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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Why do humans hold on to stuff? Oddments we don't use and yet can't quite throw out. It's not just you and me. Australia's oldest library is crammed with stuff that isn't books. Terrible paintings, old menus, human hair. Is this history or hoarding? I'm Annabelle Crabb. Come and have a rummage through the story of us told by our stuff.
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Anna Walraven used to begin her working days by saying, Good morning, boys and girls. But she wasn't talking to kids. Anna was addressing 30 chimpanzees waiting to be given their breakfast and to be let out into their day enclosure. For two decades, Anna was the senior curator at Taronga Zoo.
As the sun was coming up, she would walk through those iconic zoo gates and see Sydney Harbour sparkling in the distance over the heads of the giraffes, hearing the sounds of the lions and monkeys and birds as the zoo woke up. All of this was a long way from Anna's childhood in the Netherlands, where, as a little girl, she was forbidden to wear woolen hats or gloves in the wintertime.
She and her sister had to prove themselves by jumping off high walls and swimming across the Rhine, dodging barges and boats. This Spartan upbringing was intended to make them tough. And it turned out Anna needed all those reserves of resilience and hardiness when she started out as one of the first female zookeepers in Australia.
Not because of the wild animals, though, but in order to deal with her male co-workers. Her book is Hear Me Roar. Hi, Anna.
Hi there, Sarah.
Before we talk about zookeeping, tell me about some of the other jobs you've had in your life, because it's been quite a mix.
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Chapter 2: Who is Erna Walraven and what was her role at Taronga Zoo?
Gosh, there have been so many. A translator and interpreter, that was actually a serious job. I just happened to be good at languages. So that was one of my first jobs in Australia. I worked for the Commonwealth Bank in their migrant information service. What brought you to Australia in the first place? Love, as it is for so many people. I picked up a penniless Aussie backpacker in Spain.
Is there any other kind, Anna?
No, probably not. LAUGHTER
But you found yours in Spain and followed him back here. That's right. I was living in Spain at the time. I moved to Spain when I was 18 and I lived there for about seven years and then came across Rob. And that was too much love to resist, really. I had to chase him halfway across the world. I had never really thought about a career. I just did languages because I happened to be good at them.
It wasn't something I loved, so I realised I loved animals. It was a passion that had never waned. From when I was the littlest person, the animals in my life were so important.
Tell me about your very first interview then at Taronga Zoo. What did you wear?
I had to borrow a dress because I thought that's what you do. You wear a dress to a uniform. And I didn't have any because I've always been a bit of a, you know, boyish kind of person. So Rob's Auntie Jane lent me a frock and it was early 80s. So it was like a safari suit in beige with pockets and a belt.
That's very appropriate. I looked very smart, I thought. So you had enthusiasm. You'd also picked up some qualifications with zookeeping before this interview. But what questions or what hurdles did the staff think were ahead of you?
They thought I was there for the glamour, I think. You know, did I think it was a glamorous job? How did I feel taking a job that a man could do? They took me to the loading dock. And there were three huge Hessian bags waiting at the bottom of the loading dock. Now, loading docks are tall because they have to sort of line up with the back of a big truck. And they told me to lift them up.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Erna face as one of the first female zookeepers?
So we could put some of his medication in there and then slowly feed it to him, hoping he'd get the spoon back when It was in his mouth. Often you needed to exchange the spoon for a bit of banana or something. Bartering was part of the process.
And I would sit on the outside of his enclosure and he obviously on the inside because if he wanted to, he could rip my arms off, which, you know, just to get the medication in is a bit of a hard task. hard price to pay. And he was gorgeous. He was gorgeous. These long locks, these long red locks.
I mean, of course, a lot of these animals, wild animals, are potentially very dangerous for you. I mean, what What's it like to travel in the back of a van with a tiger that you know is sedated, but are you really confident that sedation is going to last as long as it needs to?
You really need to trust the vet that he got the right amount of medication in. And all of these drugs are based on the weight of the animal. And at that stage, you've got to guess it.
