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Birthday bash for oldest pet
15/11/2005 09:37 - (SA)
Sydney - Australia on Tuesday threw a birthday party for a giant tortoise called Harriet who at 175 years of age is believed to be the world's oldest creature - and to have been brought from the Galapagos Islands by Darwin himself.
At the birthday bash at the Australia Zoo near Brisbane, a cake was cut to celebrate a long and eventful life lived on three continents that keeper Laura Campbell hoped was far from over.
Harriet hasn't far to go before she beats the longevity record of 188 years set by another Galapagos-born tortoise that until his death was the pride and joy of the King of Tonga.
"We're well and truly hoping that Harriet lives a lot longer than that," Campbell said of the much-loved herbivore who munched away on hibiscus flowers.
Harriet goes back so far - before the motorcar, or even commercial steam trains, before the first slavery ban and before the industrial revolution got properly underway - that her early years are a bit sketchy.
She is believed to have been five years old when English naturalist Charles Darwin visited South America's Galapagos Islands in 1835 and picked her up and took her back with him aboard HMS Beagle.
Darwin took three tortoise - Tom, Dick and Harry - unaware the trio were not all boys. It wasn't until the 1950s, after living for more than a century as a male, that Harriet got her new name to accord with her newly discovered femininity.
Civil servant John Wickham brought the Galapagos exhibits with him from London when he came out to the colony in the 1850s to take charge of municipal affairs in what was then the small Queensland township of Brisbane.
Some dispute Harriet's story. But DNA testing vouches for her venerable age and her birth in the Galapagos.
She could well outlive the hundreds who attended her birthday party. Harriet has lasted long enough already to make a fool of those who were ruling the world when she was a toddler.
When Harriet arrived in Europe as a scientific specimen to be paraded and prodded, it was a continent rent by revolutions that Austrian leader Prince Klemens von Metternich predicted could only be kept in check if the ruling dynasts in Russia, Austria and Prussia held firm against social change.
"So long as the union of the three monarchs lasts there will be a chance of safety in the world," Metternich said. It really was a very long time ago.
- SAPA
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