Koala: An Historical Biography (Australian Natural History Series)

Koala

THE KOALA is both an Australian icon and an animal that has attained ‘flagship’ status around the world. Yet its history tells a different story. While the koala figured prominently in Aboriginal Dreaming and Creation stories, its presence was not recorded in Australia until 15 years after white settlement. Then it would figure as a scientific oddity, despatched to museums in Britain and Europe, a native animal driven increasingly from its habitat by tree felling and human settlement, and a subject of relentless hunting by trappers for its valuable fur. It was not until the late 1920s that slowly emerging protective legislation and the enterprise of private protectors came to its aid.

Ann Moyal

Dr Ann Moyal AM is a leading historian of Australian science and biographer and has held research and teaching positions in several Australian universities. She is the author of many books including the prize-winning Platypus: The Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World, A Bright and Savage Land and Clear Across Australia. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the founder and first President of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia. She lives in Canberra.

Koala AH Historical istorical B Biography iography

This book surveys the koala’s fascinating history, its evolutionary survival in Australia for over 30 million years, its strikingly adaptive physiognomy, its private life, and the strong cultural impact it has had through its rich fertilisation of Australian literature. The work also focuses on the complex problems of Australia’s national wildlife and conservation policies and the challenges surrounding the environmental, economic and social questions concerning koala management. Koala embraces the story of this famous marsupial in an engaging historical narrative, extensively illustrated from widely sourced pictorial material.

Ann Moya l

Koala

To my dear friend Jenny

Koala A Historical Biography

Ann Moya l Associate: Michael Organ

© Ann Moyal 2008 All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO PUBLISHING for all permission requests. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Moyal, Ann (Ann Mozley), 1926– . Koala: a historical biography. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 9780643094017. 1. Koala. I. Organ, Michael. II. CSIRO Publishing. III. Title. 599.25 Published by CSIRO PUBLISHING 150 Oxford Street (PO Box 1139) Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia Telephone: Local call: Fax: Email: Website:

+61 3 9662 7666 1300 788 000 (Australia only) +61 3 9662 7555 [email protected] www.publish.csiro.au

Cover Phascolarctos cinereus, koala, Ferdinand Bauer. Watercolour on paper, 1801–1803. Reproduced courtesy of The Natural History Museum, London. Set in 10.5/16 Adobe ITC New Baskerville and Optima Cover and text design by James Kelly Typeset by Desktop Concepts Pty Ltd, Melbourne Printed in Hong Kong by Bookbuilders

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

vii

Preface

ix

1

‘The land that waited’

1

2

Science and art

15

3

Putting the animals on the map

31

4

The upside-down world

51

5

The indigenous people

71

6

Field and metropolis

87

7

Fire, fur and guns

113

8

The literary koala

131

9

Colin MacKenzie and the amazing koala shoulder

145

10

The new protectors

155

11

Being and doing

179

12

The survivor?

195

13

Epilogue: Up close and personal

213

Select bibliography

223

Illustrations

235

Index

239

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The idea for a historical book on the koala was first suggested to me by Michael Organ, Archivist of the University of Wollongong, who has long been interested in the subject. He prepared a large bibliography for my use, contributed references and some research, and drew my attention to a number of historical illustrations. His name, accordingly, figures as an ‘associate’ on the title page. Responsibility for the writing and compilation of the book, however, is mine. Researching and writing such a book leads one down some diverse and complex pathways and I am most grateful to the many people who have assisted me on my way. My particular thanks are due to the libraries which have assisted in the reproduction of illustrative material and, in the case of the National Library of Australia, and the State Library of New South Wales and its Council, have given me generous permission to publish from their collections. In this my warm thanks are especially due to Jan Fullerton AO and Elizabeth Ellis. As always, I have researched a great part of the work at my desk in the Petherick Room of the National Library of Australia where I have enjoyed the ready and companionable assistance of the staff. I have also had the pleasure, while writing some of the chapters of the book, of spending several weekly residences at Varuna, the Writers’ House of the Eleanor Dark Foundation at v ii

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Katoomba, where both the beauty and comfort, and much encouragement, is offered to writers. Various experts have given me valuable comments and information and I am most grateful for their help. They include Deborah Tabart of the Australian Koala Foundation and her assistant Lauren Grover, and researchers and wildlife managers, Dan Lunney of the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Services, and Peter Menkhorst of the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment. I am also indebted to Wendy Brazil of Canberra for her translation of the Latin manuscript of Robert Brown. Guy Cooper, Director of Taronga Zoo, and David Schapp, Unit Supervisor of Australian Mammals at the Zoo have offered me useful guidance, and I thank them. My warm thanks for their interest and great encouragement are especially due to my colleagues and friends, Jenny Webb, Norman Reaburn, Patricia Clarke, Sylvia Carr, Andrew Seargent, Allan Mawer, Humphrey McQueen, Mark Cranfield, Roslyn Glow, Alison Cox, and my sister, Mimi Hurley. In writing I have had the pleasure of meeting that experienced koala watcher, cartoonist and Bulletin columnist, Patrick Cook, who has generously given me several pieces of his delightful art. Finally I am grateful to the staff of CSIRO Publishing for their supportive and thoughtful assistance. Ann Moyal

Canberra 2007

v iii

PREFACE Very few Australians have met or seen a koala in the wild. We know this quiet, much-loved marsupial from seeing its familiar form and face on television, in zoos, sanctuaries and native parks and sometimes, when urbanisation has driven it from its old habitats, perched in a suburban gum tree or stumbling slowly across a road. I wanted to see a koala living at least in a wild setting, if not actually in the wild, so I set out for Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve outside Canberra. The road to Tidbinbilla is long and winding, stretching alongside the Molonglo River, past the forests ravaged by fire in the fierce summer blazes of 2003 and through flat open country, now golden in a summer of singular dryness. The Great Fire that struck the national capital in January 2003, killing people and destroying a hundred houses, also swept through the Nature Reserve. Not even the fleetest animals, the emus and kangaroos, could escape. Within their watery pools and burrows, the platypuses perished. A solitary koala, burnt and battered, to be christened ‘Lucky’, was the survivor. And I am going to meet her. I am also on a detective hunt among the lofty gum trees of Tidbinbilla to see, if I can, one of Australia’s iconic animals, tucked away and carefully guarding its privacy in a tall eucalyptus tree, just as the early settlers tried, often without success, to see it. ix

K oa l a

Like my journey, this book is something of a detective hunt. For what is this animal called the koala, once ‘koala bear’, now one of the great tourist drawcards in Australia? What is its history? What events and cultural influences in its long evolutionary and contemporary experience have brought it to this pinnacle? And what is the magnetism of this appealing and whimsical marsupial that has, for so many people in this country and beyond, become Australia’s most charismatic animal? Here is its story.

x

‘THE

LAND THAT WAITED’

This contact they [the Endeavour’s company] were making was something entirely new … There is a strange quality in the Australian landscape. To the European eye, it is, at first, lacking in freshness and greenness; the light is too harsh, the trees too thin and sparse … They soon became aware that they were confronted here with something infinitely strange: an utter primitivism, wild creatures that had not developed beyond the marsupial stage, plants that did not appear to fit into the Linnean or indeed any other system of classification … It was as though they were looking straight back into the beginnings of creation. Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact, 1966

K OA L A

A misty grey-blueness hangs over the Great South Land which Captain Cook, though ‘sceptical of its existence’, found on 19 April 1770 and sailed along its eastern coast. Young Joseph Banks, naturalist on HMS Endeavour, recorded unflatteringly in his journal: ‘The countrey tho’ in general well enough cloth’d appeared in some places bare: it resembled in my imagination the back of a lean Cow, covered in general with long hair, but nevertheless where her scraggy hip bones have stuck out farther than they ought, accidental rubbs have intirely bared them of their share of covering’. He did not know what riches lay ahead. The expedition’s encounter with the country’s wildlife was immediate. The sheltered bay where they anchored was full of stingrays – great sinewy creatures weighing as much as 200 kg – which they hauled on board for food, and after which Cook named the place Stingray Bay. They soon saw a ‘quadruped the size of a rabbit’, and trees alive with clamouring cockatoos. Later, while the ship lay careened for repair at Endeavour Bay in northern Queensland after a near-fatal passage through the Great Barrier Reef, they sighted, shot and ate their first ‘kangaru’ and carried its skull and skin back to England. The British invasion of Australia’s fauna had begun. Banks himself would take home, along with a variety of faunal specimens, a veritable cornucopia of Australian plant specimens that exposed a unique new botanical world. It was his keen botanical recollections of the bay not far north of ‘lean Cow’ country that contributed to the British government’s

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‘ T he L a n d t h at wa i t ed ’

choice of a site for a convict settlement at ‘Stingray’, wisely renamed, ‘Botany’ Bay. Celebrated in London, and elevated in 1778 to become the influential President of the Royal Society for the next forty-two years, Banks opened his collections to men of science and spread his scientific mantle over the far outposts of the British Empire. After nine months at sea, Captain Arthur Phillip arrived at Botany Bay with the ships of the First Fleet and their convict cargo on 18 January 1788, and, finding it unsuitable for settlement, chose instead a site at Port Jackson, in present-day Sydney Harbour. And there on 26 January 1788, a day of mesmerising heat, surrounded by naval and military personnel and the 736 surviving convicts, Governor Phillip hoisted the Union Jack and proclaimed British settlement in Australia. From the first news of a prospective convict settlement at the antipodes, excitement ran high in the great publishing houses of London and a number of senior officers and administrators made arrangements regarding their detailed records. Botany Bay was on everybody’s lips, and there was an imperative urge for eyewitness accounts of this venture in social engineering. There was also a lively interest, already promoted by Banks, in the new continent’s unique fauna. In the light of Banks’ pre-eminence and influence, it was extraordinary that no naturalist was attached to the First Fleet. However, a number of officers were Fellows of the Royal Society and amateur artists, while others shared an educated interest in natural history.

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Captain John Hunter, Phillip’s second-in-command on HMS Sirius and later his successor as Governor of New South Wales, was an enthusiastic naturalist and artist. Eagerly sketching hundreds of birds, flowers and fish around the settlement, he was also associated with the discovery and despatch to Britain of several of Australia’s most distinctive animals including the echidna, wombat and lyrebird. In 1798, he watched an Aborigine spearing that bizarre Australian animal, the platypus, on the Hawkesbury River and posted off the first specimen of it, preserved in spirits, for the scrutiny of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. At the same time others, including George Raper, midshipman from the Sirius, later dubbed the ‘Port Jackson Painter’ from his distinctive but anonymous bird paintings, and the skilled convict artist, Thomas Watling, were put to work to capture the uniqueness of the country. They combined to build an important first collection of early natural history drawings of the Sydney settlement which found their way for permanent keeping to the British Museum. Birds and some ground-grazing herbivores were easy to sight and figure; kangaroos, emus and small marsupials were often seen around the settlement. Their descriptions and depictions appeared in the published works of John Hunter, of surgeon-general John White and Lieutenant-Governor David Collins, and fed public curiosity in Britain. A large live specimen of ‘The Wonderful Kangaroo from Botany Bay’ was also exhibited in 1790 to an astonished London public. But it was

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‘ T he L a n d t h at wa i t ed ’

Australian fauna startled the European gaze. Drawing of the flightless emu and its egg by George Raper, 1791.

the natural history fraternity, specialists and amateur naturalists alike, who most eagerly awaited and monitored scientific information from the colony. Coincidentally, a deepening interest in natural history had been growing in England. The Swede Carl Linnaeus had undertaken two major systematic studies of plants and animals, Species Plantarum (1853) and System Naturae (1858), which offered an official starting-point for botanical and zoological classification and nomenclature. The British Museum, destined

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to become the centrepiece of national zoological collections, had opened to the public in 1769, while the Linnean Society of London, devoted to the study of natural history, was inaugurated only a few weeks after Australian settlement. Fragments of information and a few specimens from western Australian shores had already found their way back to Europe through contact by the Dutch navigators Janz, Pelseart, Tasman and De Vlamingh, and from the Englishman William Dampier. But now, in the wake of the Endeavour voyage, fauna from the distant antipodes became an absorbing source of interest and challenge to specialist and amateur practitioners, and to their specialist societies. For many years, some creatures kept their secrets. The existence of a ‘whom-batt’ was first noted in 1798, an entire decade after settlement. But that other quaint marsupial – the koala, or native bear – would wait for five years more before its presence was detected. Curled high in the tall eucalyptus trees, eating tender leaves, sleeping largely by day and moving at night, the koala remained secluded, out of sight of passing travellers and explorers, inconspicuous and overlooked. The Aborigines, however, had acquired firm factual knowledge of the koala during their 60 000-year habitation of the continent. Their names for it varied widely according to their tribal place. Cullewine, koolewong, kobarcola, colah, koolah, kaola boorabee, goridun and koala were all used in eastern New South Wales. ‘Koala’ in one tribal language also meant ‘no water’, a pertinent name for an animal that rarely drinks.

6

‘ T he L a n d t h at wa i t ed ’

Across their various habitat and kinship groups, indigenous people had named, drawn and described the koala in their own scientific and environmental terms. Now, with the advent of British settlers, it would be indigenous skill, cooperation and knowledge that assisted the newcomers to find and know Australia’s fauna. It was the local Aborigines who helped former convict John Wilson, living wild in their company, and Governor Hunter’s servant, John Price, when, in January 1798, nineteen-year-old Price was sent to explore the country around the Nepean River. The discerning eye of Price made him the first Briton to note the existence of the wombat and make the first written record of the koala. ‘The country runs very open; good black soil’, he wrote in his diary that January 25th. ‘We saw a great many kangaroos and emews, and we fell in with a party of natives which gave a very good account of the place we were in search of … the people were very friendly. We hearkened to their advice.’ On 26 January, ‘we crossed one small river, the banks of which were so rockey and steep that we could scarce pass it. We saw no signs of any natives about it, but we saw several sorts of dung of different animals, one of which Wilson called a whom-batt which is an animal of about 20 inches high, with short legs and a thick body forwards with a large head, round ears, and very small eyes; is very fat, and has much the appearance of a badger. There is another animal which the natives call a cullawine, which much resembles the sloths in America.’ But John Price kept his written

7

K OA L A

account to himself and it was not published until nearly a hundred years later, in Historical Records of Australia. By the end of the eighteenth century, Sir Joseph Banks, active patron and promoter and eager recipient of news of fauna in the strange south land, had received accounts and specimens of three of Australia’s most singular mammals – two platypuses sent by Hunter, a number of kangaroos and wallabies, and news of the wombat. ‘A large animal between a bear and a badger has been discovered in large numbers’, Banks minuted at his London home, but there was no mention of the ‘cullawine’. Nevertheless he maintained firm pressure on colonial governors to keep sending specimens to Britain. In the event it fell to a Frenchman, with the further aid of Aborigines, to reveal the existence of the koala to Hunter’s successor, Governor Philip King. Francis Barrallier, the son of a French naval surveyor, had acquired some patronage in England in the 1790s and he arrived in Sydney with King in 1800. He was appointed ensign in the New South Wales Corps and, subsequently, Architect, Military Engineer and Artillery Officer. Governor King was anxious to extend the bounds of settlement and engaged Barrallier in early October 1802 to lead an exploring expedition south-west of Sydney to seek a route through the rugged Great Dividing Range. Barrallier discovered the Nattai River and established a base for a further plunge into the ranges. For his second expedition, in early November 1802, he set off well supplied with provisions and transport and accompanied by an

8

‘ T he L a n d t h at wa i t ed ’

Aboriginal guide named Gogy and two local Aborigines, Bungin and Bulgin, whom he gathered along the way. Bungin and Bulgin joined other Aborigines hunting among the eucalyptus trees around the Nepean River, setting fires in the area of Barrallier’s depot. These hunters caught a koala, and Bungin and Bulgin were given pieces of the koala carcass in return for their assistance. The next day they returned to camp where Barrallier saw the parts of the strange animal that his guides were intending to eat. ‘Gogy told me’, he recorded in his diary on 9 November, ‘that they [Bungin and Bulgin] had brought portions of a monkey (in the native language “colo”), but they had cut it in pieces, and the head, which I should have liked to secure, had disappeared. I could only get two feet through an exchange which Gogy made for two spears and one tomahawk. I sent these two feet to the Governor in a bottle of spirits. Gogy told me that this portion of the colo (or monkey) and several opossums had been their share in the chase.’ Barrallier’s findings, written in French, were forwarded by Governor King to Banks. Barrallier’s part in discovering the koala has been much commemorated in the secondary literature. It is also suggested that he later presented Governor King with a live specimen of the animal, but as the Frenchman left Australia in May 1803, out of favour with King, there is no supporting evidence for that action. Like Price before him, Barrallier’s discovery remained hidden in his private journal until it too was resurrected and published in Historical Records of New South Wales in

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1897. But Barrallier did earn a contemporary distinction. It was he who first noted the Aborigines’ use of a communicating bush call, ‘coo-ee’, an echoing greeting that was widely adopted by white settlers and which still rings out today. By 1803, however, koalas were being flushed from their arboreal retreats for human scrutiny. On 21 August 1803, the Sydney Gazette set down the informing news: An animal whose species was never before found in the Colony, is in His Excellency’s possession. When taken it had two pups, one of which died a few days hence. The creature is somewhat larger than a Waumbut, and although it might at first appearance be thought much to resemble it, nevertheless differs from that animal. The fore and hind legs are about of an equal length, having five sharp talons at each of the extremities, with which it must have climbed the highest trees with much facility. The fur that covers it is soft and fine, and of a mixed grey colour; the ears are short and open; the graveness of the visage, which differs little in colour from the back, would seem to indicate a more than ordinary portion of animal sagacity; and the teeth resemble those of a rabbit. The surviving pup generally clings to the back of the mother, or is caressed with a serenity that appears peculiarly characteristic; it has a false belly like the apposim [sic], and its food consists solely of gum leaves, in the choice of which it is excessively nice.

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‘ T he L a n d t h at wa i t ed ’

It seems likely that this perceptive account came from the pen of William Paterson, an officer in the New South Wales Corps. He was probably recruited by Banks, to whom he had sent specimens from his former posting in India, and had arrived in Sydney in 1791. He first commanded a detachment on Norfolk Island (from where he sent botanical, entomological and geological specimens to Banks), then rose to become the administrator under Governor Hunter. During leave in England, Paterson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and on his return to Australia in 1799, was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales by Governor King. A keen amateur naturalist, Paterson’s knowledge of the koala would fertilise the first scientific description of the animal, made at the Royal College of Surgeons in England. Information on the elusive creature was gathering. On 9 October 1803, a few weeks after the first revelation, a short notice appeared in the Sydney Gazette: Searjent Packer of Pitt’s Row, has in his possession a native animal some time since described in our paper; and called by the natives, a Koolah. It has two young, has been caught more than a month, and feeds chiefly on gum leaves, but also eats bread soaked in milk or water.

In the growing identification of the animal the role of the colonial governor proved crucial, and in this King was a central player. Writing to Banks in September 1803, he conveyed:

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‘Another animal has been added to the natural history of this country. As you will have an account of it from Mr Brown and Mr Bauer, I shall not attempt its description. The first that was brought in was a female. Since then more has come in and some of the males. I much fear that their living on leaves alone will make it difficult to send them to England.’ Without a specimen for despatch, King took the best course open to him and commissioned the resident natural history artist, John Lewin, to paint watercolours of the koala. John Lewin was the first free-settler professional artist in the colony. Born in 1770, the son of William Lewin, author of The Birds of Great Britain, he was already keenly interested in entomology when he arrived in New South Wales in January 1800. With King’s support, he took part in several exploring expeditions and was soon engaged on drawings and paintings of flowers, birds and subjects for his Prodromus Entomology: Natural History of Lepidopterous Insects of New South Wales (published in London in 1805), when King called upon him to paint the live koala which had been brought into the settlement. Lewin apparently painted three studies. His two watercolours of a female koala with an infant on her back were dated 1803. One showed a mother and child, the second represented a mother and infant with a male koala on a branch. The first, inscribed ‘J.W. Lewin N.S.W. 1803’, remained the property of Governor King and was later acquired from a descendant by the Mitchell Library in Sydney, where it is held in the permanent collection. The second, with the male, was annotated

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‘and the extraordinary duck-billed platypus’ by the naturalist artist John Lewin, 1810.

‘Coola, an animal of the opossum tribe from New South Wales’. It is held by the British Library. A third watercolour of the mother and child, very similar to the first, is presumed to be the drawing which Governor King sent to Banks in September 1803. This depiction was subsequently made into a print for reproduction in various English editions of George Cuvier’s The Animal Kingdom, first published in 1827. There it is noted that the plate was engraved during 1824 and the animal was described as inhabiting the banks of the Napean [Nepean]

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River area of New South Wales. This engraving was subsequently reproduced in a number of European works such as the German Okens Allgemeine Naturgeschist fuer alle Staenea, published in 1843. A fourth John Lewin depiction of the animal, dated 8 July 1804, is held in the Thomas Hardwicke Collection, in the Zoological Collection of the Natural History Museum, London. Hence, while the koala’s form and structure had yet to reach taxonomic experts for study overseas, its gentle maternal image would carry it to posterity.

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SCIENCE

AND ART

No condition was more critical in the early nineteenth century in opening up scientific knowledge of unexplored lands than the marriage of science and art. Sarah Thomas (ed.), The Encounter, 1802. Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages, 2002

Lieutenant Matthew Flinders’ voyage on HMS Investigator to survey the Australian coastline and circumnavigate the continent in 1801–04 opened an extraordinary chapter in the history of Australian science. The vessel carried two ‘scientific gentlemen’ selected by Sir Joseph Banks: Robert Brown, surgeon and naturalist, charged with the expedition’s observations on botany, zoology and, less importantly, geology; and

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one of Europe’s most experienced natural history illustrators, Ferdinand Bauer. Brown, a hard-working former surgeon’s mate in the Scottish Fifeshire Fencibles who had briefly studied medicine at Edinburgh University and acquired skills in anatomy and zoology, had honed his intense interest in botany and natural history when he came to Banks’ attention. He was appointed to Flinders’ expedition at a lavish salary, financed by Banks himself, of £490 a year. Bauer, contrastingly, was Austrian-born and already known for his remarkable illustrations of plants and animals of the Mediterranean and for a unique skill in preparing watercolours from field sketches, when Banks chose him as botanical illustrator to the Investigator at £315 a year. From the moment the ship made its first landing at King Georges Sound on the southern edge of Western Australia in December 1801, the ‘scientific gentlemen’ were to make outstanding contributions to the science of the little-known continent. Robert Brown was the first interpretative botanist to visit Australia and with his rich collections of over 4000 plants previously unknown to science, which he took back to England, he became the leading British botanist of the century, dubbed Botanicorum facile princeps by the celebrated explorer Alexander Humboldt. For his part, Ferdinand Bauer won posthumous recognition as the ‘Leonardo of natural history illustration’ as a result of his exquisite representations of Australian flora and fauna. As Flinders mapped the southern coastline and the eastern coast of Australia to the Gulf of Carpentaria and the islands of 16

Sc ie n c e a n d a r t

the Timor Sea, Brown and Bauer botanised and collected plants in rich abundance, birds, insects and fishes which they preserved and studied in their specially equipped ‘floating laboratory’. But when, in June 1803, the unseaworthy Investigator limped back to Sydney and Flinders prepared to return to England to seek a safe replacement to this ship, Brown and Bauer petitioned to remain behind. And it was then that, having been provided by the Governor with stores for eighteen months, two servants and a house at Farm Cove in Sydney, they made their important acquaintance with the koala. Writing to Banks in March 1803, Brown had not foreseen great returns in the field of zoology. ‘In zoology we have not done much’, he reported, ‘nor do I think that much was [sic] to be done. Of Quadrupeds we have only met with the Kangao, the Dog & Didelphis obesula of Shaw [the bandicoot]’. In August 1803, however, a month after Flinders’ departure from the colony, two koalas were captured at Hat Hill (now Mt Kembla) in the fertile Illawarra district south of Sydney, and brought into the town. The hill had been named by Captain Cook: ‘the top of which’, he scribbled from a good sea distance in his journal, ‘look’d to me like the Crown of a hatt’. From these specimens Ferdinand Bauer made his first sketches of a live koala, which Brown then dissected and described. For his zoological sketches, Bauer adopted the same technique that he had honed during the elaborate sketches of the plants, birds and fish he had already depicted on his landings around Australia. His practice was to prepare uncoloured lifesize pencil sketches, annotating each with numbers to indicate 17

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The drawing illustrates the elaborate number coding of the sketches, both botanical and zoological – in this case the Blue Swimming Crab – which Bauer made in Australia and which he later transformed into the vivid and subtle hues of his watercolours. Some 2000 of Ferdinand Bauer’s natural history sketches have survived in the Bauer Collection of the Natural History Museum, Vienna.

