When you enter the small foyer of this rather grand heritage-listed building (now the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia), past various motifs of Aussie flora and fauna (see the platypus on the ceiling), you will soon notice twelve busts of scholarly, long-dead men evenly spaced along the walls above you. Appropriate to the setting, each bust is stuck to the wall along a coronal slice through the head, likening it (with a couple of exceptions) to a death mask — a bleak foreboding visage. All a bit sinister for a building that welcomes visitors to a wonderful variety of film and sound exhibitions: archival, arthouse and adventure.
It’s an eclectic bunch of men: just two (Pasteur and Darwin) familiar to a wide audience; a few (Hunter, Harvey, Lister, Lamarck) familiar to the well-informed scientific viewer; plus a bunch of others today known to very few (Allen, Bell, Halford, Simpson, Stirling, Stuart). Their relevance to anatomy also seems a bit mixed. Pasteur was a famous scientist but no anatomist. Neither was Darwin — although he did have a need for one, someone to sift through loads of bones and other specimens brought back from faraway places. Lamarck preceded Darwin with his largely mistaken ideas on evolution. Lister was a surgeon more known for pioneering antisepsis. Hunter, Harvey and Bell, however, were card-carrying surgeon anatomists. And the rest were just prominent colonials, more known for their contributions to the profession and other causes rather than notable scientific endeavours. Which brings us to the fact that this was not the kind of anatomy institute that hosted classes of scalpel-wielding medical students. It was more the comparative and non-human sort of anatomy. Founded in 1931 and directed for many years by physician turned anatomist and naturalist Sir Colin Mackenzie (1877-1938) — better known as the founder of Victoria’s Healesville Sanctuary — descriptions of the institute make it sound like a place for Mackenzie to store his private collection of fauna — a fiefdom of the fierce, fluffy and feral.

Image sources: author, Public domain