Most Aboriginal people were expert observers of nature, especially those vegetables, nuts and fruits, and animals, birds and reptiles that gave them food. The Europeans followed in their shadows and at first they mainly collected, described and named.

From Victoria, bags and boxes of stuffed and fossilised specimens were sent to museums in the British Isles, and living creatures made the voyage too. Melbourne built its own museum of natural history, at first in the grounds of its new university, for natural science had been one of its four inaugural chairs in 1854. Melbourne became an enthusiastic hub of natural science with its own large botanical gardens, while smaller gardens were being fenced and planted in Geelong and a dozen other towns, where imported shade trees were blended with natives. The Zoological gardens were created in Royal Park in Carlton; their aim was to bring to Victoria animals and birds which might become acclimatised as well as to keep native and foreign creatures for the public to see. Geology was high in the government's priority, for more gold had to be discovered to stem the outflow of diggers for New Zealand and Queensland in the 1860s. Rarely in the birth of a new colony had natural history received such priority.