National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 63 | June 2003


Australiana Collection: The Koala Walk—Très Chic, or Très Wrong?

Edouard Travies. ‘Koala’ from Buffon en estampes: planches et illustrations (Paris, c.1860)
Edouard Travies
‘Koala’ from Buffon en estampes: planches et illustrations (Paris, c.1860)

The Library recently purchased a magnificent two-volume album of plates for children. Regarded as one of the rarities of nineteenth-century natural history illustration, Buffon en estampes: planches et illustrations  (Paris, c.1860) features lithographic plates by the celebrated French natural history illustrator Edouard Travies. The handcoloured plates depict four Australian native species—the kangaroo, platypus, lyrebird and koala—against a delicately rendered uncoloured background.

All plates are accurately drawn—except for the koala. With its wombat-like walk and back-clinging infant, it may have been drawn after Desmarest (1822). Strahan (Dictionary of Australian Mammal Names, 1981) states that ‘few illustrations prior to 1850 depict the koala very well’. In fact the first recorded illustration of a koala was in Perry’s Arcana, or, The Museum of Natural History (1811), and there would appear to be only a dozen texts published throughout the nineteenth century portraying the animal, ranging from fantastic to more accurate depictions. One reason for the slow progress toward accuracy might have been the difficulty of locating the animal—typically snoozing for hours on end high in the tree tops of certain species of eucalypt—unlike the ubiquitous kangaroo, found bounding everywhere on the ground.

This rare acquisition, with no recorded holdings in Australia and only two known overseas holdings, will complement other Travies prints in the Pictures Collection.
—Wanda Horky

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