So you get very good at guessing what the weight is and then you also, it's a very dangerous drug and you have to have the antidote immediately there because if the vet or anyone else gets stabbed, you immediately need to do that. But being in the back of the truck, because you get locked in and the animal's on a stretcher with a net over it,
And you're just hoping and praying that it's not going to wake up on you. So, yeah, that's tense.
Did that ever happen to you or do vets always get those doses right?
Not in the back of a truck, but one day we were doing some health checks on some chimpanzees that were going to live in another zoo. And when one of the vets and I were carrying her to get a good weight on her, she was starting to wake up and starting to...
you know, throw her arms and legs around and we just managed to wrestle her into the hospital den and then, you know, weak at the knees, broke out laughing hysterically that we'd survived it because chimpanzees are enormously strong, enormously strong. They're all muscle.
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Chapter 4: How did Erna's upbringing influence her career in zookeeping?
He didn't say a word.
I don't know whether he took his beloved posters home. I mean, were you surprised, Anna, about that kind of explicit sexism at work? I mean, did it feel different from what you were used to in the Netherlands?
Yeah. The Netherlands, I'd happily participated in the liberation of my gender there. When I moved to Spain, things were different. But in Spain, I was expecting the kind of machoism I found there. But I wasn't expecting Australia to be as sexist as I found it to be.
There were lots of challenges from the animals, not just the human animals, at Taronga Zoo. Tell me, for example, how you move a rhino.
Well, in those days, it's a little safer now, but in those days I was working with a big Welshman with quite a tummy, and he was showing me the ropes on how to get Dinah and Taronga, were their names, on display. And they were in enclosures that had a long corridor alongside it that then took them out to the paddock where they had to go. And the way to get them, they've got poor eyesight.
So we would call them. He showed me how to do that. You know, you just make a lot of noise. But then you wiggle your body and you move your arms and your legs so that they see this moving target. And slowly they start gaining momentum. And once they got a lot of momentum, you had to run ahead of them through that corridor.
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Chapter 5: What unique experiences did Erna have while working with animals?
But fortunately, I fitted between the bars quite early and I could get out. But the poor man who was showing me had to go all the way to the end to then duck around the end because he didn't fit between the bars anymore. And when we got there, he said, I think I have to go on a diet.
Was there any risk that the rhino would catch up?
Yes. And what would it do if it caught up to you? Well, if you fall, obviously... I am quite clumsy, but luckily I never did fall over. So, yeah, you just have to be steady on your feet and we had to climb up a bit to get between the bars. So, yeah, you have to be fast. But it was, you know, we enjoyed being wild cowboy types, I think. I think we all thought it was rather good fun.
What technique did you use to stop wombats from biting your ankles, which was not something I knew wombats did?
Oh, yeah, they're ankle biters. Oh, yeah, this was a hairy-nosed wombat in the nocturnal house. Hagar was his name. Not quite appropriate for a wombat perhaps, but his name was Hagar. And Hagar loved going for the ankles. So the way to clean in Hagar's enclosure was you'd let him out in the corridor so that, you know, he would be away, but then he'd come chasing you.
And the only way to stop getting bitten is to hop in the garbage bin that you brought with you, those big plastic bins, and you had a shovel and a rake for your cleaning. And then you'd hop inside the bin to wherever you had to go, move the bin with you.
um to get out and away from him but you know the the downside was that whatever you scooped up mostly you know obviously you would have to throw that on front of your your feet and hoping it didn't go into your gumboots
Well, adding to that delicious potpourri of aromas that you were marinating in all day, I guess you're always careful, being very careful of trying to not let any animal escape. Are there some animals, were there some when you were at Taronga that were better at escaping than others?
Oh, yeah, yeah. Some of them were absolute escape artists. Echidnas, no one would think so. Echidnas are fabulous escape artists. They can climb wire really high up. Yeah, they're fabulous. They can swim with their snorkel above the water. They're great. But there was one, a red panda, and her name was Mayhem for obvious reasons.
