Fabulous Australian beasts and the Ompax hoax

When Charles Darwin visited Australia in 1836, he wrote in his journal of “lying on a sunny bank” near Bathurst one day “reflecting on the strange character of the Animals of this country as compared to the rest of the World.” Darwin speculated that “A disbeliever in everything beyond his own reason, might exclaim, ‘Surely two distinct Creators must have been [at] work’”.

When the topic of the greatest Australian hoax stories is mentioned we might expect to hear of Ern Malley and other famous literary fakes such as Helen Demidenko and Norma Khouri. But Australia is not just a hoax nation in the literary sense as the entire continent teems with deceptive people, landscapes and wildlife.

Do we know even familiar native animals as well as we think? Who believes that kangaroos really do make Skippy the Bush Kangaroo’s trademark “tchk tchk tchk” noise? As TV historian Don Storey points out, the sound was “entirely fictional. Kangaroos make no such sounds. But some sort of sound was needed for the series, and someone came up with the idea of clicking their tongue to make the ‘tchk tchk tchk’ sound.” Skippy, it was thought, could not be considered almost human in intelligence without having some means of verbal communication.

It was not the first time that the kangaroo, as it were, had had words put in its mouth. Back in the early 19th century, not long before Darwin’s visit to New South Wales, the English Romantic poet Robert Southey imagined in one of his Botany Bay Eclogues that in the lonely forests of far off Australia, kangaroos emit some kind of plaintive cry: “Alone is heard the kangaroo’s sad note / Deepening in distance”.

Meanwhile, there really are many examples of Australian wildlife being smarter than they seem. In both sea and on the land insects, amphibians and fish disguise themselves for attack and defence. Katherine Fleming described recently in Australian Geographic how the bird-dropping spider in north Queensland actually disguises itself as and even reproduces the smell of bird poo in order to both attract flies and ward off predators.

For the first European settlers, and even scientists, the very hills are alive with living fakes, real or imagined. The Australian word bunyip not only applies to a certain mythical beast characteristic of this country but can refer to anything that is fake, as in “bunyip aristocracy”.

Still today there is no shortage of mysterious animals. People often claim to have seen big cats and giant feral pigs - stories which certain parts of the tabloid media will run as if they might be true. But these beasts are mundane compared with the exotic species that the early settlers discovered, or claimed to have found.

Early European naturalists were amazed not only at the variety of new species of Australian fauna but the fact that they defied the entire system of classification the scientists had brought with them.

The sunny bank where Charles Darwin lay that day in 1836 was not far from where in the Cox’s River he saw his first platypus, an animal that defied classification and whose existence baffled scientists for the best part of a century and which initially was dismissed as a hoax.

The platypus was first described in print in 1799 by George Shaw of the British Museum, who needless to say had not only never seen a live specimen (he worked from a skin that had been sent back to England) but had never been to Australia. “Of all the Mammalia yet known”, Shaw wrote, “it seems the most extraordinary in its conformation, exhibiting the perfect resemblance to the beak of a duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped. So accurate is the similitude, that, at first view, it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation.”

Shaw’s caution was reinforced by the awareness among members of his profession that weird looking creatures had been fabricated previously. The suspicion was explained in 1823 by naturalist Robert Knox. “It is well known that the specimens of this very extraordinary animal first brought to Europe were considered by many as impositions”, wrote Knox. “They first reached England by vessels which had navigated the Indian oceans, a circumstance in itself sufficient to rouse the suspicions of the scientific naturalist, aware of the monstrous impostures which the artful Chinese had so frequently practised on European adventurers; in short, the scientific felt inclined to class this rare production of nature with eastern mermaids and other works of art; but these conjectures were immediately dispelled by an appeal to anatomy.”

If the platypus proved to be a false hoax, then the bunyip is a genuine fake. The classic European account of the bunyip is that provided by William Buckley, the escaped convict who claimed to have lived with the Aborigines in the Port Phillip district for 32 years.

The Life and Adventures of William Buckley was published in 1852, 17 years after Buckley was “found”, and has been in print ever since. We learn from the book that William Buckley saw the following creature: “In this lake, as well as in most of the others inland, and in the deep river waters, is a very extraordinary amphibious animal, which the natives call Bunyip, of which I could never see any part, except the back, which appeared to be covered with feathers of a dusky grey colour. It seemed to be about the size of a full grown calf, and sometimes larger; the creatures only appear when the weather is very calm and the water smooth. I could never learn from any of the natives that they had seen either the head or the tail, so that I could not form a correct idea of their size; or what they were like.”

