All four glider species live in the Cave Creek canopy, on a diet of gum, nectar, pollen, insects, manna and honeydew, and seldom come to the ground. They are said to prefer eucalypts for their abundant nectar, which they need all year round, but our rainforest trees also flower at all times of the year, and the canopy affords plenty of dry nest sites in even the pouringest rain. I would be a liar if I said that I had ever seen any of these little creatures going about their business at night far above my sleeping head; I see them often as patches of roiled fur on local roads. One of the most powerful motives for rebuilding habitat in Australia is the longing to reverse the persecution, suffering and annihilation that is the lot of so many Australian mammal species, from the tiniest to the biggest. They are all, even the gentlest, resilient and tough. Give them a chance and they will take it.
Among the most cruelly persecuted of Australian mammals were possums, which, from the early years of European settlement, were classed as vermin. A correspondent wrote to The Argus on 21 March 1857:
On moonlit nights especially, they pour down in great numbers, when neither corn, wheat, fruit, nor vegetables escape their attacks, and in many instances the amount of damage done is really serious . . . owing to the disappearance of the blacks, with whom the opossum is the principal article of food, they have increased to an astonishing extent. It is no uncommon thing, we are told, to shoot forty or fifty in one night, and the fear is, unless some means of extermination are adopted, they will become almost the sole occupants of certain portions of the bush.
The belief that the extermination of the Aborigine had led to an explosion in the possum population was held by many.
The Mountain Brushtail Possum or, as it is now to be known, the Short-eared Possum (Trichosaurus caninus) that makes its home at Cave Creek is black with a rather plain doggy face and a big wet pink nose. Although Queensland possums had a slight advantage in that they were usually smaller and their skins less luxurious than those of animals from the cooler south, awareness of the ‘opossum threat’ led to more and more clearing of the forests that were known to harbour them. Loggers noticed that possums and gliders leapt from trees as they were being felled, while koalas clung on all the way to the ground. Thousands of animals must have perished in agony when they fired the felled wood, and yet enough survived to demolish the monocrops for which the native vegetation had been destroyed.
Killing native animals was one of the few amusements available in the bush. In 1911 a letter to the Brisbane Courier lamented: ‘It is the universal and deplorable habit of men and youths to go out with rifles and remorselessly slay every native animal they see – Australians like themselves – simply because it is guilty of the heinous crime of being alive’. (21 June)
Trade in native animal skins had been going on at least since the mid-1870s when Queensland traders began advertising for skins ‘kangaroo, wallaby, native bear, pademelon, opossum and squirrel’. When the prices for possum skins were good, farmworkers were only too ready to down tools. In 1902 a correspondent of the Brisbane Courier asked: ‘Why should I work for a squatter at a pound a week and tucker when I can earn £3 a week and tucker and be my own boss at possum snaring?’ (13 June)
Snaring or ‘possum-choking’ saved the cost of ammunition. The snares were simple affairs of twisted twine and wire. The usual method of setting a snare was to fell a sapling, attach the snare to it with a running noose, and prop it against a tree. The possum almost invariably chose the sapling as the easiest means of getting up the tree, and so ran its head into the snare, to be found hanging by its neck when the hunter made his rounds. He would then finish it off with a sharp blow on the head and free it from the noose. When cyanide became more readily available owing to its routine use in mining operations, possum hunters began to use it to poison waterholes. Cattle, horses and sheep as well as all the native species that used the waterhole would perish, but nobody cared because the profits were large. Hundreds of possums could be taken from a single poisoned waterhole. The practice was outlawed, but it continued nonetheless.
By 1911 the wholesale torture of possums had begun to have a perceptible effect on numbers (BC, 6 September). The Queensland government declared closed season on possums from October to June because the fur industry itself was in danger of collapse, if possums were not to be given an opportunity to rebuild their numbers. When times were hard, as they were regularly in the early years of the century, labour unions pressured the government to allow an open season. Supporters of the possum pointed out that young are to be found in the mothers’ pouches at all times of the year, and demanded a total ban on possum killing, to no avail. As long as the price was right, the slaughter would go on. ‘Opossum skins are worth anything from 25/- to 50/- a dozen in the Sydney market, according to variety and quality, and when it is stated that as many as 100,000 skins are sold in Brisbane at one time, to say nothing of those that are sent to Sydney, the slaughter that is going on may be realised’ (BC, 24 September 1910). During the drought of 1915 an open season was brought in specifically so that dairy farmers could survive by snaring possums. In 1922 a million possum skins were sold in the Queensland fur market, and in 1923, 1,200,000 (BC, 31 March 1924).
