Wellington Zoo’s own Doctor Dolittle
‘‘I feel proud to have been part of something that has evolved from a place you had to apologise for to a place I am proud to be a part of.
Zookeeper b June 26, 1944 d May 21, 2018
Playing hide and seek with the elephants was just another day at the office for Wellington zookeeper Murray Roberts.
It would have been a strange and wonderful sight to come across Roberts, as the main keeper for the zoo’s four elephants, walking along the town belt with his exotic charges.
‘‘I would hide and then call out their names. They’d come thundering out looking for me, trumpeting and screaming and thrashing through the bushes,’’ he once said.
During his 50 years at the zoo, Roberts worked with myriad animals, from the wildcats and penguins to meerkats and pandas, but the elephants – Kamala and Nirvana in particular – and the chimps were favourites.
The day Kamala died, in the winter of 1983, was the saddest day of his career. In a 2015 interview he said: ‘‘We found her collapsed one morning. While I waited with her for the vet she brought her trunk up to my mouth as I spoke softly to her. I thought she was going to make it but she collapsed again and died of a ruptured spleen. I was with her when she died.’’
Thirty years on, Roberts still choked up at the memory of losing his friend.
He formed a special bond with Jessie, a juvenile chimp, and was her main caregiver when she was little. These days she’s the alpha female but she remained attached to Roberts, running to him and grooming his hand whenever he visited.
Roberts started at the Wellington Zoo more than half a century ago, in 1965. It was a different place then; he once described the institution as ‘‘like the wild west’’.
The staff of just 20 were all male, apart from a typist in the director’s office. Today a team of 90 runs the zoo, and women outnumber men two to one.
There was no formal training for a zookeeper when he started. In those days you just needed a love of animals and a good work ethic.
‘‘There were all sorts of characters working with the animals – we’ve had alcoholics and drug users, but not recently. Nowadays we don’t do anything without protocol or procedures,’’ he told one interviewer.
But much of the zoo’s culture had changed for the better, he said. In the early days the zoo was more about entertainment than conservation and education, he told
The Dominion Post, recalling chimp tea parties, elephant rides and performing goats.
It was a depressing place for the animals in those early years, with animals confined to small concrete pens – a far cry from the open-air enclosures they enjoy today.
Everything changed in the 1970s and a new focus on care and conservation flourished. ‘‘When I look back at my 50 years here I feel proud to have been part of something that has evolved from a place you had to apologise for to a place I am proud to be a part of,’’ he said on his semi-retirement in 2015.
Roberts had an affinity with all the zoo’s animals and was known for his calm and patient manner. Before more rigid rules were put in place, he would regularly go into the enclosures to tend to the animals. He’d think nothing of getting in with the bears and wolves, or feeding the lions through the mesh of their cage.
As well as zookeeping, he was a keen photographer and built up an impressive portfolio of images to showcase the animals that had inspired his passion for wildlife.
Over more than 50 years with the animals, he received surprisingly few injuries. Nirvana broke a few bones after standing on his foot. A peccary gored him through the biceps. But he was rarely off work. It was, for him, a lifestyle, not a job.
Roberts had a soft spot for animals from boyhood, keeping all manner of pets – ferrets, geckos, skinks. He and his father, the manager of a Baptist bookshop, kept birds in an aviary they built at the back of their garden.
Every Saturday he’d tune into a radio programme about the zoo, and as a child collected clippings from the newspaper about anything zoo-related.
Raised in the Lower Hutt suburb of Taita with one older brother and three younger sisters, he was a keen runner, eventually competing as a cross-country rep for Wellington. His fellow runners used to joke they only ever saw the back of him because he was always out in front.
On finishing high school he went to teachers’ training college. Part of his studies saw him taking children around the zoo and giving talks about the animals.
But Roberts realised early on that teaching was not for him, and quit college. After a brief stint at a poultry farm and National Service duties, he answered an advert for a keeper at Wellington Zoo.
‘‘I think I was the only applicant and I got the job,’’ he said in 2015. ‘‘I loved it. I was really in my element. I had always wanted to work with animals and now here I was!’’
In his early years, Roberts had to track a number of escaped animals, mostly chimpanzees and the occasional otter. He was not there in 1967 when two tigers escaped into Newtown, a work exchange having taken him to Adelaide Zoo and after that to Canada, where he worked at zoos in Winnipeg and Calgary.
On his way back from Calgary he brought with him a collection of exotic animals by sea from Vancouver. Like Noah’s Ark they mostly came in twos – pairs of South American peccaries, North American black bear cubs, skunks, gibbons, and a leopard and wolf.
They all made the journey in cages on top of the ship, except the wolf. ‘‘The captain said his cage was too constricting and insisted he be tied up on deck. Unfortunately, he managed to get hold of one of the Chinese crew, who only just managed to escape by taking off the jacket the wolf had got a hold of.’’
On his return, Roberts met Liz, a Canadian visiting New Zealand on an extended trip. They married in 1970 and had a daughter and son, Helen and David. Both would spend an idyllic childhood accompanying their father to the zoo on weekends and school holidays.
This was the 1970s, when health and safety rules were relatively non-existent, and it was not unusual for the children to swim with the elephants while their father scrubbed the animals, or follow him into the wolf and monkey enclosures.
Helen died of cancer in March this year.
Roberts, who doted on his four grandchildren, retired from his full-time position in 2015 but stayed on as a weekend worker. It took a lot to keep him from this beloved zoo – Liz called it his ‘‘mistress’’ – but late last year he became ill and could no longer work.
For months zoo staff visited him at home to walk his labrador, tend his garden and reminisce about a lifetime of work with the animals.
Fittingly, after a service at the zoo, he was carried out to the strains of Bobby Darin’s If I Could Talk To The Animals.
The thing is, he did. And they listened. – By Bess Manson