Description
Rose-breasted Cockatoo, accompanying text:
“Crown and occiput, white, tinged with rose color — the basal portions of the latter, bright rose color; cheeks, a collar surrounding the neck, throat, and chest, bright rose color. This species of cockatoo is very plentiful throughout the interior and northern portions of Australia, and particularly so in the Maranoa district; all round the Gulf of Carpentaria it is also pretty common.”
Leach’s Cockatoo, accompanying text:
“Male — General plumage, black, with greenish reflections; head, crest, and neck, lighter, partaking of a yellowish brown tint. Female — Head and crest, blackish brown, each feather tinged with yellow at the tip. This, which may be regarded as the least of the Australian black cockatoos, is found in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. It frequents ridges and forest country, especially where the oak (casuarinas) abounds, on the hard nuts of which tree it principally subsists, breaking the same with the greatest ease with its powerful bill.”
Silvester Diggles was a colorful character in 19th-century Australia — a pioneering naturalist of birds and insects, as well as an artist and musician. After emigrating from his native Britain in the 1850s, he eventually settled in the Brisbane area, where he worked as a teacher and piano tuner, and began studying Australian flora and fauna. He helped found Queensland’s first scientific institution, the Queensland Philosophical Society, in 1859, and published several papers in its scholarly journal Transactions. He also worked to establish the Queensland Museum, which the Society started in 1862. Diggles initially published lithographs of his bird paintings as The Ornithology of Australia, 325 plates illustrating some 600 Australian birds, produced between 1863 and 1875. His niece, Rowena Birkett, hand-colored the plates in that collection. In 1877, he produced a two-volume second edition, using 123 of the same plates, which he named Companion to Gould’s Handbook, or, Synopsis of the Birds of Australia. After his death in 1880, his manuscript and original plates, including unpublished ones, were acquired by the publishing firm Angus & Robertson and donated to the Mitchell Library in Sydney. A facsimile edition of The Ornithology of Australia was published by State Publishing South Australia in 1990.
Henry Green Eaton was an Australian lithographer who worked mainly in Queensland. Born in England, he arrived in Tasmania, Australia, at the age of 18 on a prison ship, having been convicted of larceny. By 1844 he was working as a lithographer. He seems to have left Tasmania for Queensland in the 1850s. He is best known for his natural history subjects, including the 22 plates in Frederick M. Bailey’s Handbook to the Ferns of Queensland (1874) and all of Silvester Diggles ‘s bird prints, which he did between 1866 and 1870. He also produced landscape and portrait lithographs, often working from photographs.
Condition: Generally very good with the usual light overall toning and wear.
References:
“Henry Green Eaton.” Design and Art Australia. 9 November 2012. https://www.daao.org.au/bio/henry-green-eaton/biography/ (19 August 2015).
“The Ornithology of Australia.” Wikipedia. 25 December 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ornithology_of_Australia (19 August 2015).
