Monarto safari park white rhino rescue project recalls Adelaide Zoo's Australia first with Mr Rhini in 1886
White rhinoceroses at South Australia's Monarto Zoo, east of Adelaide.
Image courtesy ZoosSA
South Australia's Monarto safari park, east of Adelaide, worked a world first with The Australian Rhino Project to move 80 endangered southern white rhinoceros to Australia from 2002 to safeguard the species while the poaching crisis in Africa is brought under control. In 2018, a female calf, Imani, from mother Umqali, joined five others born at Monarto.
Adelaide Zoo’s experience with rhinos went back to its start when the zoo’s first director R.E. Minchin paid £66 and brought Mr Rhini, a Javan rhinoceros, from Borneo, 1886. When Mr Rhini arrived in Adelaide from Singapore in the mid 1880s, he was the only rhinoceros in Australia and was one of Adelaide’s zoo’s most popular attractions. He arrived in Adelaide with some buffaloes, lepers, tiger cats, alligators, an Indian tapir and a sun bear.
Mr Rhini, who died in 1907, was mistaken for an Indian rhino, until this was corrected by a professor at the South Australian Museum where the animal was later displayed. Mr Rhini's species became critically endangered, with less than 50 Javan rhinos in the wild in West Java, Indonesia and Vietnam.
Interest in Mr Rhini was revived through a book by Geoff Brooks, author of Game in Transit: A history of the Rhino in South Australia, and one of Monarto safari park's longest-serving employees who was involved in the zoo’s 21st Century rhino programme since the first white rhino Uhara arrived in 2000 from Singapore Zoo on a long-term breeding loan.
The dominant breeding bull Satara and other adult female Umquali arrived at Monarto Zoo in 2002 from the Kruger National Park in South Africa.
Uhura and Umquali weremothers to the five rhino calves born at the zoo. Kibibi (princess in Swahili) in 2012 was the first female calf born at the zoo.
Monarto Zoo in 2018 had six southern white rhinoceros and two black rhinoceros.
The Australian Rhino Project, working with Monarto and other Australian zoos, aimed to maintain a viable population, with targeted genetics and demographics, to ultimately allow the African rhinoceros to go back to their natural habitat and homelands. More than 1,300 rhinos were poached in South Africa alone in 2017.
Zoos SA had a 500-hectare enclosure for the white rhinos coming to the 1,500-hectare Monarto safi park. In 2018, a female calf, Imani, from mother Umqali, joined five other white rhinos born at Monarto.
