The dismissal of the fauna as “primitive” supported the notion that Australia was “uncivilised” and its “invasion” by Europeans justified, Ashby argues. “The ways in which museums and other sources represent Australian animals are often fundamentally pejorative, and reflect an ongoing subconscious colonial bias,” he writes.

He says: “This attitude begins with colonists and explorers of the 17th and 18th centuries, but remains detectable in the ways that Australian wildlife is interpreted today, in museums, TV programmes and in the popular zeitgeist.”

Museums should “decolonise the way we talk about Australian animals”, Ashby, an academic and fellow at UCL argues, as describing creatures as “weird” is “just another way of othering these animals”.

“This has been done since the very first written descriptions of Australian animals by Europeans”, Ashby said in a talk for the Natural Sciences Collections Association.

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“European colonial narratives are also present in how we typically talk about some animals today. This language... is essentially an element of the colonial framework.

Animal bias

Tasmanian devil: Dismissed as a “cover version” of a more familiar creatures such as the hyena.

Platypus: Labelled “weird” and primitive for its reptile-like egg-laying, despite it being no more primitive than other mammals.

Echidna: Museum taxidermy is fraught with errors which misrepresent the egg-laying creature.

Koalas: Like fellow its marsupials, it is subject to the “subconscious view of Australia as an evolutionary backwater”.

Kangaroos: Seen through the prism of a “colonial mindset” and denigrated by attitudes from the 18th century.

Quoll: Described as “cat-like” despite bearing no relation to felines, thus it is denied an “identity in its own right”.

The Telegraph, London