The Owl That Fell from the Sky (9 page)

Then there are the eccentrics. A woman rang to say that she had worked out why the Mayan temples were built, and did I know that catastrophic tragedies recur every 7,000 years? Once I received a letter that comprised a photocopy of a foreign postage stamp depicting a lizard. On the rest of the page, presumably for my personal benefit and future reference, were written out in capital letters various facts about the country and the lizard. But the strangest thing was that several places on both the letter and the envelope were rubber-stamped “CHECKED” and this notation was countersigned for added validity.

One time when both marine curators were absent, the receptionist, as a last resort, put a call through to me from an elderly woman in a grumpy mood. She wanted to know the name of big jellyfishes that had been washing up in large numbers on the beaches of Auckland's eastern suburbs. I am hard-pressed trying to maintain a general knowledge of birds, reptiles (including dinosaurs), amphibians and terrestrial mammals, and have to confess to an appalling ignorance of jellyfish. More than once I explained politely that it was not my field, and that she would have to ring again when one of the marine biologists had returned. Was I or was I not a natural history curator, she asked. Did I or did I not have a zoology degree? Then why could I not answer her simple question? It occurred to me suddenly that I did not have to listen to this any longer. Without another word, I hung up: the only time among thousands of enquiries that I have needed such a desperate remedy.

 

Rajah, the elephant

In 1930 Auckland Zoo paid £125 to a zoo in Tasmania for a thirteen-year-old male Asiatic elephant. This species,
Elephas maximus
, and one or two species of African elephants are the largest living animals on land. As adults they are too big to suffer predation (except by armed humans) and may live for seventy years. Their most useful appendage is their trunk, a flexible muscular elongation of the nose and upper lip with the nostrils at the end. The trunk is strong enough to tear down a branch from a tree, yet terminates in a finger-like extension delicately dextrous enough to be able to pluck a blade of grass or pick up peanuts. The trunk is used to gather food and pass it to the mouth, to suck up water for drinking, as a means of breathing while swimming, and in social interactions such as caressing other members of the herd, restraining and guiding infants, and displaying aggression.

Rajah, who was supposed to be a companion for Auckland Zoo's other elephant, Jamuna, had probably been taken from the wild in Burma. From there he had gone to London to be exhibited with a group of elephants at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The following year he had been shipped to Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, famous as the location where cine footage and photographs were taken of the last known living thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger.

In Auckland, Rajah proved bad-tempered and difficult to control. It was said that in Australia a sadistic visitor had traumatised him by placing a lighted cigarette in the tip of his trunk. This may have been the problem, or perhaps Rajah was just a troubled adolescent male reacting against change and dislocation. He spat at visitors and, unlike good-natured Jamuna, could not be trusted with giving rides to children. Finally his keeper could no longer handle him. There were few options, other than keeping him permanently chained. He was shot early on the morning of March 9, 1936 by a keeper with experience of big-game hunting.

The stuffing of mammals, birds and reptiles that died at the zoo was a convenient way of increasing Auckland Museum's collection, and so it was with Rajah. The museum staff included a skilful taxidermist, Charles Dover. Dover and his assistants spent seven months preparing the elephant as a mounted exhibit—no easy task given that Rajah was about three metres long, stood two and a half metres tall at the shoulders, and weighed nearly 4,000 kilograms. The fresh hide alone weighed about 500 kilograms; in parts it was five centimetres thick. This was one of the largest taxidermy jobs ever undertaken in New Zealand, ranking alongside the mounting of an Asiatic elephant that Andreas Reischek, an Austrian taxidermist, had carried out for Canterbury Museum around 1880.

On the day Rajah was shot, Dover and three zoo attendants spent all afternoon removing the hide after the body had been raised off the ground by block and tackle and a lifting jack. A makeshift screen hid this unpleasant scene from zoo visitors. That night the lions and tigers may have noticed a slightly unusual meat for dinner.

Rajah's skin and bones were taken across town to the museum. There visitors were able to view the work in progress, which created as much interest as the final display. Three weeks were spent on the hide, scraping and paring down the inside to remove fat and connective tissue. Meanwhile the bones, cleared of flesh, were placed on the museum roof to weather. Accurate measurements of these bones were crucial for fabricating the false body on to which Rajah's skin would be fixed. Some of the enormous bones are still in the museum's osteology collection. Big though the long leg bones are, their incomplete ends testify that Rajah was still growing.

Dover built a precisely measured framework of timber struts and iron rods, incorporating papier mâché casts of Rajah's skull and pelvis and wooden replicas of the ribs. The framework was finished with a layer of fine wire netting, covered with scrim and packed out in places with fine wood shavings. The outer layer was papier mâché, painted when dry so as to be waterproof. Finally, the elephant's wet skin was taken out of a tank of preservative and slid into place on the framework, which had been oiled to make the job easier. While the skin was still pliable the cut edges were sewn together, final adjustments were made, and the finished mount was left to dry.