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Sc ie n c e a n d a r t

the exact and diverse shades of every part. ‘There were’, writes his biographer David Mabberley, ‘a hundred shades of red, a hundred of purple to pink, a hundred of pink to mauve, a hundred of lilac and violet to blue, two hundred of green, a hundred of yellow, a hundred of brown and up to a hundred of white and black’. To this numerical encrypting he added further codes, sometimes using Roman numbers and abbreviated German and English words to designate shininess and texture. The technique was extensive and compelling in Bauer’s botanical work. There his indefatigable attention and close working relationship with Brown enabled him to prepare scientifically precise and astonishingly beautiful illustrations of plant parts and structures, their maturation from seedpod to flowering, their leaves and habitat, and the minutiae of stamens, pistils, roots and pollen grains that Brown’s taxonomic interpretation required. The two men’s work was closely intertwined, both made expert use of the microscope and in this marriage of science and art, Brown and Bauer found a perfect partnership. Now Bauer applied his exacting methodology to the koala. He sketched a female with young, a koala sitting on and climbing branches, a full-face and part-profile koala, and a remarkably precise illustration of the animal’s skull, throat, paws and feet. His finished watercolour portraits of the animal, which he would complete in London from his coded field sketches, combined vital scientific detail with a three-dimensional quality that led the Australian art historian Bernard Smith to

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observe that ‘for sheer accuracy and presentation of scientific informative facts about the animals and plants he drew, Bauer may be rivalled but never surpassed’. A the same time, Robert Brown, a very able zoologist who carried J.F. Grelin’s edition of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae in his baggage, settled down to write a detailed Latin description of the koala, the first scientific ‘type’ record of this unique Australian animal. Long-preserved in the Museum of Natural History in London, Brown’s precise record is a rare document and is translated here for the first time. His major account describes a female koala with some final pencilled notes on the male. His meticulous measurements are made from time to time in ‘lines’, one line measuring half an inch [c. 11 mm]. ‘In sylvis ad radices montium prope Hat Hill Potitans foliis Eucalypti,’ ran the unpunctuated script, yielding up in this remote colony the same ancient language Brown would later use in his major botanical work Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van-Diemen. Translated, his notes set down: Natural habitat: In the forests at the foothills of mountains near Hat Hill continuously feeding on the leaves of the Eucalyptus Name according to the Native dweller (Native name), ‘Coulo – Kola – Koulou’ as an animal which is constantly chewing. Length from nose to tail two feet one inch Largish head about 5 inches long. Between the ears 4 inches long with a slightly obtuse blunt beak, with a slightly convex/rounded forehead. 20

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Blunt nose divided into two halves through the middle; blackish; somewhat truncate, i.e. ending as if cut straight across; slightly convex/rounded, covered with dark skin sparsely covered with a few short hairs, 13–14 lines wide, hairless through the length of 15 lines. Spatulate nostrils, i.e. from a broad upper part tapering gradually downwards; with the inner lower angle slightly acute. Upper lip divided into two parts, lower a little prominent. A few short black chin hairs. Small eyes not slightly prominent With a greyish iris With a black pupil shaped like a lance (broad in the middle and tapering to a point) going downwards. Dark eyelids. Eyebrow with a few black spreading hairs. Large flat spatulate ears, rounded somewhat truncate, i.e. ending very abruptly as if cut across, on both sides shaggy with fairly long straight hairs with the inner hairs white 3 inches long. Tongue not remarkable. Teeth six upper front incisors of which the two intermediate larger teeth three inches long with the tip truncated very simple coming into contact at the base on the other side Standing apart in a line with the tips touching at an acute angle with the diameter of the convex tip point one and a half lines on the outside with the sides angled in relationship to the tooth nearer to it, with the outer teeth and the ones in between of medium size approximately shorter to the extent of one line – long, truncate, simple. 21

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The lower teeth. Two larger teeth with truncated cone-shape directed antroversely i.e. from the base standing apart a little with the tips touching. 4 and a half lines long with the diameter of the tip obliquely cut more than 1 and a half lines. The intermediate teeth. upper only. two standing apart from the first submolars with these – fairly close to two lines long; in a line; with the tip significantly more enlarged; shallowly notched. Feet five toes with two thumbs[?] with the inner separated from the rest 5 toes fingers 4 are clawed Palms bare with dark skin. Male larger with larger head with smaller ears and eyes. Penis with foreskin without a frenum i.e. the ligament which attaches to the inside of the foreskin of the glands. With the left gland oblong, with spines, acuminated i.e. tapered with stiff scales/spikes turned backwards with a short …[indecipherable] approximately two-thirds of a line long with the tip slightly scabrous i.e. rough to the touch, with the tip divided into two parts with semi-bilobule tears [semen]. Urethra ended in penis. The seminal vessels soft. The Vasa Deferentia, small glands, wrapping around the tip of the Prostate at the back.

Despite Brown’s careful records of the male and Bauer’s precise drawings of the animal’s skull, throat, feet and paws,

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Brown’s notes contain nothing on the female koala’s internal organs. In September 1803, Brown conveyed news of the animal’s discovery to Sir Joseph Banks: A new and remarkable specimen of Didelphis [the family name given by Linnaeus to the American possum from the Greek ‘Didelphis’ meaning ‘double uterus’] has been lately brought in from the southward of Botany Bay. It is called by the natives coloo or coola, and most nearly approaches to the wombat, from which it differs in the number of its teeth and in several other circumstances. The Governor, I learn, sends a drawing made by Mr. Lewin. Mr. Bauer cannot on so short a notice finish the more accurate one he has taken. The necessity of sending my description, which is very imperfect, as the animal will not submit to be closely inspected, and I have had no opportunity of dissecting one, is in a great measure superseded by Mr. Truman having purchas’d a pair, which from their present healthy appearance, will probably reach England alive, or if not, will be preserv’d for anatomical examination.

This hope, not surprisingly, proved futile, but Brown’s explicit notes and Bauer’s remarkable drawings reveal that the close association between these two men of great distinction identified the presence and nature of the koala in Australia.

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The subsequent fate of their rare and historically significant material, however, is a story of delay, neglect, frustration, disappointment and loss. While Flinders, on his second attempt to reach England and secure a safe vessel for his expedition, ended up disastrously as a prisoner of war on the island of Mauritius until 1813, the old and partially repaired Investigator, crewed by men hired in Sydney, finally sailed out of Sydney Harbour on 23 May 1805. It carried Brown and Bauer and their huge collections of natural history – plants, animals and mineralogical specimens, 2000 of Bauer’s drawings, and a live wombat. The ship, ‘the most deplorable ship in the world’, Brown declared after many hazards, sailed into harbour at Liverpool in November that year. Brown was at once appointed clerk and librarian of the Linnean Society of London with access to Banks’ library, and the influential Sir Joseph ensured that the Admiralty retained the services of both ‘scientific gentlemen’ to bring their researches to conclusion. Brown published Part I of his classic Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van-Diemen, covering 464 genera and 2000 species of Australian plants, in 1811; but the projected Part II was never published, due to lack of funding. His later essay, ‘General Remarks, Geographical and Systemic, on the Botany of Terra Australia’, printed as an appendix to Matthew Flinders’ Voyage to Terra Australis in 1814, added to his fame. Importantly, it transformed botanical classification, brought a new professionalism to botany and launched the new study of plant geography. 24

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Robert Brown’s work on zoology, however, remained substantially unnoticed. His considerable manuscript notes, field books and diaries remained in his possession until his death in 1858 when they were bequeathed as the Robert Brown Papers to the British Museum of Natural History and held for a long period in the Zoological Library. Most crucially, his long Latin dissertation on the Hat Hill koala – the animal’s ‘type’ specification in effect – was never published, and was identified in 1994 by zoological researchers Alwynne Wheeler and D.T. Moore, in the Brown Papers in the British Museum of Natural History. The watermark of this record dates it to 1814, suggesting that some of the material was recompiled by Brown from his original work books and annotated at various times. At different points he refers to his original name for the koala, Didelphis Coola, but he finally headed his description Phasolarctos Koala, a classification not adopted until 1827. His papers reveal that Brown built up numerous descriptions of animals observed during the expedition, including birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish and insects. After returning to England, over time he distributed the mass of bird and reptile specimens to collectors in the country, while the specimens of mammals found their way first to the Zoological Society of London then to the British Museum. Brown was clearly most interested in birds and mammals and, as Wheeler records, these are briefly noted in ‘a few lines of diagnostic characters with a name and a locality and date of collection’. The long Latin notation on the koala stands alone. 25

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It seems clear that, with few exceptions relating to the birds, contemporary zoologists made little use of Brown’s zoological work. What does emerge is that under the auspices of the botanically preoccupied Sir Joseph Banks, Brown directed his focus to the voyage’s botany. Certainly he appears to have done little to bring significant new zoological evidence to the attention of the scientific community. ‘Unfortunately’, Alwynne Wheeler concludes, ‘Brown never received true credit for his zoological work because of the delay in dispersing the collections to the zoologists, but mostly because there were few extremely capable zoologists working in Britain at the time.’ But what of his unique detailed material on the highly individual marsupial which he had described at source in Latin, no doubt with an eye to scholarly publication? This lapse, given Banks’ original interest in the koala, is difficult to comprehend and some blame must attach to a degree of tardiness and disorganisation on Robert Brown’s part. Ferdinand Bauer’s destiny and the fate of his natural history illustrations was no more propitious. With Admiralty support he worked on his botanical sketches for five years, initially with Brown at Banks’ library in Soho Square then in his own house in London. There he produced 300 magnificent watercolours, each a masterpiece, so exact and fine that Banks exclaimed, ‘It is beyond what, I confess, I thought it possible to perform.’ On the botanical front, Bauer drew plates for Brown’s publication On Proteaceae (1810) on Australian plants, and ten more of plants for Flinders’ Voyage (1814). Doing his

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Robert Brown FRS, from his Australian plant collections and extensive knowledge, was destined to become Britain’s most prominent 19th century botanist. Yet his scientifically specific record of the koala, written in Latin after dissecting the animal in Sydney in 1803, has remained largely unknown among his papers and is published here for the first time.

own colouring and engraving, he prepared fifteen botanical plates for his own Illustrations Florae Novae Hollandiae in 1813 for independent sale. But in the financial exigencies of the Napoleonic Wars, Bauer and his grand plan for a large publication on Australian flora did not mature. Disappointed at the poor commercial outcome of his labours, he returned to Austria in 1814 and died there in 1826. Tragically, none of his zoological drawings appeared in print during his lifetime. Bauer’s finished watercolours are in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London, while his pencil studies

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of Australian plants and animals were purchased at auction after his death by the Emperor of Austria and are now held in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. Ferdinand Bauer, however, would gain enduring fame later, in another century. During 1960 his work began to emerge from the British Museum of Natural History, beginning with William Stearn’s article on Ferdinand and his brother Franz Bauer, ‘Masters of botanical illustration’, in the British journal Endeavour. In 1976, under Stearn’s editorship, The Flower Paintings of Ferdinand Bauer was published by the Basilisk Press. Bauer’s outstanding watercolours of animals, including his brilliant koala drawings, appeared in 1989 in Marlene Norst’s Ferdinand Bauer: The Australian Natural History Drawings published by the British Museum of Natural History. Nearly two hundred years after he first painted them, Bauer’s unsurpassed watercolours of both plants and animals burst upon the public gaze. Then, appropriately, it occurred in Australia with an exhibition in the late 1990s at the Colonial Museum in Sydney entitled ‘The Exquisite Eye’. A few years later, this was followed by an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Adelaide showing the art of the British and French expeditions of science and discovery around Australia in 1801–04, and culminating in the publication of Encounter 2002. Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyage. With their public display, Bauer’s compelling representations of the koala could, at last, be observed not only as

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creations of rare perception and beauty, but as specimens of taxonomic significance, the original type specimens of an extraordinary animal which, for fifteen years after white settlement, remained unknown to Europeans on the Australian continent. The experience of Robert Brown and Ferdinand Bauer, in one sense intensely personal, was at the same time characteristic of the hazards that marked Britain’s early maritime explorations and their collections of scientific treasures. Captain Cook’s Endeavour expedition, through the spirited collecting of Banks and Carl Solander, had brought back a wealth of specimens and manuscript descriptions, along with the brilliant drawings of the ship’s young natural history draughtsman, Sydney Parkinson. But most of this well-documented collection was neither published nor described. Banks held onto the plant specimens during his lifetime, bequeathing them on his death in 1820 to his librarian, the then eminent Robert Brown, who took them with him when he moved to head a new department at the British (Natural History) Museum. Sydney Parkinson’s 243 drawings of Australian plants and a thousand more, together with the zoological sketches he assembled on the voyage, were dispersed on their return to England following his untimely death after leaving Batavia. Yet while some 740 copperplates were made under Banks’ supervision from Parkinson’s watercolours, more than two hundred years would pass before these remarkable botanical illustrations were made public in 1983 in Banks Florilegim.

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A similar fate awaited the work done by the natural history artist on Nicholas Baudin’s grand scientific expedition to Australia in 1801–03. The naturalist François Peron’s considerable scientific trophies were placed in the Paris Museum of Natural History and were not made available to researchers, while the expedition’s remarkable natural history illustrator, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, declined to bury his distinguished collections of zoological illustrations in the Museum and took them to Philadelphia in 1815. In 1838 his and Peron’s scientific treasures reached the Museum of Natural History at Le Havre, the port from which the expedition had set out, but they remained unknown to the general public. Once more the outstanding scientific illustrations of that major French expedition to Terre Australie, ambitious and richly equipped by Napoleon, did not meet the public eye until the last years of the twentieth century.

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Plate 1 John Lewin’s early representation of a female koala and her infant, despatched to Sir Joseph Banks in 1803, was printed in England and passed into various continental works of natural history.

Plate 2 ‘The koala was first sighted by white settlers near the ‘Napean’ River, New South Wales, known subsequently as the ‘Nepean’. Joseph Lycett, c.1775–1828.

Plate 3 In this first-ever depiction of koala anatomy, c. 1811, Ferdinand Bauer exhibits his singular attention to scientific detail in his masterly delineation of the animal’s skull, throat, paws and feet.

Plate 4

Phascolarctos cinereus, koala. Ferdinand Bauer, c.1811.

Plate 5 This ruminative koala painted by Dr James Stuart, naturalist and Surgeon Superintendent of the Quarantine Station at Sydney’s North Head, was one of a series of artistically accurate depictions Stuart made of animals living in the sea and woods around the station which he bequeathed in 1842 on his early death to his friend W.S. McLeay.

Plate 6

Aborigines using fire to hunt kangaroos. Joseph Lycett, c.1817.

Plate 7 John Gould, a spirited naturalist and collector, spent 18 months in the Colonies in 1838–40 gathering material for his splendidly illustrated works on Australia’s birds and mammals.

Plate 8 Bunyip Bluegum, ‘a fine round splendid fellow’ one of many from Norman Lindsay’s depictions.

PUTTING

THE ANIMALS

ON THE MAP

It is one of the most extraordinary occurrences in the whole story of natural history that such a most peculiar animal should have received no scientific name for eight years after its first record and even though it was figured three or four times in the meanwhile. Tom Iredale and Gilbert Whitley, ‘Early history of the koala’, 1934

Robert Brown’s sustained silence on this important Australian mammal remains perplexing given his first-hand zoological knowledge and experience in New South Wales and his position at the heart of Britain’s scientific community, first as

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librarian to Sir Joseph Banks and as librarian until 1810 to the Linnean Society of London. While he updated his Latin notes on the koala across the years, he had the reputation in London of being ‘the driest pump imaginable’ and kept his scientific cards close to his chest. The extensive notes and manuscripts which went with him to the British Museum were closely guarded. It was, hence, not until three years after the Investigator struggled back to England with Brown, his artistic colleague and their rich scientific cargo, that the koala’s existence was announced to the scientific community by another informant. Then it was the doughty William Paterson, soldier, lieutenantgovernor and something of a rough Renaissance man, who brought the matter to British attention. Paterson had more than once shown himself to be an enterprising enquirer. While stationed at the convict settlement of Norfolk Island he prepared a memorandum on the island’s natural history, and, back in Australia as an administrator in Sydney, he botanised and geologised around the Hawkesbury and Hunter Rivers. When later he was sent to Van Diemen’s Land to examine the possibility of a new convict settlement in the north, he showed a keen eye for the island’s natural resources, bundling up parcels of materials for Banks, and having discovered a great outcrop of iron ore, advocated founding a settlement there for unruly convicts ‘by working them in irons’, he added sharply, ‘like they do in the mines in many parts of the world’.

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It was on 10 March 1804 that Paterson took time to communicate with Banks about the koala, with which he had had various dealings: A bad state of health has hindered me from attending much to natural history. I have however a Capt. in the regiment who I employ to go in the woods and sometimes he is very successful, particularly in shooting both quadrupeds and birds. It was this man who discovered the Cooler which I gave the Governor, being the first ever seen here. Mr Lewin made a very bad drawing of it which the Governor informed me he had sent to you. Since that time many have been caught brought in and become very domestic. I had a male and female for several months, one of them (the male) eat bread, and was particularly fond of tea. I was in great hopes he would have lived till I had an opportunity of sending him to you, but an unaccountable accident happened to him & he died soon after. The skeleton of the latter I have sent to Mr Home, and both their skins are in a box with some specimens directed to you which Captain Woodruff of the Calcutta is so kind as to say they will be safe delivered.

Paterson, who had developed a close relationship with Robert Brown and Ferdinand Bauer during their stay in the colony, was clearly the source of the animals that Brown described in Latin and that Bauer depicted.

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Everard Home at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, was one of that breed of naturalists who established a strong discipline of comparative anatomy in Britain. He had trained as a surgeon under the legendary anatomist John Hunter, whose extensive collection of pathological and anatomical specimens came to form the core of the Hunterian Museum when it was established in 1806, with Home as chief curator. Home had early dipped his mind and pen into Australian classificatory matters, publishing a paper in 1802 on the anatomy of the platypus. Focusing on the bill of a dried specimen, he had then resolutely declared that, despite appearances to the contrary, any resemblance between that extraordinary animal and a duck was purely superficial. It was a paper that would remain the foundation of scientific knowledge about the platypus for twenty-five more years. Now the koala was brought to Home’s attention. Several years after receiving the information – between his busy surgical practice and a large output of papers on his anatomical and pathological investigations – he included details of the animal based on Paterson’s eyewitness report in ‘An account of some Peculiarities in the anatomical Structure of the Wombat, with Observations on the female Organs of Generation’ published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1808: ‘The koala is another species of the wombat, which partakes of its peculiarities. The following account of it was

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sent to me some years ago by Lieut. Colonel Paterson, Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales. The natives call it the koala wombat; it inhabits the forests of New Holland, about fifty or sixty miles to the south-west of Port Jackson, and was first brought to Port Jackson in August, 1803. It is commonly about two feet long and one high, in the girth about one foot and a half; it is covered with fine soft fur, lead coloured on the back, and white on the belly. The ears are short, erect, and pointed; the eyes generally ruminating, sometimes fiery and menacing; it bears no small resemblance to the bear in the fore part of its body; it has no tail; its posture for the most part is sitting. The New Hollanders eat the flesh of this animal, and therefore readily join in the pursuit of it; they examine with wonderful rapidity and minuteness the branches of the loftiest gum trees; upon discovering the koala, they climb the tree in which it is seen with as much ease and expedition, as an European would mount a tolerably high ladder. Having reached the branches, which are sometimes forty or fifty feet from the ground, they follow the animal to an extremity of a bough, and either kill it with the tomahawk, or take it alive. The koala feeds upon the tender shoots of the blue gum tree, being more particularly fond of this than of any other food; it rests during the day on the tops of these trees, feeding at its ease, or sleeping. In the night it descends and prowls about, scratching up the ground in search of some particular

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roots; it seems to creep rather than walk: when incensed or hungry, it utters a long, shrill yell, and assumes a fierce and menacing look. They are found in pairs, and the young is carried by the mother on its shoulders. This animal appears soon to form an attachment to the person who feeds it. A specimen of this animal has since been sent to me in spirits; the viscera had been removed, but the male organs of generation, and the structure of the limbs, were the same as the wombat. There was no subdivision of vessels in the groin as in the tardigrade animals.

Home gave the koala the scientific name Didelphis coola, either independently or carried on from Robert Brown’s original identification through possible communication with Banks. Yet Banks’ part in the unfolding story of the koala remains elusive. A persistant abetter of searches for the platypus and, keen to receive news of the wombat, he appeared less interested in the koala despite the fact that his close contact with Brown must have provided him with relevant information. The great patron’s interests in his vast scientific empire had clearly changed, centring on botanical investigation and the massive collection of dried plant specimens gathered and catalogued in his herbarium. He also cultivated a way of dispersing faunal materials flowing to him from collectors around the world. The two stuffed koala specimens on show among other Australian curiosities in

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Bullock’s Museum in Piccadilly in 1810 no doubt came from Paterson’s consignments. A one-time goldsmith from Liverpool, William Bullock first procured Australian faunal specimens from Cook’s Endeavour voyage. He subsequently garnered birds collected on Flinders’ voyage in Australia’s north, and purchased further items from Sir Joseph Banks’ cabinets. In 1810 he signalled the presence of ‘a large animal from New Holland called the Koala’ in the eighth edition of A Companion to Mr Bullock’s Museum. Of live koalas, however, there were none for display. Unlike the kangaroo and wombat, no living specimen reached England until – after much care and many precautions – a female koala arrived at the Zoological Society of London in 1880. The first published figure of the koala, however, was seen in Britain in George Perry’s Arcana in May 1810 some seven years after its discovery in New South Wales. Dr George Perry had built a significant reputation as a British naturalist and used his well-known newsletter to introduce many New World creatures to a growing international fraternity. He now introduced the ‘Koala, or New Holland Sloth’: Generic Character Bradypus or Sloth, having five toes on each of its fore feet, and four toes on each of the hind feet; four cutting teeth in front; the body elongated, round, and covered with fine wool; the ears bushy and spreading, tipped with dark brown behind; the head flattened, round; the legs short and depressed, each foot

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‘We are at a loss to imagine’ wrote Perry, ‘for what particular scale of usefulness or happiness such an animal could by the great Author of Nature possibly be destined.’ 38

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armed with long crooked prehensile claws; the general colour cinereous, mixed with a brown tint which predominates on the back; the nose flattened and incurvated downwards; the form of the molares is unknown. The Bradypus or sloth is one of those animals which are in some degree allied to the Bear, the formation of the legs and shoulders in a great measure resembling the latter.

