Country

by Tim Flannery

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  COUNTRY

  Tim Flannery is an internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer and writer. As a field zoologist he has discovered and named more than thirty new species of mammals (including two tree-kangaroos) and at thirty-four he was awarded the Edgeworth David Medal for Outstanding Research.

  Formerly director of the South Australian Museum, Tim is chairman of the South Australian Premier’s Science Council and Sustainability Roundtable; a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy; a leading member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists; and the National Geographic Society’s representative in Australasia. In April 2005 he was honoured as Australian Humanist of the Year. He will take up a position at Sydney’s Macquarie University in 2007.

  Tim’s books include the award-winning international bestsellers The Weather Makers, The Eternal Frontier and Throwim Way Leg. He has also edited and introduced many historical works, including The Birth of Sydney, The Diaries of William Buckley and The Explorers.

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

  The Weather Makers: our changing climate and what it means for life on earth

  Mammals of New Guinea

  Tree Kangaroos: A Curious Natural History

  (with Roger Martin, Peter Schouten & Alex Szalay)

  The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People

  Possums of the World: A Monograph of the Phalangeroida

  (with Peter Schouten)

  Mammals of the South West Pacific and Moluccan Islands

  Watkin Tench, 1788 (ed.)

  John Nicol, Life and Adventures 1776–1801 (ed.)

  Throwim Way Leg: An Adventure

  The Explorers (ed.)

  The Birth of Sydney (ed.)

  Terra Australis: Matthew Flinders’ Great Adventures in the Circumnavigation of Australia (ed.)

  The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples

  A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals

  (with Peter Schouten)

  John Morgan, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley (ed.)

  The Birth of Melbourne (ed.)

  Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World (ed.)

  Astonishing Animals (with Peter Schouten)

  COUNTRY

  A continent, a scientist and a kangaroo

  TIM FLANNERY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company 2004

  First published in Great Britain in Penguin Books 2007

  1

  Copyright © Tim Flannery, 2004

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reproduce the illustrative material: Colour plates: Plates 1, 4 and 12 are from the author’s collection; plates 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 are courtesy of Dave Watts, Dave Watts Photography, plate 5 courtesy of Lochman Transparancies. Black and white plates: Special thanks to Peter Schouten for his drawings on pages 158, 161 and 165 and for permission to reproduce the picture on p. 59. Stubbs’ kangaroo on p. 20 is reproduced with permission from the British Library, p. 98 and p. 100 courtesy of Cindy Hann; p. 157 courtesy of Museum of Victoria; p. 222 from the author’s collection; p. 247 photographer Barry Wilson, reproduced courtesy of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

  Maps by Tony Fankhauser

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192638-4

  To

  my mother

  Valda Joyce Flannery

  a woman of boundless compassion and understanding

  Contents

  Map

  Introduction: Vanished Country

  1 A Failed Circumnavigation

  2 Captain Cook’s Kangaroo

  3 Quokkas, Euros and Stinkers

  4 The Last of the Frontier

  5 Of Nailtails and Nailed Tyres

  6 Kangaroo Essence

  7 Dead-end in the Inland Sea

  8 The Mystery of Hopping

  9 The Brightest Place on Earth

  10 The Oldest Kangaroo

  11 Skeletons in the Dead Centre

  12 Where the Great Roos Came from

  13 The Age of Kangaroos

  14 Advancing with Feet or Stomach?

  15 Grass for the Kangaroos

  16 Not Formed for Such Work

  17 Land of Giants

  18 Is the Answer 46?

  19 World Conquest

  20 A Dingo-driven Revolution

  21 The Age of Mammals in Australia

  22 The Groote Eylandt

  23 The True Experts

  24 Symbols of the New Land

  25 Oolacunta!

  26 Re-making Country

  Postscript

  Family Tree

  Acknowledgments

  General Bibliography

  ‘If you want to study the history of this country,

  you’ll have to have the will to fail.’

  Tom Rich

  Introduction

  Vanished Country

  When I was young I met a man whose arse bore the bite-mark of a Tasmanian tiger. David Fleay was one of Australia’s most respected naturalists, and he’d received his punctures while bending over to film the creature as it paced in its cage in a Hobart zoo. In my youthful imaginings that scar was the supreme stamp of Australian identity, a badge of honour that lay forever beyond my reach. That was because my eyes opened on the world in Melbourne nineteen years, three months and three weeks after the last tiger closed hers forever. My birthplace was a grand, European-style city of rumbling trams, and men in coats trudging plane-tree-lined streets past Victorian bluestone edifices. I dreamed of finding a thylacine, but by the time I was old enough to travel, even kangaroos and bandicoots had vanished from around Melbourne. So I was a rebellious young man—too angry to take a good look around me—who did not know my country.

