryong can be seen in the centre distance. The countryside was probably more densely treed in 1880. Photo: Author

Oology is a branch of ornithology studying bird eggs and nests but, for many practitioners, it extends to bird identification, behavior and the like. Today those of us with a keen interest in birds are “birders”, “ornithologists” or, in some cases, “twitchers”. Bird lovers in the 1800s and early 1900s were oologists.

Raiders of the Last Auk: Birding in the 1880s 

Nowadays, we have inexpensive bird ID books, apps on our smart phones and excellent binoculars available to us. We also have great cameras and can even snap bird photos with our phones. Not so, the serious oologist in 1888. To know and delight in our native birdlife you had to kill a specimen or two to study their form and feathers. For a complete understanding you also needed to gather their eggs and nests

Oology, with its attendant necessity of killing birds and destroying their nests and eggs, was a popular activity. Some participants were conscientious and ethical citizen scientists – concerned only to better understand the thing they loved. Others were ardent or even obsessive collectors. For them, possession was the prize and (like today’s twitchers, philatelists, and numismatists) some invested considerable time, effort and money to add to their extensive collections. The scarcer the specimen, the more prized and valued it was, the greater the competition between collectors and the nearer to total annihilation the bird.

Oologist at work: Mr Tom Brittlebank, a serious student of birdlife, taking all three eggs from a Boobook Owl’s Nest near Werribbee in October 1890. The depredations of egg and nest collectors like him undoubtedly proved injurious to many species of birds. But the birds’ worries were much wider. Landscape degradation, as exemplified by the scene beneath Mr Brittlebank’s perch, was a serious threat not fully appreciated until the 1950s onwards.
 Glass Negative Picture: Photographer: A.J. Campbell
Source: Museums Victoria

While oologists were obliged to kill specimens in order to understand and illustrate them, their art shows they clearly had a love of birds and nature. Tom Brittlebank’s brother Charles, a Victorian governnment plant pathologist and oologist, created the beautiful painting you see below for A J Campbell’s 1901 book Birds and Eggs. It portrays the Rose-breasted Robin (today called Rose Robin or Petroica rosea). 

Picture ex Wikipedia

Massacres for the Millinery Market

Enthusiastic oologists and land clearing were not the only threat to birdlife in the Victorian era. The feathers for the elegant example of the milliner’s art you see below were not obtained from sustainable farming. Large numbers of birds were killed directly and as collateral damage by plume hunters.

Plumed headwear

 The Young Oologist

My first impression on reading the “lost in the Murriongs” article was of a soft city kid unused to the bush being left behind by his sturdier cousins. Not so. He roamed the countryside far and wide as a youngster and was fit and vigorous as an adult. At least one of his Thorne cousins had already joined him in birding jaunts around Melbourne before young Charles visited Gunning. I suspect he became separated from his cousins because he was still determinedly climbing trees in pursuit of specimens while they walked on.

When he was birding in the Murriongs in 1888 Master Belcher, aged only eleven, was already well on the way to becoming a serious, heavy duty oologist. He began young. In a 1948 magazine article reflecting on his boyhood he recalled his first two bird finds were at his childhood home in Geelong when aged about four. The first was to identify crows he saw flying overhead from the back of a buggy as “Elijahs” – based on seeing a religious woodcut of the biblical prophet and his ministering ravens. The first egg he ever found, at about the same age, was that of noisy miner.

Serious oologists in the late 1800s, like birders today, kept good records of the birds they came upon. Charles, as well as being a very active boy, was also a young swot. He had begun to record thoughts, hopes and bird sightings in note books from about the time he came to Gunning. These note books still exist today.

I had so hoped he had recorded all the species he had seen here during his visit. Trevor Pescott of the Geelong Field Naturalists’ Club, who is the custodian of these early note books, has searched them for me. Alas, if young Charles saw the mythical Oolong Brolga in 1888 we shall never know as he left us no record in his diary of what he came upon around Gunning.

Trevor notes that in later diaries Charles became more expansive both in words and detail. You can see him developing his character as time went on. You can also see from his notes about shanghais and pea rifles that he was a typical boy and standard oologist for the time – enjoying the hunt for specimens with not much thought about the ethics or consequences of it all. Looking back much later Sir Charles acknowledged “Pretty barbarous sport it seems today, but those were primitive and uninstructed times, and boys in those times had to hunt something.”

Charles’s visit to Gunning seems to have been brief. It might not have merited our attention today were it not for his later prominence in the Australian and international birding worlds.

The Young Oologist’s Later Life

As a young man, Charles completed a brilliant law degree at the University of Melbourne and was admitted to the Victorian Bar in 1902. Initially a partner in a firm of Geelong solicitors, he later established his own sole practice which he sold in 1907 to go to London where, in 1909, he was called to the bar by Gray’s Inn. He returned to legal practice in Geelong on the death of his father and in 1914 joined the British Colonial Service where he enjoyed a stellar legal and judicial career in Cyprus, Africa and the West Indies.

