Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
A 150-year newspaper archive traces how New South Wales turned bandicoots into a bounty animal
A content analysis of more than 3,000 New South Wales press reports published between 1804 and 1954 tracks how complaints about bandicoots moved from hunting to crop damage to ticks. Its firmest number is the nearly 19,000 scalps one bounty board took in 1906.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Researchers analysed more than 3,000 New South Wales newspaper reports published between 1804 and 1954 to chronicle how public concern about bandicoots changed over a century and a half.
- Q fever was first found among workers at a Brisbane abattoir in the 1930s, and bandicoots became the prime suspect after an infected worker thought he saw one entering a cowshed at night.
- Eight of the 15 species in the bandicoot family have become threatened or extinct since European colonisation, and the surviving populations have all declined.
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Why it matters
- constraint The study can date and count what people wrote and what boards paid, but it cannot say how much of the decline the reputation caused while predators and land clearing worked on the same animals.
- capability Coding three millennia-worth of column inches by decade turns public sentiment into a dated variable a conservation analysis can actually handle, for a period long before wildlife surveys.
- precedent A single host-preference result, once Sydney papers ran it, fixed a species' reputation for decades; wildlife-disease findings published now travel the same route to the same audience.
Nearly 19,000 bandicoot scalps reached one protection board, at Bathurst, in 1906 [11]. The killing was legal: under the Pastures and Stock Protection Act, poisons, traps and guns could be used on many native species, and from the 1880s until 1930 a scalp could be exchanged for cash [10], roughly 50 years of paid killing [4]. The bounty ledgers count animals. The newspaper reports count complaints, and the study is built mostly from the complaints.
More than 3,000 reports from New South Wales papers published between 1804 and 1954 [4] works out at about 20 a year [2]. As a year-by-year series that is coarse. The useful variation is in what people were complaining about, which the authors sort into three periods [5]. The animal's English name arrived as an error, borrowed from an Indian rat called the pandi-kokku, or pig-rat [19]. Early colonists trapped and shot bandicoots for sport, food and fur, and sent skins back to Europe for display [6]. One article in the sample called roast bandicoot "one of the most deliciously delicate dishes going" [7]. From the 1830s the grievance was agricultural, with reports of bandicoots digging up maize and potatoes across regional New South Wales and "bandicooting" entering local speech as a word for stealing garden produce [8].
By the 1920s the argument had moved to the suburbs and to the paralysis tick [12]. Earlier work on that tick had not singled out bandicoots as a key host [13]. In 1924 the veterinary researcher Ian Clunies Ross collected ticks from bandicoots and concluded that long-nosed bandicoots were the tick's favourite host [14], and Sydney newspapers carried the claim widely [16]. A favourite-host result needs a comparison across the hosts on offer; sampling ticks off bandicoots establishes what is on bandicoots. Rats and possums carry the same tick, and bandicoots are one host among many [15].
The Q fever suspicion rested on less than that. Q fever was first found among workers at a Brisbane abattoir in the 1930s, and bandicoots became the prime suspect after an infected worker thought he had seen one walk into a cowshed at night [17].
The authors' conclusion is that decades of being maligned left bandicoots more vulnerable to extinction [18]. The persecution is documented, and so is the moment a scientific claim entered the press. Working out what the persecution cost the populations is harder. Cats, foxes and habitat destruction pressed on the same populations across the same decades [3], and a press archive cannot apportion the decline between how a species was described and what was eating it or clearing its ground. The published account does not include population estimates for the bounty districts, so 19,000 scalps cannot be read as a share of the animals present [3]. The killing was legal, subsidised and sustained for half a century, and that is a direct mortality source. Eight of the family's 15 species are now threatened or extinct [2], about 53 percent [1].
What to watch
- Whether the peer-reviewed paper pairs the press series with scalp totals from boards beyond Bathurst. Totals from more boards would make bounty payments a measure of persecution across a wider area.
- Whether any population or distribution data survive for the bounty districts, without which the scalp counts stay uncalibrated.
- Whether current urban tick-management guidance in eastern Australia still names bandicoots as the principal host.