There is no superstar apex predator roaming Cave Creek, no snow leopard, no panther. We just might have a tiger, a marsupial tiger. The last live specimens of the Australian thylacine, now presumed to be extinct, were found in Tasmania, but its image recurs in Aboriginal cave painting from widely separated parts of mainland Australia. It prefers woodland, makes itself a nest in dense undergrowth, hunts by night and avoids extremes of temperature. If the marsupial tiger survives anywhere, the Border Ranges would be the place. Stories of sightings abound.
In 1894 Carl Lentz was hunting with his brother on Tallai Mountain, when his dogs ran into a thicket. Lentz, expecting some bigger game than usual, loaded his gun with ‘swoon drops’ and waited.
All at once a limb bent down with the weight of something heavy on my side of the tree. Then I saw a big strange animal’s head appear out of the thick foliage. It was about to jump towards me, so I quickly fired and it fell with a hard bump only two yards off. It had just killed and half devoured a native bear. We tied its legs together with tough vines and stuck a long pole through them, by which we carried it home about half a mile. It was heavy. I intended taking it to Nerang, ten miles away, by pack horse the next day, but owing to heavy rain that night I could not cross the creek. I intended sending it by train to Brisbane for the Museum so we measured and skinned it. From tip of nose to end of tail, it was 6 ft, height of shoulder 25 inches, around chest 23 inches. It was strongly developed on the front quarters, and it had two extra long and sharp fang teeth, besides the four ordinary incisor teeth, puce coloured eyes with five very short, bright, orange coloured haired rings around them. Its whole forehead was the colour of sulphur, which made its whole dial luminous when it looked towards you in the dark. I saw one close at night since, that’s how I know. It had round ears of pale fleshy colour, a long thin coat of dark brown hair, under that he had a short thick coat of light pale blue-grey, and white stripes downwards, also bright yellow spots which all shone through the long thin coat, this made it appear a brindle colour at a distance. It looked very pretty close by. Its tail was covered with long black hair underneath that, [a] white and blue-grey ring, an inch wide. It was a magnificent specimen, a male, the size of an Alsatian dog.
If the animal was some kind of thylacine, it is slightly odd that Lentz while noticing that it was male, didn’t notice that it had a pouch drawn up over its genitals. The skin never made it to the museum in Brisbane, possibly because in the humid conditions Lentz was not able to prevent its deterioration.
William Duncan told Lentz that he had had a similar experience when he was timber-getting on the Little Nerang.
One mid-day when he got to the camp to boil up his meat was gone. He had hung it on the ridge pole out of reach of the dingoes. He had two natives along on that occasion . . . [they] searched and found the bag all ripped up. They said it was punchum, a very big cat-like animal.
The word ‘punchum’ can be found in Gresty’s word list for Numinbah as ‘punchimgun’ interpreted by Gresty to mean ‘Dasyurus’, that is, the ‘Tiger Quoll’, nowadays the Spotted-tailed Quoll (Dasyurus maculatus maculatus). The Geytenbeeks’ Gidabal dictionary (1971) records the same word as ‘banjdjim’. Lentz’s account continues:
They advised him not to stay there by himself, as that fella would sneak onto him while he was asleep, tear out his throat and suck his blood. A black would never camp by himself, when they were known to be in the vicinity. He went straight home and bought a bloodhound and a double barrel shotgun . . . On arrival back at the camp by moonlight, the dog treed a big animal right away. It sat in the fork of a red oak, out of reach, its eyes glowed like red hot fire coals. He fired both charges into it. It jumped down onto the dog and was worrying it, so he bashed it over the head with the gunstock, killing it . . . He said the animal was the size of a massive dog.
Bushmen specialise in tall stories. It is difficult to imagine a bloodhound treeing anything, let alone a thylacine. It should not be forgotten however that both these accounts pre-date any suggestion that the thylacine was on the verge of extinction. In 1923 the assistant government geologist Sydney Skertchly contributed an article to the Brisbane Courier in response to the news of Wilkins’s Australia and Islands Expedition.
I am glad somebody is in earnest going to probe the truth of the belief in the existence of a larger tiger cat in Queensland than has yet gladdened scientific eyes . . .
As my contribution, here is an extract from one of my 1913 note-books: ‘Near Mt. Nimmel, there is a gorge; just below a precipice in Springbrook, which the blacks would not enter as there was a big “tiger cat”, large as a big dog, that would kill man or dog. No living black had seen it; but their fathers had told them of it. Can this be a reminiscence of Thylacoleo, or more probably of the Tasmanian Devil?’ (Skertchly)
‘Thylacoleo’ was the name given by Sir Richard Owen to the marsupial carnivore species of which fossils had been discovered at Lake Colongulac and on the Darling Downs. Skertchly goes on:
It is described as having great teeth. The blacks used to try and kill it by enticing it out, by taking a dog, and making it howl; but it always got away; anyhow, they were never successful. James Ferguson, timber getter, reported this to the late Mr. E. Cooper,who told me.
