by Tim Flannery
A few days later, near Uluru, I meet Nugget Dawson (Tjilpi Nagada)—the other capable stone-knapper and a great source of traditional knowledge. As we speak Nugget draws in the sand with his finger, tracing the journeys of his youth in the days before roads, cars, camels and white men. ‘Walking everywhere,’ our translator says, ‘walking all over my country, burning, hunting, visiting the sacred sites, making sure that the red kangaroos increase, the hare wallabies increase.’ His finger describes a great oval in the red sand, a trace linking small circles and crinkled lines, representing the all-important waters and sacred sites. Then he stops and looks directly at me, saying, ‘But now the white men have come and they have made their own sacred sites, putting up fences around them so that we cannot go in. They use those sacred sites to increase their money.’
He is absolutely right. The whites took the land from the Aborigines and gave it to their sacred cows, in whose name they irrevocably changed the Centre, so that Nugget’s remembered landscape is no more, and can never be again.
There is one creature I’m fascinated with, but I did not then know its Aboriginal name, nor could I describe it. Known as the central hare wallaby, its scientific name, Lagorchestes asomatus, translates as ‘the bodiless dancing hare’, which is very appropriate, for except to a handful of people like Nugget Dawson, its body remains a mystery. Europeans first learned of it in 1932 when, in the vast region surrounding Lake Disappointment near the Western Australia-Northern Territory border, explorer and mineral prospector Michael Terry came across what he called a ‘spinifex rat’. The skull was given to the South Australian Museum, and there it lay until, a decade later, it was described by the outstanding amateur mammalogist Hedley Herbert Finlayson as belonging to a distinctive member of the kangaroo family. But it has never been seen again, and Terry left us no description of the animal, unless perhaps ‘Donald’ in the excerpt below belonged to the same species:
What a pretty little thing Donald was. Shaped just like a kangaroo, the wee thing would curl up nicely on my hand. It had beautiful black eyes, and travelled for hours in my shirt front, warm against my tummy as if in its mother’s pouch.
For a day or two [following his capture] Donald sulked; he would not eat the offering of dry grass stalks, would not drink till his tiny nose was pushed into weak milk in his tin. In a week, however, he was as tame as a cat. With a boot lace around his shoulders attached to a cigarette tin holding a few pebbles to act as a drag and advertise his presence, he hopped about the camp. Poor Stan [Terry’s companion] got scared to move lest he trod upon my pet which had soon to be tethered clear of harm’s way, especially from the attentions of Chou-Chou [Terry’s dog]. For that person had natural and definite ideas about Donald; in fact I had an awful moment when the young fellow in all innocence hopped too close to the eager jaws.
Sometime later I learned that researchers from the Conservation Commission of the Northern Territory found that the Aborigines of the Western Desert remember a kind of kangaroo with long, soft grey fur, hairy feet and a short, thick tail which they knew as ‘kananpa’. It was, they said, the ‘deaf one’ or the ‘stupid one’ because it refused to leave its shelter until it was too late to flee. They report that it survived in the northeast of the Great Sandy Desert until at least 1960; but we Europeans were just too busy tending our sacred sites to go and look for it, so some doubt will always remain over the identity and appearance of that bodiless dancing hare. For my part though, knowing how thoroughly the desert Aborigines catalogued their fauna, I’m convinced that the ‘deaf one’ was Lagorchestes asomatus. Had there been another species, the Tjilpi would surely have known about it.
24
Symbols of the New Land
The fate of the kangaroos is inextricably bound with the fate of my country, so in tracing the health of their populations we can identify how things stand in this ‘fifth part of the world’. So let’s examine the kangaroo family as it is today, beginning with the great red and greys. These species are superabundant in some regions, yet are rare or absent in others. Why? To understand this we need to revisit the time when Europeans first took up the land. How were kangaroos faring then?
