Life
Page 26
The day after hearing this tale, Banks glimpsed a creature ‘like a greyhound in size and running, but had a long tail, as long as any greyhounds’. The encounter was so fleeting it left him lamenting ‘what to liken him to I could not tell’. By 7 July he had decided on an expedition to settle the question and after a night spent in ‘lodgins close to the banks of the river’ where ‘Musquetoes…spared no pains to molest us as much as was in their power’, Banks rose with the first rays of the sun. His diary records:
We walked many miles over the flats and saw 4 of the animals, two of which my greyhound fairly chased, but they beat him owing to the length and thickness of the grass which prevented him from running while they at every bound leapt over the tops of it. We observed much to our surprise that rather than going on all fours this animal went only on two legs, making vast bounds as the Jerbua does.
Saturday, 14 July 1770, was a red-letter day for both Banks and the marvellous marsupial, with the naturalist getting his first close look at the creature, as well inducting it into the English language through his journal, on a page titled ‘kill kanguru’. The animal had been shot by Second Lieutenant John Gore, the Endeavour’s most accomplished hunter, who nearly two weeks later bagged a second specimen, this one weighing eighty-four pounds (38kg). Perhaps the kangaroo’s low regard in Australian cooking originated with this superannuated individual, which Banks found to ‘eat but ill’. ‘He was I suppose too old’, the naturalist reasoned, before recording: ‘His fault, however, was an uncommon one, the total want of flavour, for he was certainly the most insipid meat I eat.’
The Endeavour carried three specimens back to England—including an atrociously stuffed skin—and from these animal painter George Stubbs produced the engraving that introduced the kangaroo to the world. It shows an almost cartoon-cute animal looking inquiringly over its shoulder with a catch-me-if-you-can look in its eye, and bears the following caption:
Inhabits the western side of New Holland…It lurks among the grass: feeds on vegetables: goes entirely on its hind legs, making use of the forefeet only for digging, or bringing its food to its mouth. The dung is like that of a deer. It is very timid: at the sight of men flies from them by amazing leaps, springing over bushes seven or eight feet high; and going progressively from rock to rock. It carries its tail at quite right angles with its body when it is in motion; and when it alights often looks back: it is much too swift for grey-hounds: is very good eating. It is called by the natives, Kanguru.
This description is erroneous in almost every regard, confusing as it does east with west, the kangaroo’s food, its use of its limbs and, according to Banks at least, its culinary qualities. The botanically trained Banks made no progress in classifying the creature and, befuddled by Stubbs’ drawing and misleading caption, nor at first did anyone else. In an imaginative leap of his own, Europe’s leading zoologist, le Comte de Buffon, postulated that it must be a gigantic rat, close to the jerboa or jumping rat of Africa. A Swiss naturalist then bestowed the name Jerboa gigantea (giant leaping rat). By the 1790s, however, these ratty affinities were beginning to be doubted by the eminent British naturalist George Shaw. Having access to better material, Shaw replaced the murine generic name Jerboa with Macropus, thus creating the binomen Macropus giganteus that remains the scientific name of the eastern grey kangaroo. Yet it took until 1816 for the marsupial affinities of the kangaroo to be definitively established.
Despite the immense excitement news of the creature aroused in the coffee shops of London, the physical evidence of its existence was neglected. No one, it seems, was much interested in any of the zoological specimens brought back in the Endeavour, and much of that priceless collection has been lost. Banks gave some of the material away (one kangaroo skull ended up with First Fleet surgeon John White), while the rest was sold at auction in 1806. A drawing of a kangaroo skull by Endeavour artist Sydney Parkinson has, however, survived. When it was examined by a biologist in the 1960s it caused quite a stir, for it clearly depicted the skull of a euro (Macropus robustus) rather than an eastern grey. The identification accords well with the otherwise baffling engraving by Stubbs, which depicts a creature with the short, curved claws of the euro on its toes, and with his description of a creature hopping ‘from rock to rock’ with its tail held at ninety degrees to its body, a behaviour characteristic of the euro and no other kangaroo.
The discovery had the potential to cause chaos in the scientific fraternity. Imagine the confusion if you were forced to swap the names of two favourite great-uncles—just remembering to call Cyril, Ernest and Ernest, Cyril—much less getting them to remember who was who—would have both you and them in despair. Changes in nomenclature are dreaded by everyone, but in the case of the grey kangaroo the day was saved through an unlikely agency.
The Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons is on the college’s first floor in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, and is packed with an astonishing array of specimens. Among the most popular exhibits are skeletons of the famous (including James Byrne aka the ‘Irish Giant’ who begged to be buried rather than anatomised), assorted midgets and the Elephant Man, all of which jostle for space with lesser wonders, such as the skeletons of two Réunion Island solitaires (large white birds extinct since the seventeenth century), the pickled penis of a pox-struck sailor who repaired holes in his organ with whalebone, and the jaws of a wombat. But these are merely the relics of a far more wondrous compilation, for the collection was devastated by German bombs during World War II. Among the lost treasures were the twisted lower spine of Gideon Mantell, the discoverer of the first named dinosaurs (he suffered a terrible carriage accident), and the skull of a kangaroo brought back by the Endeavour, which was presumably purchased at auction in 1806 when Banks offered nearly 8000 lots of zoological specimens for sale. Its true identity would have remained a mystery had not someone photographed it. The surviving black-and-white prints reveal clearly that the skull was that of an eastern grey kangaroo, and this tenuous link was all that saved the species from a scientific name change.
