NATURAL HISTORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 916, 1 March 1957, Page 6

NATURAL HISTORY

Koeby 'TKE MANS PoqR

"| AM sitting in a room talking, not to a group, but to a succession of people who-though moving throughstill remain in hearing outside. Conscious of the others, my attention is not fixed exclusively on the small boy in front who has a query on worms, for I have just recalled something about worms that the old fisherman who passed through five minutes before may wish to know. So back comes the fisherman to hear the point (without having to be called), then later everyone goes, leaving me in the room alone -until the next time." This is the way Crosbie Morrison visualises his radio audience, so he told The Listener in a recent interview. "T can tell something of a person by his letters, not very much, but enough to make him real to me; but while I’m answering his questions the rest of the audience is equally real. That’s Where the image of the room and the stream of callers comes in." "How do you organise your time? You must have to do a great deal of field work as well as everything else." *"T don’t look on field work as work; as for organising my time, my wife will tell you that I don’t." Mrs. Morrison demurred, "I don’t ‘think he does so badly," she told us. . "T have been broadcasting now," Crosbie Morrison went on, "for almost twenty years, but my interest in natural history goes back long before then -as far back as I can recall. Until I was six I was an only child, then along came twins, and with this addition to the family I had to amuse myself to a greater extent. This took the form of watching grasshoppers. They have very interesting faces-something like horses; before long I could tell the difference between the types. I still like grasshoppers for that matter. "Later on, my parents, noting my interest, used to encourage it by buying various books on nature study for me." When the time came around to choose a career Crosbie Morrison picked on industrial chemistry-"That, at least, was my intention when I first went to

university, since there seemed little prospect of a future in nature study." At the beginning of the third year in a_ three-year course, however, the choice lay between chemistry and zoology as the major subject, and the fascination of zoology won out. "So I majored in ezoology. After several years’ postgraduate research I looked around for an academic opening. There was none available near to home, and I didn’t wish to leave where I was, so when I was offered a job by a newspaper editor (to whom I was introduced as a possible writer of nat-

ural history articles) I accepted." Natural history, however, turned out to be a very minor part of his work at that stage, for as Mr. Morri-

son told us, Nis career as a full-time journalist involved all sorts of other jobs-court reporting, police calls, Parliament-at one time he was even head of the Victorian Parliamentary press gallery. "It was when I became editor of Wild Life that I first took to broadcasting, to help to publicise the magazine. Unfortunately, Wild Life doesn’t exist any more-apparently you can’t commercialise natural history. Advertisements can carry a publication, but only if the subject matter lends itself to them. We could advertise insecticides and so on, but could hardly compete with trade journals of gardening and agriculture. The population of our countries isn’t large enough to let such a magazine succeed, especially these days." "And yet natural history is a popular subject." ; "Tt is-because it is a poor man’s as well as a rich man’s hobby. You don’t need much equipment, all that is needed is a little magnifying glass. Most hobbies demand much more equipment than that." ----

We asked Mr. Morrison if, apart from his general interest in the whole domain of nature study, there was any one field that held particular interest for him. "There are three, any one of which I would be quite prepared to settle on for study if I had the time. First there is the study of birds. Australia is rich in birds, and there is enough . material there for lifetimes of study. In the small area of Melbourne Botanic Gardens alone, as many as 150 different species have been seen, and that is nearly as many as there are in the whole of New Zealand: And no one would call New Zealand poor in bird life. "The next interest is almost a philosophic one. That is the study of the origins and relationship of Australian mammals. Two of the three main mammal groups are almost exclusively found in Australia. The duck-billed platypus and the spiny anteaters belong to one

of these groups, and the marsupials to the other. Of the 150 odd marsupials known, 148 are found in Austfalia, so you see we have quite a unique fauna. It is the research into the reasons for this uniqueness that is fascinating." Among the marsupials that Mr. Morrison mentioned were kangaroos (whose young at birth are "the size of a peanut"), wombats, bandicoots, wallabies, and different types of opossums. Another marsupial was the Tasmanian Tiger, which had not’ been seen alive for thirty years. "I read a newspaper report recently that said one had been seen from a helicopter. If the report is true that one may be the last of its race. And that brings me to my third main inter-est-conservation through National Parks." National Parks, said Mr. Morrison, preserve for later generations the natural character of the land they live in. In time the whole of a land could be altered through increasing population and the resulting development, "Now is the critical stage; fifty years ago the problem did not exist, fifty years from now it will be too late." The National Parks Association of Victoria, of which Mr. Morrison is President, worked for ten years to get a National Parks Act passed, and success came with the passing of the Act just before he left for New Zealand. It is modelled in some respects on the corresponding New Zealand Act passed early in the fifties. "Problems of wild life conservation don’t arise here to the same extent. In Australia we have some creatures that are not strong enough to compete with animals like the rabbit, fox and deer, and not being strong enough to compete they should be protected. Here you have wild life reserves such as Kapiti; we would regard them more as National Parks." ‘Asked what he thought of the National Parks in New Zealand, Mr. Morrison said that New Zealanders were very lucky, not only in their parks but also in the possession of publicspirited people who served on the excellent National Parks Authority. He was staggered at Fiordland National Park’s three million odd acres-the largest park in Victoria, he said, was only 130,000 acres. "It is certainly beautiful," he said, and Mrs. Morrison agreed, adding that they had seen the area both in rain and fine, so had an idea of both sides of its character. Mrs. Morrison’s experience is that her husband’s choice of work "makes life interesting," though she voiced the usual complaint of the zoologist’s wife about "highly flavoured" specimens that had been dead too long. She described the trials of looking after live specimens, and recalled a spiny anteater that tore a strip off the garage door and a trio of harmless snakes, one of which escaped to terrify a neighbouring maiden lady. Noticing Mrs. Morrison’s use of zoological terms, we asked whether she also had had training to assist her in her husband’s work. "Only the training that the old man gave her," interjected Mr. Morrison, "Slave trade," was Mrs. Morrison’s brief comment, showing that even among naturalists a wife has the last word.