Here is another extract from the same book: ‘About the year 1906 a big “tiger cat” took a lot of fowls from Mrs. Richter’s, at Nerang. It was as big as a terrier dog, and her dog would not tackle it. It was shot, and was yellow with black spots. What became of the skin Mr. E. J. Cooper, my informant, does not know.’ I have just asked him about it, and he said, ‘If these good people like to go to Springbrook, they may get one.’ When I was up there two years ago Ben Gillespie (a fine bushman) pointed out to me a log on which he saw one sitting a few days previously. He saw it several times. My wonderful timber-getting friend, Jack Duncan, who pretty well lived with the blacks as a boy, has told me much of the beast, though even he, who has spent all his life in our mountain scrub, never saw one.
Jack Duncan was a son of the aforementioned William Duncan, and a brother of Sandy Duncan, the discoverer of the Natural Bridge.
The Spotted-tailed Quoll, largest of the marsupial carnivores known to survive at Cave Creek, might be marked like the mythical ‘tiger’, but it is very much smaller. In 1965, Elspeth Huxley described the quoll for the English readers of her book, Their Shining Eldorado:
Attractive little sharp-nosed brown-and-cream spotted creatures, smaller than an average cat, to which they are no relation, they are among the few real killers in Australia. They are marsupials and will carry as many as eight tiny joeys in the pouch. Now they are becoming very rare, because of the destruction of the forests in which they dwell. (357)
I have not seen a quoll at Cave Creek but I have come across its scats, which are unmistakeable. Quolls use communal latrine sites, usually in rocky country, where they leave twisted turds held together by fur and feathers. Unfortunately I have seen the quoll’s principal predator, the introduced fox, quite often. Because of the presence of the quolls, we can’t bait the foxes. When the quoll is threatened it opens its mouth and utters a piercing scream. It tends to vocalise as well when it encounters other quolls. At night the Cave Creek Forest resounds with shrieks and howls, of owls, of prey animals and of quolls. Awareness of the quolls and of the threats to their survival is growing. In July 2009 eighty people responded to an invitation from the Gold Coast City Council to attend a Quoll Discovery Day arranged by Wildlife Queensland at the Numinbah Valley School of Arts.
The Cave Creek version of the Long-Nosed Bandicoot (Perameles nasuta) is silver-grey; we find signs of its activities on every square metre of the property, and sometimes we find it, dead, with a three-cornered tear in its side, or with signs of owl or quoll predation at throat or anus. One evening I surprised two juveniles who fled at my approach, revealing hinder parts that were very clearly barred, which is not supposed to be the case with Perameles nasuta, which is not supposed to be silver-grey either. We have seen the Northern Brown Bandicoot (Isoodon macrourus) alive but never found a corpse, which suggests that it is doing something to outwit the local predators, all except the python, which swallows it whole. We watch every day for other members of old Gondwanan families, without success. The vulnerable Long-nosed Potoroo (Potorous tridactylus), which digs down like a bandicoot to find fungi, roots, tubers and larvae, is known from Murwillumbah and the Scenic Rim, as is the equally vulnerable Rufous Rat-kangaroo (Aepyprymnus rufescens), but none of us has yet seen either of them at Cave Creek. I live in hope.
The marsupial I know best is the Yellow-footed Antechinus (Antechinus flavipes). This little creature has excreted in every drawer, every box, every bag, every pocket, in the house. (I use the word excrete because it pisses and shits in the one wet package.) One excreted particularly copiously in my Sydney University D.Litt. hood even though it was hidden away in a dress bag. As I sit reading in the evening, antechinuses venture into the room to wolf the moths that ricochet off the light battens and skitter round the floor on their backs. Antechinuses are curiously constructed in that they can unhinge their various limbs and make themselves rectangular; when it comes to limbo-dancing under a door they can flatten themselves until they are no thicker than a credit card with a minute paw at each corner. They dance over me as I lie in bed, fight battles in my slippers, all the time vocalising, zzzzt, zzzzt like fizzing electric cables. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve opened a drawer to have an antechinus leap out and run up my arm. One day I was so put out to find an antechinus in a filing cabinet that I slammed the drawer shut with a deafening clang. When I opened the drawer an hour or two later the tiny creature was lying in it, quite dead. I hope it wasn’t felled by a lethal level of noise. It may just have been a male.