But, as Perry pointed out, further findings in the East Indies had excited the classifiers on the true nature of different kinds of sloths, and ‘even the different species of Bears are not yet thoroughly understood’. Now the ‘bear-like, arboreal koala’ cast another ingredient into the generic pot. Perry was inclined to judge that ‘although it did not agree entirely in the form of its feet, with either the three-toed or two-toed Bradypus which are found in other countries’, the similarity was so strong ‘in most peculiarities’ that naturalists might be justified in placing it with the ‘Genus Bradypus or Sloth’. His identification did the animal no favour. From its first discovery the sloth had strong detractors. The great eighteenth-century French naturalist and philosopher, Baron Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, had waxed vehement on the subject. He hit out at it in the first volume of his monumental Histoire Naturelle: No incisor or canine teeth … small and covered eyes … flattened hair that looks like dried grass … legs too 39

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short, badly terminated … Slowness, stupidity, neglect of its own body, and even habitual sadness … These sloths are the lowest form of existence in the order of animals with flesh and blood; one more defect and they could not have existed.

Perry’s view was not dissimilar. The ‘Koala or New Holland Sloth’ attracted his intense disdain. ‘This animal’, he wrote snappishly, ‘has received its name from the sluggishness and inactivity of its character’ and had ‘more analogy to the Slothtribe than any other animal hitherto found in New Holland’. Its eye, placed like that of the sloth very close to the mouth and nose, gave it ‘a clumsy appearance and void of elegance in the combination’ and ‘the uncouth and remarkable form of its body [was] particularly awkward and unwieldy’. Indeed, for Perry, the koala posed a larger question. ‘Among the numerous and curious tribes of animals which the hitherto almost undiscovered regions of New Holland have opened to our view’, he declared, ‘the creature … stands singularly pre-eminent and … we are at a loss to imagine for what particular scale of usefulness or happiness such an animal could by the great Author of Nature possibly be destined.’ Through his widely distributed Arcana, George Perry was the first naturalist to express a prevailing early nineteenthcentury British view about the primitiveness, oddity and malfunction of Australian fauna. Nevertheless, given the religious climate of the period, Perry was obliged to concede that ‘As

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Nature however provides nothing in vain, we may suppose that even these torpid, senseless creatures are wisely intended to fill up one of the great links of the chain of animated nature, and to shew forth the extensive variety of the created beings which GOD has, in his wisdom) constructed.’ It fell to naturalists across the Channel to rescue the koala and lift it to more stringent scientific assessment. During 1814 a young French naturalist, Henri Marie de Blainville, a one-time undergraduate student of Cuvier now completing a thesis on Australian monotremes, visited London and, observing a specimen of the koala, perhaps in Bullock’s Museum, sought to bring it into the accepted system of taxonomy. Blainville was an appropriate candidate for the task. In his work on the platypus and the echidna, he reached the timely conclusion that ‘too much has been written on too little direct observation’ and that zoologists were inclined to be misdirected in their evaluations. No doubt he felt the same way about the koala. In his paper ‘Prodrome d’une nouvelle distribution systèmatique de règne animal’ published in 1816, he introduced the new genus Phascolarctidae and a new generic specific for the koala, Phascolarctos – from the Greek ‘phaskolas’ for leather bag (pouch) and ‘arktos’ meaning bear. ‘I believe however’, he wrote, ‘my duty [is] to give notice of a new type of Didelphes animals which I have provisionally named Phascolarctos.’ In doing so he was the first to enshrine the concept of a ‘koala bear’. The koala he had seen came from the neighbourhood of ‘River Vapaum [Nepean River]

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in New South Wales’ and he believed its place in the broad organisation of the animal kingdom lay between the pursebearing ‘Phalanger, the Kanguroo, and the Phascolome’. Blainville named it ‘Colak or Koala’ and defined its principal characteristics as: 6 incisors teeth above [sup.] two much longer intermediaries, two lower like the kangaroo; four small intermediaries above , two below; four molars with two tubers[?] on each side of the two jaws; five separated fingers in two opposite packets, two inside, five behind, and an extremely short tail. The size of a medium-sized dog, the animal named ‘Colak or Koala’ has long hair, bulky, coarse, brown-chocolate; it had the carriage and the step of a small bear; it climbs the trees with much facility.

For Blainville it was a provisional classification and awaited the corroboration of his doctoral supervisor, the famous and influential Geoffroy St Hilaire, Professor of Quadrupeds at the Paris Museum of Natural History. It was St Hilaire who had earlier identified the two highly distinctive Australian fauna, the platypus and echidna, as Monotremata, a subclass of marsupials. St Hilaire had also named the genus Phascolomys from the wombat brought back by Peron to France, and was engaged on a grand study of marsupials. An ambitious student, Blainville rose rapidly as a comparative anatomist and succeeded to the Chair of Comparative

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Anatomy at the Paris Museum of Natural History on Cuvier’s death in 1832. Essentially he believed that mammals should be classified in descending order following the decreasing complexity of structure and organisation from primates down through marsupials to monotremes and was the first to divine the many resemblances between monotremes and marsupials. And, in his important paper of 1816, he was the first to cite the female reproductive tract as the defining difference between mammals. As Blainville hoped, Geoffroy St Hilaire included his classification and description of the koala in his Dictionaire Classique d’Histoire Naturelle in 1826. Other French zoologists were also turning their taxonomic gaze upon the bear-like animal from the antipodes. In the same year as Blainville’s paper, Cuvier, high priest of French comparative anatomy, included a brief description of ‘Les Koalas’ in the first volume of Règne Animal. Cuvier’s account was more elegant than Blainville’s but his source led him to confuse one aspect of the koala’s behaviour with the burrowing of the wombat. He noted the characteristic two long incisor teeth without canines, the two long incisors higher than the medium, some small ones on the sides, and two small canines. It was an animal, he observed: with squat body, short legs, without any tail; its five front fingers divide in two groups ‘to seize’; a thumb and the index on a side, three others on the opposite side, the missing thumb on the foot behind which has its first two

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Georges Cuvier. ‘Le Koala’, 1817.

fingers joined together as in the previous. Only one greyhaired species of it is known. It passes part of its life on the trees, and the other in dens which she digs with the foot. The mother carries her infant for a long time on her back.

A year later, in volume 4 of Règne Animal, Cuvier included an engraving of the koala which presented it as a decidedly tigerish-looking beast walking stiffly on all fours. Cuvier might designate ‘le koala’ as a type and genus, but the animal itself continued to elude realistic published portraiture. 44

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Cuvier’s work nonetheless continued to inspire other European approaches. In the competitive world of comparative anatomy aspiring zoologists jostled for place. In 1817, the German zoologist G.A. Goldfuss used Cuvier’s description and illustration of the animal to allocate a new genus and specific name to the koala – Lipurus cinereus. George Perry had introduced the term ‘cinereus’, writing of ‘the general colour cinereus mixed with a brown tint’ from which Goldfuss possibly based his species name. But as Blainville’s generic name had earlier claim, the taxonomic term Phascolarctos cinereus took precedence. Even so, Goldfuss showed Germanic zeal and offered the name Lipurus cinereus again in 1819 and the name was used in Europe until the 1840s. In 1820, the well-known French naturalist Desmarest, working on mammals for the French Encyclopèdie, suggested that the koala described as ‘brown’ was not the same as the ‘grey’ one and proposed a new taxa Phascolarctos fuscus, reproducing Cuvier’s figure with the name cinereus attached. With scant access to specimens from Australia, European classifiers did their competitive best with such variants as Marodactylus cinereus, P. flindersii and P. koala making brief appearances. The naming process rather resembled a revolving door, as one entrant followed swiftly upon another. It fell, however, to the British, to achieve a fresh and more lifelike presentation of the animal which they had so long overlooked. When Cuvier’s seminal work appeared in English as The Animal Kingdom in 1827, his illustrated ‘tiger’ had been led away and replaced with an engraving based on John Lewin’s 1803 drawing of the female koala with its young clinging to its back. 45

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This image would thread its way into subsequent English editions of Cuvier’s work and was copied in other publications in England and Europe. Yet old rivalries ran deep; it failed to penetrate the scientific literature of France. As French naturalists had never seen a koala first-hand, either on the great scientific expedition of 1801–03 or on several later French voyages to Terre Australie, Cuvier’s ‘tiger’ remained until 1840 when a new and more decorative plate of a grey koala with a young cub on her back appeared in the Dictionnaire Pittoresque d’Histoire Naturelle. It was accompanied by a formal (and posthumous) recantation on Cuvier’s behalf that belatedly accepted the name endorsed by his old rival Geoffroy St Hilaire and conveyed: ‘G. Cuvier, possessing the drawing of another animal also called Koala, and from the same region [River Vapuam (Nepean)], thought he was bound to make a Phascolarctos of it, although he asserts it lacks a thumb.’ It was G.R. Waterhouse, curator of the Zoological Society of London and later distinguished curator at the British Museum, who finally achieved a measure of standardisation and gave the stamp to the koala’s long-confounded classification. It appeared in his remarkable publication of 1841 and in further detail in his A Natural History of the Mammalia, volume 1, published in 1846. Lipurus cinereus – Goldfuss 1819 Phascolarctos fuscus – Desmarest 1820

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Phascolarctos Flindersii – Lesson 1827 Phalcolarctos fuscus et cinereus – Fischer 1829 Phascolarctos cinereus – Gray (List of the Species of Mammalia in the Collection of the British Museum) Koala wombat – Home 1808 Le Koala ou Colak – Desmarest 1817 Koala or Kola of the Aborigines; Native Bear of the colonists.

Waterhouse arranged his mammalian overview from the ‘lowest’ species – the Monotremata – through the Macropodidae family of the kangaroos, the Phascolomyidae of the wombat family, the Phascolarctos and the Phalangistidae family of the phalangers to the ‘higher’ mammals. His intention, as he affirmed, was to follow the modifications of structures and functions of the animal kingdom and to ‘lay before the public, at an early period, an account of some of the most interesting of modern discoveries amongst the Mammalian forms’. In 1841, he examined two preserved specimens of the koala, an adult from the Hunterian Museum and a young animal from the Museum of the Zoological Society of London, giving his precise measurements for the adult as: Length of head and body 25 inches; from nose to ear, 4½ inches; ear, about 1¾ inches; hind-foot to base of claws, 3 inches 1 line; fore-foot to base of claws 3 inches; circumference of body (with the fur) about 18 inches;

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height when standing on all four of its legs, about 10 inches … On the plate I have introduced a figure of a very young specimen of the Koala, measuring 11 inches in length; the fur in this specimen, instead of having a dense woolly character of the adult, is moderately soft, short, and closely applied to the body; on the middle of the back a little behind the shoulders the hairs radiate … on the rump there is another of these centres from which the hairs radiate. The ears are short, much pointed, and the posterior edge if slightly emarginated, they are not hidden in the fur as in the old animal.

‘This little specimen’, Waterhouse concluded, with information that brought fresh evidence to the study, ‘has evidently been stuffed with considerable care, and as it was sent from Australia in the position in which it is represented in the figure – a common position in foetal animals – I presume that it is the way that they lie curled up when in the pouch of the parent.’ Overall, Waterhouse pronounced the Marsupialia as belonging to the ‘implacental series’ of mammals who brought forth their young not fully developed. In the case of the koala, he referred to similarities between its ancient fossil ancestors such as the Diprotodon and Nototherum which had been exhumed – to the considerable excitement of palaeontological circles in London – a few years before.

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The classificatory puzzle was now illuminated, as far as scientific structural description and visual depiction were concerned. But, in the absence of specimens available for dissection, the internal biology of the koala remained a largely uncharted field. The problem of insufficient data and overlapping classification had proved both delaying and confused. The gentle and enigmatic koala had failed to find a settled place in the accepted classificatory system of Europe for nearly forty years after its discovery by the British. But as the biologist and evolutionary champion, T.H. Huxley, who himself would set out a strongly hierarchical system of faunal classification in 1880 (including ‘Eutheria’ – complete mammals, ‘Metatheria’ – changed or improved mammals, the marsupials – and ‘Prototheria’ prototypes or early mammals, the monotremes), somewhat ironically declared: ‘The classification of animals should be done not merely as convenient fictions of the human intellect.’ It was a point that nineteenth-century scholars, dealing with the uncertainties and rivalries of that great age of scientific classification, might well applaud.

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UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD

[A]nimals were perhaps the best metaphors for the strangeness and upsidedownness of Australia … [and] seemed conveniently to mirror the ‘reject’, ‘deviant’ and ‘undeserving’ status of the convict colony. Adrian Franklin, Animal Nation, 2006

There is a land in distant seas Full of all contrarieties. There beasts have mallards’ bills and legs, Have spurs like cocks, like hens lay eggs. There quadrupeds go on two feet, And yet few quadrupeds so fleet: And birds, although they cannot fly,

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In swiftness with the greyhound vie. With equal wonder you may see The foxes fly from tree to tree; And what they value most – so wary – These foxes in their pockets carry. There parrots walk upon the ground, And grass upon the trees is found… There missiles to far distance sent Come whizzing back with force unspent… There vice is virtue, virtue vice, And all that’s vile is voted nice. ‘The Land of Contrarieties’ Anon. ‘The Land of Contrarieties’, written early in the nineteenth century by an unnamed emigrant, summed up a mood about the young British colony in Australia that perceived this settlement as the very antithesis of everything known and cherished in Britain. The very name ‘antipodes’ echoed this sense of distance and reverse. Everything was ‘queer and opposite’. Robert Brown’s masterly botanical work from his five years collecting in Australia had established the striking differences between the harsh shapes and structures of Australian flora and the plants and flowers of Britain and Europe. Not only were they significantly different in visual form and kind, they offered fundamental challenges for which the Linnean system had few answers. Attempts to classify Australian flora further emphasised the point that the classificatory systems accepted in

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Europe were ill-equipped to sustain the weight of significant new additions from the antipodean world. The challenge was even more daunting in zoology. Nothing more potently reflected the sense of difference and reversal than Australia’s fauna. The arrival of the first platypus specimen in England in 1799, like a mythological beast – part bird, part reptile, and covered with a mammal’s hair – had set scientific tongues wagging. Was it a prank, a non-existent animal stitched together by waggish colonial lads? Or was it, as England’s noted naturalist Dr George Shaw conceded, a ‘paradoxical quadruped’ that would require much further investigation? In the colony itself, the oddities of animal nature in the immediate vicinity of Port Jackson had early persuaded John Hunter, an ardent observer of Australian wildlife, that a different biological principle was at work. Writing in 1793, Hunter canvassed the view that ‘a promiscuous intercourse between the different sexes of all these different animals’ might account for their incongruous forms. It was a concept of random promiscuity in the animal kingdom that was quickly taken up by Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s lively grandfather, in his early theory of evolutionary development from a single form, which he propounded in Zoonomia in 1796. There were simpler expressions of amazement. One interested collector in New South Wales, Joseph Arnold, summed it up in a letter home in 1810, observing of natural history in New South Wales that ‘it was as strange to me as if I had become an

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inhabitant of the moon’. Wombats, flying foxes, blue frogs, black and white cockatoos and the black swan all played their walk-on parts. Yet the kangaroo, aberrant as it was, evoked a more favourable reaction. Barron Field, building a name for himself during the 1820s as a prominent lawyer and public figure in Sydney and a founding father of the colony’s first Philosophical Society, composed a paean of praise to this remarkable animal in a poem that bore its name: Kangaroo, Kangaroo! Tho’ at first sight we should say, In thy nature that there may Contradiction be involv’d, Yet, like discord well resolv’d It is quickly harmoniz’d… For howsoe’er anomalous, Thou yet art not incongruous, Repugnant or preposterous. Better-proportion’d animal, More graceful or ethereal, Was never follow’d by the hound, With fifty steps to thy one bound. Thou can’st not be amended: no; Be as thou art; thou best art so… Be still the glory of this land, Happiest Work of finest Hand!

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Despite this temporary glow, there was a common tendency in many quarters to align Australia’s peculiar fauna with the penal settlement and to make a connection between the land of convicts, the dregs and rejects of British society, with a perception of faunal outcasts in a ‘zoological Gulag’. In England, the well-known essayist Charles Lamb observed cleverly that ‘the peculiarity of the small fore-feet of the Kangaroo seemed to be remarkably equipped for picking-pockets’. But as George Bennett, then a visiting naturalist in New South Wales, swiftly countered, Lamb ‘forgot to mention the singularity characterizing the animal kingdom in Australia, that they have pockets to be picked, being mostly marsupial!’ It was also noteworthy that several members of the penal world used their skilled fingers to portray strange Australian animals through fresh and revealing eyes. The talented Thomas Watling, transported for forgery in 1791, had made early drawings of birds and animals around Port Jackson which, taken back to England by his patron and employer, Surgeon-General John White, contributed significantly to the first detailed knowledge of the unique fauna. Other convicts also took up the pen and brush. One such was Thomas Browne, former forger and a re-offending convict consigned to a place of secondary punishment at Newcastle, New South Wales. Between 1812 and 1821 Browne painted and signed a number of highly individual pictures of ‘animated nature’ for the commandant at Newcastle, Lieutenant Thomas Skottowe which, In their distinctive mode, caught the strikingly eccentric character of the

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fauna and sharply exposed the sense of reversal and ‘primitiveness’ of the creatures which inhabited the Australian land. But it was not just amateur naturalists, surprised observers or thoughtful artists who emphasised this ‘primitive’ aspect of Australian wildlife. British attitudes on the ‘inferiority’ of Australian species, so explicit in Perry’s commentary on the koala, extended to the scientific literature and taxonomic classification in Britain and Europe well into the twentieth century, demonstrating the Eurocentric concepts that as Franklin writes, were ‘sewn tightly into British minds’. Meanwhile, European taxonomists temporised, knowledge of the koala moved slowly on the local scene. After William Paterson’s departure from the colony in 1810, there were no recorded reports from explorers until the early months of 1818. Then the botanical explorer, Allan Cunningham, collecting plants in the Illawarra region, stumbled upon the koala and made this brief entry in his journal: The native, our guide, espied, on a tree, an opossum (Didelphis), having many of the habits of the ring-tailed species. It was a female and her cub. They were asleep, hanging by the claws, among the topmost shoots of the slender Eucalyptus piperita. It has no tail; it has the thick buff head of the wombat, with strong incisor teeth, but does not burrow in the earth as that harmless, easily domesticated animal. The length of the mother was 28 inches, and its weight upward of 30 lbs.; the cub was

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about half grown, its length not exceeding a foot; it was covered with fine thick grey fur.

His jottings, however, made it plain that, despite the passage of years, Cunningham was unaware of any advances in Australian marsupial classification and confused the koala with the wombat. It was not until 1836, three decades since Paterson’s communication to Everard Home of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1804 and Home’s publication in 1808, that a comprehensive natural history account of the elusive koala appeared in print, in the The Saturday Magazine in an article ‘On the Animals called “Monkeys” in New South Wales’. The writer was William Romaine Govett, a bright young emigrant from England who arrived in Sydney in 1827 and, without any evident previous training, was appointed assistant surveyor in the Surveyor-General’s Department of New South Wales by its director, Thomas Mitchell. Surveying in the Great Dividing Range north of Sydney, Govett proved a gifted pioneering surveyor, completing a map of a particularly difficult portion of the Blue Mountains for which he won high praise from his superior. He also discovered a deep chasm among the sandstone cliffs of these rugged ranges and gained local immortality when Surveyor-General Mitchell, impressed by his assistant’s skill in delineating the challenging landscape, gave the name ‘Govett’s Leap’ to the waterfall (a ‘leap’ in Scottish) which plunges over the lofty rock formation.

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Govett, in his wanderings had made a considerable acquaintance with the koala and on his return to Britain in 1834 he shared his knowledge in one of a series of articles called ‘Sketches of New South Wales’, which he sent to the The Saturday Magazine. He reported that koalas were common in New South Wales; they were generally found in the stringybark forests of the Blue Mountains, on the ranges leading to Cox’s River below the mountain precipices, and in the ravines which opened into the Hawkesbury River, and elsewhere in the colony. On his early encounters he took them to be the sloth of Buffon, with which he saw clear affinities, but over time he concluded that the ‘monkeys’ came ‘nearest to the loris, or slow-paced lemur of India’. It was Govett’s practice to catch koalas with the assistance of Aboriginal guides and to keep some alive for observation. Accordingly, he painted a detailed picture for the readers of the koala’s four hands with naked palms with crooked pointed nails, exceedingly sharp, and rather long’, its soft, thick bluish-grey hair, small mouth and lack of tail. He also noted a feature that had not been formerly commented on that: ‘the nose is somewhat elongated, and appears as if it was tipped with black leather’. ‘The eyes are round and dark, sometimes expressive and interesting … Their countenance is by no means disagreeable’, he wrote, and added ‘like many other animals of the colony, they are drowsy and stupid by day, but become more animated at night, and when disturbed they make a melancholy cry, exciting pity.’ Govett clearly

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found koalas appealing, although he commented that ‘they are certainly formed differently from every other species of the quadrumana’. In view of the importance of the role of the Aborigines in bringing the koala to the attention of white settlers, Govett’s account of his first encounter with the koala with his ‘native’ guides makes illuminating reading: We were ascending very early in the morning Mount Tourang, one of the trigonometrical stations in Argyle. When the native perceived a very large monkey in the act of ascending a tree, he caught it, and being desirous of preserving the animal, he tied it with some silk kerchiefs to the trunk of a small tree, intending to take it to the camp on our return. About sunset, we were descending the mountain and did not forget the prisoner; but, lo! on arriving at the spot the creature was gone.

Presently the Aborigine spied the animal ‘perched upon the top of a high tree, quite at home’. He caught the ‘monkey’ by cutting a thin pole about 10 feet long with a strip of ropy bark forming a loop or noose at one end. So equipped, he began to climb the tree. The animal, on observing the approach of his enemy, ascended higher and higher till he reached the very extremity of the leafy bough on the top of the tree: while

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the native, mounting as high as he could safely go, could but scarcely reach him with his pole. For a long time he tried to get the noose over the head of the monkey, and several times when the native imagined he had succeeded, the monkey, at work with his fore-hand, would repeatedly tear it off and disengage himself. The poor animal, as he looked down upon his perplexing adversary, looked truly piteous and ridiculous, and we began to think that the black would fail in his attempt.

But, ascending a step higher, the pursuer succeeded in slipping the noose over the animal’s head and, tugging away at his captive, ‘brought him down by degrees. We could not but observe the cautious manner in which he appeared at times to treat the monkey, but this caution, we soon perceived was very necessary.’ For when they reached a point where the tree divided into two branches and the Aborigine tried to make the koala pass him to gain greater command: the monkey made a sort of spiteful catch or spring at the native … At length, however, both the man and the monkey arrived nearly at the bottom of the tree, when the latter, being lowermost, jumped upon the ground, got loose, and having crawled to the nearest tree, commenced ascending again. We seized him by the rump, thoughtless of danger, but soon thought it advisable to quit our hold.

