Richmond Park

Natural history illustrations commissioned for the National Museum in the 19th Century provide a window onto a world very different to the landscape we now experience.

While animals were collected from locations across Victoria, the great majority of specimens were from areas now enveloped within metropolitan Melbourne. Almost totally transformed by housing, industry and the drainage of wetlands, it is unlikely that the artists of McCoy's grand project would recognise those places where their carefully painted specimens were originally collected.

In the 1870s Richmond Park sprawled across a small plain close to the Yarra River. The location had always been a popular campsite for the Kulin people, with possums in the Red Gums and nearby billabongs providing abundant waterfowl.

It was here that the Melbourne Cricket Ground was established in 1853, and from the 1860s men would gather to play a rambling form of football among the trees, some of them inspired by the high marking of the indigenous ball game 'marn grook'.

Frederick McCoy records collecting a spectacularly large Phasma (a colourful sort of flying stick insect) on a 'young gum tree on Richmond Park', a place where wildness could still be experienced. The same insect would now be remarkable sight, were it to fly across the MCG pitch in front of 90,000 people at the Boxing Day test match.