late d'Abrea

[africaone]

Just received it :


d’ABRERA – BERNARD LAURANCE (28 August 1940 – 13 January 2017), in Melbourne.

[Adam Cotton]

Oh dear, very sad to hear this news. He recently had some heart surgery and he contacted me a few weeks ago to ask if I liked his final book having got out of hospital and seemingly recovered.

I will always remember several months of tea with Bernard nearly every day in BMNH in 1980.

RIP Bernard. If he is lucky he will have been right, and God will reward him for his opinions wherever he has gone. Meanwhile evolutionary biologists will carry on as usual.

Adam.

[Adam Cotton]

I thought it would be appropriate to post a photo of the title page of his last book which he very kindly sent me gratis (I only paid the shipping costs) and signed for me.

Adam.

[bobw]

I wondered when this news would come out; I was asked to keep it quiet when I heard last Tuesday.

He was a divisive character but it's a shame to hear that he's gone. As Adam said, if he was right he'll now be rewarded.

Bob

[Adam Cotton]

After many months of silence Bernard sent me an e-mail on 16th December, and it seems that he wanted to use me to explain his life's work. As a result I feel it is appropriate for me to post this part of his e-mail here for everyone to read. I am not defending his opinions but I feel it is only fair to let everyone decide for themselves what they think of him and his work:

... d'Abrera's works (which began in 1965) were the first fully illustrated and written works of their kind by a single author/illustrator, since Seitz, who employed several authors and at least two dozen illustrators and colourists. They are also the first and only work to have perfect synchrony between text and plates, and to figure photographic images in colour, of primary types of one sort or another. The works were also entirely self-funded, each title paying for the next. Thirty five volumes later, the author and his wife are in a nett loss situation, the only way we survive being my previous earnings as a teacher, and my pension coming to our rescue. I know the whole thing is my choice, but if there are any lacunae, it is because of circumstances relating to the recovery of Europe and the world following the 2nd World War. When I first began my work in 1965, WW2 had ended just 20 years earlier!!! Modern colour photography was still a bit primitive. There is also the matter of my critics joyfully trotting out all these modern ("superior to d'Abrera") works, little realising that they were all built on the foundations d'Abrera began two or three decades earlier. Those 'modern' works were all accomplished with grants, benefactions or salaries, and do not figure types or other historical material.

[dynastes]

My morning begins with sad news....

He was a great man. Eternal memory.

[leptraps]

I met him someplace and sometime after the release of the Butterflies of the Australian Region came out. He autographed my copy. He definitely was a character. He was also a gentleman and a scholar.

[jonathan]

Despite stirring a lot of controversies, I do believe that Bernard contributed a lot to the lepidoptera as we know them today and that all butterfly/moth passionists should be thankful for the sacrifices Bernard had to endure to pursue his passion for lepidoptera and to present them in the way he did.

RIP Bernard.

[Adam Cotton]

John Tennent sent me a pdf of an obituary, and said I can post it anywhere I like, so I am copying and pasting the text here:

John Tennent remembers
Bernard Laurance D’Abrera (latterly d’Abrera)
28th August 1940 – 13th January 2017
It may seem odd for me to pen an obituary for Bernard D’Abrera, since his personal attacks on me in the
eccentric introductions to some of his recent books were frequent and varied. The truth is that despite his many faults, I bore him no particular ill-will, and felt some sympathy for the demons that clearly plagued his later life.

I bought the first volume of his series of Butterflies of the World (Butterflies of the Australian Region) in a bookshop in Scarborough in 1971, days before I was posted for a tour of duty in Hong Kong. Judged by the standards of the time, the pictures were outstanding, and that first volume significantly influenced my life; it was instrumental in my interest in southwestern Pacific butterflies decades later. I paid £20.00 for that first volume and purchased some of the subsequent volumes in the series as they were published, despite some dramatic price increases.