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Doomed, the koala ultimately fell victim to the Aborigine’s tomahawk, a weapon hurled with great force and one that flickers through the records as a prized substitute for the Aborigines’ time-honoured waddy and one that became a prime article of barter between explorers and indigenous peoples. Govett’s narrative, with its curious blend of empathy and observation, is one of the very few detailed reports on the early hunting of the koala as explorers and settlers penetrated deeper into its environment. It presaged a tide of increasing assault and destruction inflicted upon this harmless inhabitant of the Australian bush. In the hot dry summer of January 1836, a more notable figure had traversed the areas of the Cox River and the Blue Mountains, and, standing at a vantage point overlooking the vast rolling ranges and deeply plunging valleys, recorded his amazement in his diary: ‘An immense gulf is unexpectedly seen through the trees. This kind of view to me was quite a novelty and extremely magnificent.’ The writer was the much-travelled Charles Darwin, escaping for a few days from HMS Beagle as it provisioned in Sydney Harbour during its long voyage of survey around the world. Riding out along the road that convicts had carved through the Great Dividing Range, Darwin spent a night on a property on the Cox River. He did not see a koala, but he was present at the shooting of a platypus in the river at twilight and, pondering this small paradox of nature, wrote again in his diary: ‘A Disbeliever beyond anything beyond his own

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The young surveyor William Romaine Govett made a considerable acquaintance with the koala during his expeditions in New South Wales during 1829–33 and published his notes and drawing of ‘The Animal called “Monkeys” in New South Wales’ on his return to Britain.

reason, might exclaim, “Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work”.’ The youthful Darwin was even then on the edge of formulating a concept that would, over the next two decades, shape his theory of the evolutionary origin of species. In this he would

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come to make specific use of the Australian platypus and its divergent nature in his argument for the survival of the fittest in special environments. For ‘Creationists’, those who believed in separate acts of the Creator to account for the disappearance and extinction of species and their replacement by slightly differing forms, such different genera were testimony to a Creator’s determining, interventionist will. Nonetheless Darwin, arguing in private correspondence with his close geological and botanical colleagues Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, contented that such forms as Ornithorhynchus (the platypus) were examples of an aberrant genus that had arrived through natural selection at a ‘lower stage of perfection’ in its smaller and less competitive environment, in its case, in fresh water. When he came to publish The Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin clearly accepted the Eurocentric view of hierarchy in the animal kingdom and the lower place of Australia’s distinctive fauna. Then he wrote, ‘It may be doubted, for instance, whether the Australian marsupials, which are divided into groups differing but little from each other, and feebly representing … our carnivorous, ruminant, and rodent mammals, could successfully compete with these well-developed orders.’ He went on, however, to draw Australian marsupials into his evolutionary scheme. ‘In the Australian mammals,’ he concluded, ‘we see the process of diversification at an early and incomplete stage of development.’ From his abundant researches and contacts, Darwin later placed the koala as a true evolutionary example of adaptive

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feeding among ‘the lower-vegetable feeding mammals’ through the development of its singular caecum (the branch or diverticulum of the intestine), and noted in some wonder in The Descent of Man that the caecum ‘is actually more than thrice as long as the whole body’. This biological finding would gain greater significance over time, yet, in Australia, a more scientific approach to the examination and recording of native fauna was beginning to take shape. During 1837, the recently established Museum in Sydney published a small work titled A Catalogue of the Specimens of Natural History and Miscellaneous Curiosities deposited in the Australian Museum. There, a brown koala specimen was listed under Desmarest’s specific Phascolarctos Fuscus and represented with its international, Aboriginal and colonial names. PHASCOLARCTOS FUSCUS. Desm.; Cuv. Regne Anim. 4 The Koala, or Kola, of the Aborigines; Goribun of the Aborigines of Yas. The Native Bear, or Monkey, of the Colonists. Habitat. Interior of Australia. The three specimens of brown koala listed were a male, a female and a young male presented to the museum by Alexander M’Leay.

The cited collector, Alexander McLeay (or M’Leay as he was also known), was one of those men of English distinction who, blessed with a good classical education and contacts, had

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become first a public servant then long-serving secretary of the Linnean Society of London and was chosen in 1826 to fill the post of Colonial Secretary of New South Wales. Now one of Sydney’s leading residents and naturalists, an entomologist and Fellow of the Royal Society, he brought to the colony his outstanding collection of exotic insects. During 1827, goaded perhaps by Barron Field’s complaint about the lack of zoological expertise or instruction in Sydney, and by the unpalatable fact that private specimens could be purchased by foreign museums to ‘reap the honour of our zoological history’, McLeay set up a room as the Colonial Museum with a small grant from the government. By the mid 1830s the Colonial Museum was gaining modest substance through donations of native fauna by a handful of interested settlers. By 1837 the intellectual thrust behind its development came from its recently appointed secretary and curator, Dr George Bennett, the experienced naturalist with strong international connections who had decided after his earlier visit to settle in Sydney. Bennett had trained at the Hunterian School of Medicine in London and become a member of the prestigious Royal College of Surgeons when, postponing his medical career, he set off in 1828 on a series of Pacific voyages to extend his horizons as a budding naturalist. From these he took large collections of fish, shells and plants back to England, prepared a number of scientific papers and received an honorary gold medal of the Royal College of Surgeons for his contributions

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to zoological science. He also published Wanderings in New South Wales, Batavia, Pedir Coast, Singapore and China: Being the Journal of a Naturalist in those Countries during, 1832, 1833, and 1834. In this, having travelled on horseback across the Great Dividing Range of New South Wales and along a tributary of the Macquarie River, he included a description of his first encounter with the koala. ‘At “Dabee”‘ [Mr Cox’s estate on the Dabee River]’, he wrote, ‘I had the opportunity of viewing the native animal, called Koala or Cola (called “Goribrun” by the Yas natives).’ Bennett had formerly seen ‘delineations’ of the animal in London but ‘this being the first living specimen I had seen it immediately occurred to me how inaccurately the published representations of the animal were delineated, being probably, like most of the drawings of Australian animals taken from stuffed instead of recent specimens. The very peculiar drolllooking physiognomy of this little beast was entirely lost in the mis-representations.’ This animal, the Phascolarctos genus of Blainville, was a young specimen, and covered over the body with a fine grey fur, having a reddish tinge, no tail, ears short and erect eyes small, iredes brown, nose naked and pointed, upper lip divided, upper jaw projecting over the lower, hind feet like the opossum, the thumb wanting the nail. This animal laps when drinking, like a dog, and is very fond of milk; it uses the fore-feet in laying hold of the

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branches when eating the young leaves of the gum trees, (Eucalypti). This specimen was a male, and the noise it uttered was a peculiar soft barking sound. It sleeps during the day, running about to feed at night, but when roused will also feed during the day in its present state of confinement.

By 1837, much interested in the fauna of New South Wales, Bennett took up residence as a medical practitioner in Sydney along with his appointment at the Colonial Museum and rapidly became a key naturalist in the colony. Fortuitously, while studying at the Royal College of Surgeons, he had formed a close friendship with his near contemporary Richard Owen who would become an immensely influential comparative anatomist in London, a high-flyer who locked horns over evolutionary principles with Charles Darwin. Owen was Bennett’s scientific lode-star, his major source of communication with metropolitan science and a mentor whom he generously served. Somewhat in the fashion of Sir Joseph Banks before him, Owen’s long arm reached out to the Australian colonies (and to Africa and New Zealand) and, with the help of many eager collectors, acquired a vast cargo of faunal specimens, both biological and palaeontological, on which – through his continuing output of scientific papers and stout volumes – he built a dominant reputation. Bennett became Owen’s key man-on-the spot in the antipodes, a tireless contributor of carefully preserved marsupial and

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Dr George Bennett, discerning observer and collector, led the field as a resident naturalist and physician in New South Wales from 1835 and spent his considerable energy despatching zoological and palaeontological specimens to his old friend and mentor, Sir Richard Owen, in London.

monotreme specimens and their bottled organs of generation. As Owen’s interest reached beyond the living fauna into the lost world of extinct giant marsupials, he also became a diligent hunter and collector of fossilised teeth and bones. Openminded and outgoing, Bennett’s possessed another special gift as a naturalist – he established friendly rapport with Aborigines from different regions, carefully noting their tribal names for species and using their knowhow in the pursuit of fauna.

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Bennett’s competence on his first visit to New South Wales had borne important scientific fruit. Among the specimens he then sent to Owen was a kangaroo uterus showing the foetus with placenta attached, decisive evidence for Owen’s research that the offspring was brought forth in the usual uterine way rather than, as bushmen and others had widely canvassed, being born in the ‘false womb’ of the mother’s pouch. On 14 April 1838 Bennett despatched his first communication about the koala to his mentor: My Dear Owen, I find much pleasure in forwarding you by the ‘Achilles’ Captn. Keate (the commander on this section in Sydney will bring for me anything you have to send) the box which I received thro’ Dr. Mollison well filled with specimens among other … the Head of a Young Koala for the brain.

The critical era of the trained scientist in the Australian field had begun.

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INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

Utilization of an exceptionally wide array of species allowed the Aborigines to tread softly in their environment. Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters, 1994.

Australia was managed by consistent, national-wide and detailed principles and practice. Australia was a cultured land. Bill Gammage, Australia under Aboriginal Management, 2002.

The Aborigines of Australia have inhabited this continent for some 60 000 years. The record of their existence, as Flannery notes, ‘is a history of one of the world’s most unusual and

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highly specialised people’. There is now little doubt that for a while they co-existed with the dinosaurs and the argument persists, albeit with some contention, that their hunting skills made them key contributors to the extinction of the smaller dinosaurs. Looking in 1871 for fossils of giant extinct marsupials in southern Queensland near Dalby, the industrious George Bennett showed the local Aborigines a drawing of a reconstruction of one of these ancient giants, done by his friend Richard Owen. ‘Many’, he reported enthusiastically in a letter to Owen that December, ‘readily recognised several of the bones delineated and expressed their surprise at the great accuracy with which they were represented. One of them said that these are those of an animal long since extinct, known to the natives as “Gyedarra”. Tradition among them has handed down the appearance and habits of this animal for generations.’ The Aborigine called Charley Pierce acknowledged that: He hadn’t paid much attention to the descriptions that had been given, but imagined that the animal was as large as a heavy draught-horse, walked on four legs, the same as any other four-footed beast, eating grass; never going any distance away from the creeks. He spoke most positively and asserted that the bones we are finding are those of the animal of which he was speaking, and that at one time the bones were very numerous about the Gowrie water-holes where his forefathers had seen the animals themselves sporting about. 72

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Such evidence was highly confirming to Richard Owen, who gave it his imprimatur by publishing the letter in the Magazine and Annals of Natural History. Bennett’s communication stands as a rare, if not unique, written testimony to the long skein of Aboriginal knowledge. From time immemorial the Aborigines have spun stories and legends of their Dreamtime, and their origin and arrival in this country. In these, animals have played a crucial part. And the koala, a creature to contemporary eyes of comparative docility, helplessness and calm, appears as a central, often dominant and determining agent in many Aboriginal Creation myths. In the beginning, said one legend, as told in A.W. Reed’s Aboriginal Legends, all was land. There was no sea. Animals and people were allowed to go wherever they pleased. It had been raining for days and weeks and months and years. The water ran down the hills, forming creeks and rivers that flowed across the plains and collected in hollows … As the deepest depressions were filled with waters that grew into vast oceans, the land area shrank and divided into many islands. Groups of animals and men were divided from one another in the encircling seas.

On one such island, far distant from the present continent of Australia, there were men skilled in throwing boomerangs who loved to engage in contests as to who could throw the greatest distance. But amid the boasting and the claims of accom73

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plishment, who could tell if the boomerang did not return? ‘There’s only one way that we can know for sure’, said one. ‘Someone must go there to see if we can find it.’ ‘I know how we can do it’, a small boy piped up. ‘We’ve heard too much from you already’, the old man growled. ‘It would be much better if you ate the food you’re given … I’ve seen you spit food from your mouth – food that’s good for you as well as good to eat.’ ‘That’, said the boy ‘is because no one has ever brought me a Koala to eat. That’s what I like best.’ As his sister’s husband had caught one that morning, it was there beside a tree. The old man picked up the animal and threw it at the boy who ran with it to the beach. Taking a flint knife … he slit the belly and drew out its intestines. Putting the end in his mouth, he blew into them until they swelled into a long tube that reached the sky. He kept on blowing. The tube bent over into a majestic arch, its end far out of sight beyond the curve of the ocean. Look what he’s done, (exclaimed the boy’s brother-inlaw). Now we can cross it and find out where the boomerang has landed. It’s sure to be a better place than the one we’re living in now. He put his foot on the bridge of intestines and began to climb the arch. Next came the boy, followed by his mother’s uncle, his father and mother, and aunts and brothers and sisters. Seeing that everyone was crowding on the bridge of intestines, the old man followed too.

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The crossing took many days, days without food and in the burning heat of the sun, but eventually they came to an end of climbing. They slid down the far end of the arch and found themselves on the far-away island. It was a good place. The grass was greener than in their own land shaded by gum trees, with cooler, clearer water than they had ever seen or tasted … For this land to which they had come was the east coast of Australia. When all the tribespeople were there they let the arched bridge float away. The sun shone on it, turning it to many gleaming colours which formed the first rainbow arch that had ever been seen by men. As they watched the brilliant colours, the rainbow slowly disappeared. The boy was turned into a koala and his brother-in-law, to a Native Cat. Although the other tribesmen remained unchanged, they split up into a number of groups, each with its own totem, and departed to various parts of the island continent. And so it was said … many generations later that the first Aboriginals to come from another island became the progenitors of the various tribes which occupied the new land.

This Creation story held many truths. It revealed the Aborigines’ long knowledge of the koala’s unique biology with its vast caecum. It acknowledged the importance and power of the boomerang and its significance for all indigenous people. It signalled the beginnings of a totemic culture in which each

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tribe chose its own special totem linked with a particular animal, it spelled out a history of Aboriginal diffusion across the land and it offered an unusual and partial overturning of hierarchical social structure in which the old man’s owned leadership was transferred to the imaginative boy. Different geographies shaped different legends that held the koala at their core. In Queensland’s rugged Carnarvon Gorge, kangaroos, wallabies and one koala lived in the Dreamtime in an arid treeless land. In vain the tribespeople, the Bidjara, attempted to bring rain by hurling their boomerangs to catch and anchor a cloud. Desperate, they called upon the koala, ‘Didane’, with his ‘powerful boomerang’: With a tremendous swing Didane hurled his boomerang into the sky. They waited. The boomerang seemed lost forever … Suddenly a shower of seeds began to fall, seeds of every kind, large and small rained down upon the hot dry earth … Soon rain came, cooling the land and filling the rivers. The seeds knocked from the sky by Didane’s boomerang began to grow in fertile soil … The Bidjara people never forgot the help of the mighty koala.

The special anatomy of the koala, with its disproportionately long and strong upper arm, was again the focus of legend. Another legend spoke of the origin of the koala’s distinctive want of a tail, as well as the Aborigines’ intimate relationship with their land. Steven Phillips outlines this Dreamtime story of totemic creatures: 76

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During a drought, the animals noticed that Koala never seemed to suffer from thirst and they all believed that a secret water supply was being kept. Even though a watch was maintained day and night, Koala’s secret remained just that until Lyre Bird saw him hanging upside down from the branches, using his strong tail. Curious as to why Koala would hang in such a strange manner, Lyre Bird crept up and saw Koala drinking water that had collected in a fork of a tree. Believing that the tree might be hollow, and consequently filled with water, Lyre Bird went back to his camp and returned with a firestick, setting the tree on fire with spectacular results. The tree burst and was indeed filled with water, enough in fact to satisfy the thirsts of all the animals. The result of the fire however, did leave their marks. To this day, if you look closely at the tail of a lyrebird, the brown scorches made by the firestick are still evident. Similarly, the koala’s tail was burnt off by the flames of the fire; he escaped by scrambling to another tree but for ever after had to live without a tail.

Legend and fact, history and dreaming are closely intertwined. The koala is known for not having to drink water, which it obtains from eating the tenderest tips of eucalyptus leaves, while the Aboriginal practice of firestick burning has shaped the landscape of the continent through vast centuries of time. The connection between the koala and water, indeed, informs many myths, as does the animal’s perceived role as a 77

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sage counsellor in times of risk and adversity, and a wily operator when oppressed. The study of Aboriginal language and its roots has pointed to a particular interaction between folklore and etymology relating to water. One early student of Aboriginal etymology wrote: In the appellation of ‘coola’ – native bear – and the place name ‘Coolawin’ there would appear to be an instance of the legendary origin. In searching for the root of the said two names one is struck with the significant fact, that particularly in the northern district rivers of N.S.W., are a number of names all connected with water, and apparently derived from the same stem as ‘Coola’, native bear. Cool = Water, Coolamin, ‘a basin made from a swelling in a tree’ and Coolabah, ‘a tree that thrives by water’.

The author goes on to list over sixty place names in the northwest, northern tablelands, midwest and central and lower coast of New South Wales where ‘cool’, ‘kool’ and ‘coll’ have entered the language, including Colac (part of the Lachlan River), Cooloongatta (the highest land near Wollongong overlooking the sea), and Cooma (a lake). Another tribal name for the native bear in far southern New South Wales and northern Victoria takes the root ‘bang, banj, boor, Boorabee’, and in legends this too is related to water. One such narrative runs:

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A long time ago, when Koob-boor was very small, both his father and mother died, and he was placed in the care of another tribe the members of which were unkind to him and he seldom had enough to drink … On a certain day the tribe went away to hunt, and they forgot little Koob-boor who was left alone in the camp. Unfortunately for the natives, they had not hung up high out of reach their tarnuks or water vessels, which were all full, and so Koob-boor had more than enough to drink … Feeling refreshed, he sat in the shade and thought over his wrongs … After this he began hanging all the tarnuks in the boughs of a small sapling, and he then filled every vessel from the creek till it lay empty. Having done all this he climbed up into the small tree and seated himself among the suspended tarnuks. Then the tree suddenly began to grow and became huge and Koob-boor sat there till evening when the blacks, hot and thirsty, returned to camp.

Koob-boor protected his position and the water by letting water fall upon the men as they attempted to climb the tall tree, until they fell to the ground and were killed. After many assaults, two men conceived a plan to climb the giant tree in circular loops, successfully avoiding the water thrown directly down by Koob-boor. They seized the small animal ‘and beat him until all his bones were quite soft. They threw him down to the ground where other blacks beat and tried to kill him.

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He did not die. He became in form and appearance what he is now, and he ran up another tree.’ A less violent variant of this legend runs: After Kur-bo-roo had drunk all the water, the women and children had no water to drink. Much distressed and perplexed, the Aborigines gave way at length to extreme despair, for no help came to them. Kur-ruk-ar-ook [a major mythical figure] seeing all these things, came down from the sky, and enquired into the causes of this sorrow. She called all the bears to her and heard their complaints, and she heard all that the Aborigines had to say, and she settled the quarrel thus: The blacks might eat the flesh of the bear, because it was good, but they might not skin it as they skinned common animals; and the bears were commanded not to steal the Tarnuk … or the waters of the creek; and all of them, blacks and bears, became friends by means of the counsel given … Thenceforth the bear became well disposed towards the blacks, and ever ready to give advice and help them.

In the nineteenth-century, as colonial explorers discovered, the meanings of the legends were echoed in Aboriginal practice. Various tribes held it lawful to eat the native bear but the koala was never skinned, unlike kangaroos and opossums. Some groups had a special custom regarding the koala’s head, which had to be saved and buried. They ‘ate the animals’ flesh with relish’, recorded Barrallier, but his early experience of 80

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negotiation with his native guide showed that they protected the fur and head. ‘The head, which I should have liked to secure, had disappeared.’ In Aborigines’ myths and rituals, animal totems played an important cultural role. Although particular animals featured in the Dreaming, the animals were not – as white settlers and early anthropologists assumed – protectors or custodians of the tribe. Some tribes or their smaller clan subgroups might choose a koala, or even a totally insignificant creature such as an insect or a witchetty grub, as their totem. There would be scant logic in selecting a much-hunted or migratory animal as a guardian. Totems, rather, were sacred objects, sometimes believed to be identified with a character ‘soul’ of the tribe, a sphere that belonged to the ‘churinga’ or special sacred location of a group. Each group might perform rites for the natural increase of their totem species, and it was legitimate to hunt their totem animal or that of a neighbouring tribe, and allow other tribes to use their totem as a food source. As historical evidence attests, Aborigines were accomplished hunters of the koala, following them into the highest treetops, knocking them to the ground and killing them with a rock or tomahawk. It has been widely argued – frequently by contemporary scientists– that Aborigines’ extensive hunting of koalas before white settlement severely affected its distribution. It is alleged that, at the beginning of white colonisation, koala colonies in eastern Australia extended through eucalypt forests from Cooktown in the far north to southern Victoria, south-east into 81

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South Australia and in New South Wales on both the eastern and western sides of the Great Dividing Range, but that koalas had declined conspicuously in coastal regions and around Sydney. Yet in December 1861 George Bennett was reporting to Richard Owen, from Sydney: ‘We get plenty of Koalas, or Native Monkey (Phascolarctos cinereus). Not a week passes but I could purchase them of all ages for from 10s. to 15s. each as they are brought by the coasting vessels from the Patterson [Paterson River north of Maitland and other parts of this colony.’ Other anecdotal testimony suggests that few koalas were seen by settlers around the Goulburn district of southern New South Wales through the 1850–60s, but that they appeared in considerable numbers later in the century after Aborigines had been driven from the region. In Victoria, in the Goulburn River district, it was again anecdotally contended that the animals were rare for many years after settlement but were present in their thousands after the local Aborigines were displaced by colonial pastoralists and farmers. There is an important counter side to this scenario. As the distinguished zoologist Alan Marshall has written in The Great Extermination: We have no real idea of how common Australian mammals were when the early settlers came. From prehistory the Aboriginal people had hunted and fed on native invertebrates, fishes, frogs, reptiles, birds and mammals. But they had struck a sort of bargain that these animals,

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as a species, did not come to harm. It was rather, the invading army of pastoralists and squatters moving outwards through bush and forest – north, west and south from Sydney – with their flocks of sheep and cattle, that took over and cleared the land for pastoral development that drove the indigenous people from their established habitats, totem sites and sacred places, and signalled significant ecological change.

In significant contrast to the scientists’ repeated theme, Canberra historian Dr Bill Gammage’s study Australia under Aboriginal Management offers striking evidence, corroborated by the writings of some major nineteenth-century explorers, of the distinctive and productive way in which the Aborigines handled and cultivated the landscape and preserved its faunal resources over their long period of habitation. ‘Aborigines’, he writes, ‘managed the whole of Australia, land, water, plants and animals. Their key was the vegetation. Sometimes they let it alone because it suited them or because they could not alter it, but they changed more than they let alone. They did so to obey the law and to make resources sustainable, predictable and convenient.’ They were intimate with every plant, rock and animal, and knew all their reserves. Their chief ally in shaping the land was fire. They used it to hunt, signal, clear tracks, and pattern habitats. ‘Aboriginal firing dotted the landscape’, Gammage records. ‘You might expect Aborigines making plans to work

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with the land, by burning country naturally without trees. They did the opposite. They left trees on poor soil, and like farmers, put grass where it would crop best, on good soil. All over Australia rich plains lay where, without fire, trees grow. This was the great gift fire gave.’ The plains proved a known habitat for their changing resources of food and game. Australian explorers, travelling widely, observed and reported the phenomenon in some wonder in their journals. Fire, wrote the itinerant Surveyor-General, Sir Thomas Mitchell, was used everywhere, ‘on the highest mountains, and in places the most remote and desolate.’ ‘It was, as Ludwig Leichhardt, the German naturalist-explorer, attested in 1845, a controlled, planned part of a ‘systematic management of their runs’. In 1839 in South Australia, the explorer Edward John Eyre made note: In some parts of the large plains we had crossed … I had observed traces of the remains of timber, of a larger growth than any now found in the same vicinity, and even in places where none at present exists … In my various wanderings in Australia, I have frequently met with very similar appearances; and somewhat analogous to these, are the singular little grassy openings, or plains, which are constantly met with in the midst of the densest Eucalyptus scrub.