There’s more. Buckley describes how he was prevented from doing some amateur nineteenth century nature study (i.e. by killing a specimen) because of a superstition among the indigenous people with whom he was living. “When alone, I have several times attempted to spear a Bunyip; but, had the natives seen me do so, it would have caused great displeasure. And again, if I had succeeded in killing, or even wounding one, my own life would probably have paid the forfeit - they considering the animal, as I have said, something supernatural.”

In an introduction to the most recent edition of Buckley’s Life and Adventures, Tim Flannery argues that Buckley (or his editor and publisher John Morgan) wasn’t simply an early Australian bulls**t artist. Buckley, Flannery suggests, may have believed he really saw the beast he described: “we must remember that Buckley was a rural Cheshireman who doubtless believed implicitly in the faeries and hobgoblins of his homeland”. According to Flannery, “this aspect of the narrative is something that makes Buckley special, for in a very deep sense he entered into Aboriginal life and understood it as did no other outsider, revealing it to us in that light. It also means, however, that we must be cautious in our approach to interpreting the text.”

One fabulous beast that definitely never existed except in a hoaxer’s imagination was a fish called Ompax, though that did not stop it from being classified and appearing in lists of fish native to Queensland. At the same time in the 19th century as the platypus was being wondered at and the bunyip mythologised this even weirder animal emerged.

The Ompax hoax took place in Queensland in August 1872, and its victims included the scientist who classified the strange creature, apparently a fish, and another scientist who ate the only known specimen.

Details of the newly discovered fish were announced to the world of science in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales by a member of that august group of naturalists who was born in London and educated in France and whose name at birth was Francois Louis Laporte. He collected pseudonyms and at one point unilaterally joined the nobility. According to his death certificate, his full name had been extended to Francois Louis Nompar de Caumont Laporte, Comte de Castelnau.

In addition to serving for a time as the French consul-general in Melbourne, Castelnau was a much travelled naturalist in South America, Africa and Asia whose output of more than 90 scientific books and papers (written under the names Laporte, Delaporte and Castelnau) was prodigious. Castelnau’s work covered a wide range of subjects, including geography and zoology, but he specialised in insects and fish.

In introducing the discovery, Castelnau wrote that he had received a singular letter from Carl Staiger, the director of the Brisbane Museum, who claimed to have encountered “a very remarkable fish” previously unknown to science while travelling upcountry. Castelnau quoted from the letter as follows: “It is only found in a single water hole in the Burnett River […] and when in August 1872 I was in Gaynah, I got it on the breakfast table, brought in by blacks from a distance of about eight to ten miles. I had the fish for breakfast, remarked its curious shape, and asked the then Road Inspector to draw it for me, which he did.”

On the evidence supplied to him by his colleague, Castelnau reached the following conclusion: “On examining the rough and incomplete sketch, I saw immediately that the fish was a ganoid nearly allied to Atractosteus but forming, by its dorsal, caudal and anal fins, all united, the type of genus, and probably of a new family.”

Castelnau was also able to state that the fish was 18 inches long featuring a snout such as could be found on one species that lived “in the Mississipi [sic], and another in the great Chinese river, the Yantsekiang [sic]”.

No scepticism about the find was expressed by Castelnau even though he himself had not actually seen, much less consumed, the specimen. (The contrast with the disbelief with which the platypus was received for half century or more is striking.) Castelnau’s confidence wasn’t shared by the Zoological Record, the journal of the Zoological Society of London founded in 1864 and the oldest continuing worldwide database of animal biology, which rejected the find.

But enter the system it did, and Ompax was recorded for many years in authoritative lists of Australian and Queensland fish. The hoax was finally revealed in 1930, 50 years after Castelnau’s death in Melbourne, in a Bulletin article published under the pseudonym “Waranbini”:

A sweet scented gum (E. staigeriana) of the northern parts of Queensland perpetuates the memory of Carl Theodore Staiger, who was at one time director of Brisbane Museum, and was made the victim of one of the quaintest jokes in scientific history. While he was visiting the Gayndah station the hard-cases there prepared a new fish for Staiger, made of the head of a lung-fish, the body of a mullet and the tail of an eel. It was nicely cooked and placed before him for his breakfast, with the remark that it was something new - a very rare fish that had never been seen anywhere but at Gaynah. Mr Staiger was immensely interested, and expressed regret that he had not seen it alive. On being told that it might be months before another was caught, he made a careful sketch of the cooked specimen before he started to eat it. The sketch and the description were subsequently sent to an ichthyological expert, Count Castelnau, and that gentleman named it Ompax spatuloides. Whenever a marine mystery was captured afterwards in the Gayndah district, the locals would remark with a grin that “it must be an Ompax”.

How the “hard-cases” who were in on the hoax must have wept with laughter every time they recounted that story.