Few voices were raised in defence of the possum but the persecution of the koala caused uproar. There could be no pretence that the koala was a pest; everyone knew that ‘native bears’ though numerous did not damage crops of any kind. In 1884 Carl Lentz saw ‘nine bears on one little gum tree . . . the bush was full of koalas in those days’. In those early days Henry Stephens could ride the half-dozen kilometres between Tagabalam and the Pocket and see twenty-nine koalas (Hall et al., 19–20). A Bill to protect the Native Bear introduced by the Hon. W. Villiers Brown in the Queensland Legislative Assembly in November 1904 failed for lack of time (BC, 24 November 1904; 4 February 1905). By 1910 ‘the inoffensive native bear ha[d] almost disappeared from most parts of Queensland’. Even so, in 1915 the Queensland government announced an open season for koalas as well as possums. The justification was that impoverished families could use the skins as currency to buy food. Readers of the Brisbane Courier, who did not include struggling bushies, gave instant voice to their disapproval. A correspondent identified simply as ‘Sympathy’ wrote to the editor on 22 July:
I can’t speak for other districts but in this one (Wide Bay) mostly every female bear has a baby on her back. Only this morning I was driving on a bush road and saw a bear with a baby on its back. The harmless creature looked at me so pitifully. I drove on, but not half a mile away I heard a shot, then another, and drove back and saw a scalper had shot the poor brute, but it got into a limb of the tree and stuck there, though dead with the baby clasped in its arms. I lectured the man, but his reply was, ‘The season is open’. We know it is, but I am afraid it is the wrong season, and if this goes on the children following us will never see a native bear; they will be wiped out. Though I did not see it I was told by a settler that he had come across a dead mother skinned, and the baby a few yards away crying.
Despite the outcry a second open season was allowed in 1917. A third, in 1919, saw more than a million koalas shot, poisoned or hanged (Evans, 168). For eight years thereafter the koala was protected in Queensland, though skins procured illegally were still being traded, according to the retiring president of the Royal Geographical Society of New South Wales, J. R. Kinghorn, usually as wombat skin (BC, 23 July 1928). In 1927, to almost universal disgust, the Queensland government announced an open season on koalas for the month of August. As a character in scores of children’s stories, the koala had become the favourite pet of Australian children, bringing gladness ‘to many a lonely little heart in the back-blocks where pleasures are very few and far between’ (BC, 19 July 1927). Bunyip Bluegum, hero of The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay, published in 1918, is the best-known of a succession of koala heroes. On 28 July 1927 ‘Con. D’ thought fit to impersonate a koala in the Brisbane Courier:
I do not hamper the white man’s work
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or live on his fields of grain;
But I’m doomed to die the dingo’s death,
for his greed and gain.
And the tall gums whisper a sad goodbye –
Your heritage lost, now doomed to die,
For Fashion you must be slain.
A catastrophic decline in koala numbers was already common knowledge; as early as February 1927 the first suggestions that a disease might be affecting the stressed koala population begin to appear in the popular press. In August all the scientific societies in Brisbane joined forces in a deputation to the premier begging him to rescind his order, to no avail. On 15 December 1927 ‘Bushwoman’ wrote to the editor of the Brisbane Courier that ‘an open season for politicians would be more in accord with the feelings of the public’. Attempts to place a federal embargo on export of koala skins came too late. In that single month of August 1927 597,985 koalas were killed in Queensland, providing skins to the value of £130,595, of which the state government got 5 per cent (BC, 15 December).
