by Don Watson
Arthur Henry never saw a kangaroo in our part of the world – a blessing because in places where they thrived they were ‘a great evil’ to the farmer, he said. Now there are kangaroos where there were never kangaroos before. We have seen them through the kitchen window of the family house, grazing in the paddock on the other side of the road.
Birds aside, there was little else in the way of original animal inhabitants. No bandicoots, goannas or wombats had survived the early settlers. They hated wombats almost as much as they hated snakes. Common wombats (Vombatus ursinus) are wonderful burrowers, though their distant cousins, the 40-kilogram southern and rare northern hairy-nosed wombats, are more wonderful still. A common wombat’s hole can be a metre wide at the mouth and extend for at least 20 metres, with more than one entrance and more than one sleeping chamber. The southern hairy-nose builds tunnels up to 60 metres long and 4 metres deep. Because their range is so wide and they have no more regard for fences, pipes and the foundations of buildings than they do for crops and gardens, they were a nuisance to just about everyone who lived on the land. In Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and New South Wales they were declared pests for much of the twentieth century and ruthlessly hunted with guns and cyanide. They vanished from our district for half a century (and from some places for good); then, about twenty years ago, they reappeared. Their habits have not changed, and landholders are muttering about declaring them vermin again.
Despite their gormless appearance, wombats are at least as bright as the brightest dog and easily the cleverest marsupial. They can run 100 metres in less than ten seconds and maintain a speed of 40 kmh over 150 metres, which no human could do on rough ground. Dante Gabriel Rossetti adored them and wept upon the death of one of the two he kept in England. George Bass ate one and found it more than acceptable, but the Aborigines seem to have shunned their flesh.
We did have what we called mountain possums, and for once we got the name right. They look like the common brush-tails (Trichosurus vulpecula), which do well in the cities and prodigiously in New Zealand, but ours were mountain brush-tails (Trichosurus cunninghami). They have shorter ears and tails than the common brush-tail and are steely-grey rather than silvery and have more black on them, though brown and creamy-yellow colourings are common in both species. At night, when excited by rival possums, dogs or the prospect of a mate, our mountain possums made a very loud and startling noise – a ‘grating throat-chuckle’, as Mrs Charles Meredith said in her Notes and Sketches.
Textbooks describe them as highly sedentary, and that was certainly true of a very big one that lived in our toolshed, up on a shelf among the old cartons of sheep dip, DDT, and cans of herbicide we used on blackberries – 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, the same stuff the US Army used to defoliate Vietnam.
From the earliest Europeans to the soldier settlers, poor farmers were obliged to eat possums – brush-tails and smaller ringtails alike. Ringtail possums are very pretty and adventurous, especially when going after rose shoots. They use their long prehensile tails as an extra hand, not only for climbing and balance, but for carrying nesting material and food. Powerful owls (Ninox strenua) eat one ringtail every night, on average. If not a staple to the same degree, possums were a regular supplement for all kinds of bushmen. There were settlers who reckoned the meat tasted no better than gum leaves, and was fit only for dogs and cats, but on a station on the Upper Yarra in 1841 Penelope Selby declared possums ‘the nicest wild animal I have tasted here’. ‘[T]he sport most in vogue with Australian youth resident in the bush is opossum shooting by moonlight’, wrote Sylvester Doig, a Scottish Highlander who lived in the subtropical Queensland bush and planted a lot of fruit trees in the midst of it. He couldn’t stomach the slaughter of ‘these helpless simple animals’. Mrs Meredith was introduced to the ‘barbarous mysteries’ of ‘possumin’ around 1840. She deplored it as ‘mere wanton cruelty, which, to gild its villainy, assumes the name of “sport”’. On the other side of the continent, Roy Kelly of Pemberton, Western Australia recalled the ‘possum moons’ of the 1930s Depression years when he would go out hunting them for their skins. Millions of possum skins were exported.
