by Tim Flannery
I had travelled to Coober Pedy with Ben Kear, a doctoral student who was studying the reptilian giants that thrived in Australia’s ancient inland sea. He told me the stones that lay strewn so thick across the Moon Plain had come from far and wide—some as far afield as Cobar, while others hailed from the Gawler Ranges and Broken Hill, hundreds of kilometres to the south and east. How had they got here? Some, it transpired, bore unmistakable evidence of transport by ice. The inland sea that in my imagination was a tropical paradise, was at times a field of icebergs spawned from great glaciers that ringed its southern margin. One hundred and twenty million years ago Coober Pedy was almost over the South Pole—a strange fate you might think for a place destined to lie at the baking heart of Australia.
As part of the festival, Ben and I had offered to conduct a fossil identification workshop for miners. Most specimens brought in were of limited palaeontological interest—opalised driftwood mostly, from the stunted forests that grew around the inland sea. A few very important specimens, however, did turn up, among them a magnificent vertebral column of an ichthyosaur preserved in precious opal. The specimen was famous across Australia’s opal fields, and I was delighted when the miner offered to lend it to the South Australian Museum. He said that ever since he had migrated from Croatia many years ago, Australia had been good to him and he wanted to give something back.
It became obvious that some of the miners had a ‘colourful’ past. Many were known only by their Christian name or nickname, and with the coming of the goods and services tax (GST) they were feeling uncomfortable. A representative of the Australian Taxation Office was present at the festival to explain this new tax. To a packed house he stated that, by virtue of their driver’s licence, passport or vehicle registration, they were all known to the government. It was no use trying to hide, for the taxman would find them, wherever they were. In response to this chilling news one opal buyer stood and said that he supposed it was all right to record his customers by the names they gave him, for he had purchased $200,000 worth of opal from Adolf Hitler last week, and $250,000 from Attila the Hun the week before that. The tax man was not fazed, replying simply that where ‘reasonable suspicion existed’ the buyer was duty-bound to record Mr Hitler’s car registration number and pass it on to the tax office. A sustained silence reigned thereafter, during which an old miner sitting next to me whispered, ‘There’s many an uncapped shaft around here. That bastard will be lucky to get out of town alive!’
The next day an elderly miner arrived at our workshop. From the tips of his shoes to the end of his long scraggly beard he was stained the orange colour of desert dust, and he glanced around conspiratorially before delving into his pocket to retrieve a small vial of water, such as miners keep their treasures in. ‘What do you make of this?’ he said as he slipped it into my hand. Peer as I might I could make out nothing in the liquid but a few specks of dust. After a prolonged silence he said, very deliberately, ‘It’s an opalised worm jaw, and the last time I showed it to anyone they offered me five thousand dollars for it. How much will the museum pay?’ The old fellow looked excitable, and I feared making an insulting offer.
‘Well, it’s a fascinating specimen,’ I said, sucking my teeth and buying time. ‘The opal value must be quite extraordinary—five thousand dollars at least—but our interest is fossils, and the fossil value of this particular worm’s jaw is limited.’
Without a moment’s hesitation the miner snatched back his precious vial and, glaring at me, slunk away.
My only official duty was to greet the opal festival parade as it arrived at the showground, and kiss the opal queen. My first glimpse of that august person came at 8 am—the mercury rising sharply—atop an enormous flatbed truck which ground its way at walking pace up the main street towards the showgrounds. She was a lady of generous proportions, resplendent in fishnet stockings, very short miniskirt, low-cut blouse and silver tiara. Her throne was an aged couch short on stuffing, and exposing several springs. Then came the drag-racing fraternity, whose display consisted of a defunct dragster that had been set alight, which was towed by an only slightly less disreputable vehicle. The fire brigade followed, playing their hoses wherever things seemed to be getting too hot. Most of the town brought up the rear, led by ‘Bad and Ugly’ a pair of identically dressed humans of indeterminate sex wearing brown paper bags over their heads and on which their names were written in texta. As the procession spilled into the showground it disrupted the beer-belly competition; the contestants, even at the last minute, were desperately trying to put on form.
There were camel rides, sideshows and an opal booth. The place was packed, including many Aborigines from outlying settlements. It seemed that everyone was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, moleskin trousers and R. M. Williams boots. And it was there, in that great melting pot, where a goodly contingent of people from nowhere mixed with Croatian miners, Greeks, Italians and indigenes, that I declared the festival open; but everyone was having far too good a time to take notice of anything I said.
I enjoyed immensely my work with the opal miners, but as far as the evolution of kangaroos went, my work in Queensland, Lightning Ridge and Coober Pedy had turned up no leads. It was in more recent sediments, preserved in other regions and dating to the last 30 million years, that answers would be found.
9
The Brightest Place on Earth
From space the dazzling white salt-crust of South Australia’s Lake Frome is said to be the brightest spot on Earth. Lying just east of the Flinders Ranges, the lake occupies a sunken region of saltpans and sand dunes unknown to most Australians, for it is dwarfed in both reputation and size by its westerly neighbour, Lake Eyre. But the Frome Basin is important, for here, through a process of wetting, drying and relentlessly blowing wind, the lakes have eaten deep into rocks laid down 20 to 40 million years ago—the middle of the Cainozoic era, the age of mammals.
Fresh outcrops of fossil-bearing rocks in the Frome Basin are the brightest shade of green to be seen in that arid region, and the fossils of moisture-loving creatures entombed there testify to an inland that was once verdant. That vanished landscape was a place I very much needed to understand, for I suspected that it was in some superannuated Centralian rainforest that kangaroos took their first hop.
The opportunity to visit came in the late 1970s courtesy of Tom Rich, who was mounting an expedition to Lake Tarkarooloo—one of the smaller salt lakes in the region, and the location of a previous dig. I had begun my Masters studies in geology, while Tom was pursuing his dream of finding mammals from the age of dinosaurs. Things were going badly on that front, however, and Tom felt an obligation to his employer, the Museum of Victoria, and to his country of adoption, to provide something more than his arid wanderings in Mesozoic-aged rocks had yielded. Working on the oldest mammal-bearing sediments then known in Australia would at least provide some public benefit, Tom believed, so he planned several extended periods of field work there.
Our expedition consisted of half a dozen volunteers packed into two Land Rovers, and we drove from Melbourne via Broken Hill through a countryside that had received heavy rains. On leaving the highway and entering the maze of dirt tracks that led to the lake we found ourselves in a sort of Eden. Immense fields of daisies blanketed the sandy soil, filling each swale from horizon to horizon with bright golden flowers, while the dune crests were a great mass of purple. Meandering lines of gold and purple as far as the eye could see were punctuated only by skeletal mulgas, whose deep roots would not taste the slowly percolating water for months to come, and which served to remind us of the usual order of things out here.
It seemed a violation to drive or walk over that carpet of blooms, for you crushed delicate flowers and stems at every step. And the scent of desert dust was replaced with a sweet smell of nectar and young, green growth—a heady perfume that became overwhelming as evening approached. Instead of retiring to bed with the travel-weary on our first night, something drew me into the darkening desert. Cross
ing one dune after another, with the light of the campfire left far behind, the sky seemed so vast and studded with stars that my mind could liken it only to a great city at night seen from the air. The stars sparkled with such vitality that you felt you could reach out and touch them, and the dizzying, sweet night-scent of a billion daisies had reached fever pitch, a billion sexual organs frantically courting a moth to their delicate stamens before the drying soil shrivelled them, robbing them of their fertility. But moths—indeed insects of any sort—were rare on that still night, for too brief a time had elapsed following the rains for them to migrate or complete their life cycle.
At first I did not notice the moon breach the horizon at my back. But as I watched it rise in the sky I witnessed a miracle in the golden fields before me. Each gilded flowerhead was turning its face to the light of the moon, until they formed a field of shimmering gold, the twice-reflected light making it seem as if the land was illuminated from below. I could not think of sleep, so I lay down among the fleshy young daisies, embraced by their scent and the still-warm air, to watch the watchers as they tracked the great silver orb on her steady journey to the far horizon.
You can live a lifetime in the Centre and never see a really big wet. The one in 1974 had filled Lake Eyre by dumping enough rain to nourish a rainforest, an event never before witnessed in living memory. But wets, both great and small, are just bounteous punctuation marks of uncertain frequency and duration in a country that nine years out of ten can stifle all but the most superbly adapted desert specialists. On that trip all I saw of red kangaroos were piles of bleached foot-bones discarded by roo shooters at gates, for the great reds that flourish in that area had dispersed far and wide to feast on the green pick.
A big male red kangaroo can exceed ninety kilograms, and there is barely an ounce of fat on his frame. As red as the sands of the Centre (the female is a smoky blue-grey—almost the colour of galahs’ wings), he is the creature most people conjure up with the word ‘kangaroo’. He may stand taller than you, and look down his long Roman nose at you with large brown eyes, through lashes whose length and beauty would make a diva envious. The musculature of his upper body, visible through the fine, pale fur, is that of a wrestler, while the span of his hands with their five long, sharp claws, may far exceed your own. His lower body is the essence of elegance, his long, slender legs looking almost surreal as he props himself on toes and tail-tip. If attacked, he will defend himself—with his back to a tree if possible, by grappling you close, then kicking out with both feet while balanced on his tail.
But the real miracle of the red kangaroo is more difficult to see, for the species is built to endure the erratic rhythms of the inland, when nothing can be wasted and no opportunity missed. Perhaps because of their need to travel great distances reds are not very social animals, living in smaller groups than other plains-dwelling species. But this self-reliance pays off when somehow, in the vastness of the inland, they detect that rain has fallen. Then they will move, even from an area that they have lived in all of their life, to the invisible green feast beyond the horizon. With their no-nonsense approach to life they have also dispensed with elaborate courtship. Their preliminaries to mating are rudimentary even by kangaroo standards, consisting of a golden shower (the female urinates on the male’s nose), and some sniffing and pawing of the female’s tail-base by the male. She favours the largest and most powerful mate she can find, and the pair copulate just once (as opposed to the repeated efforts of other kangaroos) for a brief ten to fifteen minutes.
As if they have stripped down every aspect of their existence in pursuit of flexibility and rapid growth, this business-like approach to life continues after conception. The very day she gives birth, the female red kangaroo will eject her older joey (if she has one) permanently from the pouch, and copulate so she can conceive again. Except in the most severe drought the female is never without a pouch-young. Most of her babies, however, never reach maturity, for unless conditions are favourable there is insufficient milk to feed the growing joey after it is more than a few months old. If no rain falls it is sacrificed and the next joey takes its place. The constant replacement of her growing young by the mother red kangaroo may seem brutal, but consider the sheer efficiency of this system compared with our own. Human conception is often the business of many months, while gestation takes nine months and lactation (in traditional societies) three to four years. Droughts would have come and gone, and come again, before our species had completed one reproductive cycle.
If the young red kangaroo gets past this critical juncture it grows rapidly, making its first forays from the safety of the pouch 100 days in advance of its grey-kangaroo cousins, and is weaned at about twelve months rather than eighteen months as with the grey. Having reached independence, however, the rush is over. Reds reach sexual maturity at the same age as other kangaroos, and may live longer. The oldest kangaroo on record is a male red who was tagged when fully grown in western New South Wales, and shot twenty-seven years later and over 300 kilometres away in South Australia. In effect the life of the red kangaroo mimics the rhythms of the inland; they rush to independence in the brief good season, but then live long enough to see another great wet that will carry their line onwards.
