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History & Culture
Dr Roshana Van der Wall was eight years old when she told her pet cat Isis she’d one day taxidermy her. “People thought it was a bit weird,” Roshana admits, “and then everybody just sort of got used to it.” 

When Isis died 18 years later, Roshana began her search for a taxidermist, eventually tracking down and approaching several. But no-one was interested in the job. “The few taxidermists I could find in the Yellow Pages didn’t want anything to do with it. They were like, ‘Nope, no pets, go away,’” she says.
Dismayed, Roshana asked if there was somewhere she could learn to do it. They told her to either attach herself to another taxidermist – or, horrifyingly, “just try it out yourself”. 

Now 37, Roshana is a licensed taxidermist and the founder of Drop Dead Gorgeous Taxidermy, based in Gosford on the New South Wales Central Coast. She has worked on everything from pet memorials and museum displays to ‘props’ for the film industry. She’s also one of a handful of taxidermists nationwide offering beginner and intermediate taxidermy classes, opening up access to a craft that, although maligned, is indisputably an art form. 

Roshana was introduced to the world of taxidermy on a school excursion to the Australian Museum when she was 8 years old. The type of kid who’d find a sick bird in the garden and nurse it back to health in a shoebox, Roshana had always been fascinated by animals. What intrigued her about taxidermy was that it allowed her to get up close to animals she’d otherwise never get the chance to handle. “You’d get nibbled on by a crocodile if you tried to pat it, so it was nice to be able to actually touch one,” she says. “That was really exciting for little 8-year-old me.”

It’d be years before Roshana actually tried her hand at taxidermy, but her interest in the craft never faded. She finished school and went on to study science at Macquarie University in Sydney, eventually completing a PhD in molecular biology. All the while, she kept an eye out for opportunities to learn taxidermy. The only courses she found had either taken place years earlier or were in the United States. 

Then, in 2017, Melbourne-based taxidermy company Rest In Pieces announced a beginner course in Sydney. Roshana immediately signed up. The first animal she taxidermied was a rat. “It looks a little bit janky right now,” she says. “I keep it as a reminder of how far I’ve come.”

Roshana kept returning for more classes, eventually gaining the confidence to try it herself at home. Three years later, in 2020, she founded her own taxidermy business and began teaching Sydney classes for Rest In Pieces. Last year, she began offering her own. 

Roshana works four days a week as a research assistant in a lab at Sydney University but spends Fridays at home in her taxidermy workshop. When I speak with her, she’s restoring an antique leopard skin rug from the 1950s.

Taxidermy is a combination of different disciplines. “You have to wear a lot of hats when you do taxidermy,” Roshana explains. “You’ve got to build the internal form, which makes you a sculptor. If you’re making your bases yourself, you’ve got to do carpentry. If you’re creating dioramas, you’ve got to be a bit of a botanist as well.” 

The face is often the most technically difficult part of the process. “Sculpting faces to look as alive or as realistic as possible can be quite challenging,” Roshana says. “If you don’t get the eyes right, boy howdy, they look really janky!” She buys glass eyes pre-made but occasionally repaints them to get a closer colour match. More important than colour, though, is the size. “I’ve seen some specimens with eyes that have been way too big and then the eyelids won’t go over them properly, so they look eternally surprised,” she says. 

Roshana’s favourite part of the taxidermy process is when she blow-dries a specimen after it has been washed. “They start to fluff up and look like a real little animal again,” she says. “It’s absolutely lovely.”

Pet memorials are her most common type of commission, followed by antique restoration. She has primarily worked on pet lorikeets, budgies and cockatiels, but has also taxidermied rabbits, rodents, a few cats, even a pet chihuahua – a mount, she says, that “took years off my life”. 

The work can be emotional at times, especially when doing a pet memorial. And while pet taxidermy is viewed by many as unconventional, Roshana likens it to a 3D photograph. “It might not necessarily be the soul or the spirit of the bird you remember, but it’s a nice representation of them,” she says. “You can still pat their little feathers and maybe [find] comfort in that.”

Roshana’s other ongoing projects include a powerful owl for the Jervis Bay Maritime Museum that will be used for educational talks. It’s the largest animal she has worked on to date, and also the most challenging. “It’s enormous!” she says. “It’s a learning curve. I will say that’s probably the trickiest thing I’ve had to do so far.”
“You have to wear a lot of hats when you do taxidermy. You’ve got to build the internal form, which makes you a sculptor. If you’re making your bases yourself, you’ve got to do carpentry. If you’re creating dioramas, you’ve got to be a bit of a botanist as well.” 

Roshana holds a NSW taxidermy licence, which allows her to work on native animals and also hold native specimens on her premises. Her licence has also been amended to allow her to rent specimens for educational purposes and film productions; her taxidermy has featured in The Artful Dodger
and Heartbreak High. The animals she works on are ethically sourced, meaning they’re not killed for taxidermy. Some are roadkill. Others were injured wildlife taken to vet clinics and later euthanised. 

Under NSW law, Roshana can only sell five taxidermy specimens of non-threatened native species each year. She’s also required to make detailed records of every specimen she taxidermies and sells so it can be tracked through a paper trail. If it’s a threatened species, regulations are even stricter; Roshana can only taxidermy a threatened species for educational institutions, so she can prepare the specimen but can’t keep it. 

“I might gripe about the complexity of these laws, but I’m very appreciative that they’re there,” she says. “It’s really important that these rules are in place, because once something is taxidermied, there’s no way to find out how it died. These rules are in place to stop poaching and the unnecessary depletion of our wildlife for the sake of something like taxidermy or art.”
Her scientific career often complements her taxidermy work.

In the lab, Roshana studies animal models of disease and regularly performs necropsies – animal autopsies – as part of her research. So when taxidermy clients bring her pets that have died unexpectedly, she can sometimes identify the cause of death or bring closure to a medical mystery. 

“There was one client who’d had a lorikeet for some years – she’d rescued it – and it couldn’t fly and she’d never known why,” Roshana says. “It wasn’t until after it passed and she brought her to me that I was able to [see that it] had a malformed humeral bone – one of its wing bones was entirely thick and too heavy to support flight. I was able to tell her that, and that was a huge thing of closure for her.” 

Taxidermy was formally taught in some Australian tertiary institutions until about the 1970s. After that, aspiring taxidermists could only learn the craft by finding a mentor or travelling overseas. Social media has helped change that, offering taxidermists such as Roshana a platform with greater reach to share their work and online forums to discuss tips and techniques. It has made taxidermy more visible, for better or worse. 

Roshana is aware taxidermy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but notes the negative comments she has encountered usually stem from ignorance. “Taxidermy isn’t for everybody, and not everybody is very positive about it,” she says. “A lot of people assume instantly that you’ve gone and killed this animal, and that’s never the case. I just prepare and preserve the specimen.”

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