Kookaburra on Branch

Australia has a rich history of ornithological illustration. The earliest European records and drawings of Australia's birds can be found in the narrations of the seventeenth-century of discovery. Even before colonisation by Europeans, the naming of new species collected on the voyages of James Cook in the first half of the 1770s resulted in the description of nearly 1000 species of birds. This was the raison d'etre for much early Australian bird art: scientific description, the claiming and naming of new species and their illustration in books.