‘Possumin’ was still in vogue with some youths I knew in the 1950s, but they got nothing for the skins and they didn’t have to eat them. One year we had flying foxes in the orchard, and my father went with a spotlight and the shotgun. I don’t remember seeing any dead ones: I like to think he just fired a few warning shots over their feet. Roy Kelly combined the possums with quokkas (one shilling a skin) and water rats (18 shillings) – until the quokkas, pygmy possums and quolls ‘disappeared like a magic wand’.
Possums, Tim Flannery tells us, have ‘the most flexible ankles of any living mammal’. It is because they can ‘dislocate’ them and point them backwards that they are able to scurry down tree trunks head first. Almost as remarkable to European observers was the ability of Aborigines to scale the trees in pursuit of them: for grip they took an axe to cut notches for their free hand and big toes. Possums were a staple in Aboriginal culture; everywhere they existed they were food, and in cooler climates their skins were scraped, decorated with abstract ‘scroll’ designs, and sown with sinew from the possums’ tails into full-length cloaks. Worn ‘fur out’ and like a Roman toga, they were an ‘exceedingly graceful garment’ and ‘almost impervious to rain’, the Murray River settler Peter Beveridge said. The same people wore possum-skin bands around their loins, possum-skin armlets and headbands of possum skin dyed with red ochre. They applied heated possum skins to snakebites, tied skins with sinew into balls and played games of football with them. To ensure the scars of initiation were pronounced and permanent, possum fat mixed with ash was forced into the incisions. Among the tribes who wore possum cloaks it was customary to inter the dead with them: a corpse the explorer John Oxley disinterred by the Lachlan River was wrapped in possum skins, and Georgiana McCrae saw the people near her place on Port Phillip Bay wrap ‘a possum-rug about the corpse, which they interred in a sitting position, the elbows on the knees, the chin supported by the left hand, and the opposite one laid, with the fingers open, along the angle of the jaw’.
The only creatures we shot were rabbits and the occasional fox. There were always plenty of rabbits, although with the miracle of myxomatosis we never saw the hillsides move with them as our parents and grandparents had. Introduced in 1950, myxo reduced the nation’s rabbit population from an estimated 600 million to 100 million within a couple of years. The stories of the plagues were passed down to us, together with the loathing, and from an early age we were encouraged to trap and shoot, and join in any other anti-rabbit exercises, including ripping, smoking, ferreting and fumigation. Larvicide was the fumigant, the trade name for chloropicrin, which in the First World War had been used with great effect against men. Nothing was considered too cruel and, after all, not even our steel traps were as cruel as myxo. We would see a myxo rabbit from time to time, blind and barely able to move. Once a creature makes vermin of itself it is beyond pity. Foxes fell into the same category. True, they killed rabbits, but hens and newborn lambs were also part of their diet, and they spread blackberries. We shot them for the 10 shillings the shire gave us for each pair of ears we took in.
Birds I spared in obedience to my Gould League of Bird Lovers pledge, except for crows, of which I shot three and remain sorry. I heard of people shooting magpies and I think my brother may have taken out one that swooped him. The Italian newcomers were said to shoot wrens and thrushes, and were reviled for it. I never heard of anyone taking a kookaburra’s life. The kookaburras of children’s storybooks battled with snakes, and that was a good enough reason to like them. Their charismatic bird form and their weird and spectacular call were other reasons. A kookaburra’s laugh sent a signal that something essential was still right with the world, the vanished bush was still alive but living in another sphere. But in Western Australia the bird is hated as an eastern interloper and a destroyer of local species. Tasmanians, to whose island sta
te the kookaburra was introduced, feel much as West Australians do and are free to shoot them. We could never do such a thing, even though we have photographs of a kookaburra swallowing a duckling. Recently my brother watched as one repeatedly hurled itself against a full-grown goanna that was climbing a dead gum tree, a spectacle that was all the more enthralling, he said, because the kookaburra never stopped laughing.
