Urban Bandicoots

Its time we developed a new appreciation for these misunderstood and much-maligned marsupials.

- Alasdair Mcgregor

BANDICOOT MENACE”, cried a heading on the letters page of Sydney’s The Sun back in 1951. Armed with a dictionary definition, the newspaper’s aggrieved correspondent declared that the so-called menace was more precisely a “large Indian rat”, and one no more native to Australia than the “rabbit or bulbul”.

What of the supposed foreigner’s crime? The bandicoot apparently posed a grave threat to humans and dogs through “its propensity as a carrier and distributor of ticks”. Other newspaper reports of the day said much the same: the bandicoot was the animal “ticks love best”. The drastic, if improbable, proposed solution was to confine bandicoots to the zoo! Almost 70 years on, bandicoots still roam free, thankfully. But the vitriol directed their way has, if anything, intensified and the tick controversy endures. Some Australian native animals are always receiving a bad rap.

What’s in a name? In one sense, that 1950s rat association was correct. The term ‘bandicoot’ originated on the Indian sub-continent as an 18th-century corruption of ‘pandi kokku’ (literally ‘pig-rat’) from the language Telugu, and ‘bandicoot rat’ has long been the common name for several species of giant rodent found in south Asia. They are significant agricultural pests and can carry dangerous diseases such as plague and typhus. But the black-and-white certainty regarding the origin of Australia’s totally unrelated animals was of course wrong. Only the name is an Asian import.