Such evidence, writes Gammage, was cumulative across the continent – in the west, outside Darwin, in Tasmania and 84

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in eastern Australia. Eucalyptus trees, on which koalas depend, were hardy survivors in poorer soil, hence they largely withstood the burning. Accordingly, the Aborigines used fire to make ‘belts of trees or scrub to intersect plains’ and to build the ‘plain patterns’ across the continent. ‘Plain, forest, belt, copse, and pocket’, Gammage sums up, ‘worked so well because they were skilfully associated’ – association meant putting as many plants and animals as possible within reach of one group or tribal family. As early as the 1830s, Alexander Harris was exploring in New South Wales in the wooded regions behind Wollongong and noted in his journal: The spot where we had pitched our tent was a small grassy forest on the hill side; and everywhere around it … was thick tangled brush growing amidst lofty trees … a little patch of grass would assert a place for itself on the shoulder of a hill, and partly down the side; but generally the entire surface of the mountain, for many miles up and down the coast every way, was clothed with this thick brush.

‘Friendly natives’ had brought many of the first koalas to the settlers’ hands, and the forest edges and grassy plains were home to kangaroos and many smaller browsing marsupials of interest to Aborigines. Gammage’s conclusions are enlightening. ‘Contemporary accounts show that Australia was managed by consistent, 85

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national-wide and detailed principles and practice, Australia was a cultured land … For Aborigines the land is alive.’ It was no terra nullius. The indigenous people were active, not passive. ‘Its face speaks. “Here are managers”, it says, “caring, provident, hard-working. Every yard of ground was loved and cared for”.’ Across the centuries, history tells many stories. In the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the indigenous inhabitants of Australia were seen as a primitive society, the human analogue of the antipodean fauna widely accorded inferior status in mammalian hierarchy. So fixed was this preconception that, as late as 1927, Melbourne University’s eminent Professor of Biology, Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer, could assert; ‘Australia is the present home and refuge of creatures, often crude and quaint, that have elsewhere passed away and given place to higher forms. This applies equally to the aboriginal as to the platypus and the kangaroo. Just as the platypus lays its eggs and, feebly suckling its young, reveals a mammal in the making, so does the Aboriginal show us … what early man must have been.’ Research from the later twentieth century and informed contemporary work has led us to very different perspectives.

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If science is to retain its strength, it must keep in touch with the solid grounds of observation. T.H. Huxley, ‘Essay on Owen’s Position in the History of Anatomical Science’, 1894.

It stands quite alone the solitary species of its genus. John Gould, The Mammals of Australia, 1846.

During 1838, John Gould, looking for fame and fortune, arrived in Australia with his artist wife Elizabeth, one of his four children (another would be born at the antipodes), and the zoological collector John Gilbert to bring the wildlife of

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the Australian colonies before the scientific and commercial world of Britain. Gould was a skilled organiser and hard-working naturalist entrepreneur. He had also built a considerable reputation in England as an ornithologist through his publication of A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains, a five-volume work on The Birds of Europe and his compilation and depiction of Charles Darwin’s birds published as an Appendix to the famous young naturalist’s Voyage of the Beagle. Himself an inveterate traveller, Gould’s interest in Australian material was initially spurred by his brother-in-law, Stephen Coxen, who settled as a pastoralist in the Hunter River region of New South Wales and who sent him striking specimens of Australian birds. Gould had begun a preliminary work on these colourful creatures when he decided to journey to Australia and undertake an ornithological survey on the spot. John Gould arrived in Hobart in September 1838 and, with his family, became a guest of the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin and Lady Jane Franklin, his accomplished wife. After a quick sortie in the colony with John Gilbert, he determined to include mammals on his scientific agenda. ‘It was not’, he explained, ‘until I arrived in the country, and found myself surrounded by objects so strange as if I had been transported to another planet’ that the plan took shape. With a rapid selection of ‘much-needed information about the habits and economic uses of mammals in the Colony’ he set off for Sydney. From there he began a journey that took

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John Gould, oil painting by Henry Williams, c. 1839.

him around the Cox and Hunter Rivers and made a threemonth expedition into South Australia which netted him five hundred birds and some forty ‘quadrupeds’. During 1839, staying en famille in Sydney with George Bennett, who would become his valued agent in New South Wales, Gould became acquainted with the Colonial Museum’s specimens and, acquiring several trusty convict servants from the Governor along with some tents, hunting dogs and other necessary items for a bush life, set off that hot December to explore an extensive stretch of New South Wales.

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Gould’s major findings and focus were on the Macropodidae, the kangaroo family, but he also paid attention to the monotremes, phalangers and koala. ‘During my two years’ ramble in Australia, a portion of my time and attention was directed to the fauna of the dense and luxuriant brushes which stretch along the south-eastern coast, from Illawarra to Moreton Bay’, he wrote in The Mammals of Australia, published in thirteen brilliantly illustrated colour parts from 1845–63. ‘I also spent some time among the cedar brushes of the mountain ranges of the interior, particularly those bordering the well-known Liverpool Plains.’ In all these localities ‘the Koala is to be found, and although nowhere very abundant, a pair, with sometimes the addition of a single young one, may, if diligently sought for, be procured in every forest.’ Gould’s overall view, from his own observations and facts which he picked up along the way, was that the koala was ‘extremely local in its habits’ and that ‘the south-eastern portion of the continent of Australia is the only part in which it is known’. ‘During the day’, he observed, echoing a familiar view, ‘it is so slothful that it is very difficult to arouse and make it quit its resting place.’ In such instances, a gun became a working tool. ‘Those that fell to my own gun’, he reported graphically, ‘were most tenacious of life, clinging to the branches until the last spark had fled.’ But it was the Aborigines who were invaluable in collecting specimens of the reclusive marsupial: Without the aid of the natives its presence among the thick foliage of the great Eucalypti can rarely be detected. 90

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However difficult it may be for the European to discover them in their shady retreats, the quick and practised eye of the Aborigine readily detects them, and they speedily fall victims to the heavy and powerful clubs which are hurled at them with the utmost precision.

Gould was luckier in his sightings of the platypus and, in his engaging popular style, described his first field encounter with the monotremes: Tired by a long and laborious day’s walk under a burning sun, I frequently encamped for the night by the side of a river, a natural pond, or a water hole, and before retiring to rest not infrequently stretched my weary body on the river bank; while thus reposing the surface of the water was often disturbed by the little concentric circles formed by the Ornithorhynchus, or perhaps an echidna came trotting towards me.

When he returned to London and began compiling the original parts of his three-volume work on the Australian mammals, it was Gould’s intention to present the wide and strange variety of Australian marsupials to the general British public. He himself was neither a theorist nor a participant in the growing discussion among comparative anatomists and zoologists about evolving animal forms. His goal, rather, was simply to show that each great division of the globe had its own peculiar forms of animal life and that the fauna of 91

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Australia was widely different from fauna in every other part of the world. For his narrative on the koala, Phascolarctos cinereus, he drew conspicuously on Waterhouse’s classification and descriptive details and reproduced much of Paterson’s earlier account (published by Everard Home) of the koala’s appearance and habits. For his part, Gould was in the business of presenting a vivid, accessible and enduring picture of a unique and little-known faunal community. John Gould’s work on Australian mammals marked the first general attempt to bring these singular fauna under review. Together with his own observations, he produced two beautifully coloured drawings of a female koala with an infant clinging tightly to her back and a rare ruminative portrait of the animal he called ‘this anomalous Sloth among the marsupials’. ‘It stands quite alone’, he added expressively, ‘the solitary species of its genus.’ In turn, George Waterhouse drew on Gould’s fresh firsthand knowledge in his own dense mammalian work. ‘I am informed by Mr Gould’, he noted in his A Natural History of the Mammalia, ‘that the Koala inhabits country from Moreton Bay to Port Phillip’ and ‘that, unlike most quadrupeds, it does not fly upon the approach of man.’ The links of information shared and copied between nineteenth-century naturalists mark a pioneering century of classification. Gould’s work not only added new information on the shy koala from the eucalyptus forests, but a composite and compelling picture of a vast marsupial company. Across the

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spanning fields of zoology and ornithology (his magnificent work of hand-coloured lithographs, The Birds of Australia, appeared serially from 1851 to 1869), he also kept in close touch with an emerging corps of museum naturalists and collectors in the colonies. ‘For God’s sake, & your own fame,’ wrote one frustrated curator, G.F. Angas of the Australian Museum, to George Waterhouse, curator at the Museum of South Australia recently returned with a haul of new animal and bird species from an inland journey, ‘send all the new things to Gould by me & get them described and figured before they are destroyed forever.’ In The Mammals of Australia, John Gould also demonstrated a quality of foresight as a field observer that was far ahead of his time. He deplored the settlers’ steady slaughter of the platypus ‘for no more useful purpose than to make slippers of its skin’ (a fate that also awaited the less visible koala), and warned that the Tasmanian thylacine was in danger of extinction. ‘Short-sighted indeed are the Anglo-Australians’, he declared, ‘or they would long ere this have made laws for the preservations of their highly singular … indigenous animals.’ He urged that they make provision for preserving a number of their ‘conspicuous animals’ before it was too late, or they would disappear ‘followed by unavailing regret for the apathy with which they had previously been regarded’. While John Gould’s commanding compilations brought together a striking overview of natural history from the Australian field, the growth of new philosophical and theological

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concepts based on growing faunal evidence from the New World were leading to new ideas at the scientific metropolis about organic classification and the very interpretation of the laws of nature. Onto this stage strode the imposing figure of the comparative anatomist, Richard Owen. Richard Owen’s trajectory had swept him from his brilliant start as a medical investigator at the Royal College of Surgeons and assistant conservator at the Hunterian Museum, via a series of original papers based on his dissections of the Museum’s unique collections, to a position of zoological leadership in Britain. From the late 1820s he turned his penetrating gaze upon Australian fauna and, greatly aided by specimens sent by his friend George Bennett, published a cache of papers, monographs and volumes on the physiology, structure, generation and development of living and extinct Australian mammalian forms. In November 1836 the young Owen presented a paper entitled ‘Notes on the anatomy of Koala. Phascolarctos fuscus, Desm.’ to the Zoological Society of London, a society in which he enjoyed a mounting importance. His observations were based on a dissection he had carried out on a young male koala preserved in spirits and presented to the Society by Captain Mallard which, he wrote, ‘afforded me the opportunity of examining the viscera of this rare and curious animal’. The acknowledgement of little-known collectors and helpful conveyors marked a formal recognition of the important relationship between metropolitan experts, and collectors and contributors in the field. 94

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Owen carefully defined the koala’s organs and their relationships to muscular and structural form. He posited that its visceral anatomy ‘closely approximates to that of the wombat’ which he had described in a paper to the Society earlier that year and, with the poetic eye of the skilled dissectionist, noted that ‘the whole of the inner membrane of the small intestines exhibited a beautiful velvety tissue’. Simultaneously he presented the first scientific description of the koala’s singular caecum or outer stomach (so well identified in Aboriginal mythology) with an account that became imprinted in biological literature: The caecum was of enormous magnitude, and slightly puckered equidistantly or nearly so throughout the whole of its length ... by a slight longtitudinal band of muscular fibres … Turning spirally on itself and beginning large, it gradually narrowed, the decrease of its last portion, for the length of 18 inches, being very marked; this portion running to a long vermiform point. The total length of the caecum was 4 feet 2 inches.

His notes also shed light on the koala’s penis, of which Brown had recorded an account in 1803. Owen described it as ‘of small size and conical figure’ and ‘placed immediately anterior to the anus’. It was ‘slightly bifurcate, or rather had two projecting papillae, one on each side of the urethral orifice’, a condition subsequently established to be similar to that of the wombat. 95

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Richard Owen was widely quoted. ‘It is in accordance with the views of Professor Owen’, Waterhouse acknowledged that he himself ‘separated wombats from other marsupialia as a distinct family’. Gould’s introduction in his volume on Australian mammals freely accepted Owen’s judgment that marsupials were much less highly organised than placental mammals and that the ‘cerebrum is small in proportion to the animal’. Darwin, too, drew his information about the koala’s caecum from Owen’s research. During the next few decades, combining his professorship at the Royal College of Surgeons with the exalted post of Superintendent of the Natural History Department of the British Museum (to which he ascended in 1857), Owen became the doyen of comparative anatomy in Britain. A keen retriever of zoological and palaeontological specimens from overseas, an indefatigable writer and researcher who, as his colleagues quipped – not always with favour – ‘had brains enough to fill two hats’, by 1868 Owen had also written three hefty volumes on Anatomy of Vertebrates in which he correlated the forms and features of differing animal families and hierarchies. For part of the work George Bennett was an invaluable aid. Together with the vast number of platypus uteri preserved in spirits which he sent over fifty years – an invasion of the platypus’ habitat likely to have severe impact on local Ornithorhynchus populations – Bennett also reported intermittently on the koala. He was still writing and sending specimens to Owen in 1873.

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‘I have sent you a small box’, he wrote from Sydney in March that year, ‘which … contains the skull of a Northern Native Bear (Phascolarctos assimillis) which was sent by Mr. A. Foot from Moravia, Rolleston, Northern Queensland; he sent two, one of which is deposited in the Australian Museum. I have enclosed photographs of both the Northern & Southern species of Phascolarctos which you will also be able to compare with those in your collection in the British Museum, & should you consider it of sufficient interest you could bring it before the Zoological Society.’ Well supplied with specimens, Owen added importantly to existing knowledge on the arboreal koala. Using comparative anatomical analysis, he assessed the koala skeleton, limbs, skull, mammary organs, hands, feet, scapula, jaw and teeth, finding that its limbs were closely aligned in proportionate size and structure with those of the other marsupial families and that it shared many characteristics with the wombat. But he noted the singular and constant absence of ‘functionless premolars and lower canines’. The fineness of detail was explicit. ‘The skull is remarkable in all the Marsupial genera for the small proportion which is devoted to the protection of the brain.’ He was puzzled by the tiny neonate of marsupial reproduction. ‘We seek in vain for any relationship between the size of the pelvis and that of the newborn young, the minuteness of which is so characteristic of the present tribe.’

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Contrary to his ongoing obsession with platypus reproduction, Owen displayed no apparent interest in female koala reproduction – his earliest dissection focused on the male. Shoe-horned firmly into its ascribed place in the classificatory system by others, and often by European zoologists, the Phascolarctos family with its single species offered no special taxonomic challenge to the Englishman. Richard Owen’s work, remarkable in its complexity of specific zoological identification, was deeply grounded in his philosophical and teleological beliefs. A devout Christian, a Separate Creationist who believed that God’s involvement explained the advent and disappearance of differing animal forms, Owen remained committed through all his research to the concept of a Divine will. His preface to the first of his three monumental volumes set out the overarching concept behind his interpretation of vertebrate life: The parts and organs are selected with a view to guide or help to the power of apprehending the unity which underlies the diversity of animal structures; to show in these structures the evidence of a determining Will, producing them in reference to the final purpose; and to indicate the direction and degrees in which organization, in subserving such Will, rises from the general to the particular.

From the 1830s Owen linked his zoological researches with an interest in extinct marsupial forms. The discovery of

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the Wellington (Breccia) Caves in south-west New South Wales in 1830, with the bones of marsupials of immense size, raised a major question on the continuity and origin of species. Specimens of fossilised teeth, jaws and femurs from the caves, despatched to the Hunterian Museum, fall to its curator, William Clift, and Owen as assistant curator, to determine that they were indeed relics of giant extinct kangaroos, wombats, koalas and carnivorous marsupials that had roamed the Australian continent in the Tertiary age. Their discovery had a dramatic impact on contemporary scientific thought: they challenged entrenched views of a ‘Universal Deluge’, ‘Catastrophism’ and ‘Separate Creation’ as the agents of geological and zoological change and prompted the early stirrings of Darwin’s evolutionary ideas. In The Origin of Species, Darwin confided ‘Mr Clift many years ago showed that the fossil mammals from the Australian caves were closely allied to the living marsupials of that continent … I was so much impressed by these facts that I strongly insisted in 1839 and 1845 on this law of succession of types and on the wonderful relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living.’ At the same time findings from the Wellington Cave furnished critical evidence of the past geographic distribution of mammals in Australia, a distribution that matched evidence of extinct gigantic mammal forms in Europe. But Richard Owen, already on his way to the grand reconstruction of British fossils, saw it otherwise. Although he would make this

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Australian corner of palaeontological history a special area of his research, he resisted the concept of evolution. When, to Darwin’s intense irritation, Owen took over the terminology ‘the succession of types’ as his own, he fiercely resisted the notion that species change through adaptation and natural selection. Rather, Owen held that species had been ‘created only once in time and space’ and signalled ‘a purposive and repetitive structure in the animal kingdom’. Linking his intricate work from a maze of living and extinct forms, he continued throughout his long and influential life to contend that this advancing structure flowed from ‘a beneficent Sovereign of the Universe, an all-wise and powerful First Cause’. Darwin, meanwhile, was moving to his theory of descent and modification, drawing directly on the Australian scene to illustrate his case: The great law of the long enduring, but not immutable, succession of the same types within the same area, [he wrote] is at once explained for the inhabitants of each quarter of the world will obviously tend to leave in that quarter, during the next succeeding period of time, closely allied though in some degree modified descendants. If the inhabitants of one continent formerly differed greatly from those of another continent, so will their modified descendants still differ in nearly the same manner and degree.

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Owen produced his grand Researches on the Fossil Remains of the Extinct Mammals of Australia in 1877. There he identified both the large extinct kangaroos Macropis atlas and Macropis titan, and Zygomaturus and Thylacoleo, and defined two important and distinct new genera of herbivorous marsupials, Diprotodontia and Nototherium, thought to be giant forebears of the wombat and koala. He had opened up new and astonishing worlds and had pioneered knowledge on living and fossil marsupials, ‘those old monsters’, as he called them, ‘which it has pleased God to blot out of his Creation’. But he delivered no mechanism for the succession of species. Contemporaneously fresh zoological talent was appearing in Australia. A young German émigré, Gerard Krefft, who had travelled to the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s, began scientific research as a member of the Victorian Government’s Exploring Expedition to the Murray River in 1857 and in 1862 was appointed curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney. There he catalogued its growing collection of specimens, published a series of papers on birds, snakes, lizards and whales, and began studying the country’s extinct marsupials. In Flannery’s words, Krefft emerges as ‘one of the great unsung heroes of Australian biological exploration’. He was one of the colony’s first converts to Darwinian thought, an eccentric nonconformist who saw that the growing research on extinct and existing Australian marsupials clearly illustrated an evolutionary mechanism. Hence while Owen’s

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remarkable reconstructions spurred an eager troupe of local colonial explorers, geologists, surveyors and naturalists to procure fossil fragments for his palaeontological zoo, Krefft was working on specimens first-hand and considered that Owen’s Creationist views could have distorting effects. Krefft particularly differed with ‘the great Richard’s’ classification of the Thylacoleo carnifex. From the evidence of its dentition, he saw it as a vegetable-eating phalanger somewhere in the evolutionary scale between the wombat and the koala – whereas Owen pronounced it ‘a marsupial lion’. Krefft pursued the argument in reviews of Owen’s classifications, in books and papers, and in some trenchant comment to the great man himself. He also took the argument to Darwin who, not surprisingly, replied with sympathy: ‘It is lamentable that Professor Owen should show so little consideration for the judgment of other naturalists and should adhere in so bigoted a manner to whatever he has said. This is a great evil as it makes one doubtful on other points about which he has written.’ Owen, as it happened, was right about Thylacoleo although several decades would elapse before other palaeontologists confirmed his view. But in the long-drawn-out squabble, the lofty anatomist appeared as a wrathful and overbearing foe. Krefft’s stand, however, was highly significant in Australia. Generous in helping with Owen’s research, directing an intensive re-exploration of the Wellington Caves in 1869 which disinterred quantities of fossil deposits of valuable and rare

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specimens, some new to science, he also represented a new breed of colonial scientists who were no longer satisfied with bowing uncritically to the opinion of experts on the other side of the world. His field knowledge and independent attitude focused home-grown skills. Krefft’s own work, The Mammals of Australia published in 1871, was the first major zoological publication by a colonial naturalist. The work offered substantial new observations from the field on Australia’s marsupials and monotremes and had the distinction of presenting beautiful and scientifically precise illustrations by Harriet and Helena Scott, highly skilled natural history illustrators in New South Wales whose feminine brushes and pens caught the subtle nuances of the varied marsupial forms. Krefft was the first to draw attention to the koala’s ‘powerful arms’, based on his observations in the wild. From the advantage of many sightings he recounted that ‘the koala passes the day either sitting down with the head in its lap, or lying flat upon a branch which is embraced by its powerful arms, or in some other easy position, dozing away till the approach of darkness calls it to fresh activity.’ Its eye ‘is very small, of a light amber colour, and provided with a vertical pupil’. The female ‘is provided with certain peculiar muscles which enable her to pump her milk into her helpless progeny’ who ‘like those of other marsupials, do not suck at first’. He conveyed a strong sense of the animal’s ‘localness’. He reported the limited boundaries of a koala’s activity: ‘Old bushmen state

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Diprotodon australis. Extinct ancestral herbivore marsupial which Richard Owen recreated from a fossil tooth found in the Wellington Caves of New South Wales and other Australian sites. It was, he reflected, a creature of ‘portentious size’.

if a Koala is a mile or two from its usual haunt, placed in captivity, and then liberated, it will run to the nearest tree, and remain there in preference to seeking refuge in a tree more remote or in the neighbouring forest if there be one.’ And writing in the third decade of the nineteenth century, Krefft could record that koala strongholds were the mountainous districts of Victoria and New South Wales, and that they were found in Queensland ‘to within the very tropics’. Of the animal’s giant ancestral relatives, he concluded: ‘The great Diprotodons – the short-headed Zygomaturus, and the different species of the genus Nototherium – resembled the

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Koala or Native Bear more in the structure of their limbs, the formation of the jaws, and the mode in which the teeth are constructed and implanted than any other Australian marsupial now living.’ By curious chance, more precise knowledge of the female koala’s mode of generation came, not from the field, but from the first arrival of a living koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) in Britain, purchased in 1881 for its collection by the Zoological Society of London. W.E. Forbes, Prosector to the Society, related the anticipated event: The animal, a young female, continued to do well and thrive after its arrival at the Gardens, and on a diet of fresh Eucalyptus-leaves, which were substituted after a while for the dried ones on which it had been kept alive during the voyage and the first part of its stay in this country, became daily in better condition and more active. Being a pet animal, accustomed to being caressed, it was thought better not to put it in a cage; so a room for its use was fitted up in the Superintendent’s office. Here, … it slept, perched upon the branches of a tree erected for its use, by day, whilst at night it wandered about the room. Very unfortunately, on the night of the 14th of June, it was accidentally killed, whilst thus roaming about at night, by getting caught between the top and bottom of a fixed washing-stand … It had apparently climbed up this and brought down on its neck the heavy lid. Nobody

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being near, and in spite of evidently determined struggles on its part, it failed to relieve itself, and so was found dead in the morning from asphyxia.

