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We had a lovely afternoon at Taronga Zoo yesterday. We first visited the zoo on one of our early trips to Sydney from Singapore. We have a photo of a young Leah holding an albino python. Well, a well-fed albino python was draped across a very brave little girl’s shoulders and lap for a photo-op. The zoo is located on a lovely unusual hillside site across the harbour from the Harbour Bridge and Opera House. ‘Taronga’ is an Aboriginal word meaning ‘beautiful view’. It’s clean, modern and well-kept, with lots of trees and shade. The enclosures don’t use cages. Thick glass panels, cables, electric fences or moats and ha-has are cleverly used instead to maintain an ‘open’ feel. Huge high nets contain the monkeys and birds. There are many animal species to see. The zoo is obviously doing well with lots of smart modern enclosures and new building work going on. Its restaurants and cafes are well-appointed and busy. Boatloads of locals and tourists arrive on its own harbour ferry and bus services. Reduced online entry fees are nearly $40 per adult and they don’t miss any opportunity to part you from more cash whilst you are there. It’s a perfect Sydney tourist attraction but we found it a little uncomfortable, a bit weird even.
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When we arrived we headed for the first exhibit to see the iconic Australia mascot, the newly endangered-listed koalas. No cuddling was offered but we did expect to see more than one koala asleep on a small eucalyptus tree. They had signposted ‘To the Koalas’, after all. Maybe the others were off duty but this was prime visitor time, Saturday afternoon, so where were they, we wondered to Oats. Although there are no koalas in or around Sydney and we only expect to see them in rescue facilities, parks or zoos like Taronga, finding just one sleeping koala at Sydney’s iconic harbour zoo was unlikely to excite this new-ish young Sydney-sider and first-time zoo visitor, and Oats was duly unimpressed. Oats’s grandparents have been lucky enough to see wild koalas in their natural Aussie habitat many times. The best was on the aptly-named Koala Walk, a path through a wood of eucalyptus trees on Raymond Island, Gippsland, about 300km from Melbourne. Almost every tree hosted a koala or even more. But seeking-out wild animals normally requires one to get off one’s arse to go look for them and we didn’t feel Taronga required much effort at all so maybe that’s why the koala union forbids Saturday appearances. Still, odd.
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So we moved on hoping to quickly interest Oats after a poor start. The next stop at the camel enclosure left him cold. The gorillas had their backs turned to us all and the lion were all laid down and asleep under a far-off tree. But Oats was finally interested, for a few minutes anyway, in a long-neck way, by the oddly-shaped giraffe. Oats and we identify different animals by the sounds they make but Gramps wasn’t able to come up with an appropriate giraffe-like sound so Oats quickly dismissed them too.
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We paused under a huge fig tree for a picnic lunch then we enjoyed playing bongo drums together at a nearby African village exhibit.
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Then we came to the small African elephant enclosure. Now, to your average Taronga visitor the enclosure may not have seemed small at all but to us, recent Tanzania safari goers, it was impossibly small. We’re no experts but the two poor elephants seemed to be bored rigid. Normally walking miles a day through the bush in a large social troop, two elephants being held in a small compound seemed cruel to us. One elephant was slowly moving its head from side to side which seemed unhealthy. Oats was mildly impressed. So that’s a real elephant, eh? Big. Long nose. Got it, but I have one that I sleep with at home. Time to move on.
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Conservation posters at and between each enclosure hammer-home the human impact on the animals’ natural African habitat, as if we weren’t already very aware. But it was interesting that these same posters suggested no action from us, just imposing implied guilt, as if we have any impact on that many wild animals that roam Clifton, UK or even Sydney, Australia. Literally dozens of similar ‘informative’ guilt-inducing posters are displayed but we saw none telling us what Taronga Zoo itself is doing with our $80 to help conservation work and defray some of this impact. I was expecting some explanation, even boasting, e.g. the zoo has bred x number of meerkat which have been reintroduced to the wild in South Africa over the last ten years, or some-such, but nope, nothing. It would have been nice to have read that, for example, our two sad elephants had been rescued from a La-la Land circus and we hope to breed them with help of the Steve Irwin Queensland Zoo, or somesuch, but again, nothing. We had read on their website earlier that the zoo is actually very active in many areas of Australian conservation but there was little material presented during our actual visit. Again, odd.
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We finally struck animal gold for our toddler grandson at the Children’s Zoo section. The goats were OK but when Oats found the rabbits and guinea pigs in their enclosures he went absolutely ballistic, running between them unable to believe his eyes, shouting and pointing and calling for us to look too, as if we and everyone else there were bemusedly already not. If was totally delightful to revel in his total delight. Afterwards, and actually very much afterwards, there was a small water park for him to paddle and play in and then, when he’d been dried and redressed, a set of slides for Gramps to lift him onto and let himself slide back down before running back for more. And more and more.
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Eventually we managed to extract our totally exhausted grandson, strap him back into his pram and head for the ferry home. We needed, of course, to pass through the zoo shop to exit and Oats immediately pointed to a small plush lion which we thought he believed to be a cat but which he nevertheless wouldn’t put down until he later fell asleep in his cot at home. On the ferry we had a roaring noise agreement (so not a mi-ow cat then) and an understandably confusing discussion about where Lion’s nose and mouth might be. Very toddler thought-provoking.
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More adult thought-provoking ferry-home discussion was the value of the zoo to society and to its host city today. Sitting on prime harbour real-estate the zoo’s acreage is worth many hundreds of $millions, more than enough to develop their out-of-city zoo park sister site where the animals would have much more appropriate living areas, the humans be the ones held in enclosures, and better conservation facilities and funding. Methinks, delightful tourist attraction it may be, we have probably outlived the days of a city zoo. But probably not anytime soon.
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Wish you were here.
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