The Penalty of Fame

A party of American zoologists has arrived in Sydney to study the curious Australian animals and birds and to take back a reasonable amount of material for research work.

“Why are we peculiar?” said the platypus.
“Why aren’t we built like ordinary folk?
We are fashioned on a plan that presents
us all to man
As a sort of silly scientific joke.
Why was Nature so absurd when she
fashioned beast and bird
Of this continent so curiously wrong?
So that learned men come here to awake
our nervous fear,
That our lease of life will not be very
long.”

“I admit the matter always had me
troubled,”
Said the emu. “We are certainly unique.
Take yourself a beast with legs, who
incubates his eggs
And absorbs his sustenance in thro’ a
beak!”

Said the platypus, “No need to be so
personal.
Tho’ I own you’re somewhat out of
drawing, too.
Not to mention other creatures with the
most grotesque of features,
Like the kookaburra and the kangaroo.”

“Oh, cease your cackle!” cried the kooka-
burra.
“You have nearly been the death of me
since birth.
Thro’ the endless centuries I’ve been sit-
ting in these trees,
And every day I’ve nearly died of mirth.

Can you wonder scientific man grows
curious,
Or common man regards you with a
smile?
Why, myself and my old wife, we have
known you all thro’ life,
And we can’t stop laughing at you all
the while.”