Balancing Biogeography and Institutional History: Eric Worrell’s Australia Reptile Park

Since 1963, a life sized sculpture of a Diplodocus dinosaur has stood outside the Australian Reptile Park on the New South Wales Central Coast. Its presence links Waite’s simile about biography with the project of writing the park’s history. We are not writing a biography of the park’s founder and long term director, Eric Worrell, but of the ‘nine old bones’ we have gathered together about the history of the Park, eight relate to Worrell. This raises the issue of how histories of institutions can be written without becoming de facto biography when a single person has played a dominant role in the institution. In the face of the focus on Worrell suggested by much of the evidence, we have sought ways of ensuring we are able to present the history of the whole Australian Reptile Park, not just of the man who stood at its centre for so many years.