When reading explorers’ diaries and journals it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, prior to pastoral settlement, the larger kangaroos were rarely seen over most of Australia. The naturalist John Gould, who produced a monograph on the kangaroo family and who knew more about kangaroos than any other nineteenth-century European, predicted the extinction of the red kangaroo, so parlous did its situation seem to him. The diaries of the early pastoralists contain much, however, to suggest that within a few decades of European settlement kangaroo numbers dramatically increased. One important account is from Duncan Stewart, who arrived in Mount Gambier, near the South Australian coast, in 1846. Then the settlement was only a few years old. More than six decades later, in 1910, he recalled:
When the writer came to the district, kangaroos were not by any account plentiful; although some 25 years later, they had become so numerous that the Government and the settlers had to employ men to destroy them, as they were devouring nearly all the feed. They became almost as much a plague as rabbits are at the present time. The dying out of the natives might, to some degree, account for the increase of the marsupials. Some 50,000 were destroyed in five years.
Could Stewart have been correct in attributing the increase in kangaroos to the decline of the Aboriginal population? Biologists have long ignored this possibility, pointing instead to the provision of watering points for stock as the vital factor in the increase. For the less arid-adapted grey kangaroos the provision of water does appear to have permitted their expansion into arid regions, but this cannot explain the entire increase which occurred in the well-watered districts. Changes in pasture quality or a run of good seasons may have helped, but are not enough to explain the continent-wide expansion that invariably followed pastoral settlement.
Stewart was correct, at least in part, in his analysis, but we should not minimise the role played by the dingo in controlling kangaroo numbers. Shepherds were relentless in their pursuit of wild dogs, which quickly vanished from the settled districts; and, as we have seen, dingoes can have a large impact upon kangaroo numbers.
If you have ever been fortunate enough to travel into the Aboriginal lands of central Australia you may have been puzzled by the absence of kangaroos. In 1994, at Utopia station in the Northern Territory—home of fabulous dot paintings and Aboriginal batik—I asked an elder by the name of Quart-pot Corbett about this. Red kangaroos, Quart-pot said, were all but extinct in his country. He put this down to the large numbers of people concentrated in a smallish area, and to hunting with rifles. Over the years Quart-pot had seen young men venture out in their Holdens and Fords with their 303s, unconcerned about traditional hunting restrictions, and bringing back fewer and fewer kangaroos. As I’ve travelled to Aboriginal communities around Australia it’s a story I’ve heard again and again.
To see large kangaroos it is best to visit the pastoral areas south of the ‘dog fence’ where the kangaroo shooters operate. You might imagine that the kangaroo industry would have reduced kangaroo numbers in these regions, after all it harvests millions of them every year—in 2003 the figure was 6,500,000. (The same year it employed 4000 people and generated $200 million in income.) Yet there is no decrease in kangaroo numbers, in part because the industry is designed not to do so (the quota is set at a ‘sustainable yield’ of 10 to 15 per cent of the estimated total population each year), and partly because the hunting is conducted where dingoes are absent and kangaroos consequently exist in great densities.
In national parks and reserves we sometimes see an even greater abundance of large kangaroos. The history of Tidbinbilla, now a popular nature reserve near Canberra, is typical of many pastoral districts in the decades following European settlement in that by 1870 eastern grey kangaroos were reported to be present in ‘plague proportions’. A campaign of eradication reversed that initial b
oom so that by 1964, when the reserve was proclaimed, kangaroos were all but extinct in the area.
After just thirty years of protection, however, they had returned in force, their density reaching a phenomenal 357 animals per square kilometre and their grazing pressure turning the grasslands into a short-cropped lawn. Faced with mass starvation of the kangaroos, in 1995 the authorities elected to cull nearly 1000 individuals. In a nod to our supposed cultural sensitivities, the bodies of these animals were buried rather than utilised. But six years later the kangaroo population had almost returned to its 1995 level, and managers are again grappling with the issue of culling.
