Lantern slides and platypus diplomacy: David Fleay’s legacy at the Archives

Sydney University students are the first to explore conservation pioneer David Fleay’s collections in the Australian Museum’s Archives. In this blog, they describe their project to solve a platypus mystery.

Behind the façade of its public exhibitions, there is even more to explore at the Australian Museum. Its scientific collections attract researchers from all over the world, and so do the Museum’s archives. They are a rare treasure trove for learning about the history of the study of nature and culture in Australia and abroad. In partnership with the University of Sydney, a group of students recently had the privilege to be the first to explore a newly acquired collection: the personal collections of David Fleay (1907-1993), renowned naturalist and science educator.

Fleay is a famous and colourful figure in Australian conservation science. He was the first to breed a platypus in captivity, and he showcased Australia’s unique fauna at home and abroad. Established by Fleay and his family in 1952, the David Fleay Wildlife Park on the Gold Coast remains a sanctuary for native animals and a place for visitors to learn about them and their ecosystems. Now often called a pioneer of conservation, Fleay shared his passion for Australia’s wildlife, and for preserving endangered species with a wide audience. His personal collections were kept in his family’s possession before they made the journey from Fleay’s Gold Coast home to the Australian Museum in 2024.

What does it take for a large collection like Fleay’s to enter the Museum’s archives and databases? And what historical riddles does the collection speak to? In a hands-on internship, the Sydney University students majoring in History and Philosophy of Science found out for themselves. Guided by Archives team members Damien Stone and Robert Dooley under Dr. Vanessa Finney’s direction, the student interns digitised a selection of Fleay's extraordinary collection of animal images, daunting as it may be to handle fragile and unique original glass plates, always with gloves on! Once digitised, the objects were described and labelled so that future investigators can find them in the museum’s database.

Fleay’s superb glass plates illustrate his public science education mission of showcasing Australian fauna. The fragile plates that have now been digitised once served as lantern slides, carefully inserted in a projector. Lantern slide shows had a long tradition in Australian public education, and Fleay masterfully adopted this visual technology to show a wide range of animals to his audiences far and wide: owls and platypuses, echidnas and wombats, koalas and quolls and many others.

What can these archival objects tell us? The quiet archive comes to life in the student team’s inquiries into the history of science communication, and the team’s work reveals how the materials now held in the Museum’s collection shed new light on sometimes well-known stories. Famously, a platypus named Winston was sent to England at the height of World War II at the request of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Winston never made it: Fleay attributed his death, four days from reaching Liverpool, to submarine detonations, and his account has been reproduced ever since. But the analysis of the ship’s logbook, now available to researchers in the archives, suggests that this wartime story might be a cover-up! And it links Winston’s role in connecting Britain and Australia during wartime with another platypus voyage, now to the USA. A capricious pair of platypuses named Penelope and Cecil enchanted visitors in the Bronx Zoo and attracted much public speculation about their couple life. Read the students team’s full story here.

And that’s just a start. David Fleay’s archive holds plenty more surprises for future investigators, and a new team of students is coming to the Archives soon to explore the legacy of another fascinating figure in Australian nature conservation, Les Chandler.