Many of the bush birds have adapted, and learned to live with imported mynahs, sparrows and blackbirds, but as some have vanished with their habitat, new species have arrived. Thirty years ago we never saw a galah or a sulphur-crested cockatoo on that farm. Galahs are now permanent residents and cockatoos regular visitors. We had only eastern rosellas, like the one on the tomato sauce bottle: they have gone, and today crimson rosellas zoom around the place and utter their little bell-like cry while nipping new stems off roses. In the first four decades of the family’s time there, when a thousand or more millimetres of rain fell most years and water lay in the paddocks and gushed down the gullies, wild ducks were unknown. They came as the years got drier. They bred in dozens on the dams. A first settler on the Bass wrote of birds we never saw: jays, satin bowerbirds, lyrebirds, ground thrushes, whipbirds, leatherheads, black cockatoos, and some he called ‘woodpeckers’ and some ‘whistling jackasses’. There were no magpies; they came with the clearing and the cow pats and drove out the jays. And no ravens; they also followed the settlers in. There were things he called ‘pugney possums’ and chattering ‘flying squirrels’, tiger cats, bandicoots and various ‘creeping things’, but nowhere near as many snakes as there were after the bush was cleared.
One by one the blue gums, messmates and swamp gums on the family farm succumbed. Those that lightning did not pick off, ants invaded. They turned the trees’ insides to powder, until they were too weak to withstand the wind. Not half a dozen remain. The blackwoods died, and the hazels became such a crumbling mess we cleared them. Now it is hard even to see a sign of the original bush. There are still snakes, but not the shy black ones and copperheads that had lived around the watercourses, swamps and springs when we arrived. They are all tiger snakes now, some people say because when we killed all the black snakes we killed the tiger snakes’ natural predator. A bite from a tiger snake can kill you or your dog, your horse or cow, and they are much more likely to turn up at the front door or in the fowl house. Probably they come looking for the wrens and thornbills in the azaleas and roses. If not the birds, then the odd frog living there, or the pretty little bush rats (Rattus fuscipes), which we had never seen or heard of until a decade ago but now make pests of themselves by digging under the camellias and viburnum until they tilt and die. Representatives of the species did the same to the first wheat and corn crops grown in the infant colony of New South Wales and caused the inhabitants to all but starve.
On the next-door property where I shot rabbits after school, I used to watch a platypus in a pool in the watercourse. Platypuses (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) inhabit streams from Tasmania to northern Queensland. They are solitary, but give an unfailing impression of happiness, or at least of enjoying their industriousness. Watch them in the very early morning or late dusk as they appear in one place, disappear and reappear a minute later in another place, and disappear again, all in fluid effortless motion, and you are prone to think that they are playing mind games. In fact they are collecting worms, mussels and yabbies in the bed of the stream or pool and resurfacing to eat them. They have excellent vision and hearing, and it was reported to the nineteenth-century naturalist Richard Semon that when playing or sending signals to each other in captivity they made ‘grunting, growling, squeaking and piping noises’; and Semon himself, upon shooting them, ‘often heard the wounded animal break into a dull groan’. (What noise was he expecting?) The very few people with scientific curiosity who passed through the settled districts of the east coast were intrigued by the freakish combination of electro-receptor- fitted duckbills and beaver tails, webbed feet, pouches and venomous spurs. And they laid eggs.
Platypuses are monotremes – egg-laying marsupials. ‘Monotreme’ describes the fact that their urinary, defecatory and reproductive tracts all meet in the one opening, the cloaca. Their ancestors lived with the dinosaurs in Gondwanaland. (Kangaroos, possums and koalas are relatively modern.) Nineteenth-century science saw them as a kind of Gothic mole. ‘Biddulph sends Mr Boyce the skin of a duckbill, as a specimen of the natural curiosities of Australia’, Rachel Henning wrote home to her sister in 1855. ‘I have peppered it well, and I hope it is too dry to produce another crop of those gigantic maggots of which the last consignment from Australia seemed chiefly to consist.’ Curiosities or not, for a century they too were hunted for their skins. Semon made hats out of them for his friends. Foxes were added to their natural enemies and much of their habitat was destroyed. They are now extinct in South Australia, and in the Murray-Darling Basin their numbers are greatly diminished. But in the first sunbeams of dawn on any decent stream in the bushland of the Great Divide you can still see them, ‘floating on the river like a plank’.
