Country

by Tim Flannery

  After weeks of searching Tom found our first fossil, a bone reduced by wind and weather to a pile of rubble, its fragments scattered over a hundred square metres of wash-out. We diligently gathered up the splinters and spent the evenings piecing them together so that by the time we left we had assembled most of the shoulder blade of a huge sauropod—one of the long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs.

  We had been eating out of tins for weeks when the team made a deputation to Charlie to sell us some meat. His shaded eyes peered at us from under his broad-brimmed hat as he laconically asked, ‘What cuts do you want?’ Tom asked for fillet, but when Alan Charig, with his impeccable English accent, said that a bit of liver might be nice, the slightest smile flickered across Charlie’s weatherbeaten face. He turned to me and to the youngest Pom, David Norman. ‘You two fellas come with me.’

  I was relegated to the back of the utility as we bounced towards a group of grazing steers. We stopped around fifty metres from the herd and the barrel of a rifle appeared from the driver’s side window. Bang!

  A white-faced steer fell to the ground, blood spurting from its forehead. The gun retracted as the remaining cattle ambled off, not at all alarmed. Charlie opened the door and strode towards the fallen beast, a large knife in his hands. David was aghast, for like me he was a city boy who had eaten innumerable steaks yet never seen a steer die. But things became much worse when the animal rose unsteadily to its feet and lurched a few steps, blood pouring from the bullet-hole in its head.

  Charlie ran at it from behind and expertly slit its throat before riding the dying beast into the dust. Within moments he was butchering it, its skin becoming a ground sheet to keep the cuts clean. As we helped load the meat onto the tray, Charlie passed me a long strip of scotch fillet. Then he emerged from behind the ute with the liver. The bloody, purple organ seemed a metre across. David turned a more awful shade of green as he accepted the offering and laid it in the back. When we arrived at the shed, our British colleagues went off the idea of offal, causing the barbecued fillet to become somewhat finely divided.

  After this experience I began to think about meat-eating and animal rights in quite a different way. Charlie must have frequently slaughtered a beast to feed workers and family, and his botched shooting was surely a rare embarrassment. Was the fate of that steer, I wondered, any worse than that of those taken to an abattoir for slaughter? Its end was, I suspect, significantly less painful and traumatic than the slaughterhouse-bound majority, for the creature went from calm grazing to the stillness of death in a few seconds, avoiding the round-up, transportation by road and queueing before the slaughterer at an abattoir.

  Would it not be morally preferable to avoid eating meat? What, then, would become of the outback, which is unsuitable for agriculture? Without industry no one would live there and manage the land, so central Australia would become a vast degraded reservoir of feral animals, in which native species and introduced ones alike would, in drought, suffer and die by the million.

  Care for our ecology must underpin everything we do, for without a viable ecosystem humans and animals will not survive. And sometimes, in order to stabilise the environment that we have so badly damaged, it is necessary to kill and to cause suffering. Just think of the mass death and pain of rabbits caused by myxomatosis or calicivirus. We must, of course, seek to minimise that suffering in every way we can; but we must also be willing to face the difficult decisions that are inherent in our role as the most powerful force in the environment. That is why I think people who kill their own meat, in as humane a way as possible, are the most moral of us all. In doing so they develop the understanding, courage and compassion for life that are fundamental requirements of the ‘decent’ person, things that those of us who receive our meat in plastic trays have little opportunity to achieve. It is as if we are inhabitants of a great feedlot—albeit an urban one—which robs us of full control over our lives, in particular our consumption of energy, water, food and material goods. Worse, it compromises our morality.

  After a month of intense effort Tom and I had found only four dinosaur bones, three of which were mere fragments. Tom was particularly disappointed that we had failed to find even a rock type that looked as if it might yield fossil mammals. And the only living marsupials we saw in the area were euros and red kangaroos, the latter only glimpsed when bounding across the plains. It was around the time I was admiring them that the secret of this animal’s effortless locomotion was being investigated—not on Australia’s inland plains, but in a laboratory in faraway Harvard University.

