Urban bandicoots

“BANDICOOT MENACE”, cried a heading on the letters page of Sydney’s The Sun back in 1951. Armed with a dictionary definition, the newspaper’s aggrieved correspondent declared that the so-called menace was more precisely a “large Indian rat”, and one no more native to Australia than the “rabbit or bulbul”.

What of the supposed foreigner’s crime? The bandicoot apparently posed a grave threat to humans and dogs through “its propensity as a carrier and distributor of ticks”. Other newspaper reports of the day said much the same: the bandicoot was the animal “ticks love best”. The drastic, if improbable, proposed solution was to confine bandicoots to the zoo! Almost 70 years on, bandicoots still roam free, thankfully. But the vitriol directed their way has,