by Tim Flannery
This description is erroneous in almost every regard, confusing as it does east with west, the kangaroo’s food, its use of its limbs and, according to Banks at least, its culinary qualities. The botanically trained Banks made no progress in classifying the creature and, befuddled by Stubbs’ drawing and misleading caption, nor at first did anyone else. In an imaginative leap of his own, Europe’s leading zoologist, le Comte de
George Stubbs’ kangaroo illustration was based on a badly stuffed skin collected by Joseph Banks at the Endeavour River in 1770.
Buffon, postulated that it must be a gigantic rat, close to the jerboa or jumping rat of Africa. A Swiss naturalist then bestowed the name Jerboa gigantea (giant leaping rat). By the 1790s, however, these ratty affinities were beginning to be doubted by the eminent British naturalist George Shaw. Having access to better material, Shaw replaced the murine generic name Jerboa with Macropus, thus creating the binomen Macropus giganteus which remains the scientific name of the eastern grey kangaroo. Yet it took until 1816 for the marsupial affinities of the kangaroo to be definitively established.
Despite the immense excitement news of the creature aroused in the coffee shops of London, the physical evidence of its existence was neglected. No one, it seems, was much interested in any of the zoological specimens brought back in the Endeavour, and much of that priceless collection has been lost. Banks gave some of the material away (one kangaroo skull ended up with First Fleet surgeon John White), while the rest was sold at auction in 1806. A drawing of a kangaroo skull by Endeavour artist Sydney Parkinson has, however, survived. When it was examined by a biologist in the 1960s it caused quite a stir, for it clearly depicted the skull of a euro (Macropus robustus) rather than an eastern grey. The identification accords well with the otherwise baffling engraving by Stubbs, which depicts a creature with the short, curved claws of the euro on its toes, and with his description of a creature hopping ‘from rock to rock’ with its tail held at 90 degrees to its body, a behaviour characteristic of the euro and no other kangaroo.
The discovery had the potential to cause chaos in the scientific fraternity. Imagine the confusion if you were forced to swap the names of two favourite great-uncles—just remembering to call Cyril, Ernest and Ernest, Cyril—much less getting them to remember who was who—would have both you and them in despair. Changes in nomenclature are dreaded by everyone, but in the case of the grey kangaroo the day was saved through an unlikely agency.
The Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons is on the college’s first floor in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, and is packed with an astonishing array of specimens. Among the most popular exhibits are skeletons of the famous (including James Byrne aka the ‘Irish Giant’ who begged to be buried rather than anatomised), assorted midgets and the Elephant Man, all of whom jostle for space with lesser wonders, such as the skeletons of two Réunion Island solitaires (large white birds extinct since the seventeenth century), the pickled penis of a pox-struck sailor who repaired holes in his organ with whalebone, and the jaws of a wombat. But these are merely the relics of a far more wondrous compilation, for the collection was devastated by German bombs during World War II. Among the lost treasures were the twisted lower spine of Gideon Mantell, the discoverer of the first named dinosaurs (he suffered a terrible carriage accident), and the skull of a kangaroo brought back by the Endeavour, which was presumably purchased at auction in 1806 when Banks offered nearly 8000 lots of zoological specimens for sale. Its true identity would have remained a mystery had not someone photographed it. The surviving black-and-white prints reveal clearly that the skull was that of an eastern grey kangaroo, and this tenuous link was all that saved the species from a scientific name change.
If eighteenth-century scientists were confused as to the nature of the kangaroo, then the general public was positively baffled. The situation was not assisted by the antics of Dr Samuel Johnson, the compiler of the famous Dictionary. Soon after hearing of Banks’ discovery he took a tour of Scotland, and one dreary night in Inverness enlivened the conversation with news of the antipodean novelty. James Boswell recorded how, to the astonishment of the Caledonians, the near-blind doctor gathered his ponderous, scrofula-stricken body into an erect pose, ‘put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room’.
