A series of six titles about Australian wildlife was published by Collins in Sydney, Australia, between 1974 and 1981. They were obviously akin to the New Naturalist series, with an ecological approach marrying up-to-the-minute science with natural history and land-use. Physically, too, they were similar, bound in octavo, cloth boards, with gilt lettering, and with text figures and colour plates. However the titles were not individually numbered, and the dust jackets of all but the last were more like the natural history books published by Poyser, being off-white and bearing a coloured drawing below the title. A logo above the Collins imprint on the spine proclaimed the books to be members of The Australian Naturalist Library. The last volume, A Coral Island, differed in having blue, instead of brown, boards and a wrap-around photographic jacket.
The books are quite common secondhand, although unsurprisingly found more often in Australia and the United States than in Britain (though I’m told that some years ago a bookshop in Hay-on-Wye had a huge remainder stock of one of the titles, Living Insects). For several titles there was a Book Club edition published in laminated pictorial boards with a like jacket in 1975, and some titles also had a revised quarto paperback edition in 1982-84. Bird Life and Living Insects were printed in the United States by Taplinger of Marlborough, New Jersey. All in all, the series seems to have been fairly successful, if short-lived. The books are available plentifully on online book services such as Abebooks.com, averaging between £5-15, depending on condition. In February 2004, the following number of copies were on sale on ‘Abebooks’: Fish (36), Insects (21), Bird Life (23), Spiders (5), Frogs (14), Coral Island (13).
The six titles are as follows:
J.M. Thomson (1974) Fish of the Ocean and Shore. 208 pp, 16 pp colour and 4 pp b/w plates by Margaret Senior. ISBN 0002114364. Book Club edn, Sidney 1975. A background to recreational (sport) and commercial fishing in Australian waters.
R.D. Hughes (1974) Living Insects. 304 pp, colour and b/w plates, and 69 text figures. ISBN 0800849299. Book Club edn, Sidney, 1974. USA edn 1975. A survey of insect life in Australia.
I. Rowley (1974) Bird Life. 284 pp, colour and b/w plates, text illustrations and tables. ISBN 0002164361. Book Club edn, Sidney, 1975. USA edn. 1975. New paperback edition, 1982. An introduction to Australian birds, including their ecology, with life-histories of selected species.
Barbara York Main (1976) Spiders of Australia. 296 pp, 44 colour illustrations, 12 b/w, text figures. New paperback edition, 1984.
Michael J. Tyler (1976) Frogs. 256 pp, 20 pp colour and b/w plates, text drawings. ISBN 000214429. Reprinted in paperback, 1976. New paperback edition, 1982. Covers the frogs of Australia, New Guinea and nearby islands. The author had also written volumes about the frogs of individual Australian states.
Harold Heatwole (1981) A Coral Island. The story of One Tree Island and its reef. 200 pp, 16 colour plates, text illustrations. Intensive study of a small island near the Tropic of Capricorn at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef.