In his 20s, Rod McRae moved from New Zealand to Woolloomooloo, where he lived in a share house with several friends and his Afghan hound called Heathrow. He took the dog for daily walks around Mrs Macquaries Chair, where it sniffed out dead rats and possums in the undergrowth. McRae brought home their little stinking corpses and stuck them in the fridge.
"Ah! Rod! Their tails are hanging out!" his flatmates cried. He was studying taxidermy by correspondence at the time and so practised his skills on the roadkill. He also began building his own exotic menagerie – buying a stuffed wildebeest, deer heads, a baby orang-utan.
"I was always fascinated by taxidermy," he says. "I put it down to my parents not allowing us to have pets. I think it is always very convenient to blame one's parents."
Taxidermy is driven by a desire to reconnect with nature, he says. "We're so obsessed with clean surfaces and disinfectant, and the idea that everything out there is dirty and everything in here is clean. I think there's a bit of a reaction against that. People want to re-engage with the wilderness."
His exhibition at Everglades in Leura, Wunderkammer – The Cabinet of Wonders, captures that yearning in several strange ways. A polar bear teeters atop a refrigerator. Boxing kangaroos are cloaked in old black leather handbags and purses. McRae poses with a lion in an unmade bed. The lion is posed mid-wriggle, jaws open, paws up.
"I wanted it to look pretty playful, like a domestic cat," McRae says. "It's about the domestication of the wild, basically."
His exhibition explores our responsibilities to animals and the planet. No animal was harmed to make the artwork, with unwanted skins sourced from animals that had died by natural causes, hunting, culling or for food.
"I wanted to create art that people can't ignore," McRae says. “You might feel repulsed. You might feel angry. You might feel perplexed. But you will feel something."
McRae bought the zebra in the exhibition for about $1500 on eBay, from a cash-strapped hunter in Montana and the polar bear from a taxidermist in Melbourne. The young male lion was sourced through a trusted dealer in South Africa.
Heathrow the hound lives on, happily. But the dog long ago left McRae for a larger house in the country. He now has a Persian cat called Pugsley, who has no expression other than angry. Would he stuff Pugsley when he expires? He says no.
"When people have their pets done, it is almost never a happy outcome."
- Wunderkammer is at Everglades, Leura, until August 27.
