Fabulous Australian beasts and the Ompax hoax

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.