Peter Hobbins has been awarded the 2016 Merewether Scholarship by the State Library of New South Wales for his project ‘Curios and curiosity: James Bray and the sunset of amateur science in colonial Sydney’. In extending the themes detailed in his 2013 University of Sydney doctoral thesis, Peter will use the Merewether Scholarship to explore the place of snakes, venoms and vivisection in popularising natural history in late-Victorian Sydney.