There are other national parks where kangaroos have been exterminated without the opportunity to recolonise. Marra Marra National Park, just north of Sydney, is mostly sandstone country unsuitable for eastern grey kangaroos, but there are a few pockets where they would flourish (and presumably did before European settlement) if only the animals could access them. In the absence of kangaroos these areas today grow a luxuriant crop of grass, which in summer dries off to become an ignition point for fires that rage through the region. In 2002 a massive conflagration scorched the entire park, causing great concern about the maintenance of biodiversity.
In instances where kangaroos have been exterminated, and also where they have multiplied to the point of mass starvation, the balance of nature has been lost and Australia’s biodiversity has suffered. How can that balance be regained? In parks like Tidbinbilla the introduction of predators could make a difference, but the two ideal options from a biological point of view—dingo and thylacine—are not feasible, for one is extinct while the other would not be tolerated by sheep farmers. Humans therefore remain the only feasible regulator of kangaroo populations, and whether they act by culling or instituting some form of reproductive control (perhaps a technique for the future), it is important—both for humane reasons and for the sake of the environment—that the option be exercised. As for places like Marra Marra, the answer is to reintroduce the roos, and then control their numbers to reduce the incidence of fire and starvation alike.
The situation on Aboriginal lands is more complex, for the vanishing of kangaroos from these regions speaks poignantly of a country and a people who have, at least momentarily, lost their balance. For 46,000 years Aboriginal people hunted kangaroos, guided by a set of cultural beliefs that allowed the two to co-exist. Today those beliefs and the technology used in the hunt have been forever altered. A new accommodation with the land is needed—one that is in tune with both Aboriginal culture and the needs of kangaroos—and this is something that only the Aboriginal people themselves are capable of devising.
An extraordinary study, done in the 1980s by one of the great kangaroo experts, Alan Newsome, revealed just how delicate the balance between kangaroo, country and people is, and how it can be upset in the most unexpected ways. Newsome was studying a population of red kangaroos living on Bert Plain near Alice Springs when he became fascinated by the low fertility of the group, for fewer than half the females were pregnant under conditions that should have seen all of them carrying joeys. After extensive studies of both sexes he discovered that male infertility was to blame, and that an unexpected pattern of infertility existed in the area. Among kangaroos inhabiting the ‘flood-outs’ where creeks disgorge onto the plains and where trees provide shade, approximately one male in three showed impaired fertility. Out on the Mitchell-grass plains (where the creatures abounded), only one male kangaroo in six was fully fertile. Newsome hypothesised that the continuous high temperatures of the shadeless plains had effectively cooked the testicles of the big bucks, inflicting such damage that many would never recover their full potency. In his perplexity as to how the red kangaroos could be so maladapted, Newsome consulted a ‘kangaroo man’ of the Unmatjera clan, who sang his kangaroo song, which listed the key totemic places where, in traditional times, the creatures abounded. Newsome says of the song that:
The legends relate basically overland journeys of creation, travelling in the daytime and traversed by natural means, [but] there is a gap of about 120 kilometres (from the second to the third most westerly sites known to me), which is very poor habitat for red kangaroos. The legend describes how a great wind bore one of the heroic kangaroo ancestors across that gap. As well, the Unmatjera legend includes an even longer supernatural means of travel, underground, between two sites separated by desert for a distance of about 350 kilometres. The ancestor finally emerged near today’s suitable habitat for the red kangaroo.
Because of his great familiarity with the country Newsome was able to map the places mentioned in the Unmatjera song, discovering that
ten of the fourteen sites lie along or near the most favoured habitat of red kangaroos, the major watercourses. Half of them are on flood-outs, and the most famous totemic site is close to the very best kangaroo habitat in all of central Australia, an extensive floodout.
In the traditional red kangaroo habitat, the fertility of the males is maintained by the cooling shade of trees. So why had they forsaken such country for the open plains, where they are most abundant today? Newsome believes that the reds were drawn to the Mitchell-grass plains after the establishment of the cattle industry, when intensive grazing removed the mature, dry stems from the tussocks, forcing the plants to put forth the tender green shoots favoured by red kangaroos. By promoting a change in the timing and distribution of new growth in grass, the grazing of the cattle had, via the agency of a merciless sun, effectively sterilised the male reds en masse. Newsome’s study provided a valuable insight on how delicately balanced life is on this continent, and how easy it is to damage its creatures. It also filled me with fear for the future of the large kangaroos in the face of global warming.