When the winter solstice is past, the male antechinus begins to think about sex, and then about nothing but sex. He forgets to eat, prowling the neighbourhood incessantly, desperately seeking a receptive female. Stress hormones drain his body of muscle and fat. His immune system breaks down. When he meets his receptive female he acquits himself of a bout of acrobatic sexual intercourse that may last up to twelve hours, until he rolls off dead. Of all the possible adaptations to a harsh environment this seems one of the harshest. In the laboratory scientists succeeded in keeping male antechinuses alive after mating, only to discover that when the season began the next year they produced no semen. Their testes were shrivelled ‘a bit like those of 80- or 90-year-old men’, according to zoologist Pat Woolley. Woolley is deservedly famous for her work on the morphology of the dasyurid penis, which resulted in the removal of five of twelve antechinus species and their identification as members of new genera, because of basic structural differences in penis shape.
The male antechinus having fulfilled his reproductive duty is not allowed to hang around while his mate gestates her dozen young, which travel through her fur from vagina to pouch after about a month, stay feeding in the pouch for five weeks, and are then left in the nest while she forages on her own. After three months they will be weaned, unless she eats them first. The female antechinus does not eat her offspring because she is hungry. If she eats any, she will eat either females or males, never both. It is thought that raising males, who grow faster, may be less onerous for her, while raising females who will be around when next she comes into season will diminish her own chances of successful mating. As she will not live for a third season, the issue becomes unimportant in her second. In 1960 Antechinus flavipes was bred in the laboratory to see if it could serve as a laboratory animal; it was deemed too difficult to handle and too slow to reproduce, and so escaped that fate (Marlow).
The Common Planigale (Planigale maculata) is another, slightly bigger, carnivorous marsupial mouse that lives in the rainforest and never comes into the house. It is not, as is claimed on many a website, the world’s smallest marsupial.
Three species of gliders have been found in the Cave Creek Forest, the Sugar Glider (Petaurus breviceps), the Squirrel Glider (P. norfolcensis) and the Yellow-bellied Glider (P. australis). The odd thing about all of these is that people who consider themselves to be animal-lovers are prepared to keep these flying creatures grounded in captivity. The Sugar Glider is the smallest and commonest of the Australian species. By spreading its patagium, the membrane that stretches from its fifth finger to its first toe, as it launches itself, the airborne Sugar Glider can travel up to 150 metres through the air, steering itself by altering the angle of its legs and tail. It is a highly social animal, living in family groups of up to eight adults plus the young of the current season’s mating, and very active, foraging for up to 80 per cent of its waking time. This wonderful creature is now being bred in numbers for the American pet trade. A pet glider will never know the joy of flight and nights spent foraging in the scented canopy.
The Squirrel Glider, slightly bigger and slightly less cute than the Sugar Glider, is not so far being bred as a pet, but it is kept in captivity. According to the Mammal Society of Australia ‘A group of up to 4 Squirrel Gliders can quite happily live in a suspended cage 4x4x10 with the floor of the cage being three foot off the floor.’ How this esteemed organisation, which is dedicated to providing information regarding ‘keeping our native Fauna in captivity’, measures happiness is nowhere explained. Poor old P. australis is considered vulnerable in the wild and is therefore sometimes doomed to be kept in captivity as it is at the David Fleay Wildlife Park on the Gold Coast, where ‘dozens of threatened species are kept’ ‘for research, breeding and education’.
Cave Creek is supposed to be home as well to the tiniest glider of all, the Feathertail Glider (Acrobates pygmaeus), no bigger than the smallest mouse. This little creature too, though its conservation status is of least concern, is another being bred in captivity. The first European zoo to be successful in breeding it was at Poznan in Poland; Polish Feathertail Gliders are now being supplied to zoos all over Europe. Though you might dream of travelling from one zoo to another to collect them and bring them home, in Australia it is against the law to release into the wild any animal reared in captivity.
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
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.
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).
Australian flying foxes are not vampire bats. The commonest of them is or was the Grey-headed Flying Fox, Pteropus poliocephalus. The name is more than slightly perverse, because the most obvious attribute of this creature is not its greyish head but its bolero of vivid russet fur. As Joseph Bancroft told the Queensland Philosophical Society on 25 April 1872, ‘The natural food of the animal consists of the native fig and other small fruits found in the scrubs’ (BC, 14 May). The bats were of course the original inhabitants of the land that was taken up for vineyards and orchards. Most of their forest habitat was demolished in a single generation, and the bats driven further into the inland, away from areas of high rainfall. There was no way they could survive except by returning at night to plunder orchards and gardens.