Not all was gloom. Death in a foreign field had delivered this koala to posterity. Working nimbly, Professor Forbes grasped the opportunity of a fresh animal to furnish facts about ‘the soft parts of this species’ denied earlier British anatomists like Owen, who had access only to specimens preserved in spirits. Forbes particularly addressed the female reproductive organs never before described, the liver and brain, and offered a more explicit account than Owen of ‘the great longitudinally plicated, folds of the caecum’ and ‘a great fold, apparently the caecum, which runs traversely across the middle of the abdominal cavity … passing downward to the left of the rectum, behind the uteri and bladder, to terminate, deep in the pelvic cavity, close to the cloaca!’. Forbes found the koala’s liver with its four well-developed principal lobes ‘of a very remarkable form’. He confirmed that the remarkably simple surfaces of the cerebral hemispheres of its brain were ‘broken up by no convolutions’, distinctly different from the convoluted hemispheres of the wombat. Forbes identified the female koala’s generative organs as differing in no important respect from Owen’s wombat – there were two vaginas, each bent outward to a simple curve, and two uteri. Forbes was another who argued strongly for the linked affinities shared by the wombat and koala – the lack of tail, the

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presence of cheek pouches and the possession, unique among marsupials, of the peculiar gastric gland in the stomach – and recommended that they, plus the phalangers, should be grouped under one Phalangistidae on the classificatory map. Yet science is made up of many pieces and participants, of accidents and unintended circumstances, of the chance study of one animal leading to another, of long time shifts and sequences, so that the seemingly progressive web of discovery and knowledge more closely resembles the stitching of a patchwork quilt than a seamless fabric. Rather, it is a mixture of different squares and threads, both plain and bold, assembled over time to shape a varied pattern of coherence and connectedness. The koala patchwork awaited much more elaborate and concentrated workmanship. It would receive new materials and an intricate bright thread from a remarkable young British visitor in 1883 when William Caldwell, a talented Scottish embryologist, newly minted from Cambridge University and winner of the first Balfour travelling studentship from the Royal Society of London, arrived in Sydney with two firm items on his research agenda. The first was to investigate the extraordinary lungfish, Cerarodus, a paradoxical creature that belonged to a distinct order of fish which, in the adult stage, had the form of a fish with gills but also possessed lungs that enabled it to breathe on land. His second quest was to solve the long-existing and vexatious question of the reproductive process of those other ‘living fossils’ – the Australian

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monotremes, the platypus and echidna. Was the famed platypus with its beak and furry body, so widely scrutinised in its preserved form in Britain and Europe, a missing link between birds and mammals? Did it (and the echidna) bring forth live young from within its body? Did it, alternatively, lay eggs? Or did it, as Owen had long insisted, hatch its young inside the body before expelling them? Brimming with youth and vigour, Caldwell was a professional who belonged to the new breed of embryologists and biologists who had cut their scientific teeth under the banners of Darwin and Huxley, and expectations were now high at Cambridge that he would transcend the old morphological orthodoxy of men like Owen and contribute fresh knowledge to reproductive biology. Caldwell had outstanding success in Australia. Rounding up a regiment of Aboriginal helpers on the Burnett River in Queensland to collect specimens for his second investigation of the monotremes, in August 1884, he struck faunal gold. During his third week of searching he shot a platypus ‘whose first egg’, he reported in a statement that made biological history, ‘had been laid; the second egg was in a partially dilated os uteri’ [at the mouth of the uterus]. That same week he recounted, ‘I got the laid eggs from the pouch of Echidna’. In two swift swoops, the young biologist had delivered a fatal blow to the theory so ardently upheld for almost fifty years by the renowned Sir Richard Owen and his assiduous field assistant in the colonies, George Bennett, that the platypus was

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ovoviviparous (hatching its eggs inside its body before explusion). Both monotremes, the platypus and the echidna, were now directly proven to be oviparous (egg-laying mammals) and most astonishing, that the furry platypus, that total conundrum, laid eggs. Five days later Caldwell communicated the striking news from a nearby country telegraph station to the Dean of Science at Sydney University, who forwarded it to the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting that year in Montreal. ‘Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic’ read the extraordinary message, meaning that monotremes lay eggs, the soft-shell eggs have large yolks which do not divide into cells but are absorbed as food by the developing young, as with birds. As the President of the Association’s Biological Section announced dramatically next day, ‘No more important message has ever passed through the submarine cables.’ Investigative science had triumphed in the Australian field. Caldwell had other successes. In a detailed paper for his patron body, the Royal Society of London, outlining his Australian results and experience, the young scientist related how he had left Sydney for the New England district in October 1883 to pursue the Ornithorhynchus but soon found that the platypus’ uterine stages were unobtainable in that chilly period. Learning, however, ‘that the Marsupial Phascolarctos was just beginning to breed’, he accepted the hospitality of a pastoralist at Manar near Lake George ‘where Phascolarctos is exceedingly numerous’ and began collecting them in stages of

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ovulation and generative development. In January 1884, he returned with a rich quantity of fresh and newly dissected specimens to Sydney. Caldwell was the first to set down an account of koala uterine development. It drew on his description of the membrane development of the platypus egg and offered comparative pointers. His information was detailed and specific: The egg arrived in the uterus has already received its full complement of membranes … The development of the membranes traced in Monotremata proceeds in exactly the same way in Phascolarctos cinereus up to the stage when the yolk granules begin in the Monotremata to become the characteristic yellow yolk spheres. In Phascolarcto, as in Monotremata, the delicate membrane surrounding the youngest ovum gradually changes into a distinct and strong membrane surrounding the ripe ovum. The ripe ovum of Phascolarctos, measuring 1½ inches resembles an ovum of Echidna or Ornithorhynchus measuring 2 inches.

He also noted that ‘the follicle of Phascolarctos grows very much larger than in most Marsupialia’, ‘the ovum of Phascolarctos passes rapidly into the uterus’ and that ‘the yolk of Phascolarctos never gets beyond the stage of white yolk’. In both Monotremata and Phascolarctos ‘there are two primary egg membranes in each group, the vitelline membrane and the

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pro-albumen, while a secondary egg membrane, the shell membrane, is added in the Fallopian tube and uterus’. Some of his detailed embryological data came from papers by earlier European vertebrate researchers who had gathered related evidence. But his own research position was unique. Unlike the naturalists before him who had examined Australian animals over scattered periods in the field or considered their anatomy from preserved specimens, Caldwell was conducting specific, targeted and highly concentrated research on a large number of living and freshly preserved material and with good laboratory facilities, provided to him by the New South Wales Government. He was hence in a position, not only to solve the major classificatory puzzle of the monotremes, but to furnish a detailed embryological study of the then little-known and singular Australian mammals, the koala and the kangaroo. In Australia, however, Caldwell had more direct things to say. Addressing the Royal Society of New South Wales before leaving the country, he told the audience – members who subscribed almost universally to Owen’s theory of Separate Creation – that the outcomes of his investigations in Australia ‘were facts, not theories’. He wanted ‘no letters or discussion; as facts such things could not be argued’. He declared himself an evolutionist who recognised that each living form had descended from some ‘differently constructed ancestor’. Thus, using the new study of the embryo or ovo as his tool, he was the first biologist after Darwin to fit the koala and the monotremes incontestably into the evolutionary frame.

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FUR AND GUNS

From fire, felling of trees, and from guns, no certain safety could they find. Lydia S. Eliott, Little Teddy Bear, 1939.

As scientific understanding grew in its patchwork accretions, it was many years before Australian settlers gained a close understanding of the nature and behaviour of the creature that would gain so prominent and affectionate a place in the national psyche. Concealed high in a gum tree; brought down and killed by Aborigines’ clubs; fighting off human assailants; carrying their young nimbly by pouch or back; their fur, gaze, measurements, limbs, skull, teeth, intestines and brain under expert scrutiny in London; their place in

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the evolutionary scale as a long-term survivor uncertain – what did most Australians actually know of the shy koalas’ personality and daily ways? Some early attempts were made to learn of its nature through captivity. Dr George Bennett, a persistent captor and observer, had noted ‘the peculiar droll-looking physiognomy of this little beast’ on his first visit to New South Wales and sought to domesticate one in his tent. ‘This animal was a male’, he wrote ‘and the noise it uttered was a peculiar soft barking sound. It sleeps during the days, running about to feed at night, but when roused will also feed during the day in its present state of confinement … The animal laps when drinking and is very fond of milk.’ But later experiments forced him to admit that captive animals fed on gumleaves and bread and milk ‘did not survive more than six weeks at the furthest. They die plump and in excellent condition; so it cannot be starvation that kills them.’ Other colonists, attracted by the koala’s teddy-bear attributes (the names ‘bear’, ‘native bear’ and ‘koala bear’ hung on well into the twentieth century and can still be heard at times today), also tried to keep them as pets, but human understanding and purpose were inadequate. ‘How can one help making them human, these solemn-faced innocent-eyed little fellows?’ asked the early twentieth-century natural history communicator, Charles Barrett, bringing a marked touch of anthropomorphism to the ‘bear’.

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Of course, [Barret writes] he has a few minor faults from our human point of view. He will use his sharp and stout claws if seized and frightened … But Koalas never go looking for trouble; he is naturally inoffensive, and tries to avoid even a skirmish when captured. Given half a chance he goes off on all fours in a hurry, making for the nearest tree. A mother ‘bear’ with a cub on her back, will travel in this manner, with surprising alacrity. When a climber is still far below him, a Koala moves higher up until he may be clinging with those strong claws, to a swaying branch brushing the sky. He is quite at home among the tree-tops and should he fall – it very rarely happens – alights safely … but he does not like it … A Koala makes forced landings. He clings tightly to lashing boughs in a storm, or sits wedged in the fork of a tree. He can go to sleep while ‘clawed’ to the trunk of his home tree though favouring a seat where a bough springs from the bole, making a comfortable ‘V’. Sturdily built, broad shouldered and possessing powerful arms, he always descends backwards and, essentially arboreal, he is able to judge the strength of the most treacherous or delicate branch and moves with the utmost precision and adroitness.

Frederic Wood Jones, an early Professor of Zoology at the University of Adelaide, also wrote affectionately after some close encounters, of the koalas in captivity and in the wild.

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The animal is wholly inoffensive and makes a most curiously affectionate pet. When brought up in captivity it becomes strangely dependent upon human society, and dislikes being left alone … The food is gum leaves, and the animal is very particular in the choice of the leaves it eats: when it has ascended a tree to its liking it will eat the tender shoots, and before it changes its tree will strip it of most of its young leaves. The whole animal smells strongly of eucalyptus … Koalas are powerfully armed with strongly curved claws and they can scratch severely. If a tame one is placed on the floor it will make all speed to climb up the person who stands nearest, and the weight of the sturdily built body and the degree of the development of the claws makes this demonstration of friendship one that may be embarrassing … The old males have a tremendous voice, somewhat like the braying of an ass, but this accomplishment appears to be only rarely exercised, the common vocal expression being a hoarse grunt.

Both men were highly alert to the harmless nature of this animal and its particular vulnerability. ‘Disturbed from his sleep in the daytime’, Barrett summed up expressively, ‘the Koala looks down with that wondering babyish expression that captivates everybody but the hardened pelt hunter and the “sportsman” whose creed is that all furred and feathered creatures were born only to be killed.’

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There, indeed, lay the rub. In the later nineteenth century and well into the first two decades of the next, the gun came to play a phenomenal role in the relationship between man and the native fauna, in which the koala played a pivotal role. Not surprisingly, British settlement had immense impact on the wooded landscape of ‘the land that waited’. This started with the arrival of the First Fleet at Port Jackson on 26 January 1788 and, as buildings rose and settlement moved outwards from the shoreline, the assault on the trees and the environment grew. The early practice was to fell trees at about a metre from the ground and to burn the fallen timber, leaving the stumps which convicts and other workers removed. The practice bit deep into the surrounding countryside. ‘The invaders hated trees’, the historian Keith Hancock declared trenchantly in his small classic, Australia, published in 1928 and as early as the 1840s the sharp-eyed Polish naturalist, Paul Strzelecki, cutting an exploring swathe through eastern Australia from Sydney through Victoria to Western Port, was observing that ‘the Mammalia and Aves … in the most settled part of the country are threatened with extinction’. Sheep and cattle, economically valuable animals, soon became the new faunal currency, moving with the settlers across the ‘plain patterns’ of the Aborigines and driving the indigenous people from their associated sites. The local fauna had to take their chances. Both settlers who developed farms and pastures, and the rising tide of immigrants who flocked to Australia’s goldfields from the early 1850s,

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contributed to the displacement of Aborigines and the depletion of animal populations through land-clearing, tree-felling and the concentrated mining activity and movement of the diggers. By the 1860s, the practice of ringbarking gum trees was devastating the countryside on a major scale. In this the koala became an irrevocable victim. Diggers and passing explorers ate them although, as one observed, ‘their flesh is far from being nice’. Most pioneers and visitors saw little beauty in the Australian landscape with its grey-green trees that shed their bark yet kept their leaves. Even Darwin, on his short sojourn in 1836, damned the pale green colours of the ‘never failing eucalyptus family’ and the absence of the ‘first bursting into foliage of the leafless tree’. The ‘bush’ was alien to the British, who sought whenever possible to re-create familiar parklands. Yet it was also the advent of hunters, sportsmen, timbercutters and trappers that threatened the survival of members of the marsupial world. ‘The flying squirrel’, wrote the naval surgeon, Peter Cunningham, from a ringside seat in the 1820s in Two Years in New South Wales, ‘are of such beautiful slate colour with a fur so fine that, although a small animal, the hatters here give a quarter dollar for every skin.’ The native possums were another target. ‘The settlers hunt them in the fine moonlight evenings when they come out to feed. The dogs chase opossums till they run up a tree, at the bottom of which they stand and bark, when the sportsman either knocks them down with a stick, cuts down the tree, or shoots them with a musket

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having a bright light or chalked barrel, to enable him to take better aim.’ Even the ‘small hopping things’ fell prey. ‘The Bandicoots and kangaroo-rats are cut out of the hollow tree they may run into, or dug out of the ground if taking refuge there. In this way you may return home after a few hours’ pastime loaded with a dozen opossums, squirrels, bandicoots, and native cats, if the forest has not been previously much hunted in.’ A number of people in Sydney, Cunningham added, ‘earn a good livelihood by collecting our beasts, birds and insects; stuffing, preparing and arranging them in cases; and disposing of them to individuals leaving the colony.’ In the slaughter and exploitation of Australian wildlife, two mindsets were at work. When gold digging yielded scant returns, restless miners moved about the pastoral stations, shearing, timber-splitting and sinking tanks. Others acquired land by squatting on the less-fertile outskirts of pastoral properties. These, as one observer noted, were ‘hungry men’, resourceful but unacquainted with the nature of the land, eager to run as many sheep to the acre as possible, to ringbark the gum trees and slash the native vegetation so that more pasture would grow. They also slaughtered the big animals that grazed their land, the kangaroos, and ultimately the bandicoots, bilbies and potoroos. As the trees fell and the abundant forests disappeared, so too did the koalas and flying squirrels. Such ‘battler settlers’ soon saw the magic of the fur trade. ‘Platypus, Possum, Flying Squirrel, Kangaroo, Wallaby, Koala

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and bilbies’, wrote Alan Marshall. ‘Everything with marketable fur was slaughtered in order to eke out a supplementary living on selections all over the country.’ In Victoria, a ‘European alienation’ of the landscape was also taking place. Stimulated by reports from the exploring Surveyor-General Mitchell that land was ‘open and available in its present state, for all the purposes of civilized man’, settlers travelled from Melbourne and Portland to occupy and transform and stock the land. In this early period from 1834, one study of game laws in Victoria suggests that ‘attitudes towards wildlife were simple: there was a concept of abundance, an implicit belief that the fauna represented a limitless resource to be exploited at will. The early colonists … held no sentiment for the country and were committed to participating in its alienation well before basic ecological characteristics were understood.’ There was a second state of mind held by a class of pastoralists often drawn from British army and naval backgrounds or graduates of British universities who formed a local elite which maintained its connections with the traditional lifestyle of their homeland. Over time and increasingly from the late 1850s onwards, they imported animals – deer, hare and foxes – for sporting practices, and tried to shape laws regulating animal management that attended, not to the conservation of indigenous fauna, but to the protection of imported stock. An Acclimatization Society was proclaimed in Victoria in 1861 and another a few years later in New South Wales, with goals

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that gave precendence to ‘the introduction, acclimatization and domestication of all innoxious animals, birds, fishes, insects and vegetables whether useful or ornamental’ and adding, somewhat oddly, ‘the conferring of rewards upon seafaring men, passengers from distant colonies, and others who render valuable service to the cause of acclimatization’. With a hasty afterthought, encouragement to ‘the spread of indigenous animals’ was inconspicuously tacked on. As ringbarking bared the landscape in the 1860s, the koala faced enormous challenges. Factual information on its declining numbers in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia is hard to find since no official records were kept. The spirited woman naturalist, Louisa Atkinson, riding around the Kurrajong region of New South Wales to gather stories for her newspaper column ‘A Voice from the Country’ in the Sydney Morning Herald, informed her readers rather lightly that the koala ‘was exploited for its bear grease’. In northern New South Wales the visiting German naturalist, Richard Semon, armed with knife and field book, recorded that ‘in pursuit of contributing to science’ he had ‘set up a good embryological series’ on the ‘interesting marsupial, the native bear of the colonists’ and once ‘killed twenty-three specimens in a day’. In 1894 a mammalogist from the British Museum, Robert Lydekker, wondered publicly about the general state of the Australian koala, writing ‘that the Koala must be an abundant animal since from 10,000 to 30,000 skins are annually imported

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into London while in 1889 the enormous total of 300,000 was reached.’ The totals included thousands from Victoria. In Victoria, the Chief Inspector of Game, Frederick Lewis, stated that while there was good evidence that ‘Native Bears’ were exceedingly common ‘over almost the whole of the Colony in the 1880s, they had been brought to near extinction’ by the time he reported in 1934. Writing in The Victorian Naturalist that year, he nominated two causal factors – human and climatic. ‘From inquiries I have made among wellinformed people’, Lewis noted, ‘it appears that the favourite “sport” of the young men and boys of thirty or forty years ago was shooting Native Bears. Their idea of “sport” must have been very primitive, because no more inoffensive and easilydestroyed animal than the Koala lives in any part of the world … Immense numbers of Koalas must have been destroyed by those young “sportsmen”.’ But ‘apart from the shooting which so greatly reduced their numbers’, Lewis contended, ‘the next most important factor was the bush fires which, during the last twenty or thirty years have ravaged practically the whole of this State.’ To this, koalas fell easy victims. By 1934, he estimated that koalas had been almost ‘wiped out’ in Victoria, with a mere 500–1000 remaining. One area in Victoria where the koala was known to survive peacefully and in abundant numbers late into the nineteenth century was the densely timbered and unsettled region of Wilson’s Promontory, although fur hunters found a rich harvest there during winter among the thicker-haired

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animals. The koalas gained temporary reprieve when the Promontory was reserved as a permanent National Park and Sanctuary in 1908. Victorian koalas were considerably larger than their northern counterparts, with almost twice their bodyweight, greater breadth of skull and nasal bones, and longer and shaggier fur of dark cinnamon-brown. Even as its numbers declined dramatically it was pronounced a different species from the ashgrey Phascolarctos cinereus of New South Wales and in 1935 it was named as a subspecies, P. cinereus victor, by zoologist Ellis Troughton. In New South Wales koalas were killed for fur from very early times as their dense hair made particularly warm and durable coverings. Their skin also tanned to an excellent leather. The best pelts were sought in winter when the fur was at its thickest and the young, born in March, might fend for themselves. Even so, shooting koalas presented difficulties. One roving bushman related, ‘They are very difficult to shoot, on account of the thick hide: and it is a cruelty to shoot at them with shot if they are any height up a tree; but a bullet brings them down by the run.’ Others acknowledged that the chance of hitting koalas high in their treetops was slim. Many trappers preferred to put a wire snare at the base of the tree or, more popularly, use poison as that inflicted least damage on the pelt. In Social Sketches of Australia, Humphrey McQueen provides disturbing testimony of the trappers’ ways:

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If killed by cyanide, a jam tin of water with this in solution, is placed at the foot of a tree or in a near-by hollow log, and the morning shows the agony passed through before death gave the animal release, … and there lies one more to be skinned and its white body slung to the dogs or ants. If snared, trappers place slanting saplings against the likely trees, and arrange on each the deadly wire noose through which the animal will thrust his head coming down. In the early morning, before dingoes and crows have disturbed the carcases the trapper does his rounds to collect the strangled possums and bears. All ‘ joeys’ are torn from the pouches, the young one being thrown to the dogs, and the more developed ones sometimes, and if alive, are liberated for further gain.

At first it seemed that trappers and pastoralists co-existed amicably side-by-side in the hunt but, as the native animals were depleted, farmers and graziers, anxious to protect both their own stock and their fur-bearing animals, began to fence their land. Yet, from whatever source, as the export market in fur increased, koala skins were harvested with high profits almost everywhere the mild marsupial lived. ‘By the turn of the century’, wrote Alan Marshall, ‘the koala remained plentiful in few places outside Queensland.’ During 1902 some 600 000 animal skins were recorded as purchased in New South Wales. Another 57 933 koala pelts passed through the Sydney market in 1908, not all from that

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state – Sydney woolbrokers handled the sale of fur from as far afield as north Queensland. By 1924 more than two million koala pelts were estimated to have left Australia, often under the name of ‘wombat’. On the world market koala fur ranked below mink and beaver but above possum, wombat and rabbit. The koala’s pelt stretched to a fine oval of flat, thick soft fur which was in demand for rugs, muffs and coat linings and, by some international couturiers, for trimmings on women’s garments. It was the most desirable Australian fur, soft, warm and vermin-free. Wombat fur, in contrast, was coarse and hairy, and never exported in quantity. Where were the animal protectors? Evidence of naturalists’ public concern is scant. In Victoria where the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria was formed in 1880 for the study of natural history through meetings, publishing and excursions and the Victorian Naturalist, launched five years later, remained its enduring forum, legislative practice continued to centre on the protection of the imported hare for the recreation of a social elite. For naturalists as well as politicians, the native furred creatures ran a poor second to birds. In both New South Wales and Victoria, leading scientific savants such as the geologist clergyman, Rev. W.B. Clarke, the Government Botanist of Victoria, Ferdinand von Mueller, and the itinerant geological priest, Julian Tenison-Woods, spoke out publicly and in writing against the dire effects of ringbarking on climate, and preached the importance of forest culture. But there was no critical debate on the destruction of the

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native fauna. Nor did the establishment of a Committee for the Protection of Birds and Animals at the inaugural meeting of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science in 1888 have any discernible effect. At last, in New South Wales, a Native Animals Protection Act was introduced in 1903. It gave the koala, platypus, echidna, red kangaroo and three species of wombats, plus nine other native animals, protection for a specified period from December 1903 to January 1905 to allow them to ‘breed up’. But the carnage and shooting continued until the koala was protected by state legislation in 1910. It was not until 1939 in Victoria – ‘about forty years late’, cried one exasperated critic – that an Act to Afford Greater Protection to Koalas rumbled through the Victorian legislature, projecting the creation of reserves, national parks and sanctuaries for native fauna. In South Australia, the koala had disappeared entirely by the 1920s. Grim as was the track record of legislators and others in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, the most damning episode in koala destruction occurred in Queensland. There the koala, a slightly smaller and paler grey animal, had been categorised as a subspecies, P. cinereus adustus, in 1923 by Thomas Oldfield at the British Museum, and a terrible fate awaited it. The Queensland government had enacted some legislation relating to the koala but, as historian Norma Howlett recounted, ‘it had been worded to assist the fur trapper and protect graz-

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ing and agricultural interests’. To this end, three periods for ‘hunting bears’ were declared open seasons between 1908 and 1926 – June to October 1915, August to October 1917, and April to September 1919. In the last season no fewer than a million koalas were slaughtered for their skins. For eight years, koalas had a period of peace, when, in 1927, the government, prompted by pressure from fur trappers and a severe drought that left many rural workers unemployed, proclaimed another open season, and vehement protests erupted across Australia. ‘So the slaughter of the innocents starts on 1st of August’, expostulated ‘Bush Woman’ in a letter to the editor of Brisbane’s Courier Mail that July. ‘Can nothing be done to stop the ruthless destruction of one of our most lovable little animals, one who interferes with none but lives its tranquil life amongst the old grey gums?’ The writer, Vance Palmer, put the case more directly in his letter to the Courier Mail on 19 July. ‘The shooting of our harmless and lovable native bear is nothing less than barbarous’, he exclaimed, voicing what was evidently a popular feeling across the country. The koala’s case ‘was extremely different from that of other furred animals. No one has ever accused him of spoiling the farmers’ wheat, eating the squatters’ grass, or even the spreading of prickly pear. There is not a social vice that can be put down to his account … He affords no sport to the gun-man … And he has been almost blotted out already from some areas.’

