In early 1943, the second world war raged across multiple theatres. Hitler’s army had just suffered a historic defeat at Stalingrad, but U-boats still prowled the Atlantic and Britain’s resources were stretched to the limit. So it must have come as a surprise to Australian prime minister, John Curtin, when a telegram arrived from Winston Churchill requesting six platypuses be sent to Britain forthwith, in a scheme conservationist Gerald Durrell described as “magnificently idiotic”.
Historians have tried to place this episode in a broader context of empire and international geopolitics, but it seems Churchill just really wanted a platypus. He had collected exotic animals throughout his life, including black swans, a white kangaroo, a budgie named Toby who attended ministerial meetings, and a lion named Rota, which he sensibly kept at London Zoo.
There was one man for the job. In March 1943, government officials knocked on the door of Australian biologist David Fleay, who received “the shock of a lifetime”. Fleay convinced the powers that be that getting six platypuses to England, and looking after them once they got there, was unrealistic at any time, let alone in the middle of a war. Instead, they agreed to transport one live monotreme – a healthy boy Fleay caught and named Winston. When Australia’s foreign minister, Herbert ‘Doc’ Evatt, met Churchill and US president, Franklin Roosevelt, that May in Washington, he cabled the Commonwealth director-general of Health: “Churchill at Washington most anxious that platypus should leave immediately. What is present situation?”
Four months later, Winston boarded the heavily armed MV Port Phillip, where he was housed below deck in a wooden platypusary built by Fleay, who stocked the ship with “enough earthworms, crayfish, mealworms and fresh water to have refuelled Winston on a complete round the world voyage”. The ship slipped out of Melbourne in September, crossed the Pacific and passed through the Panama Canal with Winston “lively and ready for his food”. A press release was drafted announcing Winston’s arrival in the UK and asking for worms to be sent from across Britain, packed in jars with “mould or moist tea leaves”, to feed the prime minister’s new pet.
Sadly, Winston didn’t make it. Four days from Liverpool, the ship’s sonar detected a German submarine, and the captain responded by detonating depth charges. The boat and its crew survived, but there was one new Australian war casualty: little Winston. “Tragically, the heavy concussion killed the platypus then and there,” Fleay wrote. “After all, a small animal equipped with a nerve-packed, super-sensitive bill, able to detect even the delicate movements of a mosquito wriggler on stream bottoms in the dark of night, cannot hope to cope with man-made enormities such as violent explosions.”
The colonisation of Australia coincided with an intense British fascination with exotic animals. In the late 18th century a well-to-do family could acquire a parrot, monkey, flamingo or zebra, or even a docile rhinoceros for the right price. Travelling menageries were a popular form of public entertainment – at the peak of the trend, more than 500 animals circulated England in purpose-built wagons and were put on display at local fairs.
Two black swans arrived in England on the Buffalo in 1800 and were presented to the Queen, but unfortunately one died soon after, and the other “availed himself of the liberty they gave him … and was shot by a nobleman’s game-keeper as it was flying across the Thames”. A living wombat was taken to England in 1805 by Matthew Flinders’ naturalist Robert Brown, who gave it to anatomist Everard Home. Another arrived on the Investigator in 1810. A pickled wombat and platypus had arrived in London in 1799, delivered in a cask of brandy, which promptly burst over the head of a woman who was carrying it over her head after it had been unloaded.
The presence of kangaroos in particular was seen as further evidence of British superiority over the kangaroo-less French during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1802, during a brief period of peace, Joseph Banks presented two kangaroos to the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and two years later the expedition of Nicolas Baudin returned after almost four years exploring the southern coast of Australia (or “Terre Napoleon”, as it appears on Baudin’s charts) with 33 large cases full of scientific specimens and 72 very seasick live animals including kangaroos, dingoes, long-necked tortoises, wombats, black swans and a lyrebird.
Most of the Australian animals – plus others collected en route, including lions, ostriches, porcupines, monkeys, a hyena and a wildebeest – ended up in Empress Josephine’s menagerie in Malmaison. Her collection also included dwarf emus from Kangaroo and King Islands, a species that was driven to extinction soon after; the last surviving Australian dwarf emu died in France in 1822.