Confusion followed news of the wondrous kangaroo even to the shores of Botany Bay. Watkin Tench, a captain lieutenant on the First Fleet, describes what happened in 1788 when the ‘kangaroo’ first came to Sydney Cove:
Soon after our arrival at Port Jackson I was walking out near a place where I observed a party of Indians [Aborigines] busily employed in looking at some sheep in an enclosure, and repeatedly crying out ‘kangaroo’, ‘kangaroo’! As this seemed to afford them pleasure, I was willing to increase it by pointing out the horses and cows, which were at no great distance.
‘Kangaroo’ is a corruption of a word from the Guugu Yimidhirr language of the Cooktown area and is of uncertain origin; indeed, the confusion inherent in the act of an eighteenth-century European pointing into the distance, in the general direction of a fleeing marsupial, while making culturally specific inquiring gestures at an Aboriginal man, are considerable. At various times the word has been reputed to mean ‘I don’t know’, or ‘Bugger off’. It may even be the Guugu Yimidhirr name for the euro, further confounding (if that were possible) the association of the name Macropus giganteus with the eastern grey kangaroo. In any case, the word ‘kangaroo’ was Greek to the Eora people of Sydney Cove, whose language is as different from Guugu Yimidhirr as English is from Hindi. They quite sensibly assumed it was a whitefella word for any large animal except the dog—which they taught the whites was ‘dingo’.
Clarity, however, was coming. By 1791 Londoners could, for a mere shilling, satisfy themselves as to the nature of the beast by ogling a living specimen at a trunk-maker’s shop (No. 31) in the Haymarket. The creature had presumably been brought back aboard some returning First Fleet vessel, and was the first of many to make the migration. By the 1820s English kangaroos were so common that you could not have got a halfpenny for a peek since herds of the creatures, along with prolific flocks of emus, had been established at Windsor Great Park and other English estates.
Today, grey kangaroos have entirely lost their mystique. It probably doesn’t help that their name suggests the dullness of men in grey suits—and indeed the species remains common around Parliament House, Canberra—but as with some besuited humans, their dull exterior hides an impressive anatomy. An adult male eastern grey can outrun a greyhound or a horse, swim a mile and still have the energy to drown a harassing hound with its great hind-feet. They are superbly adapted to the well-watered eastern part of Australia, and like all marsupials are economical in their food intake. They are slow breeders, taking over eighteen months to wean their young (it takes a year for the red kangaroo), and are usually seasonal in their reproduction. But in the delicate matter of selecting the sex of their offspring the grey kangaroo shows astonishing discretion, for there is some evidence that females selectively rear daughters while they are young, and sons when they are older. The advantage the mother derives is a social one, for the bond between mothers and daughters is long-lasting and may benefit both. Sons, in contrast, wander to establish their own territory. Just how this trick is performed, however, is not yet understood.
Although eastern grey kangaroos moved westwards as stock watering points opened up, they are hopeless at coping with drought. Breeding ceases far earlier in a dry spell than with either euros or reds, and hundreds of eastern greys have been known to perish around a drying waterhole when good water and feed existed only kilometres away—something unthinkable for the red kangaroo.
Yet the eastern grey kangaroo is clearly doing something right, for as I learned when I prepared those skeletons at the Museum of Victoria, it belongs to a venerable lineage. The bones entrusted to me had
been discovered in one of the biggest quarries in the southern hemisphere—the Morwell open-cut coal mine in west Gippsland. Occasionally the machinery that scoops up the coal will encounter a patch of clay, the result of ancient fires when the coal was exposed at the surface. In the 1970s a machine operator scooping up this muck somehow spotted a bone. Investigations soon showed that complete skeletons embedded in the clay were preserved in such detail that the remains of tiny joeys could still be seen in the region of the pouch. And not just that, but around the bones impressions of skin, fur and even the ‘last meal’ of the creatures could be discerned, the stems as green as they day they were plucked!