  8

  The Mystery of Hopping

  The disastrous wreck of the Dutch vessel Batavia on the Abrolhos Islands off Western Australia in 1629 provided the first opportunity for Europeans to observe a member of the kangaroo family. Captain saw large numbers of creatures he described as ‘cats’ on the forlorn islands where the shipwrecked mariners sought refuge. But they were strange cats, for their hind legs were ‘upwards of half an ell in length [about half a metre], and it walks on these only, on the flat of the heavy part of the leg, so that it does not run fast.’ These creatures were tammar wallabies (Notamacropus eugenii), smaller relatives of the great red and grey kangaroos, and Pelsaert’s appraisal of the wallaby hind-leg is quite accurate, leaving no doubt as to the identity of its owner, yet it seems that the tammars never hopped in Pelsaert’s presence, or moved rapidly at all. The Dutch would surely have welcomed the five to ten kilograms of meat that each wallaby offered, so why did the creatures not flee as they do best–by hopping away? Perhaps after 10,000 years of isolation on their arid island, where the only predators were eagles, they failed to perceive the danger that the Dutch represented.

  Whatever the case, had Pelsaert observed his ‘cats’ more closely, he would have seen something to make any shipwrecked sailor envious—the creatures can drink saltwater. This means that tammar wallabies remain fit and healthy, even reproducing when they have nothing to eat but dry food, so long as they can sip from the briny. They therefore thrive on arid isles from the Abrolhos to Kangaroo Island.

  The Dutchman may have been further astonished had he known that, like horses, tammars share a common birthday, for the great majority enter the world in late January. The tammar is one of the few species of kangaroo to have modified its ancestral reproductive pattern to become a seasonal breeder. The embryos emerge from suspended animation around the summer solstice (22 December) and are born a month later, ensuring that grass greened by winter rains is available to them when they emerge from the pouch in another eight to nine months.

  By the seventeenth century, Dutch mariners had recorded the existence of both quokkas and tammars, but it was not until Dutch artist Cornelis de Bruin encountered a member of the kangaroo family that the world received an accurate description. The year was around 1700, and the location exotic—a colonial garden on the island of Java. He had been invited to visit the governor-general of the Dutch East Indies at his country abode, and there observed an animal he called ‘filander’, a corruption from the Malay ‘pelandok Arou’. Judging from de Bruin’s illustration, the creature was the Aru Islands pademelon (Thylogale brunii) which also inhabits southern New Guinea. The transplanted colony was thriving, and enjoyed:

  full freedom, running with some rabbits which have their burrows under a little hillock encircled by a fence. The Filander, which has hind-limbs much longer than the fore, is nearly the size of, and possesses nearly the same form as, a large rabbit… but the most extraordinary circumstance is that the female has a bag-like opening in the belly into which the young enter, even when they have attained a considerable size. They are often seen with head and neck thrust out of this bag; however, when the mother is running the young are not visible but keep to the bottom of the pouch.

  The wallabies were breeding well in exile, for whenever the governor held a feast, his tables ‘groaned under the weight of the Aroe rabbits’.

  It was not until James Cook led his nation’s first major sci
entific expedition, which in 1770 charted Australia’s east coast, that a true appreciation of hopping was gained by the Europeans. But it fell to Dr Terrence Dawson to unlock the deep mysteries of hopping. In his 1995 publication Kangaroos: The Biology of the Largest Marsupials he writes that as a young researcher at Harvard people expected him to know things about kangaroos which neither he nor anyone else then understood. Dawson decided to carry out a thorough investigation into the seemingly obvious—how and why kangaroos hop. His main tools were a treadmill, a few red kangaroos which had been brought to Boston and trained to hop on it, and a battery of devices to measure oxygen consumption, muscle effort and heart rate in the gymnastic marsupials.