By 1931 most people had understood that the true challenge was to re-establish the koala in its old habitat, but according to the Wildlife Preservation Society (BC, 7 December) there were already so few koalas to be found in the wild that this was proving almost impossible. Since then the koalas’ predicament has steadily worsened. The collapse of koala numbers has entailed a loss of genetic variability and lowered resistance. As the forest ecology has been affected by dieback, and by logging and clearing and subsequent Lantana infestation, the koalas’ nutritional status has fallen, and they have become vulnerable to organisms that thitherto they had been able to live with, including Chlamydia and Cryptococcus neoformans. Now a retrovirus has turned up and is integrating with the koala genome; the immune deficiency syndrome that it is thought to cause is transmitted not only from one animal to another but genetically, from parent to offspring. As the virus has been found in 80 per cent of the animals that Queensland researchers could get their hands on, Phascolarctos cinereus will probably be extinct there within twenty years.
For a mere $8.50 added to the adult entry fee of $17.10 visitors to the David Fleay Wildlife Park, now managed by the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency ‘as an environmental education resource’, may enter the Koala Contact Zone and take pictures of each other clutching a koala. At Currumbin Sanctuary too you can inflict an embrace upon a koala, but it will cost more than twice as much. In 2009 researchers at the University of Queensland published their conclusion that acute chlamydiosis in koalas is a manifestation of reduced resistance resulting from the stress associated with loss of habitat and human encroachment. And yet people who call themselves animal lovers consider themselves entitled to force their attentions on helpless captive koalas simply because they have handed over money. In his Histoire Naturelle the Comte de Buffon accused the koala of ‘Slowness, stupidity, neglect of its own body and habitual sadness’. He went on: ‘These sloths are the lowest form of existence in the order of animals with flesh and blood: one more defect and they would not have existed.’ Even Gerald Durrell called koalas boring. The mildness of the koala continues to be misunderstood and exploited to this day.
One evening when a clamour of butcherbirds announced that something was afoot, I looked out of the kitchen door to see a young koala striding past on all four legs. When she saw me she shinned up a young Red Bean tree. When the tree began to bow beneath her weight, she stopped climbing and sat there, well within reach, wishing herself invisible. To give her a break, I went inside and shut the door. She had a long way to go before she would reach another koala colony that might accept her, and many a python lay in wait. The next time I saw a koala, it had just been regurgitated by a python, in two parcels, one a cylinder of fur and the other the koala’s astonishing alimentary canal which even a python could not digest. In 2011 the Queensland EPA (now the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection) sent me a letter informing me that the property at Cave Creek had been deemed suitable for revegetation with sclerophylls for koala habitat under State Planning Policy 2/10. On the map to be seen on their website, the only area nearby where koalas are known to live was coloured pink as ‘unsuitable’. Only one of the eucalypt species they recommended would do well at CCRRS, where it already grows as an occasional on the higher slopes. Not for the first time I wondered if the right hand of the Queensland EHP had the faintest idea what the left hand was doing.
‘Did you know,’ said Jenny, who had been reading this over my shoulder, ‘that baby koalas have to eat a special pap from their mother’s gut when they’re being weaned? That’s how they get the right microbes in their gut to break down eucalyptus leaves. It’s amazing really, because eucalyptus leaves contain all sorts of terpenes and phenols and are toxic to most herbivores. We know from the fossil record that koalas were originally rainforest animals, so they must have adapted as the rainforests retreated before the onward march of the eucalypts.’
‘They’re classed as vulnerable round here,’ I said. ‘You’re not allowed to interfere with them.’
‘Unless they’re at Dream World,’ said Jenny sourly.
‘That’s something I just don’t get. Why is handling marsupials allowed? Handling causes them stress. Stress can kill them.’
‘Not just marsupials,’ said Jenny. ‘Stress can kill virtually any wild animal, but marsupials do seem to be specially sensitive.’
‘What actually happens?’
‘Suppose the animal is being chased or struggling. The enzymes in the muscles start pumping out lactic acid. This rapidly builds up in the bloodstream, the body pH changes and the heart falters. Muscles die, releasing myoglobin, which damages the renal tubule.’
‘Multiple organ failure.’
‘Quite. Sometimes the process is slow, a week or more, and sometimes it’s sudden and catastrophic.’
