White Beech: The Rainforest Years (53 page)

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.

The early settlers were even less kindly disposed to macropods than they were to possums and koalas. In 1877, in response to pressure from the sheep farmers of the interior, who were convinced that kangaroos and wallabies were eating out their pastures, the Queensland government passed the first of fifteen Marsupial Destruction Acts. The first version of the act actually imposed penalties on landholders who did not kill marsupials on their properties, as well as a tax on graziers to finance the payments made to scalpers, who travelled the country, setting traps and shooting the animals. The scalper was a despised individual, ‘affected by no sentient emotions, void of all romantic attachments, a pariah, an outcast, excluded among his wattle scrubs or sandalwood patches, from the outer world; practically unknown except to his fellow shooters, or the publican and store-keeper of the backwoods township’ (
Q
, 25 May 1895, 981). As government officials didn’t know one scalp from another, the scalpers found it sinfully easy to cheat them. Some got Aborigines to get the scalps for them and paid them in tobacco. And it was not only the scalpers who did their best to annihilate marsupials; by 1878 the kangaroo had become ‘the common enemy of every man and boy in the bush capable of carrying and using a gun’ (
BC
, 14 October). In Queensland by 1930 27 million kangaroos, wallaroos, wallabies, pademelons, kangaroo rats and bandicoots had been destroyed (Hrdina). Many species survived only in inaccessible regions like the Border Ranges. Unbelievable as it may seem, the Marsupial Destruction Act was not finally repealed until 1994.

In hilly south-east Queensland there were very few sheep farmers. The people trying to grow crops in the coastal areas south of Brisbane were up in arms about a different kind of creature, not a marsupial this time. Marsupials were the original mammals of Australia, from about 45 million years ago; the most hated creatures in Queensland were relative newcomers, placental mammals that flew across from south-east Asia about 15 million years ago, namely, bats.

The first settlers who managed to get their cosseted peach trees to set fruit were astonished and appalled when the evening sky was darkened by armies of bats appearing as if from nowhere and helping themselves. In February 1844 one observer described how they flew over Maitland for nearly half an hour in ‘dense masses’. ‘There was a good deal of firing at them each night, but they fly high and strong and dusk is not the best time of day for taking aim, so that very few were brought down’
(
MM
, 3 February). The next year the bats came in even greater force, as more and more of their habitat was felled and burnt (
MM
, 5 February 1845). Even at night the mere sight of the bats flying overhead was greeted with gunfire from all sides. ‘As old colonists will know it is the fruit . . . that attracts the “foxes” or, as some call them, the “vampyre bats”; and we can testify from experience to the havoc they make amongst the peaches,’ wrote a correspondent to
the
Brisbane Courier
(10 March 1863).