Country

by Tim Flannery

  At this imposition Hann’s temper broke. He ‘demurred at my taking such rubbish’ the miffed Tate noted; while Hann wrote in his diary, ‘To entertain the idea that any kangaroo known to us, or approaching its formation, could climb a tree, would be ridiculous; the animal was not formed for such work.’

  But kangaroos in the treetops there are. Eleven years after Hann tossed out Dr Tate’s skeleton, a Norwegian naturalist by the name of Carl Lumholtz collected, in those same scrubs (as rainforests were then called), a complete specimen that set the scientific world aflame. The extraordinary discovery was named in his honour and has been known as Lumholtz’s tree-kangaroo (Dendrolagus lumholtzi) ever since. When, a few years later, the Reverend Charles De Vis of the Queensland Museum obtained a specimen of a second, larger species from further north, the scientific world was at first suspicious—surely this was an aberrant Lumholtz’s tree-kangaroo. Bennett’s tree-kangaroo (Dendrolagus bennettianus) was, however, a valid species, meaning that Australia’s tropics were home to not one but two species of kangaroos living in the treetops.

  Astonishment at the discovery was largely limited to the English-speaking world, for ever since Dutch scientists from the Netherlands East Indies Natural History Commission had found tree-kangaroos in New Guinea in 1828, Europe had known of such creatures. But to the Anglophone nations (and especially the colonial Australians) Lumholtz’s find was novel enough to precipitate a fascination that has persisted ever since. In truth the centre of tree-kangaroo diversity is New Guinea, where eight species reside. The two Australian species are rather primitive and certainly not as accomplished at climbing as some New Guinean types. But like all tree-kangaroos they are (except for a few populations of Lumholtz’s tree-kangaroo) reclusive and hard to study.

  My sole opportunity to observe Australian tree-kangaroos in the wild came courtesy of Roger Martin of Monash University. In the early 1990s he was undertaking a long-term study of Bennett’s tree-kangaroo, then one of the most elusive and poorly understood of all kangaroo species. Roger had camped at a place called Shiptons Flat, inland from Cook-town, and invited me to join him. He had provided me with instructions scrawled on a scrap of paper indicating how to find his camp, and so I drove out of Cooktown, past the Lion’s Den Hotel (where Roger occasionally consoled himself), and up a bush track, where the vegetation began to thicken. I was nearing the X-marking-the-spot on the grubby paper when, passing through some thick bush, I came across a large truck parked in the middle of the track. There was no easy way around this obstruction, so I stopped to examine the situation. It was a near-new cattle truck which had suffered considerable damage, and had what looked like a huge pool of oil under it. I bent down and dipped a finger into the sticky substance. It was a pool of blood, at least three metres long and a metre wide.

  The hair started to rise on the back of my neck as I wondered what atrocity had been committed on this loneliest of roads. No quick escape was possible, for the nearest help was at Roger’s camp, and to reach it I needed to drive around the truck. I quickly marked a path through the dense bush and back onto the track. Over the next rise Roger’s camp-fire and chair came into view, though, as I drove on I could see the camp had been utterly trashed. Roger’s equipment had been scattered, the tarpaulin he slept under flung into the bushes. Fearing that the murderers at the truck—whoever they were—had done away with my colleague and mate, I was desperately searching for a deceased Roger when I heard a voice behind me.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ It was Roger, radio-tracking antenna in hand, puffing up the hill after a morning spent in pursuit of his tree-kangaroos.

  ‘You tell me!’ I blurted. ‘God, I’m bloody glad to see you.’

  We drove to the homestead of the Roberts family, pioneers of the Cooktown district, to find out what was going on, and I told Roger about the sinister truck.

  The Roberts’ house was a fantastic piece of antique Queenslandiana, its water tank crafted out of the trunk of a colossal tree, and before we reached the front gate we were greeted by Charlie Roberts. The original Roberts had come from England’s west country three generations earlier, but so profound was the family’s isolation that they still spoke with a marked accent. Added to Charlie’s peculiarity of repeating things, it made for interesting conversation.