 

 

In October 1936 the reincarnated Rajah went on display in the Hall of General Natural History. The museum's annual report congratulated Mr Dover “on a fine piece of taxidermy” and the elephant settled down to his role as one of the museum's biggest single items and a notable attraction. When I first knew him, in the early 1980s, he held pride of place in the centre of the hall, surrounded by a strong wire-mesh barrier that was chest-high to a man but only knee-high to Rajah. He shared this distinguished spot with a giant Seychelles tortoise and a very large alligator. During this period the museum employed its first conservators, and one of their earliest projects was improving the condition of a seam at the back of one of Rajah's legs.

In the mid 1980s someone scaled the barrier and tore off part of Rajah's tail. The damage was quickly noticed and the attendants on every floor went into high alert, their walkie-talkies crackling with urgent messages. Two suspicious-looking characters—just the sort who looked like they might steal the tail from an elephant—were followed at a distance, but to no avail. The tail was never found.

By the late 1980s Rajah's condition was a little embarrassing. After fifty years on open display in bright light, he was dusty and faded. The seams on his legs and trunk were unsightly and, as well as the damage to his tail, there were tears and punctures in his skin. He was inspected twice—by the taxidermist from the National Museum of New Zealand and by a pair of preparators from the Museum of Victoria, Melbourne—to see if he could be restored. Both inspections revealed serious defects. The metal in the supporting framework, especially the sheet metal in the ears, was rusting. Lubricating grease used during the original taxidermy was seeping to the skin surface and oxidising. Any remedial work would be cosmetic and temporary.

In the early 1990s the museum was set to embark on a much-needed upgrading of its permanent exhibitions. The gallery in which Rajah stood, one of the most outdated, was earmarked for closure to create temporary storage and working space. What to do with Rajah became an issue.

Near the end of 1992 Rajah was moved with difficulty down the stairs to the main foyer. There he was elevated more than two metres on a brightly painted pedestal. A colourful howdah, or riding carriage, was strapped to his back and into this was placed a magnificent stuffed peacock from the bird collection, and an open parasol. At the press of a button, a recording of elephant trumpeting reverberated around the foyer. A label gave the elephant's history. At the end was added: “Please help us decide on Rajah's future. What do you think should happen to him?” This led to a deluge of contributions, most of them impractical, nonsensical or obscene.

Managers explored various possibilities and in the end decided to store the elephant off site. In March 1994 Rajah left the museum where he had been exhibited for fifty-eight years. His departure was a public event. The night before, he was taken out through the front door to the steps of the museum. He did not quite fit through the door, but this was fixed by cutting off his legs and trunk with a chainsaw. The next morning a small crowd gathered to hear a speech from the governor general, Dame Catherine Tizard. An Indian dance troupe circled Rajah, and mounted on a trailer, the scars on his reattached appendages hidden by bandages of gold cloth, the elephant set off down the hill to the farewell strains of “Haere Rā”, sung by the museum's Māori cultural group.

About a year later, someone told me there was a large photo of Rajah in a magazine—he was depicted in the warehouse of a storage company—and his small immature tusks were missing. We had overlooked the intrinsic value of the ivory in Rajah's tusks. They were never recovered.

Things quietened down until January 1998, when one of the new museum managers rang me to say he had had a curious answerphone message from a storage company. They had a large item in their warehouse. It belonged to the museum and they wanted us to do something about it. Could he have heard right? “They said it's an elephant!” Rajah had come back to haunt us.

By now the museum had a preparator with experience restoring museum elephants in Britain, so it was possible to have Rajah's appearance improved and the elephant worked his way into planning for one of the new social history galleries, which had the theme of connections with childhood. He came back to the museum in June 1999, this time entering through a hole created by removing a large side window, so no more amputations were needed.

In ten weeks, David Weatherley, the preparator, cosmetically restored Rajah by remodelling his damaged ears and fashioning replicas to substitute for his missing tusks and tail. He strengthened his legs internally using aluminium rods. He cleaned his skin, filled holes—especially the amputation scars and gaps along the stitching lines—and painted the outer surfaces an elephant grey. Rajah looked surprisingly good.

On New Year's Day 2000, just a few weeks after the restored elephant had been unveiled, ivory hunters—or just plain old vandals—broke off his right tusk. A stronger false tusk was installed. This was followed by minor vandalism to the tail. Today, cracks are evident in the cosmetic repairs of 1999 and more conservation work is needed, but I am glad Rajah is still on display. Regular beauty treatments may keep him going another seventy-five years. In Moscow and Beijing, crowds of the respectful and curious line up to see the precariously embalmed bodies of the revolutionaries, Comrade Lenin and Mao Zedong. Perhaps Rajah—the angry young elephant—can be Auckland's equivalent.