My rat shook paws with David Bowie

Sydneysider: A personal journey

When I worked at the Australian Museum my constant companion was a rat.

I went to work at that august institution in 1986, as the Chief Guide and was charmed by the fact that lots of museum people kept rats as desk pets. There was a particularly beautiful black and white female who lived in the Human Resources office. She had an appealing way of crossing her front paws and laying her head on them, like a dog. Somebody else had a lovely champagne-coloured beast.

These were selectively-bred “fancy” versions of the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), aka common, sewer, Hanover, Norway or wharf rat. The white laboratory rat is the same species. Actually they didn’t originate in Norway at all, but in northern China but they’ve spread to every continent on the planet except Antarctica making them the most successful mammal on Earth, after humans.

The rats were supplied by Martyn Robinson from the education section and I asked if he could get me one. When it arrived, it was just a plain brown colour with small white gloves on its front paws. It could have passed for a wild brown rat, like the ones that lived in Hyde Park, across the road, or underground along the City Circle and it occurred to me that my rodent could have a very useful career indeed. I named him Ben, after a rat in a movie I’d never seen.

Ben was gentle, friendly, very adaptable and he’d work for birdseed. I could carry him around in my pocket and suddenly produce him for dramatic effect. His usefulness in a tour of the Mammal Gallery (long gone) is obvious, but he was also quite at home elucidating ecology or the story of human migration.

One of my tours actually started outside the museum at the Archibald fountain. People had to book for it and meet me there and they’d be told: “Just look for the man with a rat on his shoulder.” I found very few people were repelled by Ben. Rats get a lot of bad press and it was nice to be able to let people make contact across the species barrier, which is where empathy for, and interest in, wildlife begins.

One day in 1987, I was in my office when the guide at the College St entrance rang to say that David Bowie (then touring Australia) and a lady friend had just wandered in and asked to be directed to the Aboriginal Australia Gallery. I shoved Ben in my shirt pocket and went up. By the time I got there they were in the gallery and a clutch of female museum employees were peeping around the corner to get a glimpse of Ziggie Stardust.

When Bowie and his lady came back to the entrance, Ben was sitting on the desk entertaining the masses. “Dave, meet Ben, Ben, this is Dave”, I said. And they shook paws. Ben never washed that paw for rest of his short life.

He did a guest appearance on The Ray Martin Show, and a gig on Burke’s Backyard with TV naturalist John Dengate where he helped explain the difference between brown and black rats (Rattus rattus). The segment was shot in my house in Turrella. I open a kitchen cupboard and there’s rat inside and I scream and run past John who walks calmly to the cupboard and picks up Ben.

When I left the museum and went back to National Parks, Ben came to live at home. I’d been approached to appear in a TV New Zealand documentary about Sydney wildlife. It had a jokey storyline and one of the ploys was to have Ben and I go to one of the infamous RAT Parties at the Hordern Pavilion.

There were thousands of people clustered outside and it looked like we’d never get in but the cameraman knew his job. He spread the legs of his tripod and held it out in front of him. We got in a scrum behind him, charged at the crowd screeching “TV New Zealand! TV New Zealand!”, and battered our way through to the ticket check where a security guard – frisking me for alcohol (you could buy expensive half-sized cans of beer and cheap recreational drugs inside) – got the shock of his life when he discovered Ben.

There were speakers the size of mini-buses, the music was appalling and the volume was painful. Ben started furiously cleaning his ears. We shot a few seconds of him on my shoulder, lit up by strobe lights, watching the band, and departed before we were reported to the RSPCA.

I think that was the famous rodent’s last job. He spent his retirement nursing an uneasy relationship with the cat and building elaborate nests out of shredded paper.