Grey-headed Flying Foxes are remarkable animals; the span of their wings, as thin and stretchy as cured tobacco leaf, is more than a metre and a half. Because the stigmas of many rainforest trees are only receptive at night, bats are the most important pollinators for at least sixty tree species. And because flying foxes travel up to fifty kilometres to find their preferred food, they are also the most important seed dispersers. They prefer to roost in tall trees on mountain streamsides 200 metres or so above sea level. On most nights they will be feeding somewhere in the forest at Cave Creek. As they hustle among the leaves, you can hear their soft chuckling and chiding. More than twenty different calls have been identified. Carers for baby flying foxes say that they are intelligent and responsive. Not that that would do them much good. Rats are intelligent and responsive too and we still consider ourselves entitled to persecute and torture them in their millions.
The early settlers knew next to nothing about their ‘nightly visitors of disagreeable and injurious character’ (SMH, 22 February 1848), whose ‘voracious powers ha[d] increased tenfold over the destruction of former years’ (SMH, 29 January 1848). They didn’t know where they came from or where they went when they had finished gorging. Eventually they learnt that the bats roosted in distant camps in the scrub where by daylight they could be shot in their hundreds from point-blank range. Regular flying-fox shoots or ‘battues’ were organised. Parties of forty or fifty shooters travelled far into the ranges seeking out flying-fox camps. When they found trees full of sleeping bats they simply blasted them with shotguns. A few wet blankets complained that this was not sport but butchery, but they were not allowed to spoil the fun. This enthusiastic account of ‘Flying Fox hunting in the Blue Mountains’ appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald for 26 April 1860:
What a sight! literally thousands of these great bats on the wing, gyrating round high tree tops, ever and anon settling and suspending themselves by their hind feet. Then fired among and rising into the air in the utmost state of consternation yet not forsaking the accustomed roosts. The chirping, clucking and buffetting of the whole; the cries of the wounded, the report of firearms, and shouts of the men in that dense copsewood combined to make a scene rarely equalled for wildness and interest.
A correspondent wrote to the editor of the Brisbane Courier on 15 April 1872:
We have found out the haunts of those pests of flying foxes where they during the daytime are congregated together by many hundreds if not thousands.
About a mile or two from the German Station is a country called the Serpentine. A certain portion of this is called the Never country; here they have their home in the daytime, and as soon as the evening comes you can see them come in droves from that direction, spreading all over the district and plundering wherever they find fruit.
Let the young men from town and country fix a day for the sport . . . and come together at the German Station.
The hunters met at the German Station, which was the name commonly given to the site of the abandoned Moravian Mission of Zion’s Hill (now Nundah), at 9 a.m. on the Queen’s Birthday and a great time was had by all but the flying foxes. Such battues became regular occasions.
Agitation for a Flying Fox Extermination Bill began even before the Marsupial Destruction Act came into force. Farmers who organised flying-fox shoots complained of the cost of the ammunition and the difficulty of disposing of ‘dray-loads’ of dead bats. Others had been poisoning fruit with strychnine. Though the agitation intensified the government declined to include flying foxes in any of the revisions of the Marsupial Destruction Act, apparently because the damage done by them to the fruit crop did not affect exports and had no obvious economic consequences. The complaints of the fruitgrowers about the costs of ammunition for the battues and bounties for bat carcasses grew ever louder, and still the government failed to act (BC, 22 December 1874).
On 22 October 1880, the Queensland Legislative Assembly went into committee to consider amendments to the Marsupial Destruction Bill.
Mr [Albert] Norton [member for Port Curtis] proposed an amendment having the effect of including ‘all marsupials’ in the operation of the bill, but subsequently withdrew the amendment it being pointed out that flying foxes could be shot in such numbers in certain localities that all the funds available under the measure would soon be exhausted . . . (BC, 23 October)
Nobody seemed aware that flying foxes are not marsupials. (Foraging mothers carry their small young attached to a nipple close to the wing.) George King MLA, who had sold in Japan the skins of 40,000 wallabies killed on his property at Gowrie when it was invaded by marsupials during the drought of 1877–8, moved a similar amendment, and called for a division, but there was only one other member in favour, and the motion failed. By 1884, state legislators had learned more about flying foxes. In the Legislative Council, on 29 July 1884, ‘Mr. May pointed out that the bill under discussion was for the destruction of marsupials and he thought flying foxes did not belong to that order.’ The honourable gentlemen made a joke of the matter. ‘Mr. [Peter] Macpherson stated that as attorneys were made gentlemen by Act of Parliament, no doubt flying foxes could be converted into marsupials by the same means.’
When John F. Buckland MLA for Bulimba addressed voters at Holmview on 3 June 1886, the chairman of the meeting drew his attention ‘to the fact that the farmers down in the Beenleigh district were taxed for the purpose of paying for the destruction of the marsupials for the benefit of the squatter’s pocket, while they the farmers were troubled with the flying-fox pest, and he considered this vermin should have been introduced among the things for the destruction of which the government was prepared to pay’ (BC, 5 June). Buckland had no option but to agree. The result was the empowering of the local divisional boards to raise finance for the organisation of flying-fox extermination programmes, which was in effect simply passing the buck. It was not until May 1889 that a specially convened Conference of Local Authorities in south-east Queensland passed a motion ‘That the Government be requested to introduce into parliament a measure to provide for the destruction of flying foxes and noxious birds, and give power to a united local authority for the purpose’. The result was the East Moreton Flying Fox Board, which proved just as ineffectual as its antecedents.
Other remedies were tried. To those who observed the Aboriginal method of smoking flying foxes out of their roosts it was clear that ‘the fumes of sulphur, burnt under the trees where the flying foxes camp, will bring them down wholesale . . . as the creatures hang in large masses like bunches of grapes, sulphur on a moderately calm day could be used effectively on them.’ Orchardists tried ringing bells, leaving lamps lit all night, using various substances said to be bat-repellent, and running wires around the trees. Nothing worked. Many fruitgrowers gave up, leaving their orchards to go feral. Others invested in costly netting and went broke. Twenty years ago electric grids were introduced. These are ranks of live wires inches apart that will electrocute any bat that comes in contact; in 2001 use of these was banned, but as the ban is barely policed and the farmers were not required actually to dismantle the grids, it is thought to be widely flouted.
Grey-headed Flying Fox numbers are now in serious decline, nobody quite knows why. It has been suggested that the fall in numbers and a demonstrable shift of 300 kilometres southwards in their range are responses to climate change. Nearly 50,000 have been discovered dead on their roosts after periods when daytime temperatures reached 42 degrees Celsius. In November 2008 at nearby Canungra Bat Camp 300 baby bats were found abandoned. They were rescued and rehabilitated by a new generation of bat-carers. Roost sites are now legally protected; a recent biodiversity action plan developed for the Border Ranges suggests that a buffer zone of 200 metres must be left around any bat camp, particularly those where females gather to give birth. Meanwhile thousands of bats are injured every year by barbed wire; others become trapped in fruit-tree netting and still more are electrocuted. Even in the inner city you can see flying foxes hanging dead from power lines.
In February 2010 ‘an estimated 40,000 flying foxes descend[ed] on Canungra’. A local ‘Vietnam veteran and retiree’ complained that the bats had made him and his wife sick, that they carried E. coli and Giardia in their droppings. He demanded a cull. ‘The only method I know of that is 100 per cent foolproof is to blow the damn things out of the sky,’ he told reporters, blissfully unaware of the lesson of history.
The case against fruit bats has been recently strengthened by the identification of three bat-borne diseases: Hendra Virus, Australian Bat Lyssa Virus and Menangle Virus.
Hendra Virus (HeV) was the first to turn up, in 1994 in the Brisbane suburb of Hendra, where it killed fourteen horses. A trainer and a stable-hand caring for the affected horses also contracted the disease and the trainer died. Black and Spectacled Flying Foxes have antibodies to the disease and are assumed to be the vectors but, though many tests have been done, the way the disease is transferred is still not understood (Australian Veterinary Journal, 76:12). The hosts for HeV are now understood to include pet animals, mice, brush-tailed possums, bandicoots, hares, carpet pythons and a variety of blood-sucking insects including March flies. Horses continue to become infected and there is still no treatment. More than forty horses have died, seven people have contracted the disease through contact with infected horses, and four of them have died. In October 2006 a horse died of Hendra disease just over the range near Murwillumbah.
In November 1996 an animal carer was handling a Yellow-bellied Sheath-tail Bat when she received a scratch; four to five weeks later she began to show signs of a rabies-like illness, and twenty days later she died. Another woman who had been bitten by a flying fox which she was trying to detach from a terrified child four months earlier and had suffered no apparent ill effect refused post-exposure treatment only to fall ill two years on. She was admitted to hospital but died nineteen days later. In this case the virus was a lyssavirus (ABLV), from the same family as rabies.
Flying foxes are thought to be the vectors of the third bat-borne virus, which was first detected in 1997 when animals in a piggery at Menangle became ill and two of the humans looking after them came down with something like flu. Research into the bat-borne viruses goes on, but so far neither state nor federal government has voted to fund the development of a vaccine.
