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Take yourself back in time to the 1850s.
The British colony of Melbourne,
Victoria, Australia is thriving.
Frederick McCoy is appointed the first director
of the new Museum of Victoria.
He plans to produce
the natural history of Victoria publication
called the Prodromus.
The word prodromus means 'preliminary description'.
Over the next several decades,
McCoy publishes a two-volume edition of the Prodromus.
He plans to do more but there are complications,
and the project remains in the archives
at Museum Victoria for over 100 years.
Jump forward to the 21st Century.
We meet John Keane,
a visual artist by background.
He takes a sabbatical from his job
as an exhibition producer
to undertake a Thomas Ramsay Research Fellowship.
He is joined by Bec Carland,
who has a history background,
and together they analyse the Prodromus collection.
McCoy intended this publication
as the first stage in a much more ambitious project
to describe all of the animals in classes.
And you'll get a mix of fish, lizards,
bryozoans , echinoderms, all sorts of animals mixed up.
He intended later on to reprint those descriptions
and have all the snakes together,
and all the lizards together,
all the mammals together
that would become the complete biology of Victoria.
His style of writing is just really engaging
and really different I think to a lot
of the museum practices that followed.
He sat in the middle at Melbourne University
in his laboratory and his apartments
and through his correspondence
and connections in the colony
he had specimens delivered to him.
And opportunistically
he would sort of tick off various species.
The specimen would come into the museum
fresh or reasonably fresh
and it would be taken over to the illustrator,
very often Arthur Bartholomew,
who would do straight taxonomic illustrations
of the animal,
usually from the side, the top, the bottom
to capture its diagnostic characteristics
and also to capture the colours of life
while the specimen was still fresh.
With insects they'd keep them alive in wardian cases,
like little hothouses,
and they'd make observations of the animal
as it changed from one state to another.
If it was a fish,
quite often after the illustrations were done,
McCoy or Bartholomew would sort of cut the animal open
and McCoy liked to do drawings of the fish's guts.
After that was done, they'd drop the specimen
into a spirit jar, or if it was a butterfly or an insect,
pin it into a drawer and preserve it.
A lot of those specimens are still in the collection.
It's a magnificent and big project.
He started the thinking of it
and the commissioning of artists
in the late 1850s
and he was still commissioning artists
in the early 1890s.
So it's almost ..you know, it's like a 35 year project.
And in our research we found in the collection store
the last plate still on a lithographic stone.
The unpublished prodromus.
Even though it remains incomplete,
it is perhaps our greatest achievement in publication