Such preservation is extremely rare. Nothing like it has ever been discovered anywhere else in Australia. Further, studies indicated that the remains were at least two million years old, their astonishing preservation being due to the lack of oxygen in the mud that had accumulated in ponds in the burned-out coal seam. When I studied these fossils I found that in every detail except size (the Morwell animals would have been somewhat heavier), the fossils were identical to eastern grey kangaroos still living in Victoria. The similarity even went as far as the skin impressions—the hair follicle pattern was indistinguishable from that seen in leather made from the hide of eastern grey kangaroos, but very different from that of reds and euros. I would later discover that jawbones dating back about 4 million years did not differ from those of the living eastern grey kangaroos—evidence that eastern greys had existed long before red kangaroos, indeed, before even the mighty diprotodon and giant short-faced kangaroos of the ice age.
3
Quokkas, Euros and Stinkers
After passing South Australia’s Coorong on that motorcycle journey in 1975, stinkers and their chocolate females were the only grey kangaroos I saw. On nearing Perth a more experienced kangaroo watcher might have detected a subtle change in the animal—a slight lightening of the fur accompanied by a distinct widening of the foot—a sign that the boundary between the mallee subspecies of western grey (Macropus fuliginosus melanops), and the great southwestern kangaroo (Macropus fuliginosus ocydromus) has been crossed. If I had diligently hacked a foot from every road-killed kangaroo I came across on that journey and noted its age and sex, I might have been of service to science. That is because no one has yet clearly established the distribution of the mallee grey and the southwestern grey, nor determined whether these varieties intergrade or abut as distinct communities. This is a question of vital biological significance, for if they abut they may be separate species, rather than mere subspecies.
A few hundred kilometres east of Perth a sharp change in vegetation occurs. The mallee, which has dominated the landscape ever since leaving the Nullarbor, gives way to kwongan—scruffy-looking heath-land where every plant seems to belong to a different species, and it is this boundary that may account for the distribution of the subspecies of grey kangaroos.
In 1975 when we stopped to examine the kwongan, venomous olive dugites with fine black spots slithered among the flowering kangaroo paws, whose brilliant green and red flowerheads shone like beacons, while every now and then a small tree smothered in orange-yellow flowers stood out above the scrub. This was the Western Australian Christmas bush (Nuytsia floribunda), which flowers with surprising vitality in the heat of the Western Australian summer. Only later would I learn the reason for this—it does not fuel its nectar flow with its own water but with that stolen from neighbouring plants, whose roots it taps with spigot-like structures.
By the time we were coasting down the Darling Escarpment into Perth the clutch on Bill’s bike had begun to slip ominously. Back then Guzzis had a six-stud clutch—the Achilles heel of an otherwise immortal machine. Needing a replacement, we located the only Moto Guzzi dealer in the city, a man named Stolarski. But how to carry out extensive repairs with our slender budgets? Stolarski, it turned out, was the salt of the earth. Perhaps he remembered his own youth spent on motorbikes, for he suggested that we buy the spare parts and use his workshop and tools to replace the clutch ourselves. We quickly set about unbolting the gearbox and removing the clapped-out clutch plate.
Moto Guzzis are heavy bikes, weighing over 200 kilograms, and their stands consist of a band of metal with a thin keel running along its underside. We were black with oil and grease by the time I eased the repaired bike off its stand, in the process crushing my big toe between the metal keel and the concrete floor. As Stolarski watched me hop around the workshop, blood flowing from my running shoe, he reached for a huge spanner and bashed it against his right shin. ‘Crushed your toe, eh? That’s nothing,’ he said, as he hoisted his trousers to reveal a false leg. ‘I lost this in a racing accident years ago.’
A none-too-pleased matron at casualty screeched at me not to touch the walls, insisting I wash my filthy hands if I wanted to be examined. An X-ray revealed no broken bones, so a few days’ rest and the toe would repair itself. As Bill and I had no money there was only one thing for it: we left the bikes at ever-patient Stolarski’s and headed for Rottnest Island to sleep rough until the flesh healed. Perhaps we would find oysters and fish.
