Girlfriend New Zealander Hates Possums

My girlfriend’s a New Zealander and so hates possums. It’s not a dealbreaker (but I’ll bring her round) | Rebecca Shaw

They’re poison in Aotearoa but protected in Australia – and in inner-city Sydney, I’m grateful for any encounter with wildlife

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A few days ago, after a weekend of partying at Mardi Gras, I was in my garden at 2am in the quiet night air, trying to recover enough to be able to walk upstairs and get into bed. I was minding my own business when out of the deep silence I heard a strange scurrying, and I looked up just in time to see a big fluffy tail shoot past. For a moment I thought I’d partied too hard and was hallucinating, but then I decided it was probably one of the large neighbourhood cats who cruelly ignore me no matter how casually I pss pss at them.

Then I heard more notably freaky noises, and noticed the suspicious shaking of some of our greenery. Turns out it was a huge possum, mistaking a tallish houseplant in the back yard of an inner Sydney terrace for a big safe tree in which to hide from a normal human woman. I went closer and spoke in what I considered to be a helpful voice, informing the possum that it had come to a dead end, and it might want to come down.

It did, by jumping out and running directly at me. Luckily I was swaying on my feet anyway and it missed me and raced out of the garden. After realising this was real life, I was delighted by the interaction. I don’t get many encounters with wildlife living in the inner city. I felt a bit disappointed that my girlfriend had already gone to bed, but then remembered that it might not have been as enjoyable for her. She loves animals and wildlife, she is constantly sending me Small Animal With Big Animal videos and similar, but she’s from the country of Aotearoa New Zealand – where they think of possums as the devil.

This fact is one that I did not realise until after we had started dating, and it’s been proven by all my friends from Aotearoa. They hate possums with a passion. I’m not saying it would have been a dealbreaker if I’d learned about this before we started dating, but it is a difference that comes up a lot.

Possums are considered an enemy of the state over there. They are an introduced species (not their fault, they didn’t ask to be put on a boat), and they are loathed. This is because to survive in the new country, possums turned (allegedly) to the worst crime a New Zealander could ever think of – eating native bird eggs. As I’ve written about before, people from New Zealand are obsessed with their funny little not-evolved-to-avoid-predators-or-fly-away-to-safety birds. I agree the birds are special. They are also basically what all New Zealanders pin their national pride on.

From birth, my girlfriend and friends have been fed extreme anti-possum propaganda. There have been smear campaigns in schools, young minds imprinted with images of evil-looking, glowing-eyed possums clutching kiwi eggs in their wicked paws. There are colloquialisms like “the only good possum is a dead possum” and incidents of children being encouraged to possum toss.

We had opposite experiences. I was taken spotlighting as a child, trying to find the cute little creatures and sometimes their babies. I have known them as protected, mostly herbivorous little friends (if annoying in roofs and vegetable patches). People from Aotearoa have had no chance to see them as animals worthy of praise, only as furry little enemies that must be destroyed.

I don’t think there will be neutral feelings toward possums from that country until they succeed in their hopes of wiping them all out. The country has implemented a Predator Free 2050 campaign, hoping to get rid of all the evil egg-eaters like possums and stoats. In the process they have also randomly discovered that Selena Gomez’s cinnamon Oreo biscuits attract them the best.

Of course, I also love New Zealand birds and don’t want them or their homes to be destroyed, but it’s hard for me to see my little possum friends portrayed in this way. The people of Aotearoa have never fed a bit of pumpkin to a baby possum, an innocent baby possum that nibbles from your hand and has no intention of ever eating bird eggs in its life. They can only see possums as deliberately bloodthirsty predators, out on the prowl in the dark, targeting the most beautiful and vulnerable of their special birds.

I think it will be difficult for me to ever see a possum as evil, but my girlfriend has encountered a few in Australia now and has, as a visitor in their territory, been trying to wrap her mind around them maybe not being the spawn of the devil – but it’s difficult.

Usually she just stands and looks at a possum contemplatively, trying not to react negatively. She has the rock-throwing instinct of her countryfolk, but she is mostly able to hold it inside these days. She’s being possum-pulled in several directions at once, and her programming by the state is very difficult to change after all these years. Hopefully, with time, she will be able to come around to possums. Until the next time she visits home and resets to kill on sight.