  ‘Well, those fellas from Wudjal are setting up a butchery—needed some beasts they did,’ he began. ‘Yes, needed some beasts. Got a new truck with a government grant, a brand-new truck with a government grant it was. Loaded ‘em up just here above your camp, Roger. Loaded ‘em up, and put their best rodeo rider in the driver’s seat, too. I said to him, “If you pump the brakes like that, they’re likely to give way suddenlike.” Likely to give way, I said, and just then she started to creep forward. Had her in neutral he did, and she started to creep. You know that bend just above your camp, Roger? Well, that fella hung on to there. Best rodeo rider they had too, he was, but he jumped out as she veered into the turn.

  ‘The truck hit that big blue-gum, Roger, that big blue-gum near your camp. Sheared the engine mounts they did and flattened your camp. They tried to drive on but she was so crook they only got to the bottom of the hill and those steers had broken legs and cuts all over, so they butchered’ em on the spot. Left the truck right there, too, Roger. Reckon I might try to buy it off’ em. Might buy it off ‘em and fix it up, I might.’

  Reflecting perhaps on the tyre mark over his swag, Roger’s singular reply was, ‘Good thing I got an early start this morning, Charlie.’

  The local Aboriginal community at Wudjal Wudjal south of Cook-town includes descendants of the people who gave the word kangaroo to the English language. Old Harry Shipton, then in his eighties, was the elder of the clan. He had hunted tree-kangaroos with dogs at Shiptons Flat right into the 1960s, but of late he had found more congenial occupations, for many a young woman had travelled north to spend time in the hippy communes dotted around the region, and oftentimes they sought out Harry to learn a little of his ‘blackfella knowledge’. Old Harry was only too happy to share, taking them to remote beaches and forest camps where, according to local gossip, a rather full and intimate knowledge was imparted.

  Roger, however, had found it difficult to get much information about tree-kangaroos—or anything at all—out of the old man. Perhaps he lacked the right currency. Indeed Roger’s best insight came from a Hungarian emigre who seemed to have a can of XXXX welded to his hand, and was often found sitting out the front of the Lion’s Den. One afternoon, after months without seeing a single tree-kangaroo, he asked Roger what he was doing in the district. When Roger explained his interest in tree-kangaroos, the man said, ‘Plenty out the back,’ jerking his thumb towards the woodland and thin forest corridor that clung to the Annan River just below the hotel. Roger thought finding tree-kangaroos there about as likely as finding fairies at the bottom of his garden, so neglected to investigate. Years later, however, he learned that tree-kangaroos abounded along the Annan. Had he followed the sage advice he could have done his work in half the time from the comfort of the pub itself!

  Bennett’s tree-kangaroo has rust-red shoulders, a black belly and a long, bicoloured and tufted tail, like a lion’s. Charlie told us that when his dad had assisted an expedition from the American Museum of Natural History around 1948, the creature was scarcely seen in the area. Apart from a couple of nineteenth-century accounts and a few museum specimens it was almost unknown, the only recent sightings being from the highest peaks in the region such as the evocatively named Mount Misery. Things remained that way until the 1970s when, Charlie said, about a decade after the last of the old Aboriginal hunters stopped coming to the area to hunt, the population began to grow.

  In the 1960s Charlie had seen one hunter with a catch of seven tree-roos, and believed that hunting of the slow-reproducing creatures had kept numbers low. They had survived on the mountain-tops, he thought, because the peaks were story places—haunted regions where the Wudjal people feared to go. Lately, h
owever, they were being seen in entirely new places. One had even jumped through the Roberts’ kitchen window, lured by ripening bananas and frightening the bejesus out of the whole family.

  After putting the camp in order we set off to track the tree-kangaroos that Roger had collared with a transmitter. Roger led the way through the thick scrub, the strength of the ‘pings’ from his radio receiver revealing the proximity and direction of the kangaroos. As we walked Roger explained how in order to fit the transmitter he had had to tranquillise the animal and then catch it in a net. Occasionally they would be disturbed and jump, thereafter Charlie would give chase and, astonishingly, he managed to run a couple of them down.

  Eventually we found ourselves standing beneath a forest giant festooned with vines and epiphytic ferns, the signal from Roger’s receiver indicating that high above lurked a mother tree-kangaroo and her half-grown young. We could see nothing of them, but after half an hour of craning our necks Roger caught sight of two long tufted tails. They looked like the broken ends of vines, and to this day they are all I have seen of this extraordinarily beautiful kangaroo.

  Roger suggested that on my way back south I should visit a man who had looked after an orphaned joey Bennett’s tree-roo. Rob Whiston was a wild Irish transplant who had created a paradise by the Bloomfield River. Native fish by the hundred came to the creek below the house each day for Rob to feed them, and the verandah was ornamented with a roost of tiny bats. As we toured his estate he spoke of his orphaned tree-kangaroo, a little female that, when annoyed, would take a hop forward with her razor-sharp claws raised high above her head. ‘Ready to strike,’ he explained, ‘but always silently, and with the face as devoid of expression as only tree-kangaroos and the English are capable.’

  Rob had planted a hectare of durian trees up the back and was hoping that their fruit would one day provide a living for him and his wife. I mentioned to Rob that in Indonesia orang-utans love durian fruit and strip the trees quickly. Without batting an eye the Irishman said, ‘Oh, you needn’t worry about them. We’ll spray for them, to be sure.’ To this day I’m not sure whether he was joking or not.

  As I drove off I considered in some detail the similarities between tree-kangaroos and the great apes. One New Guinean species, the Doria’s tree-kangaroo (Dendrolagus dorianus) is rather gorilla-like in both colour and behaviour, for it eats leaves and lives in male-dominated groups, the alpha males of which are muscular and forbidding creatures. Like silverback gorillas, male Doria’s tree-roos use brute force to keep other males from their harem, which saves their sperm from having to compete to fertilise the egg. As a consequence of this, they have small testicles for their body-size. Male chimpanzees, on the other hand, are not as physically forbidding, and because several males co-exist in the one troop they compete sexually as well as physically. As a result they have huge testicles which produce enough sperm to swamp the competition.

  Strangely enough, there is a tree-kangaroo that provides a parallel with the chimps, and perhaps even us. Goodfellow’s tree-kangaroo (Dendrolagus goodfellowi) is a reddish-coloured fruit-eater and although it weighs only seven kilograms its testicles are as large as a human’s. There are even indications that it may form pair bonds, as on occasion do chimps and, most famously, ourselves. In many ways tree-kangaroos are the greatest untapped vein in kangaroo research for, like the first kangaroo, they have crossed into a new frontier and therein have diversified spectacularly.

  After nearly twenty years of field work, during which I had the privilege of naming four types of tree-kangaroo, I felt that I had learned most of what I ever would about these fascinating creatures and their evolution. But science has a way of surprising you, and I could not have been more amazed when one afternoon in August 2003 I entered the Western Australian Museum in Perth to look at fossils from caves on the Nullarbor Plain and found, among the clay-smeared bones, the skeletons of two tree-kangaroos. Nullarbor means ‘no tree’ in Latin and the name is remarkably apposite. So what were tree-kangaroos doing on the no-tree plain? Preliminary dating suggests that they are perhaps a million years old, and in that bygone era maybe there were trees on the Nullarbor. The skeletons are not as adapted to an arboreal life as the living species, yet their tree-climbing proclivities, as revealed by their hind-limbs, are unmistakable. Their skulls, however, surprised me, for they bore similarities both to tree-kangaroos and the pint-sized and strictly terrestrial quokka of Rottnest Island. There is enough of a similarity about those Nullarbor skulls to have me wondering if the quokka is a tree-kangaroo that, during the course of its evolution, has come to ground. Studies of the quokka’s DNA, which are yet to be done conclusively, could prove whether such notions are fanciful or not.

  17

  Land of Giants

  In 1873 the famous nineteenth-century anatomist Sir Richard Owen, then director of the British Museum of Natural History in London, described a massive jawbone that had been unearthed beside the Tambo River in eastern Victoria. Although the creature would have been the size of an ox, Owen was convinced it had once belonged to a kangaroo and had accordingly named it Palorchestes azeal, meaning ‘ancient leaper’.

  Few dared query such an authority and around 1958 Harold Fletcher, the curator of fossils at the Australian Museum in Sydney, decided to give the public some idea of what Palorchestes looked like. Taking a grey kangaroo for his model, he had a commanding reconstruction made. Towering more than three metres, the monstrous plaster figure was for a short time a great drawcard and object of awe. Yet it was fated to come to a bad end, for a few months after it went on display, Jack Woods, director of the Queensland Museum, took a closer look at the jaw of Palorchestes and discovered that it lacked the distinctive hole through which the chewing muscles pass in all kangaroos.

  Palorchestes was in fact a distant cousin of the wombat, a revelation that so filled the museum staff with embarrassment that they took to their creation with a sledgehammer. Moral: don’t believe everything you see in a museum—or on TV, for that matter. Yet giant kangaroos did once bound over Australia’s inland plains, and though none were as large as the Australian Museum’s fantastic plaster model, some were far more unusual.

  Australia’s ice-age kangaroos have fascinated me ever since that first opportunity in 1974 to clean and study their skeletons as a museum volunteer. In 1978 a special chance to study them arose when Tom Rich found himself with so many volunteers at Hamilton that there was insufficient room for all to work. To ease the congestion, Tom gave permission for two to accompany me to a fossil deposit I had located near Minhamite, eighty kilometres east of Hamilton. There, fossilised bones are preserved in a deposit of thick black clay on the bank of a small creek. Although it was ‘only’ tens of thousands rather than millions of years old, I was excited by the deposits because they contained the remains of many gigantic kangaroos.

  To sit in the mud on a frigid summer day such as Victoria’s Western District can offer, slicing through stiff clay with a trowel and encountering massive mahogany-coloured bones, became the most exhilarating experience of my life—something I could only be driven from by horizontal sleet, thence to huddle in the back of a panel van to warm myself as the slurry swirled all about. To flick a triangle of clay from such a bone, revealing its shape and knowing that you are the first living being in 50,000 years to see that sight, was as energising as sex; for then you could visualise the part of the skeleton that the bone represented, and fantasise about the kind of marsupial from which it came.

  Sometimes, intimate insights into the life and death of an animal would become evident: the slice-mark made by the tooth of a marsupial lion (imagine seeing the groove where that great slavering premolar found its mark), or an old fracture that had healed—each one as informative as the scar on the body of a lover. But what held me most in thrall was trying to imagine those animals as they really were. A huge grey kangaroo, almost twice the weight and a third taller than any living today had stood on this spot. Did it endure the sleet as I did? Di
d its nostrils flare at the scent of its mate; and how did it breathe its last, right here, in the black clay under my feet?

  I was holding its ankle-bone in my hand 50,000 years after its burial, a still-living thing on its land, yet separated from its life by such a gulf of extinction and change as might separate me from my unimaginably distant descendants, if humanity and my genes survive so long. The gulf of time will consume you if you linger over it too long—it will break down your morality and your essence, so that you, like the extinct kangaroo, will only fuck and eat and sleep, until you too join the black mud.

  And what of the extinct giant wallaby whose empty eye-socket looked out at me as I excavated its skull a short time later? What land did it behold, and what were its comforts? We need not only more scientists but poets as well—a Ted Hughes of palaeontology—who can imagine those past lives and guide us through the labyrinth of time to show us how things were in the distant past.

  The story of the Australian ice age—the most glorious age of kangaroos—was first glimpsed in caves located a few kilometres east of Wellington, New South Wales, where the western foothills of the Great Dividing Range give way to featureless plains. As with Hamilton and Bow Creek, the Wellington Caves lie in a region of undulating hills and red-gum-dotted grasslands. Their secret was first penetrated around 1829 when a settler named George Rankin lowered himself into a shaft on a long rope that he had attached to a protrusion on the cave wall. When it unexpectedly snapped off he discovered it to be the limestone-encrusted leg-bone of a huge, extinct bird. It was the first significant ice-age fossil ever found in Australia, and it led to explorations that revealed the caves to be chock-a-block with the bones of extinct creatures. So abundant are these fossils that they were once mined for their phosphate content, a process that saw millions crushed to dust and strewn on the fields as fertiliser. For all the destruction this entailed, a huge number of fossils made their way into museum collections.