12 
Presidential Address. 
The Australian Fauna and Flora and Exotic Invasions. 
BY J. BURTON CLELAND, M.D. 
(Read before the Society on the 29th June, 1909.) 
Before the advent of the white man, the great island-contineut 
that we inhabit was almost unique amongst the larger lands of 
the earth in the long isolated position that much of its Fauna 
and Flora had experienced when compared with the more rapid 
interchanges that could occur and had occurred between those 
of the other continents. Zoologically and botanicall y speaking, 
for ages its characteristic animals and plants had been allowed 
to multiply and differentiate and adapt themselves quite free 
from exotic invasions from neighboring lands except in a few 
instances. The result has been that types, highly modified 
it is true, have survived in comparative abundance till to-day, 
that have elsewhere long been superseded by families, genera 
and species more suited to the strenuous life and climatic condi- 
tions of those latter times. With the advent of the white man, 
however, the old order changed to give place to new, and an 
evil train of disease, disaster and death has fallen upon too 
many of our indigenous animals and plants. Even already to 
the Naturalist it is strange and sad to look back to this fair land 
as it must have appeared on that 26th day of January, 1788, 
when the first fleet sailed into Botany Bay. The fair woods 
have fallen, the self-neglecting aboriginal has become a diseased 
and decaying creature, the wild birds have left their desolated 
homes, and the emu and the kangaroo are doomed. Let us look 
back a little and see what might have been. 
In the first place the coming of the white man, possessing 
as he did an intelligence far superior to that evolved by the needs 
of his black aboriginal brother, makes it obvious that his domina- 
tion over the other was merely a question of time. The mechan- 
ism was not there for the Australian native ever to be educated 
so as to hold his own with the European, and, save in as much 
as he might be kept in reserves as' a' curiosity stranded on the 
shore by the seas of time and cared for much as we tend canaries 