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Chapter 6: How did Erna manage the health care of zoo animals?
They are pollinators. They are fabulous. And I was able to teach Klinger all sorts of tricks. Like, you know, kids in the classroom loved it when you show how a bat has a pee because they hang upside down. How does a bat? You don't want to pee on yourself, so you turn your bottom down. So they hang by their thumbs, so their bum... faces downward so that they don't wet themselves.
Although on a hot day, when you go through a bat colony, you see that they actually pee on themselves and smear it all over their wings, which they then flap because there's a lot of blood supply there and it cools them down on really hot days. But generally, they pee downwards by hanging on by their thumbs. So that was one of the things I trained him to do so the kids would have a good giggle and
And when you'd go and see him, would Klinger recognise you, do you think?
Yes, Klinger lived for over 20 years and every now and then I'd go and see him and sometimes busy, live work. I hadn't been there for months and as soon as he heard my voice, he would fly over, wrap his wings around my head and just lick my face. It was just such a delight.
So, Anna, is there a lot of sex at the zoo?
There is. I mean, obviously, amongst the animals, it's what we do. So it can be quite concerning, especially in the early days when lions, they're at it all day. When the females in season, they mate, like, all the time and are very vocal. Very, very vocal.
So, you know, you're having there your cup of tea with your workmates in the morning and you can just hear the lion having a particularly good time.
And vocal in what way? Roaring?
Roaring. Yeah, roaring. Yeah, yeah, very loud. And you can hear it all through the zoo when it's breeding season, yeah. And obviously we talk about sex a lot. And in those early days when it was, you know, quite a sexist place, in order to understand animal husbandry and breeding animals, you need to understand a lot of sex.
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Chapter 7: What insights can be drawn from Erna's experiences with animal behavior?
You know, female tiger gives birth to cubs for the first time and she looks like, holy moly, what do I do with that? So that's the other thing that we've been told by biologists from Victorian era and that has been propagated for, you know, it has served... a male-dominated society very well to say all females are good mothers. All females. It's instinctual. It's instinct.
All females are good mothers. When you work with animals, you realise that it is not the case. They are hopeless at the first lot. I mean, so often the first offspring dies and they learn from that. And, you know, it's interesting because now most humans only have one or two.
Tell me about the early animals in your life. Did you have pets or was there wildlife around you? What kind of animals did you grow up with?
My parents loved animals. I was allowed to keep any animal as long as it wasn't in a cage. Haha, zookeeper. Or school excursions. I wasn't allowed to go once to the zoo because my parents were... Yeah, well, and I think zoos then weren't the zoos of now. I mean, they were very much animals in small cages. So, yes, we always had lots of dogs, cats, lambs, turkeys, chickens... Loads, loads.
And I can remember I had a raven once that had a broken, which is quite funny because my name is Walraven, a tame raven. My earliest memories are of a black German shepherd called Peter. Peter. That was, you know, my mate.
Your parents were young adults during the war when the Netherlands was invaded and occupied by the Germans, right? What did your mum experience during the Second World War?
Mum was amazing. I mean, in hindsight, you don't know that when you grow up. But she was also good at languages and she got a job with the Ortskommandant as a secretary. So the Germans occupied the town and then just put a layer of authority on top and the Ortskommandant was the highest German in town. Her father worked for the underground as... Did she?
And everything she typed for him, she took a carbon copy and smuggled it out when she left in her handbag and then gave it to her father who passed it on down the line. That's so risky. It was very risky, very risky. That wasn't the riskiest thing she did. She was also involved... in taking Allied soldiers along the line. So they'd fall with parachutes.
They'd hopefully get to a safe house, passed on to the people working in the underground. And then it was usually young women who took them at night from village to village. Now, there was curfew at night. No one was allowed to be out. If you know anything about Holland, you know there's a lot of water and they built high... roads called dikes to keep the water at one side.
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