London: Platypuses appear “weird” to the Western world because museums represent Australian animals with an “ongoing subconscious colonial bias”, a museum chief has said.

Kangaroos, koalas, and Tasmanian devils are also “regularly denigrated through hierarchical language”, according to Jack Ashby, the assistant director of Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology.

Not weird: an Echidna at Taronga Zoo in Sydney. Credit:Nine

He argues museums are “complicit” in people labelling these animals “weird”, “bizarre” or “primitive”.

“Western animals have acted as the zoological standard, and Australian creatures, in not being perceived as confirming to that standard, have been implied as inferior to it.”

It has been claimed that the problem pervades written accounts, museum displays, and even the promotion of Sir David Attenborough’s natural history TV programmes.

No other continent faces the same disparaging attitude toward its wildlife, Ashby said, even as people may be fond of Australasian animals.

Platypuses are not strange or primitive, despite being described that way by Europeans.

He has taken issue with the description of unique Australian fauna as “cat-like” or “dog-like”, as such descriptions treat them as taxonomic “cover versions” of Western animals which frames them as “secondary” and denies them “an identity in their own right”.

Australian animals are dismissed as lower in a zoological hierarchy than evolutionarily similar creatures from elsewhere, he says. Egg-laying mammals like echidnas and platypus, it has been claimed, are also badly represented by faulty taxidermy in British museums, giving a false impression of what these animals actually look like.

The dismissal of the fauna as “primitive” supported the notion that Australia was “uncivilised” and its “invasion” by Europeans justified, Ashby argues. “The ways in which museums and other sources represent Australian animals are often fundamentally pejorative, and reflect an ongoing subconscious colonial bias,” he writes.

An 1803 watercolour of koalas. Westerners unfavourably compare Australian animals to the “norm” of European animals, says Jack Ashby, from Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology. Credit:Linnean Society London

He says: “This attitude begins with colonists and explorers of the 17th and 18th centuries, but remains detectable in the ways that Australian wildlife is interpreted today, in museums, TV programmes and in the popular zeitgeist.”

Museums should “decolonise the way we talk about Australian animals”, Ashby, an academic and fellow at UCL argues, as describing creatures as “weird” is “just another way of othering these animals”.

“This has been done since the very first written descriptions of Australian animals by Europeans”, Ashby said in a talk for the Natural Sciences Collections Association.

“European colonial narratives are also present in how we typically talk about some animals today. This language… is essentially an element of the colonial framework.

Animal bias

Tasmanian devil: Dismissed as a “cover version” of a more familiar creatures such as the hyena.

Platypus: Labelled “weird” and primitive for its reptile-like egg-laying, despite it being no more primitive than other mammals.

Echidna: Museum taxidermy is fraught with errors which misrepresent the egg-laying creature.

Koalas: Like fellow its marsupials, it is subject to the “subconscious view of Australia as an evolutionary backwater”.

Kangaroos: Seen through the prism of a “colonial mindset” and denigrated by attitudes from the 18th century.

Quoll: Described as “cat-like” despite bearing no relation to felines, thus it is denied an “identity in its own right”.

The Telegraph, London

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