Figure

SIR THOMAS MITCHELL Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo Lophochroa leadbeateri. Watercolour, 38 × 30.5 cm; c. 1837. In May 1836, near present-day Booligal, south-west New South Wales, one of Mitchell’s expedition party shot the cockatoo. His second-in-command hoped to take it back to Sydney, but it only lived for a few days. The illustration, drawn and transferred to stone by Mitchell himself, appeared, as ‘Cockatoo from the interior of Australia’ in his book Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1838). Mitchell thought that the elegant ‘cockatoos with the scarlet and yellow top-not … could have have embellished the air of a more voluptuous region.’ Mitchell is honoured in the cockatoo’s common name. Its scientific name commemorates Benjamin Leadbeater, a renowned London merchant of natural history materials, who owned the specimen on which the first description of the species was based, in 1831. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA