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Exhibits at the Taronga Zoo
Allison Price
30 InterSection
On my recent trip to Australia, I saw so many wonderful sights: the Blue Mountains, the Great Barrier Reef, the Sydney Opera House, acres of rainforest…. I could go on. And yet the image burning in my memory a week after I returned home is a single exhibit at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney. My husband and I had signed up for a zoo tour that would enable us to meet some of the animals in the zoo’s native fauna section, including marsupials like bilbys and binturongs and that prickly monotreme, the echidna. An unforgettable experience, to be sure, but at the end of the tour our group walked by the Tasmanian Devil Breeding Centre exhibit to see if those legendary critters were out and about. Sure enough, there in the middle of the habitat, was a baby devil eating the guts out of a dead kangaroo. Okay, back up. The kangaroo was a fake. But my shock was real. The exhibit is designed to look like a small country road meandering somewhere along the outskirts of Anytown, Australia. Short scrubby bushes flank a strip of black pavement. A yellow road sign cautions drivers to be on the lookout for wildlife who wander into the motorists’ path. Sprawled across the road’s dotted yellow line is the kangaroo, which visitors can presume was struck by a vehicle. The belly of the ’roo is hollowed out and includes wire framing that
the keepers use to attach the devils’ food, thus producing the effect of seeing a Tasmanian devil chowing down on Australian road kill. This isn’t just attempt to push boundaries, however. Tasmanian devils thrive in this type of environment; as scavengers, roads essentially serve devils their meals on a concrete platter. Animals that are killed in roadways become a feast for any devils nearby. And while that might seem like good news—who doesn’t like having ample food around?—Tasmanian devils are endangered due to a contagious cancer called Devil Facial Tumor Disease. As devils come together and share their meal, they pass the disease around to each other, thus further infecting their already vulnerable population. As a visitor, you can get only part of this story from the animal’s habitat; you have to explore the rest of the exhibit to really understand what is going on in front of you. But that’s exactly why the exhibit was so effective. The exhibit was one of the only ones I have ever seen where I felt undeniably compelled to learn more, and I wasn’t alone; there were as many visitors gathered around the facial tumor signs as around the animals. With that gutsy (pun intended) display and thoughtful interpretives, the Taronga Zoo not only communicates its devil conservation program to guests, but also provokes visitors to think differently about their relationship to native wildlife. It also can’t hurt