Clarke’s financial situation remained unsound, however, and in 1839 he decided to look for better opportunities by migrating with his family to Australia, where he was appointed headmaster of King’s School, Parramatta, with responsibility for neighbouring parishes. He soon moved to other posts, and in 1846 he took charge of St Thomas’s, St Leonards, his parish covering much of the North Shore, as far as the Hawkesbury River.

Clarke’s superiors were flexible enough to allow him time to geologise over much of New South Wales, especially in the Sydney Basin and in the mountains of the Great Dividing Range. It was Clarke who first discovered gold near Bathurst in the 1840s, but without letting on to the public, so that the NSW gold rush did not begin till the following decade with the announcement of gold by Edward Hargraves. Clarke also did much work on the geology of the coalfields. His travels were justified to his superiors in that he could provide ministry in places that had no priest; but his parishioners at St Leonards may have felt somewhat ‘short-changed’, while appreciating his heroic efforts and the importance of his scientific contributions.

Like many naturalists of the Victorian era, Clarke was an indefatigable correspondent, and from his position at the scientific ‘periphery’ he endeavoured to keep the scientific ‘big-shots’ at the ‘centre’, such as Sedgwick, informed of developments in Australian geology and especially his own labours. His numerous correspondents treated him both as a friend and a source of valuable information on antipodean geology. Their correspondence is now published in two handsome volumes by Ann Moyal, the doyenne of history of science in this country. She has laboured for many years on the project, and it is a pleasure to see it now brought to a triumphant conclusion. A total of 895 letters, both ingoing and outgoing, are transcribed and published, the correspondents including major northern-hemisphere geologists such as Sedgwick, Roderick Murchison and James Dana; men in Australia such as Phillip Parker King and Philip Gidley King (son and grandson of Governor P.G. King), William Sharpe MacLeay, Richard Daintree and Frederick McCoy; and James Hector and Julius von Haast in New Zealand. The work involved in the transcriptions must have been immense. Sedgwick and Murchison, for example, and Clarke himself, had execrable handwriting, as did many Victorian scribblers.

Besides the letters, the volumes have detailed name and subject indexes, a register of the letters, a comprehensive bibliography of relevant secondary sources, plus a list of what I take to be the whole of Clarke’s scientific writings, a great number of which in fact appeared in the pages of the Sydney Herald (later renamed the Sydney Morning Herald). In Clarke’s day, it was usual for the ‘colonial scientists’ to try to maintain their links with the ‘centre’ by publishing in Britain (or some other colonial power); but Clarke chiefly maintained his connection by correspondence, for the most part publishing his ideas in local journals, newspapers or books. Thus, his name is not well known to today’s historians of science. Moyal’s work will, however, bring Clarke to their attention, if for no other reason than that some of the ideas, activities or private feelings of the British ‘big-shots’ were made known to Clarke by their letters.

The volumes are introduced by an excellent account of Clarke’s geological work in Australia, notably in relation to his debates with the palaeontologist McCoy, a professor at Melbourne, about the correct interpretation of the age of the coals of the Sydney Basin. Major issues were: whether plants could be relied on as guide fossils; whether the Australian coals were the same age as those in Europe; and whether or not the southern continent had the same stratigraphic column as that which was being unravelled in Europe. Such questions were of fundamental importance for nineteenth-century geology. Put another way (albeit in post-Darwinian terms), did evolution proceed in the same rate or order in different parts of the world?

Clarke started off with the (mistaken) idea that the coals of NSW were Jurassic (‘Oolitic’), but he soon relocated them in the Carboniferous – like the British coals. The museum geologist McCoy averred that the fossils pointed to a Jurassic age, but he did not deign to go north to look at the field evidence with Clarke. So a typical Victorian scientific controversy bubbled away for years, as can be seen in the correspondence (though readers will find it easier to get hold of the issues from Moyal’s introduction). McCoy had some advantages as a palaeontologist of international standing, and from sitting on a Melbourne chair. But Clarke was ‘more right’ than McCoy – the coals now being classified as Permian. All this was written up in 1981 by the late Thomas Vallance of Sydney University in an essay, ‘The Fuss about Coal’, which was published in Plants and Men in Australia (edited by A. Carr and S.G.M. Carr). Moyal makes excellent, as well as undoubted, use of this earlier publication.

Scholars rarely sit down and read books such as this from cover to cover. They ‘quarry’ them for information. Such quarries are essential for historical research, provided that one can rely on the work of the compiler. So far as I can judge, one can indeed rely on Moyal’s work. I can point to a few errors of transcription (for example, Caradoc – an important unit in the stratigraphic column, as well as a hill in Shropshire – has been construed as Caridoc), but such glitches appear to be rare. Much more serious is the omission of the occasional geological sketches with which Victorian geologists were accustomed to adorn their letters. As the cliché rightly has it: a picture can speak a thousand words. The omission of all such sketches is most regrettable. A sample of Clarke’s handwriting would have been appreciated. One must also deplore the diminutive size of the footnote numbers, though the notes themselves are highly informative.

The vast majority of the letters published here are held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, with only a few letters from the Cambridge University Library and a small number from other locations. I dare say there are other relevant items scattered about the world. Yet Moyal has surely done enough to earn the grateful thanks of all historians of Australian science – and a good many other breeds of historians. Admittedly, that mythic publishers’ beast the ‘general reader’ may not be greatly interested. But as reviewers are wont to say in such cases, every good library must acquire this book. It is a notable addition to Australian scholarship.