Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01306:reg:64
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01306
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 64
Character Range: 112922–115419

64   'The Australian Institute of Anatomy. Annual Report for the Year ending 30th June, 1936', p. 1, CRS A1928, item 695/17; letter, Cumpston to W.M. Hughes, 29 October 1937, CRS A1928, item 695/24; Australian Encyclopaedia, vol. 5, p. 435, NFSA information sheet, 'The Building of the National Film and Sound Archive'.

  Even the Halford Oration and the face mask of Halford in the foyer of the Institute bespeak a connection with the MacKenzie family. Halford had taught MacKenzie and two of his older brothers at the Melbourne medical school. It is possible as well that some family influence was at work in securing the Basedow Collection for the Institute. Basedow had been an associate of the explorer Donald Mackay and had in fact led the second Mackay expedition into Arnhem Land. Mackay was the son of an Alexander Mackay and Annie MacKenzie who, like MacKenzie's own parents, hailed from the eastern highlands of Scotland.65

  The Institute of Anatomy could also be characterised from the very beginning as a curiously anachronistic institution. It is almost

  as though it embodied a prolongation of the Victorian custom of amassing vast collections of natural history specimens. MacKenzie's theories about the relevance of the study of Australia's fauna to human health also appear rather quaint. Ironically, it was one of MacKenzie's own family who delivered the most devastating assessment of these theories. In response to an enquiry from Cumpston after MacKenzie's retirement, Dr Charles MacKay proffered the following remarkably candid opinion:

   [The] purpose was to ascertain whether our native animals held secrets which might shed light on problems associated with the health and disease of human beings living in the Commonwealth.

   It is my considered opinion, given very reluctantly, that this second objective has proved to be impracticable.

   I do not think that the Australian native animals are likely either now or in the future to give us any special information which will definitely alter the practice of medicine or surgery in any one particular.66

  This assessment was echoed by the eminent anatomist, Professor Frederick Wood Jones, who was quoted by Cumpston as saying that the relevance of the study of Australian animals to human health was 'very remote', such that it was 'hardly worth while further pursuing this presumed relationship.'67

Figure 24: Australian Institute of Anatomy by Frank Hurley,1938 (National Library of Australia 2018)