Perhaps the slaughter of the 1880s and 90s did have long-term consequences, for flying foxes breed slowly, with only one offspring per female per year. Their range seems to be sliding southwards, and the cause seems to be global warming. In 1999 the Grey-headed Flying Fox was declared ‘vulnerable to extinction’. It is now protected everywhere in Australia. Even in Queensland roost sites are supposed to have been protected since 1994. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that shooting flying foxes is known to be inhumane, in 2012 the Queensland government announced its intention to issue permits to farmers allowing them to shoot specific numbers of four species of flying foxes if other control methods had been tried and failed. The reasons given were inconsistent; some said it was to assist beleaguered Queensland fruit farmers, others that it was to limit the spread of Hendra virus, others that bats are a nuisance. The announcement was made on Threatened Species Day.
In 2010 CCRRS discovered its own flying-fox camp. Flying foxes need dense riparian vegetation, which is what we’ve got. They like altitude, ditto. And they like fruit, ditto again. In March 2010 the workforce became aware of an unusual level of noise emanating from the creekside. As they walked through the bush towards the noise they became aware of an equally unusual level of smell. On the boundary with the national park they found a 50-square-metre bat camp. The tall roost trees were almost completely defoliated and underneath them, the little walking-stick palms, exposed as they were both to the white-hot sun and a rain of bat excrement, were dying. The workforce reckoned that there were 1,000 to 1,500 Grey-headed Flying Foxes in the camp. There was nothing they could do to save the little trees, not even flap their arms and say ‘shoo!’ It is now illegal to disturb any bat roost. The Gold Coast City Council solemnly intones that ‘Camp locations should be excluded from public access. A buffer zone of 200m is recommended.’ Our bat camp was within twenty metres of the walkway down which the 300,000 people who visit the Natural Bridge Section of the Springbrook National Park each year are required to walk. There was not so much as a sign to warn them to keep away from the bat camp. At the end of August the bats were gone, as suddenly as they came.
At CCRRS, where there is no barbed wire and power cables run underground, our eighteen bat species, many of which are listed as vulnerable or threatened, can live and breed in relative safety. Besides the Grey-headed Flying Fox, we have the Black Flying Fox (Pteropus alecto), thought by some people to be displacing the Grey-headed than which it is slightly bigger and heavier. In the mating season the male of this species has a mildly unpleasant habit of selecting a length of branch upon which to groom himself repeatedly and display his engorged genitalia. The Little Red Flying Fox (P. scapulatus), which is nomadic and roosts alone in a different place after every night’s foraging, visits when the Silky Oaks and other proteaceous plants are in flower. The miniature flying fox called the Common Blossom Bat (Synconycteris australis) is entirely dependent upon rainforest. It too roosts alone in the canopy and feeds nightly among the flowering and fruiting trees. As it bustles among the flower spathes it collects pollen on its fur. Walking in the forest at dusk I sometimes hear it defending its food plant, vocalising and clapping its wings. The Eastern Tube-nosed Bat (Nyctimene robinsoni) is another that can only live in rainforest, but its range is even narrower. Like the Blossom Bat it loves the flowers of quandongs and Black Beans and it specialises in figs. I have never managed to see it or even to hear its characteristic whistling call, but I know it’s about.
Many bat species nest in tree hollows. The Eastern Free-tail Bat or East Coast Free-tailed Bat or Eastern Little Mastiff Bat (Mormopterus norfolkensis) is one such. Very little is known about it because it is not often trapped but it, or something very like it, has been found in the caldera. Another is the White-striped Free-tailed Bat (Tadarida australis) which can form maternal colonies of several hundred in tree hollows of thirty centimetres diameter. The Eastern Long-eared Bat (Nyctophilus bifax) is another rainforest denizen, that is likely to roost among the interlaced roots of strangler figs or in tree ferns. The rare Golden Tipped Bat (Phoniscus or Kerivoula papuensis) is another rainforest bat so tiny that it chooses to roost in the abandoned nests of scrubwrens and gerygones. Unusually its diet consists almost entirely of orb-weaving spiders. There are half a dozen species of forest bats in the genus Vespadelus, and perhaps more. As these can be told apart only by a comparison of their penes, it is more than I can do to tell you which ones live at Cave Creek and which don’t.
