Is it a plains rat—or a palyoora? Why Australia is turning to Aboriginal animal names

In the desolate plains of southern Australia scampers a small creature with pointy ears, a silky tail, and a cream-colored belly that ecologist Steve Morton describes as “wonderfully beautiful.”

Its not-so-beautiful name? The plains rat.

“I’m an outback man myself,” Morton says, “but could you imagine a more discouraging name?”

Perhaps more discouraging is the rodent’s conservation outlook. The plains rat is now presumed extinct throughout most of its historic range, a victim of habitat loss and introduced predators like feral cats and foxes.

But Morton has an idea for how to save the rats that remain: Ditch their European names and reclaim them as uniquely Australian creatures.

The ecologist is leading a campaign to see the plains rat renamed the palyoora, a moniker used by the Wangkangurru people. In fact, Morton argues that all of Australia’s rodents could use a rebranding: Of the country’s 60 native rodent species, nearly a third are extinct or threatened. Yet it’s hard to get the public to care—and Morton thinks it’s partly due to their lackluster names. Perhaps the palyoora would enjoy the kind of public affection other Aussie species with Aboriginal names do, such the wallaby, the kookaburra, and, of course, the kangaroo. 

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Changing their names would also be a step forward in another way. “The European names imposed on these animals were just often demeaning,” Morton says. “Aboriginal people are still in possession of their law, their culture, and much of their land—why couldn’t they be in possession of their naming rights too?”

What’s in a name?

Changing common names is rare but it’s not unprecedented.

In many instances, name changes have come about as part of a broader reckoning. Invasive gypsy moths became spongy moths in 2022 to avoid an ethnic slur for Romani people, while Asian carp were renamed copi the same year. Currently, the American Ornithological Society is in the process of renaming the dozens of bird species named after eugenicists and slaveowners.

Animal names aren’t just a matter of semantics, but of emotions. A 2020 study that analyzed 26,794 common names found that many contained words that induced a strong positive or negative emotion. Some of the positive words were “golden,” “great,” and “dove.” Negative terms included “rat,” “lesser,” and “blind.” Lots of names are downright misleading; consider the common hamster, a critically endangered European rodent that has lost 94 percent of its range and is now anything but common.

Gregory Andrews, a D'harawal man and Australia’s first appointed threatened species commissioner who served from 2014 to 2017, says that rodents in particular stand to benefit from a name change.

(To save endangered species, Joel Sartore takes their pictures.)

“Because of the European cultural context of rodents spreading disease, people think rodents need poisoning,” he says. “But in Indigenous culture, rats don’t have that negative overlay.”

Since conservation efforts and funding often rely heavily on public perception, providing animals with positive (and accurate) names could be a “a simple and cost-effective way to improve conservation outcomes,” the researchers wrote in the 2020 study.

“Just imagine the people sitting around the table deciding about the allocation of the [conservation] money—you’re not going to give it to the rat, are you?” Morton says. “But you might give it to the palyoora.”

Another study seems to prove his point. In 1998, researchers asked visitors to the London Zoo to rank 133 photographs of animals in the order they would choose to help their conservation, first without revealing their common names. When the names were added, they had a negative effect on animals like the strawberry poison frog and the red-faced black spider monkey—while a providing a boost to creatures like the British warbler or the Diana monkey.

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Australian names for Australian rodents

The effort to rebrand Australia’s rodents has been a long time coming. Thirty years ago, Morton and his fellow ecologists published a paper titled “Australian Names for Australian Rodents,” in which they suggested replacing the “uninspiring, unwieldy, and downright ugly” common names of Australian rodents with Aboriginal ones. The brush-tailed rabbit-rat would become the pakooma; the false water rat reborn as the yirrkoo.

Change was slow in the decades that followed—although it did have some notable successes.

A few years after Morton’s paper was published, the Australian Department of Environment and Heritage replaced the name of the water rat, Australia’s largest rodent, to the rakali, a name taken from the Murray River language. Around the same time, Western Australia revealed its 1997 recovery plan for the Shark Bay mouse, which also used its Pintupi name, djoongari.

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Then, in 2015, Andrews took advantage of his role as the country’s threatened species commissioner to stealthily change the name of the smoky mouse to the konoom. As its name suggests, the animal boasts a shimmering grey coat. But Andrews knew there was a better name for it than its English moniker (and certainly its Spanish name, which is raton bastardo fumoso, or “gray rat bastard.”) 

“The most common Indigenous name for is it is the konoom,” he says. “So in 2015, I asked one of the staff to get into the official database and change it. We didn’t tell anyone; we didn’t have a renaming ceremony. It was really quite cheeky.”

In the months that followed, Andrews wrote speeches for his superiors in which he referred to the rodent “as the remarkable konoom,” he recalls. “I just normalized it. I was in a position to do that.”

Most recently, in 2023, the Australian government referred to the New Holland mouse as the pookila, from the Ngarigu language, in the rodent’s threatened species profile.

But why was the scientific world so slow to respond to Morton’s original call to action?

“I suspect it has just taken time for the community to begin to realize there are better ways of actually helping the animals you’re purporting to want to rescue,” says Morton, “and not lumbering them with these awful names when there’s an obvious alternative.”

'A form of decolonialization'

There’s yet another compelling reason to restore Australian names for Australian rodents besides the wellbeing of the rodents themselves.

“Renaming them back to what they were is a form of decolonialization,” Andrews says.

As the country embarks on a variety of renaming initiatives to grapple with its colonialist past—for example, Tourism Australia now uses dual naming to promote destinations, while Sydney’s Cook’s River may soon once again be known as Goolay’yari—Morton has reignited his campaign to rename Australia’s rodents.

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“We settler Australians are trying to come to terms with colonized people who still have good reason to resent what’s happened. And every little gesture we can make to recognize and recover from it helps.” Morton says. “This would be a gesture of good faith.”

But how to carry it out in a country with more than 20 active Aboriginal languages?

Andrews says scientists should simply consult with the Aboriginal people where the species predominantly exists—which he admits would be “trickier with migratory species and marine animals.”

Can better names boost public perception for Aussie rodents? Just ask the thousands of members of the Rakali Awareness Day Facebook page, who enthusiastically share videos of the bulky rodent swimming, foraging, and sneaking onto porches to find a snack. Decades after it got its new name, the animal once known as the water rat has an online fan club.

For Morton, it’s buoying to see scientists and society embrace both new names and new attitudes. “There are lots of younger people who do this cross-cultural work with aplomb,” he says, “I hope we paved the way a bit for them.”