BSR VIRTUAL EXHIBITIONS

Ashby was left scrambling to find a way home in early August, after the RMS Orvieto was requisitioned for troop movements. Writing to Evelyn Shaw on 19 August, he simply explained that 'some of the Orient [P&O] are off', and instead of hanging around Sydney, 'I can now go up to Brisbane, which I was going to have cut out.'
With that, he caught the overnight train and arrived in Brisabane on 27 August. The following day, he joined a small group of scientists on a train zig zagging its way up and over the Great Dividing Range and into remote regional Queensland. Their destination was 'a desolate little place', the Prickly Pear Research Facility at Dulacca, where the train carriage would serve as the group's accommodation for the weekend.
The facility's raison d'être was to identify the means and methods for eradicating prickly pears (cacti), a highly invasive species. In the first of three photographs, the supervising scientist, Dr White, who is wearing a white dress, discusses her approach to the problem while the scientists inspect the experimental plots (image 1). In the next photo, Ashby has framed the facility's laboratory and isolation tents, which were built for the cochineal insects and cactus moths, within the branches of dead trees (image 2). His last photograph is of the so-called "witches' cauldron" sitting atop a purpose-built cart (image 3). When used, the drum was filled with arsenic trichloride and then heated to generate toxic fumes that the breeze would carry across the fields densely packed with cacti.
Later that night, their carriage was re-hitched to a passing train, and the group returned to Brisbane via Toowoomba.

All photographs by Thomas Ashby, BSR, Thomas Ashby Collection 
Scientists inspecting Prickly Pear experiments, TA-XLVI.094
Laboratory and isolation tents, Prickly Pear Research Facility, TA-XLVI.095
The 'witch's cauldron' at the Prickly Pear Research Facilities, TA-XLVI.096
Correspondence: Thomas Ashby to Evelyn Shaw, 19 August 1914. BSR Administrative Archive, Box 51.