Acclimatiser
Best known as a Museum Director and university professor, Frederick McCoy's involvement with Melbourne's zoo is less well known.
He helped shape a menagerie at the Royal Park depot of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria - a location that would later become the zoo - from a transient collection of animals awaiting permanent homes elsewhere.
Not primarily intended for display, these animals were brought to Victoria in the hope of enriching the purses and psyches of immigrant colonists - introducing birds that would sing sweetly or consume fruit-attacking insects, fish for the rivers, and game and grazing animals for bush and paddocks.1
McCoy presented his ideas on acclimatisation at the Society's first annual address in November 1862. He asserted that acclimatisation, contrary to the popular notion that it referred to the adaptation of species to difficult climatic or geographic conditions, was rather:
... the bringing together in any one country the various useful or ornamental animals of other countries having the same or nearly the same climate and general conditions of surface.
1Gillbank, 'Animal Acclimatisation: McCoy and the Menagerie that became Melbourne's Zoo', The Victorian Naturalist, McCoy Special Issue, Volume 118 (6), 2001, pp. 297-304.