The Australian 6apr99

John Gould's Birds of Australia, Protoavis Productions;

distributed by Manaccom; Windows 3.1x; $49.95

ONE of the most fascinating elements of Australian colonial history is the way the early colonists had to reconstruct their habitual perceptions of the world, and adapt their expectations of ordered British fields, tame wildlife and demure British birds to the untidy landscape of Australia, its weird mammals and extraordinary variety of bird life.

The folks back home in England, already reeling from exposure to two centuries of wonders from the recently lost New World, were nonetheless keen for more exotic titillation to take their minds off the dark satanic mills springing up in the vacant fields all around them.

And for British publishers the annexation of the Australian continent was a godsend: presenting them with an endlessly exploitable menagerie of exotic mammals and lurid, idiosyncratic birds they could sell through the new and profitable medium of subscription publishing.

As a result, the British still know more about the flora and fauna of Australia than they do about the odd bunch of castaways who turned a slave camp on the shores of the most beautiful harbour in the world into home, then a nation.

The birds grabbed their imagination first, thanks to John Gould.

His monumental, multi-volume work, The Birds of Australia, was published between 1840 and 1869.

It revealed the ornithological glory of the southern continent – particularly the parrots – those flamboyant, chattering princes of our skies. God knows how many budgies were incarcerated in cages because of Gould.

Born in 1804, Gould was something of a renaissance man, the son of the foreman gardener at Windsor Castle, where he learned taxidermy.

By 1827 he was taxidermist to the Zoological Society of London.

He began issuing folios of coloured lithographic plates of exotic birds, usually drawn from carcasses or skins, in 1830. They sold very well, which encouraged him to publish others. Soon he could afford to mount an extensive expedition from 1838-40 to collect and observe Australian birds and mammals.

Gould was also a media entrepreneur, profitably exploiting the new technology of colour lithography in the 40 volumes and 3000 coloured plates he published in his lifetime.

Gould's commentary is a pleasure to read, if you like languorous Victorian sentences – as I do. It is unpretentious and keenly observed, but not devoid of whimsy, as evidenced by some of the exotic names he gives.

Although this Australian-produced digital version of Gould's masterpiece was released some time ago, it had managed to escape my attention.

Perhaps because of the order imposed by the book, navigation is simple, through a floating menu with eight options: help, find, a map of Gould's Australian travels, back, forward, Gould biography and exit.

The core of the disc is the book, and once again simplicity in presentation and approach is paramount. Hypertext is out, for instance, and the biography and map sections are satisfactory but static.

Each entry is presented with the coloured plate on one side and the text on the other. Irritatingly, landscape images are presented side-on, but they come up laterally on a full screen. Click on either half-screen to make it a full screen.

Sometimes full-screen images are very severely cropped.

Initially, it appears that the images lack saturation, but in this they are faithful to the printed work.

It's disturbing to realize that many of the birds Gould describes are now extinct.