Several species of bat have probably taken up residence in the old house. Certainly we find droppings on the floor. One day, in an old tar pot hanging on the house wall, I found the tiny desiccated corpse of an Eastern Horseshoe Bat (Rhinolophus megaphyllus) with her baby in her arms. These little bats fly by echolocation, hunting moths, beetles, flies, crickets, bugs, cockroaches and wasps through the dense forest; somehow this mother and child ended up in the tar pot unable to get out. Of all the creatures in the forest, the bats are the ones we know least, and of the bats, the insectivores are the ones we know least about. It is my fervent hope that a bat specialist will come to work with the bats at Cave Creek.
We can only wonder now which bats used to live in the cave from which Cave Creek takes its name. These days it houses no bats, though according to a visitor in 1908 it was then ‘filled with bats which when disturbed fly about in hundreds; they were so thick in the air that a person kept involuntarily dodging his head to avoid them’. These may have been Eastern Cave Bats (Vespadelus troughtoni) typically found close to escarpments along the scenic rim. They like to hunt the insects feeding on Booyongs, Rosewood, Stingers and Carabeens, all of which are common in the Cave Creek forest. The Large-eared Pied Bat (Chalinolobus dwyeri) is another that lives in sandstone caves close to the forest edge. It was not discovered until 1966 at Copeton in northern New South Wales, at a site that is now under the Copeton Dam. It has been found in Lamington National Park, where it is supposed that it was roosting in basalt. The land at CCRRS is traversed by a broad stripe of sandstone that crops out over the forest and the creek, perfect habitat for Chalinolobus dwyeri.
Placental rats and mice made their way to Australia five to ten million years after the bats. Viewers of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here will have seen C-list celebrities being buried with rats, having rats tipped into their trousers and so forth, and they will have been told that the creatures in question are fierce ‘bush rats’. In fact they are common Rattus rattus, from the nearest rat-fancy. To have been genuine local bush rats they would have had to be Rattus fuscipes subspecies assimilis. This animal is not commensal with human beings and would have left the site of IACGMOOH as soon as it was taken over by television crews in 2002. Though bush rats are supposed to be strictly nocturnal, I have seen them by daylight. I have never seen more than one at a time, and always in the same place on a track about fifty yards from the old house. The rat would pop out of the kikuyu on one side of a track, cross it and disappear into a tunnel in the grass on the other side. The tunnel appears to have been in use for generations, because I have been seeing a bush rat near it for seven or eight years, much longer than the life cycle of an individual rat, which lives only a year. Rattus fuscipes typically has a snub nose, dark feet (hence its name) and a short tail.
There are two species of native mice as well as imported house mice at Cave Creek, but both are elusive and increasingly rare. One is the Fawn-footed Melomys (Melomys cervinipes). I am supposed now to call it a Korril, a word that originates from the language of the Stradbroke Island people, but I’ve never heard anyone call it anything but a mouse. The other is the Hastings River Mouse (Pseudomys oralis), which I’m sorry to say was caught in a deadfall trap by someone seeking to display his credentials as an academic mammalologist.
Our biggest placental mammals are our dingoes. I was walking alone on the edge of the forest only days after I first slept at CCRRS, when a big blond dingo with a plumy tail came trotting down a pademelon track to within a few yards of where I had come to a stop. He had been sniffing amongst the undergrowth and hadn’t seen me until that point. He stood and looked. I looked back. I vaguely remembered that you’re not supposed to stare dogs in the eye, because it is confrontational, so I broke the gaze once or twice. I didn’t dare turn my back to him because it might have triggered his chase reflex, so I stood my ground and talked to him, as is my wont. The path was steep and he was slightly above me, motionless, his golden eyes looking intelligently into my face. Then he wheeled and trotted back up the path. I watched his plumy tail floating above the undergrowth until it disappeared.
I have seen him several times since, and even managed to catch him on video. The last time I saw him it was broad midday. I was sitting on the verandah of the old house, reading, when some small unfamiliar sound made me look up. Plumy Tail was standing a hundred yards away keeping nit for his pack, as they crossed the main track on their way to the creek. I was too late to see the leader of the pack, who would have been a senior bitch, but even so I counted more than a dozen animals, as well as a horde of smaller pups of whom I could see just tail tips and the odd ear. Plumy Tail stood still, head up, ears pricked, gazing down the track towards me as they trotted over the crossing and into our planting, almost as if he was showing them to me. Then he too was gone.
Plumy Tail has at least one rival, a darker ginger dingo whom I’ve seen once or twice from a distance. Now that the forest is growing up we see dingoes less often, but we hear them more and sometimes from very close quarters. They emerge at night from their refuge in the forest to take prey in the neighbouring cleared areas, usually young lambs. Every now and then we get a circular advising us that 1080 baits are being laid, as long as all the landowners within a five-kilometre radius consent. This has the effect of rendering the baiting impossible, which is just as well. We couldn’t agree to the baiting of wild dogs if we wanted to because, in an attempt to protect quolls from ingesting the poison, baits may not be laid within 300 metres of a forest edge. There is now nowhere at CCRRS that is more than 300 metres from a forest edge.