  What he discovered was amazing. Hopping at medium speeds (15 to 40 kmh), Dawson and his colleagues concluded, is the most efficient means of locomotion ever evolved by a land-bound creature. Much of the energy expended in hopping is saved in the tendons of the legs, which act like the springs in pogo sticks, storing the power of each bound and releasing it to assist with the next. The heavy tail also stores energy as well as acting as a balance. Later studies by other researchers demonstrated that even more energy is saved by the action of the gut, which moves like a piston with each hop, emptying and filling the lungs and thus saving the effort of breathing.

  More recent research by Dawson and his students has uncovered further remarkable aspects of the marsupial metabolism. The heart of the red kangaroo is twice the size of that of a similar sized placental mammal, such as a deer, and when at rest it beats only half as often, thus saving energy. But when at work it can beat up to 60 per cent faster, allowing for a massive sustained output when required. The tail is also prodigiously powerful, exerting as much force as it pushes a roo along at low speeds (less than 6 kmh) as both human legs do when walking.

  The origin of the kangaroos was very much on my mind when, in late 1984, I got my first real job. Following my doctorate I had been appointed to the mammal section of the Australian Museum in Sydney, and a phone call from Dr Alex Ritchie, curator of fossils, soon brought an exciting discovery. ‘There’s something here you really must see,’ he blurted out in his brogue, before giving me the address of a nearby motel. Alex opened the door to reveal a suntanned opal miner and, behind him, spread out over the bed, were hundreds of opal fossils.

  In opal fossils we see nature’s rubbish transformed into precious gems. No one fully understands how a shell, piece of wood or bone is turned into opal, but such fossils are found only in a few locations in New South Wales and South Australia. At these special sites, miners dig into sediments that were laid down in or beside the inland sea, and at depths of up to twenty metres they find shells, dinosaur bones and other fossils that flash with red, green and blue. The opal fossils on the bed had been brought to the museum for sale, and among the usual clamshells, fragments of turtle carapace and other bones, one stood out.

  It was a jawbone that had once belonged to a creature the size of a cat, and it still bore three teeth. It was a magnificent specimen—as much a jewel as a scientific treasure, for through the flashes of opalescence that emanated from it one could see the internal structure of the bone, which seemed to have been replaced by a beautifully tinted glass. Through this the roots of the teeth and the channels that once conducted nerves and blood vessels could be seen. It was as if, after being buried, the entire bone had been delicately etched away, leaving a void into which the opal had been deposited. Yet so delicate was the process that even fine films of clay, such as those surrounding the tooth roots, were left in place as the opal formed around them.

  The jaw represented a breakthrough, for it was around 110 million years old—four times as old as any mammal ever discovered in Australia. But what sort of mammal was it? I had half expected the bone to be from an ancient marsupial—perhaps a distant relative of the kangaroo—but it was in fact the fossil jaw of an ancient platypus. In 1985 the jaw, along with other opalised fossils, was purchased by the Australian Museum for $80,000. The news caused quite a stir among the opal miners at Lightning Ridge and I hoped that more fossils would be forthcoming. Within days I received a phone call from an old miner who announced in a conspiratorial whisper that he had located the complete skeleton of a ten-metre-long dinosaur on his claim. Such a specimen, if preserved in opal, would be one of the most important fossils ever found, and would be worth millions of dollars. I was thrilled at this news and was mentally making arrangements for an impromptu trip out west when he said, ‘Yep, I’ve outlined him perfectly on the surface with stones.’ After some probing it emerged that the ‘skeleton’ was still buried fifteen metres underground, and divining its presence had been quite a business. The caller told me that he had been left in charge of his son’s electrical store, who had urgent business interstate. This unprecedented opportunity had allowed the old tinkerer to construct a fossil-detecting apparatus consisting of a large head-frame surrounded by magnets and an electrical current supplied by an array of batteries. The maker of this outlandish device had wandered the scrub for days before making his grand discovery.

