BooksAn eye-opening history of the mayaroo melds field guide with folktale to remove the stigma that has followed it for too long
Very few words land as heavy as “rat”. In almost any sentence it enters, it comes across as demeaning or funny, never beautiful.
But hungry for days, tracking circles in the dirt, Burke and Wills might not have died if they had paid one particular species – the long-haired rat – the respect it deserved.
The Diyari people east of Lake Eyre called it the majaru or mayaroo, and loved it as an easy source of food. The Europeans called it the long-haired rat and refused to eat it. Even dying of hunger, Burke and Wills looked down on them, seeing a shadow of home and disease.
The Australian long-haired rat (scientific name Rattus villosissimus) is not just misunderstood, but unknown to many. It is its own distinct species, native and clean, large and cute, and mysteriously at the centre of all kinds of history.
One day, I don’t know how it happened, I thought I could write a rodent historyTim BonyhadyTim Bonyhady’s ode to the rodent, The Enchantment of the Long-Haired Rat, rights this wrong. Part history, part field guide and part folktale, the more you read the more you realise that this bewitching creature is an allegory for Australia itself.
The long-haired rat does not carry disease. It does not smell. It is mostly hidden underground, coming above in huge masses after rain. While European rats are “commensal” (reliant on human populations for food and shelter), the Australian rat is not. It moves through this country’s history as a proud, independent figure, fluffy and odd-looking and, according to Bonyhady, somewhat magical.
Bonyhady is a professor in environmental law at the Australian National University and the author of previous books on cultural and art history. The rat is an “entry point” into other worlds, he tells Guardian Australia.
“There was something exciting about taking this creature that people hadn’t heard of and having it as my kind of my main thread. I hit on the idea that I could call it a rodent history. We have economic history and environmental history and social history and all those different types. One day, I don’t know how it happened, I thought I could write a rodent history.”
For one, the rat is an easy marker of climate, drought and environmental change. Their populations grow and shrink with the rains, in thrall to El Niño and La Niña. They sustained predator animals such as the letter-winged kite and the taipan, and their decline mirrors the rise of the feral cat.
And they illuminate human history too. The settler disdain for Australia is written on the rat, engraved even in the use of “rat” in its name. The bilby was lucky, Bonyhady says, to be known by its Indigenous name. “There are these dozens of native animals which get stigmatised with being characterised as rats or mice or rodents, which makes them very difficult to be seen,” he says. This stigma was behind a push by scientists in the 1970s to call the long-haired rat the mayaroo – which is what Bonyhady uses throughout as much as possible.
Bonyhady recounts that after the first specimen was sent to London, and drawn up in lithograph, it was described by zoologist HH Finlayson 80 years later as “insufficiently rakish”, with a head “too chubby and too small”.
In the settler language about rats, they seemed to swell and break, like extensions of the land pushing back at invaders. According to historical reports, the rats seemed to have a special hunger for European food and equipment, ruining leather saddles, even starting bushfires because they nibbled at imported wax matches.
“The long-haired rats fought back,” Bonyhady writes. “Possibly no other Australian animal – not even the dingo – responded so aggressively to Europeans.” On the Burke and Wills expedition, they essentially killed the men, he argues. “One of the survivors revealed that the rat had erased traces of Burke and Wills after they had returned from the Gulf of Carpentaria – so other members of the expedition did not know their leaders had revisited Camp 65.” Add to that the pair’s refusal to feast on them, because “‘civilised’ people did not eat rat”.
In many ways, this book is about that language and literature itself. Like it or not, there is a certain way we talk about rats. There is a rat canon. There are rich stylistic rules. That is part of the fun. Much of the book is quotation, line after line of fantastically vibrant rat reportage from the 19th century.
They “paddled down sandy soil like a flock of sheep”, according to one report. A “perfect army” of them “crossed the country”, said another. In 1886, local newspaper the Silver Age described them as coming from somewhere “unfathomable”, which Bonyhady describes as “a typical piece of rat writing”.
In Bonyhady’s hands, the movement of rats becomes something joyous – “gambolling about in biscuit barrels”. His rat scenes have the fun of fantasy and the gravity of fable, with an air of Salman Rushdie and a little gloss of magic.
“Colonists named two places after the long-haired rat,” he writes. “Both out of horror.” One was at Cooper Creek, where Burke and Wills found a lush waterhole that “appeared ideal by day, lined with trees, surrounded by grass, and rich in waterbirds and fish”. But at night, “the explorers found themselves under siege … The rats that attacked in such numbers that the men ‘could keep nothing from them, unless by suspending in the trees.’” They named it the Rat Hole. (Later in the expedition, they saw two dingoes attacked by rats, who seemed the “undisputable owner” of the turf. They called that place Rat Point.)
“The language shapes so much of how we see these creatures,” Bonyhady says. And for the long-haired rat that language has been devoid of love and wonder for too long.
“Enchantment is a key word,” says Bonyhady. “It’s sort of vital, it has this kind of force.
“I have a kind of sense of wonder and attachment to this rat … It’s written as a work of persuasion I hope. The story that it opens up is about this Australia that is so different to what we otherwise imagined.”
The Enchantment of the Long-Haired Rat by Tim Bonyhady is out now through Text Publishing
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