Archibald James Campbell
Travelling alone, the 22 year-old Archibald James Campbell sailed from Liverpool aboard the barque Statesman on 4 February 1840, disembarking in Melbourne on 21 June.
He obtained employment in the Victorian Education Department,[4] but moved to the rural Werribee River region in 1851 at a time when it was beginning to be exploited for agricultural and pastoral purposes.
By 1852, the Australian Electoral Roll records that several members of the Pinkerton family owned large tracts of freehold land on the Werribee River, used mainly to pasture sheep for the wool trade.
Migrant families experienced for the first time the most basic living conditions, epidemics of serious diseases (for both humans and animals), and destructive natural hazards including fire, flood and drought.
Landowners were also faced with another insuperable problem - the vanishing of their farm labourers whenever news of another discovery was reported in the Australian gold rushes of the 1850s and early 1860s.
In addition, the cost of living increased dramatically because of the influx of diggers, and gold soon displaced wool as Australia's chief export commodity.
His next significant career step was confirmed on 12 September 1874 when his name appeared in The Argus (Melbourne) newspaper's list (page 7) of those who had passed the Civil Service Examination.
Since the establishment of the club, members have regularly arranged field trips for research, published scientific papers in their journal the Victorian Naturalist, and have taken an active and public role in promoting conservation and protection.
Campbell had close working relationships with other prominent scientists in the FNCV, amongst whom was Professor Walter Baldwin Spencer, head of the Department of Biology at Melbourne University, and Dudley Le Souёf, an ornithologist and zoo director.
[14] Both men shared an absence of secondary and tertiary education; and both undertook self-education so thoroughly that they became pre-eminent in their fields, and the books they wrote quickly became the standard scientific texts on their chosen subjects.
Until 1840, Gould's pictures of birds were drawn and painted by his wife Elizabeth Coxon; many were reproduced by means of the recently invented technique of hand-painted lithographs; forty years later, Campbell's images of nests, eggs and habitat were created by the cutting-edge technology of photography.
Campbell's advocacy resulted in the formation in 1899 of a 'Wattle Club' in Victoria, to promote public interest in wattles and organise bush excursions on the first day of September every year.
[11] His photographs provide not only a demonstration of the state of the art of photography in the 1880s but also a detailed historical record of conditions for the pioneering naturalists, who were sometimes accompanied on their expeditions by wives and children.
After the loss of his first wife, Elizabeth Melrose Anderson (1855-1915), Campbell married again, to Blanche Duncan (1870-1953), and took up residence in Box Hill (which was still a rural area at that time).
He continued his expeditions and his writing, and one of his retirement projects was to prepare a new book of text and photographs entitled Golden wattle, our national floral emblem.
Campbell, AJ 1974, Nests and eggs of Australian birds, including the geographical distribution of the species and popular observations thereon, Wren, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