  Then again, how do you ever know your country? Had I not rejected what I’d been taught at school I might have remembered the sage words: ‘by their fruits you shall know them,’ and perhaps even recollected the First Fruits of Australian Poetry, a work that in 1819 eulogised the kangaroo, hailing it as

  thou spirit of Australia,

  that redeems from utter failure�
��

  this fifth part of the Earth.

  The author of that first-published volume of Australian poetry was Justice Barron Field of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Perhaps only one whose days were spent judging colonial miscreants could have rhymed ‘Australia’ with ‘failure’. Then again, I’ve always suspected that Australians are a self-deprecating people who, despite their penchant for scattering ‘Great’ reefs, ranges and bights across the map, were ashamed of their country. Even our national symbol, the kangaroo, has been something of an embarrassment. Many people convert their national animal into haute cuisine—venison, wild boar or buffalo steak—but kangaroos are mostly fed to dogs.

  The origins of the modern kangaroo industry illustrate how very low in the esteem of Australians the creature had fallen. It began in the 1960s when rabbit shooters, whose game had been ruined by myxomatosis, were forced to search for an alternative. Australians had long welcomed the flesh of the pestilential rabbit to their tables, but they would not touch the kangaroo. So the creatures were shot for skins and the pet-food industry in numbers—nearly nine million in 1966–67—sufficient to threaten them with extermination. The impact of the slaughter prompted naturalist Vincent Serventy to lament that ‘from the average person’s point of view the kangaroo is now extinct. Nowhere can the average person see a live kangaroo within convenient distance from urban areas.’ In 1971, at the first meeting called to discuss the situation, the eminent zoologist Ronald Strahan captured the prevailing sentiment: ‘I believe that kangaroo meat is only of commercial interest because it is cheap. The moment we… put effort into its husbandry, we shall find that the game is not worth the candle.’

  It astonishes me that such a wondrous creature as the ‘spirit of Australia’ could plummet so low in the nation’s affections, for our first published poet did not miss the mark in his eulogy. So breathtakingly different is the kangaroo that if it did not exist we’d be unable to imagine it: hopping being as marked a departure from running as the orbital engine is from piston and crankshaft, and every bit as efficient. Perhaps familiarity has bred contempt, for unlike the thylacine, whose extinction has endowed it with mythic status, large kangaroos are today so commonplace that most Australians have long ceased to wonder at them. Some even regard them as pests.

  Yet they are, in my opinion, the most remarkable animals that ever lived, and the truest expression of my country—not because they appear on everything from the coat of arms to the national airline, but because they have been made by Australia. They are, in short, the continent’s most successful evolutionary product. Forged over eons by Australia’s distinctive environment, what was originally a tiny possum-like creature has endured a million genetic changes to become a kangaroo. In reading the animal’s history we should be able to discover, in distilled form, the story of our country.

  In all of life’s tenure on Earth no other large creature has achieved the triumph of hopping. True, some rodents hop, but even the largest rodent hopper—South Africa’s springhare—is twenty times smaller than a grey kangaroo. Humans are proud of walking upright, but that is an accomplishment shared with many creatures. Hopping is an accomplishment more akin to the development of human language, for as with speaking it is a singular evolutionary achievement.

  Yet hopping is only one aspect of a revolutionary design that has made the large kangaroos the most successful of Australia’s marsupials. In an age when so many of their relatives have become extinct they are true survivors, for despite centuries of hunting, persecution and competition from supposedly superior herbivores such as cattle, horses and sheep, today they are more abundant than ever. Aerial surveys reveal that there are at least 57 million individuals of the four largest species (red, the euro, and the eastern and western grey). But the success of kangaroos must also be measured by another yardstick—the diversity and breadth of adaptation of the family as a whole.

  You might imagine that hopping is such a specialised trait that it has constrained their evolutionary development; after all, you cannot hop backwards. Yet the seventy-odd species of kangaroo, wallaby and rat-kangaroo that currently make up the kangaroo family (we are still counting because scientists keep discovering new ones) have made their homes in a staggering variety of habitats. At least ten species of tree-kangaroo inhabit the treetops of tropical rainforests where they eat fruit and leaves and live like monkeys do on other continents. Some rat-kangaroos excavate burrows under the Australian deserts where they pursue a rabbit-like existence (though their burrows are deeper and more complex), while others tough it out on the surface of some of the most hostile, arid and unpredictable wastelands of our planet. It is no exaggeration to say that every square kilometre of the enormous region stretching from Indonesia’s Wallace’s Line to Tasmania is, or was, occupied by at least one member of the kangaroo family. They are the chief herbivores of this expansive realm, and in the sheer exuberance of their evolutionary branchings they far outstrip the great mammalian success stories of other continents such as horses, deer or antelope.

