History

History

George Perry’s illustration in his 1810 Arcana was the first published image of the koala.
The first written reference of the koala was recorded by John Price, servant of John Hunter, the Governor of New South Wales. Price enco

untered the “cullawine” on 26 January 1798, during an expedition to the Blue Mountains,[113] although his account was not published until nearly a century later in Historical Records of Australia.[114] In 1802, French-born explorer Francis Louis Ba

rrallier encountered the animal when his two Aboriginal guides, returning from a hunt, brought back two koala feet they were intending to eat. Barrallier preserved the appendages and sent them and his notes to Hunter’s successor, Philip Gidley King, who forwarded them to Joseph Banks. Similar to Price, Barrallier’s notes were not published until 1897.[115] Reports of th

e first capture of a live “koolah” appeared in The Sydney Gazette in August 1803.[116] Within a few weeks Flinders’ astronomer, James Inman, purchased a specimen pair for live shipment to Joseph Banks in England. They were described as ‘somewhat larger th

an the Waumbut (Wombat)’. These encounters helped provide the impetus for King to commission the artist John Lewin to paint watercolours of the animal. Lewin painted three pictures, one of which was subsequently made into a print that was reproduced in Ge

orges Cuvier’s Le Règne Animal (The Animal Kingdom) (first published in 1817) and several European works on natural history.[117]