Rottnest is a low, limestone island lying a few kilometres off the mouth of the Swan River and has long been a holiday playground for the citizens of Perth. Bill’s parents had honeymooned there and apart from an unfortunate incident involving Bill’s dad snoring open-mouthed on the beach and a defecating seagull with a crackshot aim, they had come away with wonderful memories. But I was at best a hobbler, and we soon discovered that non-paying campers were expressly forbidden by law. It was a bleak place to try to hide, for there were few thickets and the best I could do was to hop to a clump of melaleuca bushes near the beach. There we set up camp and watched the army training a hundred metres away.
That night I was awoken by a sharp thump by my head. Fearing that our hideout had been discovered I peered up cautiously to see two beady eyes observing me at close range. It was a quokka (Setonix brachyurus), a member of the kangaroo family for which the island is famous. These cat-sized creatures had constructed a quokka highway under our bush, and my body lay right across it. Throughout the night these compact, brown wallabies, with their trusting faces and short tails, thumped the ground in alarm as they confronted the unexpected obstacle.
At the time I saw quokkas in 1975, the species was at the nadir of its existence. They had all but vanished from the mainland, their last secure strongholds being Garden Island and nearby Rottnest. They were one of the first Australian species to be described by Europeans. The Dutch navigator Samuel Volckertzoon landed on an island in 1658 and described wild cats, with ‘pouches below their throats into which one could put one’s hand, without being able to understand to what end nature had created the animal like this’. In 1696 another Dutch navigator believed the animals were a kind of large rat, and named the place Rats-nest Island (now Rottnest). Another claim to fame is more recent, dating to the 1950s when investigation of the quokka’s reproductive system led to the discovery of a phenomenon known as embryonic quiescence. This remarkable strategy, whereby mothers can suspend the growth of their embryos for up to a year, has proved to be widespread among kangaroos, and is one of the key factors in their success; but more of that later.
After a few days of saltwater bathing had done its best for my mangled toe, Bill and I returned to our bikes, intent on resuming our circumnavigation. We headed north, up the west coast of the continent. The landscape beyond Shark Bay was hallucinogenic—blood-red, yellow and white mesas that, in the heat-haze of summer, hovered above the horizon. With the stifling heat and monotone rhythm of the V-twin engines other sounds became muted, and we were soon gliding along in an ethereal world of shimmering, illusory shapes and colours, like satellites through space.
We drove past the Murchison District in Western Australia’s mid-north without giving the place a moment’s thought. It would be almost a quarter of a century before I would have another chance to explore it.
In 1996 by way of a letter fr
om Sandy McTaggart, secretary of the Murchison District Sports and Shooters Association, asking if I would address their annual general meeting. When I phoned Sandy to find out more he mentioned the other organisers, Jock McSporran and Muggon Bill. The names had me wondering if this was an elaborate practical joke, but then Sandy told me that Mount Narryer lay on his property, and I was hooked. Mount Narryer is home to some of the oldest known rocks on our planet—4.2-billion-year-old zircons.
The Murchison sportsmen and shooters hold their annual meeting in spring, when for three weeks their country is transformed into a tech-nicolour carpet of daisies and other wildflowers. As I drove up the Butcher’s Track towards Sandy’s homestead, drifts of paper daisies painted the roadsides pink, yellow and white. As beautiful as this was, it formed at best a threadbare carpet that could not hide the degraded condition of the land. This was marginal sheep country, and overgrazing had reduced much of it to eroded sand and clay, while foxes and goats were present in such plague proportions that even the rabbits seemed under threat of extermination. I later discovered that dingoes had been hunted out well beyond the dog fence, which in this area was abandoned in 1952. The dog fence is a barrier designed to stop dingoes moving into the agricultural and sheep districts. Cattle can graze outside the fence, for cows are generally too large to be worried by dingoes. Sheep and dingoes, however, do not mix, for a dingo can kill hundreds of sheep in short order, destroying a grazier’s livelihood in a single night. But here, in the absence of Australia’s top predator, mangy, half-starved foxes and goats had increased almost unchecked.