Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01306:reg:27:p1
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01306
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 27 (pt 1/2)
Character Range: 60416–63255

27   Memo, Home and Territories Dept, 'Article in Melbourne "Age" of 22/7/27, regarding the delay in constructing the buildings for the National Museum of Australian Zoology at Canberra', 25 February 1927, CRS A431, item 59/450.

  Australian fauna.'28

  The other main consideration that the government had in mind was the collection's potential research value in helping to improve the health of Australia's people. The nation's health was of unusual concern to the Australian government and to community leaders in this period. This concern was in large measure born of an acute awareness of Australia's small population and hence of the continent's vulnerability to foreign invasion. There was a very widespread belief that national security depended on the maintenance of a high standard of health and fitness in the nation's small population. During the war years, the nation had been shocked by revelations of the extent to which syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases were rampant in the community, and by the generally poor standard of national health revealed in the rejection rate for army recruits.

  It was partly as a result of these concerns that the Commonwealth government, in March 1921, had established a federal Department of Health under Dr J.H.L. Cumpston, an individual who was later to have a major influence on the Institute of Anatomy. In 1924, the government also set up a Royal Commission to inquire into the state of the nation's health. In the meantime, Walter Massy Greene, the Minister for Defence, had added the new health portfolio to his responsibilities, a remarkable combination of ministries that has only ever been repeated once in Australia's history, and by Sir Neville Howse later in the same decade. The combination was an expression at the highest administrative level of the relationship the government of the day saw between the nation's health and its security.29

  In this climate of anxiety about the health of the Australian people, MacKenzie's belief in his collection's value to the understanding and treatment of diseases that particularly affected children was especially welcome. Thus, it is probably highly significant that the person to whom MacKenzie made the offer of his material was Senator Pearce. Pearce had been Minister for Defence for the duration of the war and, much more than most, would have appreciated the need to improve the nation's health for security reasons. The potential for Mackenzie's collection to serve this purpose would have not have escaped his attention.

  2.7     Sites and Plans

  Some time after the Act creating the National Museum of Australian Zoology received formal assent and in October 1924, MacKenzie visited Canberra to select sites for the museum and for the reserve for his live specimens. For the museum, he fixed upon