The weather broke in autumn, sometimes April, sometimes May, and winter lasted well into October. It would rain for days on end, cut down to drizzle for a week and go back to raining again. It would clear up and the barometer would rise, and then it would fall again. He’d come in from the shed and say, ‘I think it’s going to come in rough.’ And often it did. Water fled down the bare gullies towards the Bass and the river brimmed, swirling and brown. Crabs that had lived deep in the soil of the forest and now lived under the house and rhododendrons pushed up hollow cylinders of clay. In the sodden paddocks, earthworms two metres long (Megascolides australis) gurgled and sucked in the ooze beneath our gumboots, like a gripey movement in the bowels of our earth. Only in our tiny part of the world did these ancient things live. We never saw them unless a landslip tore apart their homes and the air killed them. Water seeping up from the saturated soil became trapped in the sole of grass and formed water-filled balloons 3 metres across. The mud in the cowyard was knee-high. ‘Mud!’ my mother would say. ‘I’m sick of the mud.’
In winter, mud became a prime element. For a decade or so at the beginning of settlement, a horse-drawn mud sledge had been used to transport goods and people. ‘Korumburra Sledge’ was painted on the side, and it must have been a delightful thing to slip and squelch along the ridges on it. Huge mud holes formed in the tracks. One settler said he had more than once seen swans swimming before his cart. Packhorses developed mud fever. In midwinter in the 1950s it was easy to imagine people getting it. When television and film, painting and literature increasingly represented Australia as a land of parched landscapes, we felt a little left out.
Late in winter the black wattles burst into clouds of gold, and our proud little hearts swelled with the honey-scented blooms. Then the road beside the Bass was what we called ‘a picture’. After Eucalyptus, Acacia is the most abundant Australian genus and, as with the eucalypts, many species have been exported to other countries, with good effects and bad. Black wattle (Acacia mearnsii) has been declared one of the world’s worst invasive species. A pioneer plant of the native forests, its seeds sprout in profusion after fire, and the seedlings bind the soil and fix the nitrogen essential for other plants, including eucalypts. Marsupials need the fungi that attaches to acacia roots and trunks. Grubs like them, and birds like the grubs, as they do the pollen. Wattles break down, split, blow over and die young. They rot and make life good for the rest of nature. Early settlers used wattle saplings and branches to build wattle and daub huts. Wattle bark contains tannin, and countless men made their living collecting it for the tanning industry in Australia and abroad. Demand was so great that in the 1880s wattle plantations were established. Decoctions of wattle bark were used by Aborigines to treat illness and injury, and wattle seeds were a staple of the diet. Stranded and suffering with scurvy in the South Australian desert, Charles Sturt’s men noted the Aborigines lived ‘almost entirely’ on aca
cia and grass seeds.
In the paddocks newborn calves staggered to their feet and fell and staggered again, as their mothers licked them clean. The next time you looked the calves were sucking, and the next time they were playing, like rocking horses, kicking their back feet in the air, then their front feet, swishing their tails. They came home with their mothers, and there the union ended. Most of the little females had a life to look forward to, but the males had every right to complain. Once the farmer would have knocked them on the head, skinned them, salted their hides and fed their flesh to his dogs. Ours were lined up with rubber teats attached to lines sunk in a trough of milk and were fed this way for four or five days. My mother did most of the feeding. Bull calves went to the local market where men bought them for baby veal, pet food and glue. (Around 800 000 five-day-old poddies – each of them as pretty as Bambi – are slaughtered every year in Australia.)
For a time we also had sheep. They did it tough in the frosts and foul weather of our winters, but that’s the way it is with sheep. They are needy creatures and vulnerable to passing cold fronts. When it was not their rotting feet that required attention, they had to be crutched or shorn, or drenched, dipped, dressed or daubed with some sort of stuff that the CSIRO or ICI had come up with; or mulesed, after the Mr Mules of South Australia who first came up with the method of cutting away the maggoty flesh of their rear ends (blame the blowfly that arrived from South Africa or India around 1890). They had to have their tails and testes removed. They needed to be protected from foxes looking for newborn lambs to kill, and ravens that would peck their eyes out.