If a few populations of larger kangaroos have waxed so mightily that their very prosperity has become a risk to our collective ecological health, this must be balanced against the underprivileged legions of the extinct and vanishing. Seven species of kangaroos—10 per cent of all that existed 100 years ago—are today extinct. A further seven species—30 per cent of Australia’s remaining smaller kangaroos—are now so reduced in number and distribution that they no longer play a functional role in Australia’s ecosystems.
25
Oolacunta!
I’m writing these words in 2003, on my way home from London where I’ve been studying some of Australia’s most interesting mammals. It’s been a sad pilgrimage, but a necessary one, for the only surviving examples of the long extinct creatures I’m interested in reside in London’s Natural History Museum. Its collections are the richest and oldest in existence—the spoils of an empire—and they include a treasure-trove of Australian mammals housed in a cavernous storeroom filled with tall green cabinets, whose drawers bear the scientific names of the occupants. Pull a drawer out and you will see their stuffed bodies lying row upon row, as neat as soldiers on parade.
It is a strange feature of Australia’s historic extinction epidemic that it struck most fiercely at those species that seemed most secure. The native rats and mice which once swarmed over the inland in countless millions suffered a greater depletion than Australia’s marsupials and monotremes; while among the marsupials it was those paragons of success, the kangaroos, which lost the most species.
Looking at the taxidermised remains of broad-faced potoroos, nail-tailed wallabies and desert rat-kangaroos, I feel as if Britain has taken the heart of my country. The desert rat-kangaroo, eastern hare wallaby and crescent nailtail once thrived right across the land stretching out 11,000 metres below me, but the plants they browsed now go unclipped by their dainty teeth, while the tribes and predators they fed must make shift without them. Perhaps, I secretly hope, my studies of the ecology of these vanished creatures will assist in regaining that equilibrium, for until we know what we have lost, we cannot make good the damage.
As I write, outside the plane a vermilion line announces the coming of the day. I’ve seen it often enough from below, but from up he
re it is a miracle. Galah-grey clouds stretch from horizon to horizon, sculpted by winds into a monochrome rippled beach, through which the rising sun spills a lava of pink—an eerie rose glow from below, piercing the cloud in strange patches.
My jetlagged mind is suddenly thrown back twenty years, to the other side of that ripplefield of cloud. I’m in the loneliest desert on earth, wandering towards camp after a day spent searching for fossils on the shores of a dry salt lake. I move along the crest of a blood-red sand-dune, its summit a maze of dead-looking clumps of cane grass and sandy blow-outs. It’s been a long, hot day, and my water ran out hours ago. There’s not a sound, not even the wind, to remind me that I share the Earth with another living creature.
My eyes are trained to scan the ground for the tiniest fossil—I usually find the lost earring, the contact lens, the money on the pavement. Now I see miniature black dragon, its body thrown into an S-shape that is half buried in sand at my feet. My tongue rasps against the roof of my mouth as I muse on the tricks that an exhausted and dehydrated brain can play on you. Surely this is nothing but an oddly shaped stone—a mirage of a fossil of a mythical creature that’s been awaiting me in this lonely spot since the dreamtime? I pick it up, but immediately drop it. I can’t interpret the sensation in my fingertips, then I realise I’ve been burned. I bend once more to pick up the mysterious object—more cautiously this time—juggling it to dissipate the heat. Incredibly, it is a miniature dragon—made of brass and blackened by time, which has lain there all day on the dune crest storing up the heat of the sun. It is one half of an old Chinese belt buckle that, intertwined with a brother, once upheld someone’s dignity. Is it possible, I wonder, that an errant Chinaman, bound for the goldfields of Ballarat, perished out here by Lake Eyre, leaving the buckle as the only testimony to his existence?