Later Life
Harriet was thought to be male for many years and was actually named Harry after Harry Oakman, the creator of the zoo at the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, but this was corrected in the 1960s by a visiting director of Hawaii's Honolulu Zoo. (As it happens, Tom, the specimen in the Queensland Museum, was also a female.)
On November 15, 2005, her much publicized 175th birthday was celebrated at Australia Zoo. This event was attended by Scott Thomson (the researcher on Harriet's history), three generations of the Fleay family, Robin Stewart (author of Darwin's Tortoise), and many hundreds of others who knew this tortoise during the latter part of her life.
Harriet died in her enclosure on June 23, 2006, of heart failure following a short illness.
Read more about this topic: Harriet (tortoise)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“All my life I’ve been running, from welfare officers, thugs, my father. See, there they are [the killers]. There on the bridge. I’m a dead man. Nosseros told me that. He told me. He said, “You got it all, but you’re a dead man, Harry Fabian.””
—Jo Eisinger, and Jules Dassin. Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark)
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)