Platypus Matters by Jack Ashby

Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals
By Jack Ashby
University of Chicago Press, 2022

Australia’s signature gallery of animals – echidnas, wombats, kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, pygmy possums, quolls, wallabies, bandicoots – are joined in the pages of Jack Ashby’s new book Platypus Matters by the apple of Ashby’s eye, the platypus, that odd-looking little creature with fur like an otter and a naked bill like a duck. These animals, according to Ashby, is “essentially a series of compromises.” Ashby, assistant director of Cambridge’s University Museum of Zoology, politely allows that “If I sound excited about platypuses, it’s because I am.” 

And he goes on about them, always in fascinating detail:

Platypus limbs are rather like Swiss Army knives, with gadgets for walking, swimming and digging. To power their swimming stroke, platypuses use their webbed hands (their hind feet are only partially webbed). No doubt this webbing contributed to their overall perceived ‘duckiness’ and influenced early descriptions, but their webbing is quite different to that of a duck – not to mention the fact that ducks have webbed feet, while platypuses have webbed hands. In ducks, the webs pass between the toes, while in platypuses it passes under their fingers.

This is wonderfully dorky stuff, and Platypus Matters has plenty of it. But there’s much more going on here than Ornithorhynchus anatinus. Ashby energetically recounts the stories of a dozen species of Australian animals, their natural histories, and the universally-tragic record of their discovery by, interaction with, and decimation or extermination at the hands of humans. These are largely depressing stories, a long Australian list of ecological travesties that only look more dire when read against the backdrop of the environmental catastrophes stalking the country in the 21st century. And although Platypus Matters is a persistently, defiantly upbeat book, downright infused with Ashby’s scientific exuberance, it can’t avoid a touch of the funereal. In Australia as everywhere else, the ecological outlook for all forms of life humans don’t enslave, exploit, or eat is bleak. 

Considering how passionately Ashby cares about Australia’s wildlife, it’s understandable that he’d end his book by acknowledging this dark reality, although he chooses a particularly shrill Twitter-esque way of phrasing it, a way that makes you imagine some company’s HR department receiving a “Be Better” memo about increasing koala-representation on the staff:

We need to change the way we talk about Australian animals, because the current narrative perpetuates a colonial view of the country and its peoples, and hinders environmental conservation. We need to resist the notion of ‘weird’ animals, because this is a belittling value judgment. We need to stop calling animals primitive, because it doesn’t make any scientific sense … When we go into a museum that implies in its displays that Australian animals are anything but precisely adapted results of evolution, we need to call them out and explain the harm they could be doing by conveying messages that work against what should be their primary mission – engaging people with the natural world.

Nevertheless, the points are valid, however unlikely it is that changing a couple of adjectives will change the long-term survival chances for the platypus. But considering the wonders at stake, any start is a good start.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.