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The Queensland Naturalists Club and the Nature Lovers’ League added to the outcry and implored the Minister for Agriculture and Stock to reconsider before it was too late, and to withdraw a proclamation that threatened an animal which was the single representative of its species. Deputations gathered, one newspaper bordered its pages in black to represent mourning, naturalists and media railed against the destruction of a ‘helpless’ creature which was apparently valued only for its economic worth when it was dead. To no avail. The minister declared that the matter had received the fullest consideration and, in a government case for the revenue generated by 10 000 registered fur trappers, he adhered to the proclaimed open season on native bears and possums during August 1927. More than 584 738 koala skins were collected, most of which were exported to the USA. But, ‘to this must be added’, wrote Howlett, ‘several thousand immature animals left to die because they were too small to skin, and those which were poisoned and crawled away to perish miserably’. ‘The cruelties associated with the “open season”’, Noel Burnet summed up a few years later, ‘can hardly be mentioned, but episodes are recorded of Bears not properly killed, and so tenacious of life, endeavouring to climb up trees minus their furs.’ The total value of the skins was £378 023. Slowly, government policies underwent change. Legislators decided that the potential votes of outraged citizens had come to outweigh those of shooters and skin dealers. Nonetheless, with the growing spread of settlement northwards in Queensland and the extensive clearing of forest habitat meant that 128

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A truck load of 3600 koala skins obtained by hunters in the Clermont district of Queensland, 1927.

koalas remained highly endangered and even in danger of extinction. ‘The death knell of the Native Bear, or Koala has been rung’, David Stead, Secretary of the Wildlife Protection Society of Australia, summed up dramatically in his Annual Report for 1927, ‘and the greatest disaster that has ever overtaken any denizen of our bushland has happened.’ There was a final irony to the Queensland massacre. In 1970 the Queensland government moved that the koala become the state’s faunal emblem. ‘So’, wrote the President of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, the distinguished poet and environmentalist Judith Wright, to the Courier Mail in July 1970, ‘Queensland has applied for the koala as first choice in the State faunal emblem … Looking at the Queensland record in the matter of koalas, the choice is a 1 29

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‘A Holiday Question for Sportsmen’. ‘I am a good Australian. What are YOU?’

pretty wry one.’ Little had changed, in her opinion, in government care for or rescue of koalas in the wild since the slaughter of 1927. ‘And then we apply’, she concluded angrily, ‘to use it as an emblem of this State … Now can we hope that the State will at last decide to do something to prevent its looming extinction in its natural habitat.’

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LITER ARY KOALA

If you would be Gay and free, Take my tip and Live in a tree. Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding, 1918.

The Queensland koala massacre of 1927 focused as nothing had before a collective feeling for the koala which was slowly making a claim on the national psyche. The concept of the importance of native fauna and its need for protection arose slowly in Australia. In earlier times the country’s convict origins and a sense of ‘upside-downness’ and difference from the northern world had engendered feelings

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of cultural inferiority and second-rateness among free settlers in a colony far distant from the mother country, which many continued to think of as ‘Home’. They had been taught to regard the seemingly freakish Australian animals, without parallel in the northern hemisphere, as anomalous and clearly inferior to the other mammals, the placental sheep and cattle, imported to graze in the Australian countryside together with the foxes, hares, birdlife and other creatures transported there during the heyday of the Acclimatisation Societies. But by the last two decades of the nineteenth century, home-grown colonials moving about the bushland and finding delight in its subtle colours, its birds and flora, were developing a sense of national pride and an awareness of a distinctive environment. Now the native fauna took on a new meaning. A sense of nationalism was taking shape, stimulated as the century closed both by thoughts of federation and a growing recognition of an Australian identity. Hence, far from being ‘senseless and aesthetically unpleasing’, as Adrian Franklin wrote in Animal Nation, these curious animals were considered ‘beautiful’ and ‘marvellous’ and started to be seen ‘as metaphors for national inspiration’. With the federation of the colonies to form the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 this sense of national symbolism and heritage had firmed and received formal acknowledgement when the official emblem of the new nation chosen for the Commonwealth’s coat of arms, designed by an Australian draughtsman and artist, H.V. Cotton, depicted an emu and a kangaroo.

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In this new spirit of ‘Australianness’, the koala would come to take on an unexpectedly prominent place. Its prominence evolved from the work of nineteen-year-old artist draughtsman, Norman Lindsay, who, in 1904, joined the staff of Australia’s national journal, the Bulletin. Six years earlier, in 1898, Norman and his brother Lionel, himself a future eminent artist, had tried their hand at publishing a short-lived magazine, The Rambler, during which Norman Lindsay developed his remarkable talent for drawing with relaxed and elegant pen strokes. Two years later he came to the attention of J. F. Archibald, the Bulletin’s influential editor and, to Lindsay’s surprise and joy, was given the chance of drawning a full page of social and political cartoons in the prestigious journal. The characters that initially attracted his attention were the city’s larrikins, tramps and slum urchins, which, in a new mode of backblocks humour, he turned to lively account. In the Bulletin of 11 August 1904, however, he presented a small satirical cartoon titled ‘Australian political phrases illustrated – Magnificent Natural Resource’, in which a larrikin boy holds up a koala to the moneylender with the cry ‘I’ve popped almost everything else, what can you lend on this?’ It was the beginning of Lindsay’s long acquaintance with and attachment to this marsupial. It was at the Bulletin, Lindsay recounted, that he ‘trained his hand to handle the pen … The cartoon is a form of picture writing.’ He also recalled that until he ‘saw it lived through’ at the Bulletin he didn’t realise that Australia ‘had a

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Norman Lindsay’s cartoon, ‘The Boy from Manly’, brought a new perspective to the koala in Australian culture.

background’. Since his method was to ‘symbolise a situation or an idea in a single form’, he chose the koala as his form and idiom of Australianness.

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From then he would come to make the koala, or ‘native bear’ as he liked to call it, uniquely his own. This was no faunal portrait, but a knock-about larrikin, a cartoon koala, skittish, alternatively scruffy or stylish, through which he depicted what he saw as the national character. Most often masculine, his native bear was anything but the lazy creature that real koalas were often considered to be. Lindsay’s bear was energetic, enlivening and filled with personality. Lindsay’s koala first appeared raffishly dressed in black in the Bulletin’s Christmas issue of December 1905 – he finds a bottle of rum in the bush, drinks the lot and falls about drunk. We meet him again in May 1907 in the Australian monthly magazine Lone Hand, where he was shown in a boxing match refereed by a platypus. In July 1907 he featured in twelve humorous poses in ‘An Election Speech’, decked out in an imposing tailored black outfit. And in January 1908, he appeared in Lone Hand under a new and enduring moniker, ‘Billy Bluegum’. Thereafter the Bulletin frequently featured Billy Bluegum, with many Christmas issues offering a full page of this energetic and engaging character. Appropriately, the last drawing of Billy the ebullient ‘bear’ appeared on 12 December 1956, with him at the Melbourne Olympic Games. Across his lifetime the prolific Norman Lindsay drew a variety of Australian animals as well as a menagerie of the family pets at his house at Springwood in the Blue Mountains, some of whom he immortalised in books. But his ‘bears’ were

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far more than a private and publishing amusement. They came from his mind and heart to symbolise national habits, foibles and ideals. Variously dressed in formal attire with bowtie, or jaunty in check blazer and baggy pants, the koala became a familiar figure in the popular journal. Lindsay was, hence, the first in those early years of the twentieth century, to recognise the artistic possibilities of Australia’s unique animals and to choose the rounded, bushy-eared koala as his legendary hero. As his later close colleague, Keith Wingrove observed, Lindsay ‘had the unique ability to invest Billy Bluegum and his brother bears with a distinct human personality and appearance, while retaining in them the beariness of the bear’. And they were all drawn with a striking sense of both the serious and comic sides of life. Yet the types were ‘unmistakably Australian, and the drawings could not have been done anywhere else in the world’. The ‘bear’ latched firmly into Norman Lindsay’s mind. Amid his rising fame as etcher, watercolourist, sculptor, famed painter of voluptuous women, novelist and journalist, the koala bear was always there. Travelling to Europe in late 1909, he sent a letter from Colombo which the Bulletin produced in its Christmas issue: I have done a little work on the ship – bears – for a book of bears. The idea is a native bear who has been captured, and has learned the habits of civilisation, returning to the bush to carry human culture among the Barbarian

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bush bears. The fact is I haven’t the intelligence for anything beyond bears, and though quite oblivious as regards personal discomfort to the rolling of the ship, it makes serious drawings impossible by importing a curious feebleness to the direction of the pen stroke.

With this letter Lindsay also sent a dozen drawings for an illustrated work for which Edward Dyson did the letterpress. ‘Billy Bluegum or Back to the Bush’, as the work was called, was published in Lone Hand in monthly instalments from April to September 1912. Billy Bluegum, with spirited satire and cheerful humour, sets out as a social reformer toting a magical bag labelled ‘Public Loans’ to take human civilisation and culture to the barbarian bush bears. For a time his efforts were successful until both Billy and the bears, after attempting many ‘civilised’ practices, began to feel a strong desire to return to the simple bush life and ‘to climb gum trees’. In a final charming illustration, we find Billy installed in the fork of such a tree leaning softly against ‘a lady bear’. ‘I am done with civilisation’, he concluded happily. ‘I only want to be lazy and content.’ Lindsay’s master work involving the koala, however, came from an idea late in 1914. As war raged in Europe, ‘sitting glumly one night in my studio to avert thought of mud and blood,’ he recalled, ‘[I] plucked up my pen and started writing some nonsense about a bear named Bunyip Bluegum, and his Uncle Wattleberry’s whiskers, and from then on the book

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wrote itself.’ The book was The Magic Pudding, published by Sydney’s leading publisher Angus & Robertson in 1918, and destined to become one of Australia’s best-known and enduring children’s classics. Outliving its creator, for Lindsay died in hospital at Springwood in November 1969, still sketching koalas (the last one featuring his own smiling face), The Magic Pudding has almost never been out of print. It was a winner from the start, with its fantastic principal characters – the bear named Bunyip Bluegum, ‘a fine round splendid fellow’; his travelling companions, the old salt Bill Barnacle, the upstanding penguin Sam Sawnoff, and Albert the rude and raucous Puddin’, a ‘cutan’-come-again Puddin’’ endlessly regenerating itself in tempting flavours from steak and kidney to jam roll and apple dumpling. And its magic depended not only on the cranky little Puddin’ but on the book’s wit and pungent humour, colloquial language and comic verses, its fun and vivid imagination, and the characterisation and brilliant illustrations that Lindsay included in the mix. Its swift introductory depictions at once enticed readers young and old. ‘Bill [Barnacle] was a small man with a large hat, a beard half as large as his hat, and feet half as large as his beard. Sam Sawnoff’s feet were sitting down and his body was standing up, because his feet were so short and his body so long that he had to do both together.’ And Albert the small round Puddin’, source of their enduring sustenance, travelling at the end of Bunyip Bluegum’s hand, was caustic and

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outspoken from the start. Whenever they stopped eating, he would sing out lustily: Eat away, chew away, munch and bolt and guzzle Never leave the table till you’re full up to the muzzle.

Not surprisingly, Lindsay told his publisher, George Robertson, that he vastly enjoyed writing the book. ‘I would consign any piece of work, even so trivial a matter of drawing bears, to perdition if it failed to amuse me in the manufacture … I’ve been at considerable pains to bring it up to a standard of humour, though whether you will get as much fun in reading it as I am in writing is another matter.’ Robertson and generations of adults and children did. Some 15 000 copies were printed for Australia’s small population in its first year of sale; it was reissued in 1920; a second edition followed in 1924 and a third in 1930. An American edition came out in 1935 along with an English one, while demand in Australia led to reprints in 1937, 1938 and 1940. The book was out of print from 1942 to 1948 due to paper shortages during the Second World War, but it was reissued in 1951 and 1963. A particularly fine edition was published in 1964 and a celebratory Jubilee edition in 1968, a year before the author’s death. From the 1970s, various Australian publishers offered full-colour, black and white and some edited editions; the most recent being the Australian children’s classic edition in 2000. An American edition, rich with praise, appeared in 2004.

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The Magic Pudding’s influence on Australian thinking, both juvenile and adult, was profound and settled the koala firmly into community consciousness. Lindsay once confided to a friend that he saw the book’s greatest drawcard in the fact that children loved food above all else. With a magic pudding, there was endless, taste-grabbing food. Yet with its pudding thieves, the court case, the assembly of pompous judges and officials, its singular cast of animal characters and the Puddin’s many larrikin outbursts against authority, the work also contained considerable contemporary satire. And through all its sparkling humour, it resonated with a strong sense of comradeship, egalitarianism and justice for the underdog. Bunyip Bluegum proved a wise fellow, an independent and loyal friend – old Australian values which had become deeply ingrained during wartime. In The Magic Pudding Lindsay portrayed a timeless glimpse of the Australian national character and chose the ‘native bear’ to reflect the best of it. Here is a slice of The Magic Pudding: The Society of Puddin’ Owners were up bright and early next morning, and had the billy on and tea made before six o’clock, which is the best part of the day, because the world has just had his face washed, and the air smells like Pears soap. “Aha”, said Barnacle Bill, cutting up slices of the Puddin’. “This is what I call grand. Here we are, after a splendid night’s sleep on dry leaves, havin’ a smokin’ hot

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slice of steak-and-kidney for breakfast round the camp fire. What could be more delightful?” “What indeed?” said Bunyip Bluegum, sipping his tea. “Why, as I always say”, said Bill, “if there’s one thing more entrancin’ than sittin’ round a camp fire in the evenin’ it’s sittin’ round a camp fire in the mornin’. No beds and blankets and breakfast tables for Bill Barnacle. For as I says in my ‘Breakfast Ballad’ – ‘If there’s anythin’ better than singin’ away When the stars are gaily shinin’, Why, it’s singin’ a song at dawn of day, On puddin’ for breakfast dinin’.’’ There was a hearty round of applause at this song, for, as Bunyip Bluegum remarked, “singing at breakfast should certainly be more commonly indulged in, as it greatly tends to enliven what is on most occasions a somewhat dull proceeding.” “One of the great advantages of being a professional puddin’-owner,” said Sam Sawnoff, “is that songs at breakfast are always encouraged. None of that … scowling while eating, and saying the porridge is stiff as glue and the eggs are as tough as leather … Instead, songs, roars of laughter, and boisterous jests are the order of the day. For example, this sort of thing,” added Sam, doing a rapid

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back-flap and landing with a thump on Bill’s head. As Bill was unprepared for this act of boisterous humour, his face was pushed into the Puddin’ with great violence, and the gravy was splashed in his eye. “What d’yer mean, playin’ such bungfoodlin’ tricks on a man at breakfast?” roared Bill. “What d’yer mean,” shouted the Puddin’, “playing such foodbungling tricks on a Puddin’ being breakfasted at?” “Breakfast humour, Bill, merely breakfast humour,” said Sam, hastily. “Humour’s humour,” shouted Bill, “but puddin’ in the whiskers is no joke.” “Whiskers in the Puddin’ is worse than puddin’ in the whiskers,” shouted the Puddin’, standing up in his basin … Seeing matters arriving at this unpromising situation, Bunyip Bluegum interposed by saying, “Rather than allow this happy occasion to be marred by unseemly recriminations, let us, while admitting that our admirable friend, Sam, may have unwittingly disturbed the composure of our admirable friend, Bill, at the expense of our admirable Puddin’s gravy, let us, I say, by the simple act of extending the hand of friendship, dispel in an instant these gathering clouds of disruption. In the words of the poem: “Then let the fist of Friendship Be kept for Friendship’s foes. 14 2

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Ne’er let that hand in anger land On Friendship’s holy nose’ …” The meal over, the breakfast things put away in the bag, Sam and Bill took Puddin’ between them, and all set off along the road.

The House of Bunyip, Barnacle and Sawnoff, with its especially made annexe for Albert the Puddin’. 14 3

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**** When The Magic Pudding was published in 1918, fur hunters were killing koalas in their thousands across the eastern states. There is little doubt that Lindsay’s book inspired much of the outraged national response when the open season of koala hunting was declared in Queensland in 1927. His book had become a landmark and a lightning rod, and the koala a favourite friend to be protected. Norman Lindsay the conservative, the multifaceted artist and writer, had put his finger on the pulse of national sentiment and inspired a pervasive new feeling for Australia’s fauna. Visiting Taronga Zoo Park while writing this book in 2007, I was introduced to a neat steel-grey koala called ‘Norman’. Cast out by an unmaternal mother when very small, he had been found one winter morning, near death, under some leaves at the foot of a tree, and had been tenderly reared and hand-fed for several months by keeper, David Schaap. ‘Why “Norman”?’, I asked, thinking it a strange name for a koala. ‘I christened him “Norman”’, said the keeper, ‘after the artist, Norman Lindsay, who did so much for koala conservation.’

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COLIN M ACK ENZIE

AND THE

AMAZING KOALA SHOULDER

It is inconceivable that anyone should attempt to handle a paralysed deltoid (the thick fleshy triangular muscle which gives the round form to the shoulder) without some knowledge of its ancestral history. Colin MacKenzie, The Action of Muscles, 1918.

As images of a chirpy, knock-about ‘human’ koala and the legendary Bunyip Bluegum were penetrating the Australian psyche via Norman Lindsay’s cartoons, a very different engagement with the ‘native bear’ was occurring in Melbourne that would draw the koala into medical literature.

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In this, an orthopaedic doctor and surgeon, William Colin MacKenzie, played a dominant part. Born in 1887 at Kilmore in Victoria, the son of Scottish parents, MacKenzie (always called Colin) was a scholarship boy at Melbourne’s Scotch College who went on to study at Australia’s first Medical School, recently established at the University of Melbourne. In 1899 he graduated with first-class honours in surgery, obstetric medicine and diseases in women and children, and after three years residency at the Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, moved into general practice near the gates of the university. There he was quickly snapped up by the Medical School as an honorary demonstrator and later lecturer in applied anatomy. During 1904 MacKenzie’s horizons broadened from a journey overseas. He visited Heidelberg to work with the noted orthopaedic surgeon, Professor Vulpius, on muscle tendons, studied for a Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and spent time at the renowned School of Orthopaedics at Liverpool. He returned to Melbourne well-equipped to pioneer orthopaedics in Australia. Yet MacKenzie had a second agenda. He had early taken a special interest in the Australian fauna which he believed were bound for extinction. Like contemporary biologists in Britain and Europe, he saw the Australian marsupials and monotremes as ‘primitive’ and more poorly developed forms than the placental mammals of the northern hemisphere, a scientific view that held currency for decades to come. Indeed, nearly thirty years later the eminent biologist Professor Baldwin Spencer

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was confidently pronouncing that Australian marsupials were doomed to extinction because, unlike the higher ‘Eutherian’ forms (which Huxley had categorised), they had not been able to develop ‘full lacteal gestation’. Convinced that marsupials and monotremes were fast disappearing, MacKenzie seized on the importance of securing specimens to preserve them for posterity. ‘His idea’, wrote science historian Libby Robin, ‘was to collect as many whole and partial specimens as possible to preserve them for their anatomical and physiological significance.’ Extreme as the idea may appear today, Mackenzie was motivated by the rising evidence that marsupials were being killed for commercial and sporting ends and from the fact that, since white settlement, at least twenty known species of Australia’s fauna, both birds and marsupials, had already become extinct. Colin MacKenzie began his faunal collection in 1902 after a visit to South Africa, assembling ‘wet’ specimens by making dissections of marsupials and monotremes for teaching and demonstration purposes. He was especially keen to make close studies of functional units of the marsupials, such as the koala’s digestive system and the echidna’s reproductive form. Most of his anatomical specimens were chosen, Robin held, ‘for what they might reveal about “primitive” forms and body systems, and what they could tell about an evolutionary story’. He accordingly preserved his dissections in tall glass jars and stored them, together with bones and other comparative anatomical material, in his laboratory. Having met Australian

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artist Victor Cobb in South Africa, on Cobb’s return to Australia in 1905 MacKenzie employed him to make detailed drawings of the dissections for instructive use. At the same time MacKenzie was also engaged in his growing medical practice. Shortly before his return to Melbourne and again in 1908, the eastern states were engulfed in a severe outbreak of poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis). Confronted by many children suffering from the disease, MacKenzie gathered his knowledge of muscles and tendons acquired overseas and data from his anatomical studies of Australian marsupials to develop a unique method of treatment. And here the koala came to play a stellar part. While other surgeons focused on helping young patients to recover some use of their legs, MacKenzie turned his attention to the severe effect of infantile paralysis on the upper arm and shoulder girdle, leading to permanently withered limbs. In his dissections and particularly his investigation of the koala’s deltoid region (the shoulder muscle lifting the upper arm), he had noted the functional powers of such a differentiated and well-developed muscle, and, seeing the animal in its native environment he had observed this tree-dweller’s exceptional ability to reach up and grasp gumleaves far above its head. Now, seizing on the implications of his dissections and the movements involved, MacKenzie developed a systematic method of treatment entirely his own, which enabled him to make optimum use of the remaining muscle power in the affected shoulder and arm to prevent considerable deformity.

