Past Macleay Miklouho-Maclay Fellows
Due to administrative reasons the MMM Fellowship was not offered in some years.
2012: Helen Smith
Assessing and curating the historic collections of arachnids in the Macleay Museum collections.
2011: Fergus Clunie
Fergus is working to advance understanding of the natural history and ethnological specimens that John Archibald Boyd collected for Sir William Macleay in Fiji and Melanesia between 1874 and 1882, as well as to substantially background similar collections he made for the Australian Museum (1865, 1872-1884) and worldwide.
2010: Michael Shea
In 2010 Michael Shea took several months of his time as a research consultant at the Australian Museum to identify and catalogue the Macleay Museum's vast collection of terrestrial snails, or land shells. Updating the scientific names written by the first curator of the Macleay, George Masters, Michael identified over 1000 shells; most over 100 years old and many endangered and extinct species.
Click here for the article in Sydney University Museums NEWS (page 5)
2009: Dominic Cross
In 2009 Dominic Cross was a graduate of the University of Sydney. He worked on isolating the Cuban insect collections from the hundreds of thousands of other specimens in the Museum cabinets. William Sharp Macleay lived in Havana Cuba between 1825 and 1836 working for the Commission for the Abolition of Slavery. While there he seemingly took every opportunity available to extend his collection of insects.
2008: Dr Elena Govor and Dr Chris Ballard
In 2008 Dr Govor was Senior Research Associate at the Australian National University on the ARC-funded research project ‘European Naturalists and the Constitution of Human Difference in Oceania: Cross-cultural Encounters and the Science of Race, 1768–1888’.
Dr Ballard was a Fellow in Pacific History at the Australian National University and editor of The Journal of Pacific History.
Their project drew on the extensive archive of documentary, artefactual and photographic materials held at the Macleay Museum and the Mitchell Library that relate to Miklouho-Maclay’s Melanesian travels.
Click here for their article in Sydney University Museums NEWS (front page and page 7).
2007: Susie Davies
Susie Davies had just retired from the Macleay Museum when she took up this fellowship to work on the Museum’s south-west coastal Papua New Guinea ethnographic collections. Her research will go towards a catalogue of these important Macleay holdings.
2002: Kirk Huffman
In 2002 Kirk Huffman was Honorary Curator of the Vanuatu Cultural centre. He is an anthropologist/ethnologist specialising in the ‘art’, material culture, ritual and traditional spiritual life of Vanuatu and specifically the island of Malakula. He surveyed the Macleay collections provenanced to Vanuatu and those unprovinanced. His findings were communicated to Ni-Vanuatu.
Kirk is a Honorary Associate of the Macleay Museum.
Click here for Kirk Huffman's article in Sydney University Museums NEWS (page 4).
Click here for Kirk Huffman's article in Sydney University Museums NEWS (pages 4-6).
2001: Dr Jude Philp
In 2001 Dr Philp was a consultant with the National Museum of Australia’s Torres Strait Islander gallery. Before having to give up the Fellowship for employment she was looking at the Australian interest in Papua New Guinea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the role of natural history and particularly ethnography in these debates.
2000: Michael Letnic
In 2000 Michael Letnic was a PhD student in Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney working on the landscape ecology of the Simpson Desert. One of his main interests was in nineteenth century natural history. He developed an exhibition on Aboriginal trade routes across Australia Shaping Australia: Tracks and Trade in Pre-Colonial Australia.
Click here for an article on the exhibition in Macleay Museum News on the exhibition (pages 1-3)
1999: Dr Steve Wroe
In 1999 Dr Wroe was a mammalogist with a passion for Australian marsupial carnivores. He examined the Museum’s skeletal collections and curated a display, Carnivorous Solutions, which used animal skulls and models to show how we can deduce the diet of a species from teeth. It also examined the question of convergence, one of the major themes in the study of evolution, and how different groups of animals arrive at similar solutions to the same problems independently.
Click here for an article by Dr Wroe in Macleay Museum News (pages 1-2)
1998: Graham Fulton
In 1998 Graham Fulton was a graduate of the University of Sydney. He worked on the Museum’s bird collection, in particular, the largely uncatalogued skeletal material, nests and eggs. He also recorded data on the vulnerability of the specimens held (rare, endangered or extinct).
Click here for an article by Graham Fulton in Macleay Museum News (pages 7-8)
1996: Shane Ahyong
In 1996 Shane Ahyong was a Research Officer with the Australian Museum. Shane worked on the decapod crustacean collection (crabs, prawns and lobsters) in the Museum. His project involved the identification of specimens to species level and the preparation of a catalogue.
Click here for an article by Shane Ahyong in Macleay Museum News (pages 4-5).
Click here for an article by Shane Ahyong in Macleay Museum News (pages 8-9).
1993/1994 : Dr Clemency Fisher
In 1993 Dr Fisher was Curator of Birds and Mammals at the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside in Liverpool, England. She looked in detail at the Museum's collections of birds and mammals. One area of special interest to her was the collection of birds made on several Pacific islands by the Layards, father and son. Her research led to a published paper co-written with John Calaby: ‘The Top of the Top End: John Gilbert’s Manuscript Notes for John Gould on Vertebrates from Port Essington and Cobourg Peninsula (Northern Territory, Australia); with Comments on Specimens Collected during the Settlement Period 1838 to 1849, and Subsequently’ in The Beagle, Records of the Museums and Art galleries of the Northern Territory, Supplement 4, December 2009.
Click here for two articles on Dr Fisher in Macleay Museum News (pages 1-2 and 6-7).
1992: Dr Daniel Tumarkin
In 1992 Dr Tumarkin was at the N.N. Miklouho-Maclay Institute of Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He spent two months in Sydney researching Australian records relating to the life of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay. Dr Tumarkin's research will be incorporated into a book on the life, scientific and social activities and academic heritage of Miklouho-Maclay.
1990: Dr Lois Tilbrook
In 1989 Dr Tilbrook had just finished working at W.A. College of Advanced Education as lecturer in Anthropology. She researched nineteenth-century collectors who contributed to the Macleay Museum's collections. Her research was the basis for a book The Macleay Collectors - A Working Notebook published in 1992.