Sir Charles is listed among “The People of the Century in Australian Ornithology” in Prof Libby Robin’s “The Flight of the Emu: A Hundred Years of Australian Ornithology 1901-2001”. A major pioneering figure in Australian birding, his contribution rests mainly on the following:

Foundation Member Royal Australian Ornithological Union and Editor of The Emu

The Royal Australian Ornithological Union (RAOU) – today part of BirdLife Australia – is Australia’s oldest birding association. It was formed in 1901 to promote the study and conservation of Australia’s native bird species , its motto being “Conservation Through Knowledge”. The then Mr Belcher was a foundation member and active on its committee, serving as editor of its journal Emu from 1905 to 1907.

The RAOU did much to change the way in which we saw our native birds. In particular, it mounted a successful campaign from 1907 when Emu published pictures by Arthur Mattingley of starving colonies of egret nestlings whose parents had been shot by hunters selling their plumes for the international millinery trade. This led to the collapse of the industry around the world as women turned away from the fashion for wearing plumed and feathered hats.

Starving egret nestlings wait in vain for the food that never came, their parents having been killed by feather hunters.
One of the confronting photos published in Emu and internationally.

The RAOU also became concerned about widespread egg collecting. It was one of the strong supporters of the Gould League of Bird Lovers which promoted bird education, the creation of sanctuaries and, importantly, the discouragement of bird egg theft.

Gould League of Bird Lovers membership certificate. Members undertook to protect Australian birdlife and not to take their eggs.  Image courtesy National Museum of Australia. No further reproduction is allowed without prior written permission.

Today, Birdlife Australia is a very active and effective organisation running major research, monitoring and conservation programs with significant volunteer input. You may know of the Australian Bird Atlas, Birds in Backyards, the Aussie Backyard Bird Count and others. These very successful and important citizen scientist based activities owe their beginnings to the early founders of the RAOU, Sir Charles among them.

Author of “Birds of the the District of Geelong” – An Early Regional Bird Guide

People in 1888 had no access to an affordable and easy to use bird identification book. There were a few hugely expensive multi volume tomes and, what guides there were, tended to focus on eggs and nests.
In 1914 Charles published “Birds of the District of Geelong, Australia” giving an account of 244 species with 50 photographs. This was one of the first regional bird guides to be published in Australia. He wrote it in the Reading Room at the British Museum using his bird notebooks as his source. This early and well regarded book was described in an obituary written by Jack Wheeler, the then President of the Geelong Field Naturalists’ Club, as “a fine dedication to one of so many high ranking achievements.”

Still to Come

Young Charles was the first of three oologists I know to have been active in the Oolong district. The next two came much later than him and their activities, interesting in their own right, illustrate how Australians have come to better understand our environment and our effects upon it. I hope to tell you a little about this in a later article.

Were You an Egg and Nest Collector?

Despite the excellent work of the Gould League, egg and nest collecting remained popular activities for some young people around Gunning until quite recent times. In the same way as Sir Charles Belcher, some became lifelong field naturalists as a result of their earlier youthful collecting hobby.
If you were an active egg and nest collector in your youth I would be very grateful to ask you about your recollections of it. I can be contacted at gunninghistory@gmail.com and would be delighted to arrange a time to talk to you.

Thank You

A special thank you to:
Harold Hazell: Oolong district historical guide who enabled me to retrace the 1888 bird nesting jaunt of Master Charles.
Trevor Pescott of the Geelong Field Naturalists’s Club for helping with research on the young Belcher’s notebooks.

References and Further Information

This has been a cursory account of a big subject through the prism of the life of Sir Charles Wheeler.  For those wanting to know more on the matters only touched upon here I can recommend:
The Flight of the Emu: A Hundred Years of Australian Ornithology 190-2001 by Libby Robin. A thorough account of Australian birding in the twentieth century.
How a Continent Created a Nation, also by Libby Robin. Looks at how Australians who have arrived in this country since 1788 have understood, changed and been changed by our environment.
The main references for this article are:
Birds and a Boy: Sir Charles Belcher’s recollections of his birding boyhood published in Wild Life magazine January 1948.
Belcher, Sir Charles Frederick. A Geelong Biographical Register entry prepared by the Geelong Historical Society.
The Belcher Era of Local Bird Life. An obituary by Jack Wheeler, the then President of the Geelong Field Naturalists’ Club in the Geelong Advertiser of 2 October 1971.
A J Campbell: The Nests and Eggs of Australian Birds. 1901. This is the first bird book Sir Charles remembered seeing. Perhaps the first Australian book to use photographs to show eggs, nests and habitats.