Arthur Johnstone has worked at the Werribee Open Range Zoo for more than 35 years. 84036 Picture: MATHEW LYN
By ALESHA CAPONE
JUST like the cheetahs, crocodiles and camels, Arthur Johnstone calls Werribee Open Range Zoo home.
As the zoo’s senior operations manager, Mr Johnstone has resided at the facility for more than three decades.
“I’ve been living there since 1977 and working here since 1975,” he said.
At night he can hear the lions, hippos and zebras as they wander across the grasslands.
Mr Johnstone was one of two employees who started at the facility when it was Werribee Fauna Park, a place for Melbourne Zoo to house surplus animals.
“Because I was here at the beginning, I treat this place like it’s my own, though obviously it’s not,” Mr Johnstone said.
“The first animals which came were the water buffalo, the North American bison and a herd of red deer.
“While it was still developing, within the first 12 months there were only three or four of us, we did the animal keeping.”
Mr Johnstone remembers when the zoo first opened and around 23,000 visitors came through the gates.
“We’ve grown from that to 400,000 visitors a year,” he said.
As a live-in resident at the zoo, Mr Johnstone has plenty of stories to entertain his three grand-children.
“We were working on an exhibit and it was wet, and there was a small slippery hill and the rhinos were at the top,” he said.
“They actually came down and slid down the hill on their bottoms, just like children would do. It was play to them.”
Mr Johnstone said the zoo also recently installed kilometres of “feral-proof fencing to keep cats, foxes and rabbits out” so they can breed the endangered Eastern Barred Bandicoot.
“I enjoy it so much if I go on holidays for a week or two I look forward to coming back,” Mr Johnstone said.
“There’s so much going on and there’s a great team here.”
