A SHIP arrived in Sydney in 1826 bringing a new colonial secretary along with his large family and hundreds of boxes of bugs. Macleay’s collection, at one stage considered one of the finest private ...

Australia’s early naturalists went to great lengths to get new specimens. For Robyn Stacey, shooting the wonders of the Macleay Museum’s natural history collections took its own kind of intrepidity.

A restoration of the Macleay building would in itself be very welcome: it was constructed in 1887 as a fireproof edifice to house the highly flammable Macleay entomological collections, and ...