  Yet so uninteresting did these amazing creatures seem to most Australians that until 1963 no one had thought to ask how kangaroos hopped, or why. As late as 1970 no one knew that the grey kangaroos seen in paddocks from Perth to Cooktown were two distinct species—a discovery as startling as if scientists suddenly realised that two species of red deer roamed Britain, or that two species of bison lived on America’s Great Plains. And as late as 1980 no one had any idea about the early evolution of the family, for no fossils older than a few million years had been studied. The year 1995 brought the revelation that a black-and-white kangaroo resembling a small panda lives atop the highest mountains of Indonesia. And today the discoveries continue: in 2003 a banded hare wallaby from South Australia was named—the only surviving specimen having lain unrecognised in a European museum for 150 years, while at least two New Guinean treekangaroos are yet to be classified and receive their scientific binomen. So rich is the seam tapped by researchers of kangaroo biology that fundamental discoveries continue to emerge at a rapid rate, indicating that, despite all we have learned, we are still at the beginning of understanding these animals and the country that shaped them.

  Although they are diverse, the living kangaroos are a mere shadow of the stupendous variety that once existed, for as recently as 50, 000 years ago there were over 100 kangaroo species, including some true giants. I first became aware of these ancient behemoths in the early 1970s when, working as a teenage volunteer at the Museum of Victoria, I was entrusted with cleaning the fossilised skeletons of extinct kangaroos that were twice the size of any living species. My studies later broadened to become a quest in time and space aimed at understanding the entire evolution of the kangaroos, from their obscure beginnings to the monsters of the ice age—great flesh-eating kangaroos and kangaroos with ape-like faces—that seemed to have stepped out of a Grimm fairytale.

  I’ve come to think of my work as piecing together an ever-changing jigsaw in which my fellow Australians—animals, plants and people—are all parts. I soon realised though, that most of the puzzle’s pieces remained undiscovered, and so I’ve searched for them in Australia’s deep history, wherein lie buried answers to fundamental questions such as where kangaroos come from, and why they hop. The fossils that shed light on these matters are often found in the remote outback, where floods fill Lake Eyre and droughts blight rangelands as extensive as western Europe. It’s a wondrous land—full of surprises and subtle beauty. Because the puzzle is still incomplete, the story I’m about to tell makes some leaps. But stick with me for the ride, even if it seems bumpy at times, for I’m sure you’ll find the journey worthwhile.

  The story begins in Melbourne in 1975, when I could, had I got off my unpunctured arse and roamed the bush instead of dreaming about thylacines, have discovered my very own kangaroo species—right there in Victoria. This is no small matter, for ten million years of evolution have given us only seventy living species; so to claim one as your own is qu
ite an achievement. Neil Armstrong might have walked on the moon by 1975, but East Gippsland’s long-footed potoroo (Potorous longipes) remained beyond human knowing. Indeed the creature was not formally described (by Victorian government scientists) until 1980. One of the first specimens discovered was lying dead on the side of a road just a few hours’ drive from 20 Rose Street, Sandringham, where I lay a-turning at night, a teenager restless for adventure.

  1

  A Failed

  Circumnavigation

  Were it not for museums and their volunteer programs I probably would have become a schoolteacher, my year-12 scorecard having shattered my aspirations of a career in biology. La Trobe University, a newly established institution in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, accepted me to study humanities, and I enrolled in early 1974 because nothing else came to mind. I tried to fit some basic biology in alongside studies of Greek tragedy and the fate of the Portuguese seaborne empire, but the early starting times of science lectures proved a fatal impediment to an eighteen-year-old in his first year of independent living. Even withdrawing from the course proved beyond my organisational ability, and when I awoke on the day of the final Zoology 101 exams with the sun high in the sky, I knew that I had failed science with the lowest mark possible.

  Specifically, it was a tall, blond Californian with a Mennonite-style beard named Dr Thomas Rich, who had just moved to Australia to take up a curatorship in vertebrate palaeontology at the Museum of Victoria, who sustained my slender hopes for a career in science. I first met Tom while I was in high school, and he did not care that I was a failure in the formal curriculum, but instead gave me his time so that I could learn a little, informally, about palaeontology. Early on he told me that, were I lucky enough to embark upon a career in palaeontology I had to have the will to fail, which was his way of saying that when all looks hopeless you just have to plough on. It was a valuable lesson, and without it I hate to think of where I would be today.