Captain Arthur Phillip wrote of this (at the time) mysterious bird—calling it the 'psittaceous hornbill'—in his 1789 work "The voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay", consulting with ornithologist John Latham and deliberating that it had features of a parrot, hornbill or toucan, though conceding there were no toucans in the region. He gave it the name "Scythrops novaehollandiae" in 1790. Its generic name is derived from the Ancient Greek "skuthro-"/σκυθρο- 'angry' or 'sullen', and "ops"/ωψ 'face', 'eye' or 'countenance'. The specific epithet "novaehollandiae" means of New Holland, hence Australian. John White, the surgeon-general of the First Fleet to New South Wales, wrote "A Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales" in 1790, including this bird, which he termed 'anomalous hornbill".