  Some scepticism must have crept into my voice because the caller suddenly volunteered, ‘I can find out anything with this machine, you know. I can tell yer how much money yer have in yer wallet right now!’

  Seizing on this assertion, and remembering that I had not been to the bank, I asked, ‘All right, how much is in it then?’

  After several minutes fumbling he replied, ‘Son, the signal’s too weak from here. Better if you come out and look at the dinosaur, and then I’ll tell yer.’

  A decade later, in 1994, another opalised mammal jaw was unearthed in the area, providing a plausible excuse for a visit to Lightning Ridge. This second jaw, which was also around 110 million years old, had molars that resembled miniature hot-cross buns. After exhaustive comparisons I concluded that it too had belonged to a platypus-like creature, but one adapted to eating hard-shelled food such as clams. Perhaps it was Australia’s answer to the sea otter, although pre-dating that creature by 100 million years.

  The specimen had been found by a schoolteacher who spent his spare time chasing opal underground. He had been careful to recover any fossils he found during his work, and was happy for me to visit him. His camp was an eye-opener to the miner’s way of life, consisting of no more than a few swags and utensils around a large fire. Underground, though, was a different story. The shaft leading to the opal-bearing layer was only a metre wide, and a long series of rusting, linked ladders, disappearing into the gloom, hung from one side. After descending around twenty metres the shaft opened out into a spacious cavern where a digging machine, blower and electrical cables lay.

  All around the walls I could see mud from the margin of the inland sea, with ripple marks and tiny channels still intact, and here and there the dull glint of opal. This was where the fossil had been unearthed. The teacher had spotted it in the wall of the mine when he and another man were clearing away clay with a jackhammer. The teacher had shouted for his mate to turn off the hammer to avoid damaging the specimen: his mate refused. He was there to dig opal, not fossils, he said, as he pointed the hammer at the priceless relic. After a brief tussle the teacher grabbed the specimen from the wall, snapping off both ends in the process. As a result we may never know if the creature had a bill like a living platypus, or just how the jaw articulated with the skull.

  For every precious fossil recovered at Lightning Ridge ten thousand must be lost to the digging machines and the tumblers that wash the opal dirt, in the process rolling priceless fossils of unknown creatures to nubbins.

  By 2001 my hopes of finding dinosaur-age ancestors of the kangaroos had all but vanished. So when a chance arose to pierce to the heart of the inland sea I travelled with different motives. I was by this time director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide and was preparing for a new exhibition of opalised fossils. The mayor of Coober Pedy, the leading opal-mining town in Australia, some 1300 kilometres west of Lightning Ridge, had invited me to
participate in their inaugural opal festival. It was an opportunity too good to miss as miners from across Australia were expected to attend.

  The drive from Adelaide to Coober Pedy takes about nine hours and crosses a stark transect from Australia’s green fringe to its dead heart. The stately river red gums and winter-green croplands drop away after Port Augusta, then mulga gives way to a scattering of saltbush. As one approaches Coober Pedy even this thin cover exhausts itself and all that is left is a panorama of broken rocks and blowing dust known as the Moon Plain. Once the floor of the inland sea, it is still littered with the debris of that past age and is a Mecca for palaeontologists. Coober Pedy supposedly means ‘white fellow in a hole’, and most residents live underground—the only sensible thing to do in such a place. The quality of the dwellings varies enormously; some are palatial, while others are but a drive in the side of a hill whose entrance is draped with a piece of burlap, which when swept aside reveals a dusty swag and a caravan stove. Some of the more basic homes are located far out in the distant opal fields, and when enjoying the hospitality of a miner living in such circumstances, I often wonder how they survive through the summer when for weeks on end the thermometer refuses to dive below the old century Fahrenheit mark. Fate can play cruel tricks on such men. One resident showed me where he had discovered $20,000 worth of opalised shells when enlarging his bedroom. He had been sleeping for decades with his head just inches away from the cache, often desperate for a dollar or two for food.