If eighteenth-century scientists were confused as to the nature of the kangaroo, then the general public was positively baffled. The situation was not assisted by the antics of Dr Samuel Johnson, the compiler of the famous dictionary. Soon after hearing of Banks’ discovery he took a tour of Scotland, and one dreary night in Inverness enlivened the conversation with news of the antipodean novelty. James Boswell recorded how, to the astonishment of the Caledonians, the near-blind doctor gathered his ponderous, scrofula-stricken body into an erect pose, ‘put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room’.
Confusion followed news of the wondrous kangaroo even to the shores of Botany Bay. Watkin Tench, a captain lieutenant on the First Fleet, describes what happened in 1788 when the ‘kangaroo’ first came to Sydney Cove:
Soon after our arrival at Port Jackson I was walking out near a place where I observed a party of Indians [Aborigines] busily employed in looking at some sheep in an enclosure, and repeatedly crying out ‘kangaroo’, ‘kangaroo’! As this seemed to afford them pleasure, I was willing to increase it by pointing out the horses and cows, which were at no great distance.
‘Kangaroo’ is a corruption of a word from the Guugu Yimidhirr language of the Cooktown area and is of uncertain origin; indeed, the confusion inherent in the act of an eighteenth-century European pointing into the distance, in the general direction of a fleeing marsupial, while making culturally specific inquiring gestures at an Aboriginal man, are considerable. At various times the word has been reputed to mean ‘I don’t know’, or ‘Bugger off ’. It may even be the Guugu Yimidhirr name for the euro, further confounding (if that were possible) the association of the name Macropus giganteus with the eastern grey kangaroo. In any case, the word ‘kangaroo’ was Greek to the Eora people of Sydney Cove, whose language is as different from Guugu Yimidhirr as Engl
ish is from Hindi. They quite sensibly assumed it was a whitefella word for any large animal except the dog—which they taught the whites was ‘dingo’.
Clarity, however, was coming. By 1791 Londoners could, for a mere shilling, satisfy themselves as to the nature of the beast by ogling a living specimen at a trunk-maker’s shop (No. 31) in the Haymarket. The creature had presumably been brought back aboard some returning First Fleet vessel, and was the first of many to make the migration. By the 1820s English kangaroos were so common that you could not have got a halfpenny for a peek since herds of the creatures, along with prolific flocks of emus, had been established at Windsor Great Park and other English estates. Today, grey kangaroos have entirely lost their mystique. It probably doesn’t help that their name suggests the dullness of men in grey suits—and indeed the species remains common around Parliament House, Canberra—but as with some besuited humans, their dull exterior hides an impressive anatomy. An adult male eastern grey can outrun a greyhound or a horse, swim a mile and still have the energy to drown a harassing hound with its great hind feet. They are superbly adapted to the well-watered eastern part of Australia, and like all marsupials are economical in their food intake. They are slow breeders, taking over eighteen months to wean their young (it takes a year for the red kangaroo), and are usually seasonal in their reproduction. But in the delicate matter of selecting the sex of their offspring the grey kangaroo shows astonishing discretion, for there is some evidence that females selectively rear daughters while they are young, and sons when they are older. The advantage the mother derives is a social one, for the bond between mothers and daughters is long-lasting and may benefit both. Sons, in contrast, wander to establish their own territory. Just how this trick is performed, however, is not yet understood.
Although eastern grey kangaroos moved westwards as stock watering points opened up, they are hopeless at coping with drought. Breeding ceases far earlier in a dry spell than with either euros or reds, and hundreds of eastern greys have been known to perish around a drying waterhole when good water and feed existed only kilometres away—something unthinkable for the red kangaroo.
Yet the eastern grey kangaroo is clearly doing something right, for as I learned when I prepared those skeletons at the Museum of Victoria, it belongs to a venerable lineage. The bones entrusted to me had been discovered in one of the biggest quarries in the southern hemisphere—the Morwell open-cut coalmine in west Gippsland. Occasionally the machinery that scoops up the coal will encounter a patch of clay, the result of ancient fires when the coal was exposed at the surface. In the 1970s a machine operator scooping up this muck somehow spotted a bone. Investigations soon showed that complete skeletons embedded in the clay were preserved in such detail that the remains of tiny joeys could still be seen in the region of the pouch. And not just that, but around the bones impressions of skin, fur and even the ‘last meal’ of the creatures could be discerned, the stems as green as they day they were plucked!
Such preservation is extremely rare. Nothing like it has ever been discovered anywhere else in Australia. Further, studies indicated that the remains were at least two million years old, their astonishing preservation being due to the lack of oxygen in the mud that had accumulated in ponds in the burned-out coal seam. When I studied these fossils I found that in every detail except size (the Morwell animals would have been somewhat heavier), the fossils were identical to eastern grey kangaroos still living in Victoria. The similarity even went as far as the skin impressions—the hair follicle pattern was indistinguishable from that seen in leather made from the hide of eastern grey kangaroos, but very different from that of reds and euros. I would later discover that jawbones dating back about four million years did not differ from those of the living eastern grey kangaroos—evidence that eastern greys had existed long before red kangaroos, indeed, before even the mighty diprotodon and giant short-faced kangaroos of the ice age.
The Mystery of Hopping
2004
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 Franz Pelsaert 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, as 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 scientific 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 that 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 that had been brought to Boston and trained to hop on it, and a battery of devices to measure oxygen consumption, mus
cle effort and heart rate in the gymnastic marsupials.
What he discovered was amazing. Hopping at medium speeds (fifteen to forty 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 six kmh) as both human legs do when walking.