The adult red displays other abilities that have ensured its survival. An adult male is not bothered by a single dingo, for he can outrun a dog or even a horse, and if caught is likely to beat the wild dog in a fight. Nor does competition for food in a drought usually worry them, for they can go without drinking far longer than any domestic stock, allowing them to feed over a wider area. Their food requirements, furthermore, are not overly demanding: a red kangaroo thrives on two-thirds the food required by a similar-sized sheep, and can get by with even less in a dry summer. At such times reds can eat saltbush without becoming too thirsty, and they can avoid the need to urinate by recycling urea through their saliva and into their stomachs, where it is converted into food. And then, if distant rain falls, they will all move off, leaving grey kangaroos and sheep alike to perish around shrinking and depleted waterholes, to return to the field of bones when the drought has broken.
An absence of older fossils indicates that the red kangaroo sprang into existence in the past million years. There is no doubt that it is closely related to the antilopine kangaroo (Macropus antilopinus) of Australia’s tropical north, and may have developed from some isolated population of antilopines living on the desert margins. An Australia without reds is unimaginable, but weather shifts predicted for the continent as a result of global climate change offer a sobering reminder of how delicate the balance of life is. Many climatologists calculate that over this century the number of very hot days will increase dramatically, as will the length and severity of droughts. At the same time, rainfall over much of southern Australia will decrease—perhaps by as much as 40 per cent. Red kangaroos are creatures born of the climatic oscillations that characterise Australia, but extreme swings in climate could have disastrous consequences, for reds rely on the odd good year to replenish their numbers, and if these become too widely spaced the population will crash.
The year I first visited the Frome Basin, 1978, was a good one for reds, with few young perishing that season. Yet the ground around the lake was still parched and barren. We chose to camp beside a clump of tortured-looking coolibahs, the only shade in the area. The area that Tom intended to work (‘Tom O’s Quarry’) was around ten kilometres from the camp, so each morning we would make lunch and drive to the site. The place was a couple of knee-deep holes a few metres across, located beside a dry salt lake, itself set in a horizontal landscape of salt scalds, samphire and grey-green clay. We would sit there scratching cautiously at the sides of the excavation, hoping to uncover some treasure—maybe the jawbone of some long-extinct koala. But such finds are as rare as gold nuggets, and a succession of the more common fossil fishbones, crocodile teeth and turtle shell fragments provided the only excitement for days on end.
By 10 am the sun had
heated the air in the pits to uncomfortable levels, and at 11 we would rise to brush the dust, salt and mud from our skin and break for a cup of tea. It was then that we would confront the full force of those undersized devils of the outback, Musca vetustissima (in Latin ‘most hairy fly’), aka the bush fly. It is much like the house fly but smaller, more persistent and far fonder of orifices—each time any of us opened our mouths to speak, the son of a maggot born on a dungheap would dart inside. Because we were host to hundreds if not thousands of these irritants, we seemed destined to swallow a fair proportion of the horde each day. Although it is possible that some entomologist actually counted the hairs on the bush fly to ensure the appropriateness of its Latin name, it seems far more likely that instead they merely estimated its hirsuteness from the torturous tickling that these licorice-tinctured insects inflict on the oesophagus.
Tom was well prepared for this particular torment, for he had recently returned from Saudi Arabia, where he had acquired the full Bedouin outfit of thobe and gutra. He was much taken with the Arabs and their way of life (though references to Noah and the flood made his search for dinosaur bones a touchy subject) and he saw nothing wrong with donning the white thobe, which stretched from neck to ankle, nor wrapping his head in the red-and-white checked fabric known as the gutra. Thus swaddled, Tom sat unperturbed, immune to heat and flies alike as he scratched for enlightenment in the quarries of Tarkarooloo, with only his American accent betraying him as a newcomer to Arabia Deserta.
After a week of unproductive torment the clouds grew dark and threatening and the wind began to gust. Tom decided that it was time for us pansies to return to camp. He had, however, just discovered two splendid fossilised turtle carapaces which he intended to excavate and encase in a plaster jacket before the storm struck. He asked that one of us return in two hours, conditions permitting, to pick him and his turtles up. If the rain bucketed down, though, we should not bother—the walk back to camp was a pleasant stroll for one encased in thobe and gutra.