D’Abrera and I first met in the bowels of what was then the British Museum (Natural History), now the Natural History Museum, in London, in about 1990, following my retirement. We had much in common, and became friends, insofar as one could be a friend of his, since relationships were invariably – latterly always – on his terms. But we muddled along quite happily, and shared a lunch in each other’s house on more than one occasion. Bernard was an accomplished and amusing raconteur, with a great sense of humour, and it was possible in those days to overlook the rather disturbing fact that so many of his stories included verbal attacks on well-known and respected entomologists and biologists. I was able to purchase further volumes of his world butterfly series at a significant discount through the Museum, something which apparently irritated him a lot (he preferred cash in hand), and it was perhaps around this time, in the mid-1990s, that his famous eccentricity began to develop a venomous edge. This may have coincided with
evolution of his creationist views, for which he became infamous.

Bernard could be very generous, and I was both flattered and delighted when he offered to publish my first
book, on North African butterflies, through his own publisher in Australia, although our brief publishing
association was to end badly. We fell out one day shortly after I saw the first very slim volume of his planned three saturniid volumes for the first time. As we left the Museum together I asked him why he hadn’t published everything together in one volume, and was immediately treated to one of the explosive tirades for which he was already renowned. Our relationship foundered permanently when he left a series of highly offensive messages on my home answerphone that evening. He also put me to considerable expense and inconvenience in retrieving my own plate photographs for my North African book from his Australian publisher, threatening to sue me for … well, it was never clear what: the first of many such threats which were certainly full of sound and fury, signifying very little. His own recollection of that event described in the introduction to his most recent volume (Butterflies of the Neotropical Region 1, 2nd edition: page 245) as “historical fact”, is pure fantasy. It was never clear whether D’Abrera believed his own creative inventions, but there was certainly something of the Walter Mitty about him.

It would be tedious to embark on a catalogue of the many occasions when Bernard and I did not see eye to eye, but I must admit to an element of childish pleasure in deliberately provoking him occasionally; for example, shortly after the frankly ridiculous debacle outlined above, I used (in his absence) the Museum telephone on a visitors bench he used more-or-less permanently in the basement of the Museum; the following morning I found myself the focus of a formal complaint that I had used “his” telephone, a complaint based on the fact that the receiver was the “wrong way round” and that I must have been the guilty party. This was arrant nonsense, but I confess that when I subsequently passed “his” bench and found it empty, I would often turn the telephone receiver around and stroll away … action which eventually earned me a patient reprimand from the head of department who explained that although it was quite amusing, the stream of complaints from D’Abrera was very wearing, and would I please desist.

D’Abrera was vexed that he was never given a formal position in the Museum (i.e. Scientific Associate), but the reason was straightforward. He absolutely refused to submit his work to peer review, with the predictable result that his books contain numerous errors, many of which would have been easily
identified and resolved even if he had only asked someone to give them the ‘once-over’. His innate pomposity, combined with an ego of monumental proportions, resulted in the fact that even major errors were – so far as I can see – rarely if ever corrected in subsequent editions of the same book, even over a period of decades.

Colleagues were moved to despair with D’Abrera’s attitude and errors, and yet his legacy is substantial – many of those who decry his work have his volumes on their shelves, and I am no exception. Perhaps a huge ego was helpful in his belief that it was even possible for one man to document all of the world’s butterflies. D’Abrera’s creationist views and associated spiteful ramblings and caustic criticisms of others in his more recent books became longer and more frequent, leaving him open to widespread ridicule; if his energies and intellect had been directed instead at the job in hand, the entomological world would have been a more comfortable place.

Bernard D’Abrera thought much of himself, and saw no reason for humility; but he also thought highly of the work of our most famous bard, William Shakespeare. At the end of D’Abrera’s life, Shakespeare’s words from Macbeth seem disconcertingly appropriate:

“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Shakespeare
Macbeth, on being told of the Queen’s death
(Act 5, Scene 5)

John Tennent
London
1st February 2017

(Published in
Entomological Society of Queensland News Bulletin, 44(9), Jan/Feb 2017)