In 1803 a kangaroo appeared in the royal menagerie in Vienna. By 1830, Penny Olson writes, “kangaroos (and wallabies) featured in public and private menageries, museums, in plays and circuses from England to Russia”. Wombats were shipped to France, dingoes to London and black swans to Copenhagen, Cologne, Java, Kolkata and Paris. By the first half of the 19th century, however, menageries were increasingly seen as unfashionable and the more enlightened embraced a modern feature of most western cities: the zoo.
The Australian acclimatisation movement took full advantage of the trend. The Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, whose main business was importing European animals to let loose in the Australian bush, sent Australian fish, ducks, dingoes and magpies to the London Zoological Society for research; in 1865 alone, the society dispatched animals – mostly kangaroos, emus and black swans – to St Petersburg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Cologne, Copenhagen, Kolkata, Mauritius, Sicily, Yangon and Java. Lords of the Admiralty in London made Her Majesty’s ships available for the transport of specimens “provided no expense be thrown on the department”.
There are limited accounts of how animals fared on international voyages, but it clearly wasn’t well. Many died en route and those that made it alive had to endure cramped conditions and storms that could last for days – which must have been a novel experience for an animal that had spent its life bounding through open plains, burrowing under the ground or nesting in treetops.
The first annual report of the ASV noted the challenges of transporting wild animals:
The usual course with private individuals – and even in the first instance with societies – who have animals to send is to take them down to the ship at the last moment and put them under the care of the steward, the cook or the butcher without knowing anything about his disposition or character, or the amount of other duties which he may have to attend to. Everything goes well as long as the weather is fine. But a storm arises, every man is called to his proper post in the meantime the dens and cages are washed by every sea, the animals tumble over each other and are at their wits end, and when the gale is over it is found that half of them are maimed or dead.
The ASV’s solution was to provide “proper care and attendance for the animals on board”, and to ship animals in huge quantities to improve the odds of some making it to their destination alive. The ASV noted in 1864 that echidnas required great care on long voyages because they had to be fed “on a milky food and eggs”. Salmon and trout ova were shipped in boxes on beds of charcoal, green moss and chipped ice. Songbirds, apparently more expendable, were sent in wire cages without an attendant. Seals were reportedly one of the hardest animals to transport by sea since they had to be kept in water tanks that allowed them to come to the surface regularly to breathe.
Of course, it was no easier coming the other way. In 1886 Dudley Le Souef bought zebras, reindeer and wild barbary sheep in Paris for the Melbourne Zoo, but the real prize was an American bison, which died at sea despite the best efforts of Le Souef and the ship’s doctor. Two years earlier Dudley spent a month in Singapore with a shopping list of animals including a rhinoceros and a tapir (a large mammal native to South America). He bought two tapirs and sent them on to Melbourne while he waited for a rhinoceros to come up for sale. A month later he finally got his hands on a rhino, which made it as far as Sydney before falling ill and dying before it reached Melbourne. When Le Souef arrived home he discovered one of the tapirs had also died in transit and the other had passed away soon after arriving. The trip had taken three months and cost £400, but it wasn’t a total failure – he did bring home some other interesting animals including a black panther, a leopard, a tiger and some orangutans, which were added to the zoo collection.
Two years later, Le Souef successfully brought a tapir back with him from Europe. A rhino proved more of a challenge, but one was eventually bought in Kolkata. It was loaded on to the SS Bancoora along with a young elephant, monkeys and parrots. On 13 July 1891 the steamship ran aground in a gale near Barwon Heads. The animals were rescued and put on a train to Melbourne, but the rhino died weeks later (in the time it was on display, attendance at the zoo doubled). The treacherous waters of the Southern Ocean didn’t spare travelling animals. The ship carrying Ranee, Melbourne Zoo’s first elephant, was hit by a severe storm on its way from India in 1883. She reportedly wrapped her trunk around an iron stanchion, and held on.