A dingo is a dog, nowadays called Canis lupus dingo; domestic dogs are also Canis lupus. The two can and do breed with each other. One school of thought holds that dingoes have become more dangerous because of interbreeding with introduced dogs, which has weakened their shyness trait so that they no longer avoid humans. This is probably bunk. From what I see of dingoes at Cave Creek they are quite capable of observing humans and familiarising themselves with them. They certainly know me a lot better than I know them. They are as easy to tame and train as any other dog breed. They were essential members of Aboriginal communities, as hunting companions who found, harassed and sometimes took game, and as guardians who identified hazards before humans became aware of them. Yet, from the beginning of settlement ‘wild dogs’ have been persecuted. Steel-jaw traps were set for them; they were shot and poisoned with strychnine, with small regard to the degree of suffering involved. In Queensland between 1932 and 1967 doggers collected 685,000 dingo scalps. Since 1968 ‘wild dogs’ are poisoned with 1080, sodium monofluoroacetate, a toxin derived from West Australian pea species. The thinking was that because the dingo was introduced from Asia only 4,000 or so years ago, it had no immunity to 1080, but native species could ingest it without ill effect. There was never any good reason to believe that the immunity acquired by south-western fauna was shared with the fauna of the discontinuous eastern region, but for nearly forty years the idea was accepted, along with an equally ill-founded notion that this method of killing was humane. Anyone who saw a dog die of 1080 poisoning knew that it wasn’t. In 2007 a Queensland drover called Bill Little, thirty of whose cattle dogs had been poisoned with 1080 over the years, told ABC TV news programme PM: ‘You get up in the middle of the night and your dog’s screaming in pain and he’s climbing the wall of your van, you’ve got to get out in the middle of the night and shoot your best dog.’
At CCRRS the dingo is not a problem that we need to solve. We have no livestock to protect from predation, or from the diseases thought to be carried by dingoes. The way I see it the dingoes have more right to our mountains than do sheep. One morning the workforce surprised a dingo bitch who had chosen to give birth on one of our warm mulch-heaps. She ran away, leaving four newborn pups. When she didn’t come back, Luke took the pups home to his mother who reared them. They were supposed to be going to a dingo sanctuary in Victoria, but when tests were done to find if they were pure bred, it turned out that they were only fifteen-sixteenths, mongrels like the rest of us. They are still living over the hill with Luke’s mum.
Every day I meet animals going about their business. I have become used to surprises and still they keep coming. I had finished writing this chapter, and was putting the laptop away when I heard a rustling in the gathering dusk. I leaned over the verandah rail and peered into the heaving vegetation. Whatever was causing the upheaval seemed fairly clumsy. Every now and then I glimpsed a round bottom parting the fern fronds. A bandicoot, I thought. But then it climbed onto a rock and I saw that it had a beak and spines.
An echidna. An echidna! Tachyglossus aculeatus. A creature more ancient than a marsupial. A monotreme! I felt weak at the knees. I had thought that the rainforest was too wet for echidnas, and here, calm and comfy as you like in the sodden forest, was a wild echidna. It rambled off down the gully we have planted with Bangalow and Walking-stick Palms and my heartfelt blessing went with it.
Whenever a truly wild creature lets me see it behaving naturally, I feel a blessedness, as if I had been allowed to enter a realm far more special than the celebrity A-list. When I look up from a book, and see a few yards away a pademelon grazing with her joey, I feel vindicated, as if I had won acceptance as an animal in my turn. Lots of people are persuaded to spend lots of money on shelter and food for wild creatures, when all they have to do is to stop making lawns and weeding and tidying up, and turning the bush into an outdoor room. While it’s not true that all you have to do is to let your garden run to seed, before wild vegetation and wild creatures will return to it, it is true that if you remove weeds and do your best to restore the original vegetation, the endemic animal species will reappear as if by magic. You won’t be able to keep a dog or a cat or even hens, because all of them do tremendous damage to wild creatures, but you won’t miss them, because all around you the bush will rustle with to-ings and fro-ings of a vast range of creatures great and small. A patch of rescued bush is a sanctuary where the special creatures who evolved with the vegetation can stave off extinction.
This book must end, but the story will continue. As the forest community at Cave Creek rebuilds itself, we will do our best to record the process on the Friends of Gondwana Rainforest website.