‘I remember when kids at school brought in joeys they found, they were always strangely hot and floppy and they had a peculiar vinegary smell. No matter how hard we tried we simply couldn’t keep them alive.’
‘In those days you wouldn’t even have had any suitable food for them, so it’s no wonder you killed them.’
I winced. ‘Remember Skippy the Bush Kangaroo? He was actually a female wallaby or rather lots of female wallabies. Sometimes they didn’t even last a day on the set.’
‘Marsupials can go into shock from events as insignificant as being injected or darted.’
‘I knew it! Some woman who was studying pademelons rang up to ask if she could come here and study ours. She told me she was working on establishing the pademelons’ optimum range. She wanted to trap them, weigh them and take blood from them. I’m afraid I got rather cross with her. The poor beasts would have the shock of being trapped, and the hours of trying to get out of the trap, and then they’d be taken out of the trap, and put in a sack to be weighed, and then restrained while she took blood. Then she’d let them go, lost to follow-up. I felt rather guilty about refusing her access at the time, but I’m glad now that I acted on my instinct.’
At the time I explained to the student that I wasn’t creating habitat so that the animals could be badgered for no good reason. She told me that as well as Red-necked Pademelons (Thylogale thetis) there were Red-legged ones (T. stigmatica) at CCRRS. These are listed as vulnerable in New South Wales, where they were never numerous, the caldera being the southern limit of their range, so I disbelieved her. That was before I realised that more than one kind of pademelon was taking turns to graze in the rainforest garden. The one that tended to nibble at the vegetation like a sheep with her head down was the Red-necked; the one that used her hands to pick up fallen leaves and fruit and carry them to her mouth as a kangaroo does was the Red-legged. The first pademelons I ever saw were grazing on the lawn at O’Reilly’s on Lamington Plateau, which led me to believe that they preferred exotic pasture grass to rainforest vegetation. Now that I see them every day I know that they are more likely to reject exotic grasses for rainforest
groundcovers and fallen fruits if they can get them. They also chew their way through tougher material, palm fronds, lomandras and sedges.
Most rainforest animals have evolved to eat a fibrous diet, which is why they should not be given picnic scraps, which can cause a bowel blockage and painful death. The received wisdom is that pademelons live on rainforest verges and venture into cleared areas to graze, never more than 100 metres from cover. They are dependent upon their own tracks, which are like tunnels through the rainforest, through which they bound away from trouble using their back legs, whereas otherwise they tend to move on all fours.
I would see more of the Cave Creek marsupials if I went spotlighting at night, but I hate the way the dazzled animals freeze in terror. I’m most likely to see macropods on the first day or two after I arrive, while the animals still think they have the forest to themselves. I was on a track on the forest edge at sunset, when I rounded a corner and surprised two Swamp Wallabies (Wallabia bicolor) who stared at me in astonishment. I kept still and talked to them softly. They craned their big ears to hear what noise I might be making. Big black eyes gazed at me out of pointed faces that were sooty from ear to nose, with cheeks picked out with silvery-white guard hairs. The dainty hands and long feet were sooty too, but the rest of their long fur was dusted with silver. For a long moment we looked at each other as I burbled and then the wallabies took off, plunging down the slope with their heads low and their tails stretched out behind.
People working in bush regeneration may tell you that wallabies and pademelons are pests because they eat the young trees in replantings. In our forest they have eaten one tree in particular, namely Hymenosporum flavum, the Native Frangipani, known throughout Australia as a street tree. They strip it of young leaves and it usually recovers. Grazing by macropods is not a problem at CCRRS because of the sheer variety of species in the plantings and the scale of the operation. Native herbivores will destroy all the infant trees they find planted in narrow batters surrounded by suburban gardens full of unpalatable exotics, but in broadscale plantings their impact is negligible. When native groundcovers reappear in the place of soft weeds, the pademelons and wallabies graze on them rather than the young growth on the baby trees, and both animals and plants thrive. Pademelons have been hard on the smaller, rarer shrubs in the rainforest garden, but that is a price we are prepared to pay.
White Beech: The Rainforest Years Page 38