Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01306:reg:24:p1
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2021L01306
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 24 (pt 1/3)
Character Range: 54400–57231

24   MacKenzie, 'Brief Resume …', c. 1930, CRS A2644, item 70; PWC, 'Report … relating to the Proposed Construction of … the National Museum of Australian Zoology', 1927, p. iii; Australian Encyclopaedia, vol. 5, p. 435; MacCallum, ADB, vol. 10, p. 307.

  In the ensuing years, MacKenzie received offers for his collection of dissections from overseas museums, including at least one substantial offer from an American institution. He refused, hoping instead that the Australian government would acquire his collection for the nation. It appears that, during the early 1920s, MacKenzie pressed the government to take this course of action, possibly using the overseas offers as a lever on the federal authorities. Whatever the case, by late 1922 the government had agreed, at least privately, to acquire the collection; the decision was announced prematurely in the British Medical Journal in January 1923. The Australian government duly announced its intentions in March, stating that it deplored the fact 'that the Commonwealth had no central museum of specimens of its own' and 'that it would be wise before already rare specimens became extinct to secure specimens of them for such a collection …' MacKenzie formally donated his collection to the nation, by way of the Minister for Home and Territories, Senator George Pearce, in June 1923.25

  The donation came with conditions. Under the terms of the agreement with MacKenzie (dated August 1924), the Commonwealth undertook to erect buildings and enclosures in Canberra to house his collection of animals, both live and dead. For this purpose, it agreed to reserve one or more sites in the new federal capital. For the first three years from the date of the agreement – that is, until August 1927 – MacKenzie agreed to maintain the collections in Melbourne at his own expense; thereafter, all costs were to be met by the federal government. MacKenzie himself was to be appointed Director of the proposed museum, with the title of 'Professor of Comparative Anatomy' and an annual salary of

  £600. He took up the appointment on 1 January 1924, preceding by eight months the formal signing of the agreement with the Commonwealth. On his becoming Director of the museum, MacKenzie was compelled to relinquish his lucrative orthopaedic practice in Melbourne.26

  It seems quite certain that, in making the agreement with MacKenzie, the federal government did not fully comprehend or foresee what it was committing itself to. Clearly, the government expected that, by the end of the three-year period stipulated in the agreement, it would have buildings ready in Canberra for MacKenzie to occupy, although this was not actually what the agreement specified.27

  Unfortunately, MacKenzie also interpreted the agreement in this way, a fact that later led to friction between