Gregory Mathews was an Australian ornithologist notable for his twelve-volume natural history The Birds of Australia, published between 1910 and 1925. After visiting the natural history collections of the British Museum, he began to prepare what he hoped would be the most comprehensive study of the birds of Australia since that of John Gould in the 1840s. In preparing for the work, Mathews became fully engrossed in his research, collecting books and obsessively finding taxidermied specimens of Australian birdlife. Despite this passion for the subject, Mathews’s work did not add much to the knowledge of the birds of Australia. His conservative approach in the early volumes, studying prepared specimens rather than observing the birds in the wild meant that he was often restating the writings of his predecessors. In later volumes, Mathews took a more extreme approach and began to favour the splitting of different species into sub-species, often unnecessarily. As he reached the end of the work, he had returned to his conservative views but by then the field had moved on.