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For this purpose he designed an upper arm ‘abduction splint’ for cases involving the shoulder, and worked to re-educate the damaged muscle group. His splint, featured in his writings in 1908, was exhibited at an international orthopaedic congress in Italy that year. These innovative ideas were circulated in MacKenzie’s pamphlet on The Treatment of Infantile Paralysis: A Study on Muscular Action and Muscle Regeneration which included Cobb’s medical illustrations and was published in Melbourne in 1910. They also appeared in his paper ‘The Treatment of Infantile Paralysis: A Study in Biology’ in the British Medical Journal early in 1915. Through further careful research and argument, the koala, the wombat, the kangaroo and phalanger all became key members of MacKenzie’s medical ark.

Right forearm and hand of koala from the Mackenzie collection, National Museum of Australia.

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Recalling this close interaction between anatomy and restorative techniques, MacKenzie’s co-worker and eventual successor, the biologist C.V. Mackay wrote ‘I have vivid recollections of days spent in active orthopaedic practice, with every evening and every week-end devoted to unravelling the anatomical structure of the platypus, koala, wombat, echidna etc. A battered old copy of Richard Owen’s incomparable work on The Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates was our inseparable companion. At the outbreak of war a valuable collection of dissections had been accumulated.’ Colin MacKenzie would carry his ideas, judged both novel and controversial by the medical establishment of Melbourne, to wartime Britain in 1915, where he catalogued specimens of war wounds for the British Army. He was subsequently invited by Sir Robert Jones, his early mentor and supporter at Liverpool in 1904 and now Inspector of wartime military orthopaedics in Britain, to serve at the Military Orthopaedic Hospital in London, at Shepherd’s Bush. For the pioneering Australian, it was a rare opportunity to apply his koala shoulder techniques to British soldiers with shrapnel injuries to their shoulders, and to reconstruct their upper arms with the methods he had developed for polio victims. At the same time, using the many specimens he brought from Australia, MacKenzie wrote his best-known book, The Action of Muscles: Including Muscle Rest and Muscle Re-education. In this he formulated his central concept of the evolutionary law of muscle function, where ‘the particular functions of any muscle are the result of the evolutionary history of that muscle’. 150

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As the muscles of the human body are adaptive or survival results of struggles which have gone on during the past ages, [he wrote] it follows that some appreciation of their comparative anatomy is essential for the clinician … In effecting elevation of the hand from the hanging position to above the head, Nature was not prodigal in muscle expenditure … Yet Nature has experimented in this direction when the marsupial was the highest form of animal life. The selective factor was in all probability drought. It drove the wombat below the surface of the ground for water and roots. It drove the koala to the trees for the eucalyptus leaf.

While Richard Owen had been the first British comparative anatomist to draw attention to the koala’s long upper arm, it was research ideas from the antipodes that turned an evolutionary adaptation to bring medical research ideas and applications to wartime Britain. As Robin summed up: ‘It took a uniquely Australian animal and put it on the Empire’s medical research agenda.’ When original medical research was extremely rare in Australia, Colin MacKenzie stood as one of the few medical figures of his period to win reputation beyond his own country. Returning home from wartime Britain, his two passions pursued a continuing symmetry. Now a pre-eminent orthopaedic surgeon, a pioneer of Australian myology (the science of muscles) and consultant, he resumed the task of building his growing collection of wet and dry marsupial specimens into a 151

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Colin MacKenzie portrait with some of his wet specimens on exhibit at the National Museum of Australia.

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laboratory and museum at his new residential address in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. In 1918–19 he published his four-volume work The Comparative Anatomy of Australian Mammals, based on his collected dissections. Purposeful and determined – and alert to his long-term goal of a national facility – he named his museum and laboratory the ‘Australian Institute of Anatomical Research’. During 1920, MacKenzie was granted permission by the Victorian government to occupy 80 acres of bushland at Badger’s Creek, Healesville, as a research field station, where the koala’s favourite food, Eucalyptus viminalis, grew abundantly. He fenced the land, built a large house for a curator, a cottage for visiting scientists, a workshop and animal pens, and employed technical assistance. His offer that it should be enlarged into a national park was taken up by the Victorian government in 1934 and named the ‘Sir Colin MacKenzie Sanctuary’ (he had been knighted in 1929). ‘The sanctuary is roughly oblong in shape’, wrote his widow, Lady MacKenzie. ‘The trees are mainly eucalyptus – peppermints and candlebarks on high ground, and along the Badger Creek. These last provide the principal diet for the koala.’ During 1923, MacKenzie offered his laboratory and museum collection, then much sought-after in the United States, as a gift to the Australian government. A year later, a Commonwealth Act proclaimed it the ‘National Museum of Australian Zoology’ and MacKenzie became its first director and Professor of Comparative Anatomy. ‘The donation of such

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a gift at a time when our fauna is rapidly becoming extinct’, Senator Pearce, Minister for Home and Territories, applauded in announcing MacKenzie’s move to the Parliament, ‘constitutes an act of practical patriotism.’ During 1929, his large collection of anatomical specimens was moved to the young national capital of Canberra, where it was renamed the ‘Australian Institute of Anatomy’. Linked as a natural history museum to human nutrition research and public education, it was opened in October 1931. With MacKenzie as its first director until 1937, it stood as an iconic building that attracted a large and curious public to view its highly eclectic, and at times freakish, anatomical exhibits. It served for many years as a centre for the intellectual and cultural life of Canberra, until 1985, when the building was put to other use and its collections stored for Canberra’s planned national museum. The innovative purposes of Sir Colin MacKenzie’s ‘Australian Institute of Anatomy’ and its enduring historical importance were recognised when its collections were proclaimed Australia’s first National Heritage Collection at the Australian National Museum.

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The earth is not only for humans. The motto of Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary.

Colin MacKenzie had been among the first to foresee the national need to investigate Australia’s unique mammals and secure biological knowledge, and to attempt an early approach to their conservation. But governments at all levels were singularly slow to ensure effective protection of Australia’s native fauna. A recommendation that ‘special legislation should be introduced in all colonies to provide for the protection of animals of economic value or particular biological interest’, made by a special committee of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Adelaide in 1883, fell on

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deaf legislative ears. But even the motion’s own terms tended to reflect a limited understanding of the inherent worth of indigenous fauna. Scientific organisations in general had shown scant regard for native animals. Australia’s first zoological garden was a rare exception. Set up as a private venture by William Beaumont and James Waller in association with the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel at Botany in 1847, it opened to the public in 1851 and remained there and at Watson’s Bay in Sydney Harbour through the 1860s, with the purpose of building a collection of ‘beasts and birds peculiar to the Colony’. But when the colonial government declined an offer to acquire the collection, the animals were summarily destroyed. The Australian Zoological Gardens launched by the Zoological Societies of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia in the later decades of the nineteenth century had other intentions, and it was they who became the progenitors of the state zoos. From the outset they were firmly linked to the colonial Acclimatisation Societies with their growing collections of imported birds and animals. Hence, as the Zoological Gardens took shape, their interests centred not on native animals but on the display and educational promotion of exotic creatures such as lions, monkeys and tigers imported from abroad. Visiting the three existing zoos in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in 1914 on an extraordinary overland trek from Queensland to Western Australia with his family and a pet koala, pastoralist A.S. Faulkner reported: ‘I was much surprised upon visiting the Zoological Gardens at each 156

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Australian capital to find no specimen of the Koala in captivity. But at the Taronga Park Zoo, at Sydney, one of the keepers informed me they often had a few, but they generally cleared out into the bush again, not being caged in, and there were none at the time of my visit.’ Faulkner himself provided a rare example of maintaining a koala in successful captivity. In contrast to the fatal attempts recorded in the nineteenth century by a number of eager naturalists and settlers, he was the first white Australian to keep a koala alive contentedly for eight years at his home at Geraldton in Western Australia. He fed it a diet of gum leaves, cow’s milk and occasional peppermint lollies and protected her in specially constructed cages while she was also allowed to roam about his house and garden until a severe bout of pneumonia felled her in 1926. In the event, the impulse towards conservation of the koala would come not from government but from a new breed of farsighted independent protectors. Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane was the first such sanctuary to be properly established, in 1927, and became a major player. During 1930, as plans for MacKenzie’s Healesville enterprise gathered shape, in Victoria, a keen practical man, Noel Burnet, bought forty acres of land in New South Wales at Pennant Hills near Parramatta, and, planting out the koala’s favoured eucalyptus trees, opened his wildlife sanctuary, ‘Koala Park’. Burnet had wide experience of the koala and its subspecies from working in all the eastern states and, much influenced by MacKenzie’s ideas, was fearful that killing koalas for the fur 157

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Noel Burnet with a handful of his favourite animals at Koala Park, Sydney.

export trade would lead to their swift extinction. He was the first to witness the birth of a koala in captivity and twentythree animals were born in the Koala Park in its first five years. As the site grew, stretching to absorb two more park areas and

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‘BlueGum Park’ for the koalas’ winter quarters, Burnet became the first successful koala breeder and the foremost contemporary authority on this marsupial. Since few Australians had ever seen a koala, Koala Park and Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary became increasingly popular tourist attractions where children, adults and a rising tide of overseas visitors poured in to observe Australia’s ‘bushland baby’ at close quarters. At Healesville by 1935, the Sir Colin MacKenzie Sanctuary was experiencing the vagaries of koala conservation. With nine Victorian subspecies of koalas and one short-haired Queensland P. cinereus adustus cub (dropped off by a car and foster-mothered by a Victorian female with a similar-sized young), severe diarrhoea struck that wintery June and the koalas climbed down from their tree shelters – as koalas do – to die on the ground. Only the little Queenslander, curled up in a tree fork and choosing to eat only the long-leaved box eucalyptus, survived to become monarch of the territory. Another prominent protector, David Fleay, was waiting in the wings. Fleay had exhibited a lively interest in native animals since childhood and, with a degree in science from the University of Melbourne, was appointed curator of Australian animals at the Melbourne Zoo in 1934. There he established the first Australian faunal enclosure at an Australian zoo, and placed the koala at its centre. There the enquiring Fleay carried out the earliest detailed study of koala diet in captivity, in which he identified its strong preference for the rough-barked coastal manna gum, E. viminalis, except during the midwinter

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months of June and July when koalas chose the long-leafed box eucalypt. Fleay arrived at Healesville Sanctuary as curator in 1937 and built an outstanding conservationist career. It was at Healesville that he won international fame as a pioneering breeder of the platypus, and accompanied three of these unpredictable animals by sea and air to the New York Zoological Gardens in 1947, although he later mused ‘never did a furred animal offer a greater challenge to closer acquaintance!’ It was a different story with the koala. During 1952, Fleay set up his own Fauna Reserve at West Burleigh near Queensland’s Gold Coast, and made the koala the core of his early management and breeding work. In Queensland, Fleay quickly discovered that the ‘roadkill’ of koalas wandering out of the reserve threatened the existence of the Gold Coast koala remnant. ‘The carnage’, he wrote, ‘had already set in and over a 12-year period the early census of annually dead and dying native bears mostly brought in by car drivers who had accidentally run them down by night totalled at least 60.’ Such drivers were the conscientious ones. Fleay also found that koalas were suffering from rapidly advancing urbanisation and uncontrolled domestic dogs. ‘Over the last quarter of a century on the Gold Coast’, he summed up later in Living with Animals, ‘the disappearance of our most attractive animal (once seen only 15 years before in road-side trees) has been in direct proportion to “civilising” activities.’ Expanding vigorously into breeding a veritable menagerie of native fauna – marsupials, monotremes, snakes, emus, 16 0

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birds of prey, owls – all came into his care, and broadcasting, campaigning and promoting the interests of native wildlife, Fleay became a well-known communicator and educator who built up one of Australia’s most prestigious conservation parks at Burleigh. It was renamed the David Fleay Wildlife Park in his honour in 1997 and is now managed by Queensland’s Environmental Protection Agency as an environmental education resource. Through such pioneering activities, public knowledge and support of the koalas grew. Brought ‘up close and personal’ in parkland sanctuaries, people were captivated by the quaint and benign marsupial. Was there something endearingly familiar in the way the female clasped and cuddled her young, and the tender maternal qualities she openly exhibited to the observer’s gaze? ‘There is only one more entrancing person than the koala’, exclaimed one early exuberant if genderinsensitive English visitor, ‘and that is his wife with her baby!’ Of all the native fauna, the whimsical ‘native bear’ – for the name lingered – appeared the cutest and the most accessible to humankind. It was a perception readily accepted by the community from the first two decades of the twentieth century, as the koala’s role as a national icon took root. This mood, stimulated by Norman Lindsay’s writings and drawings, was also influenced by the rise of popular juvenile literature about the koala. The small books Blinky Bill. The Quaint Little Australian (1933) and Blinky Bill Grows Up (1934 ) were written for her small son by Dorothy Wall, a New Zealander who had settled in Australia. Published, with sequel 161

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‘The koala embraces Australia’. Children’s books gave significant impetus to the koala’s popularity and public profile in the 1930s.

stories, as The Complete Adventures of Blinky Bill in 1940 they became widely circulated children’s classics. They were adapted by other authors, published in Malaysia, commemorated in a special edition at Australia’s Bicentenary, and produced during the 1990s as an ABC television series ‘The Adventures of Blinky Bill’. While some critics were opposed to Wall’s anthropomorphic treatment of her animal characters, which decked them out in trousers, dresses and bonnets to act out domestic scenes in fabricated bush setting, generations of

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children responded delightedly to the central koala character and to his mischievous and adventurous ways. Wall’s stories were precursors of many other koala books for children through the 1930s including The Australian Native Bear Book (1930) illustrated by famous photographer Harold Cazneaux, an American edition Bubby the Bear by Kurt Wiese in 1936, and in 1947 Edward Dyson’s Billy Bluegum or Back to the Bush, which reprised Norman Lindsay’s comic drawings. A major addition was Lydia S. Eliott’s Little Teddy Bear, published in London and Glasgow in 1939, which proved a particular winner. Perceptive and factually accurate, Little Teddy Bear was illustrated by artist Alan Wright and was particularly instructive to young readers. ‘The koala showed no excitement’, Eliott narrates. ‘Neither the birds nor the wombat disturbed them. They looked down at the visitors with a steady gaze, their beady eyes shining a little more brightly than usual, and their big Indiarubberlike noses twitching now and then.’ She mentioned their limited need for drinking water, and informed that ‘Koalas are strong swimmers and survive floods.’ Tellingly, the book carried a preface by Frank L. Edwards, secretary of the Koala Club of Australia which was founded in 1937 to obtain ‘full and adequate protection of the koala’ and to aid all efforts to prevent its extinction. The club’s existence itself was testimony to the koala’s rising importance. Writing as war loomed, Edwards put his finger on the koala’s singular appeal: ‘The kangaroo and the emu on the Commonwealth Coat of Arms

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are repeated on documents, uniforms, masonry and postage stamps. But all the King’s horses and all the King’s men cannot save these distinctively Australian creatures from giving place to the more popular koala.’ Why? Edwards attributed the koala’s ‘proud position in public esteem’ to its way, shared with other marsupials, of carrying its young in a pouch, but additionally to that more unique form of transport, hoisting its infant on its back. Yet most important, this strong advocate argued, was ‘the animal’s lovableness, its serenity, its quiet charm, its extraordinary friendliness and its total lack of predatory instinct or will to harm’. This was praise indeed. It was Edwards’ belief that Australians had taken their cue in favouring the koala from the reaction of overseas visitors. Remembering the not-too-distant massacre of koalas for their fur, he concluded that ‘familiarity [had] bred contempt’. But overseas praise for koalas had been potent and well-timed: ‘It has given an enormous fillip to the veneration of this primitive marsupial.’ Edwards clearly underrated Australia’s community interest in the gentle animal. With growing evidence that agricultural expansion was threatening koala habitat, Australian children assumed a role as key participants in promoting the culture of the koala. Nonetheless, while the koala’s public popularity mounted and the Commonwealth issued the first Australian koala stamp in 1930, effective government action for its conservation and protection dallied across the nation.

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The Vanishing Koala. Youth to the Rescue.

It was Victoria that led the way by adopting the concept of assisting stressed koalas by translocating those whose habitat had been fragmented or reduced to new regions of settlement. As early as 1870 an independent settler, J.F. Smith, provided the first example of such a transfer when he gathered a few koalas from the Bass River area on the eastern shore of Western Port Bay and sailed them across to Phillip Island. Over the next ten years, koalas from south and west Gippsland and the Mornington Peninsula were also shipped to Phillip Island and a small set from north of the Bass River were moved to French

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Island where, in congenial new circumstances, they swiftly multiplied. Koalas were given legal protection in Victoria under the Native Game Act of 1890, but they had already suffered serious decline through hunting, habitat destruction, bushfires and disease. The extent of the decline was highlighted in the early 1920s when the enterprising Chief Inspector of Fisheries and Game, Frederick Lewis, launched a series of communitybased surveys among bush schools, sawmills and other rural places to determine the koala presence in each district. Alerted to the evidence of koala scarcity in the once wellpopulated Gippsland region of eastern Victoria and to its disappearance in western Victoria, the Goulburn Valley and the north-east, Lewis engaged his department in large-scale relocation and rehabilitation programs that removed koalas to new regions with ‘safe havens’ and restore them eventually to their former range. During 1930–31, 165 koalas were placed on manna gumrich Quail Island in the northern part of Western Port Bay; in 1944, following critical multiplication, overbrowsing and a ‘koala crash’, some 1300 koalas were released back into mainland areas – a move that marked the beginning of reintroduction in Victoria. At the same time, about sixty koalas were moved from Phillip Island to a site north of Ballarat. In 1945 Snake Island, another small island in Western Port Bay, was brought into service as a breeding ground and continued to produce moderate groups of koalas for relocation within Victoria.

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Through the 1930s and into the 1950s, this turnstile of transfer and retrieval gathered pace. During 1957, over six hundred koalas were moved from French Island to the Grampians and another seventy-two despatched to Sandy Point on inner Western Port Bay. Phillip Island proved a flourishing breeding ground and some 3300 koalas were translocated from there within Victoria between 1941 and 1978. As pressure on Snake Island’s population mounted, large numbers of koalas were also moved back to the mainland. As Victorian state wildlife manager, Peter Menkhorst, sums up, between 1923 and 2006, ‘over 24 600 animals were translocated to over 250 release sites across Victoria in probably the most sustained and extensive wildlife reintroduction program ever undertaken.’ Wilson’s Promontory had its own distinctive story. Regarded throughout the nineteenth century as ‘the home of the koala’, it maintained thriving koala populations in its dense and isolated northern woodlands and the hills and sheltered timbered valleys of its western coast. There, it was reported, albino and semi-albino varieties were not rare. In 1908, the Promontory was permanently reserved as a National Park and Sanctuary for the preservation of native fauna and flora, and fur hunters were banned. But immunity from interference led to a koala population increase that threatened the animals’ natural food source. When some koalas were transferred to other parts of the park and some were destroyed, the eucalyptus was virtually exterminated and the koalas were removed entirely

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Transportation has played an important part in koala management. Here bemused koalas wait to be liberated on Quail Island, Western Port Bay.

to New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia. After eucalypt replanting, koalas were returned to Wilson’s Promontory and continue to rove in that highly popular native park retreat. Contrastingly, New South Wales moved only slowly towards koala protection. The state passed its first Native Animals Protection Act in 1903 when fourteen animals, including the ‘native bear’, red kangaroo, platypus, echidna and three species of wombat were scheduled for ‘absolute protection’ for several months in 1905 to allow them to ‘breed up’. But widespread shooting for the fur trade followed this brief hiatus.

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During 1911, persistent badgering from the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia (formed in 1909 by a group of preservationists) led to an amendment to the Native Animals Protection Act that secured the koala a five-year reprieve from being hunted for fur. Yet since offenders were charged a mere £5 for breaching the Act, the koala was still hunted for its fur and captured for export. An updated Birds and Animals Protection Act, introduced in 1918, was intended to protect all native birds and animals but, as it too lacked administrative back-up, it proved a toothless tiger. Where were the protectors? Members of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales pressed the need in their 1923 journal for more effective legislation ‘to regulate the taking and export of our native animals and birds, their fur, skins and feather, before the fate of extinction overtakes some of Australia’s remarkable fauna’. No action, however, followed for over half a century. As the senior colony and first place of settlement, New South Wales became the site of the greatest koala decimation and the destruction and fragmentation of its habitat. The process grew from extensive ringbarking and clearing and from agricultural and pastoral occupation, although large sections of the state’s coastal regions remained well vegetated. By the 1930s, however, community voices were rising. As koalas vanished from many woodland areas, the press launched a popular move to enlist people power, including children power, to preserve the increasingly popular species.

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At last, in 1948, responding to heightened lobbying from conservationists, the New South Wales government enacted its important Fauna Protection Act, which established a special Fauna Protection Panel and a Chief Protector of Fauna. The Act also set in place laws to deal with future issues of protection and preservation, including the illegal export of koalas to private collections and foreign zoos. A National Parks and Wildlife Act was passed during 1967, then repealed and replaced by a new Act of the same name in 1974. The 1974 Act created the National Parks and Wildlife Service in New South Wales, bringing faunal protection and habitat management under the authority responsible for all national parks, reserves and water catchment areas state-wide. Translocation of koalas from dwindling habitat was not a policy adopted in New South Wales. The state introduced various protection strategies including creating small reserves where there were dense koala populations and fencing-off parts of larger reserves to take a number of koalas to regenerate and repopulate the surrounding areas. Nonetheless, by the mid 1980s it was estimated that koalas had disappeared from 50–75 per cent of their range and had become‘rare’, ‘uncommon’ and’ extinct’ in some areas. By the end of the twentieth century the largest koala populations were predominantly on the north coast, with colonies on the Northern Tableland, the Western Slopes and Plains, and on the Central and Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. In addition to government approaches, community-based koala conservation centres were being developed at Port 170

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Stephens and Port Macquarie, and the world’s first Koala Hospital – for sick, wounded or burnt koalas – was established at Port Macquarie. Queensland’s record of faunal protection was conspicuously poor. While protection was provided by legislation in 1908, the legislation proved highly flexible with open seasons for hunting declared in 1915, 1917 and 1919, and famously, in 1927. Yet it was the impact of the open season of 1927 and its attendant ‘fur frenzy’ and public outcry that ushered in change. Until then the government had directly favoured rural and trapping interests. Thereafter the koala’s dwindling numbers soon made it uneconomic to kill koalas for their fur. The fur trade moved beyond the growing coastal settlements to northern and central western Queensland and, in the face of sharpening public criticism over koala destruction, turned to animals such as the kangaroo who enjoyed only ‘interim status’ protection. Even so, koala populations were known to have severely declined by the late 1930s while surveys conducted in Queensland in 1967 and 1977 plainly indicated that the range of koalas had continued to shrink. Apart from such independent ventures such as the koala sanctuaries and parks at Brisbane’s Lone Pine and at Burleigh, there was scant evidence until very recent times of the Queensland government’s concern for koala protection and management. A Nature Conservation Act was not introduced until 1992, and large-scale land-clearing and fragmentation of woodland and forests were common in the last decades of the twentieth century. In these and in later years land-clearing in 17 1

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Queensland has, in fact, been judged greater than in developing countries. The koala was named a ‘vulnerable’ species in Queensland in 1994. When the authorities did turn their attention to the problem of the koala, they looked to translocation to assist repopulation. Koalas were moved to several islands off the Queensland coast including Brampton, Magnetic, St Brees and Newry Islands for breeding programs and to ward off the threat of extinction. But translocation was also used as a management tool to facilitate urban development in south-east Queensland and in some non-urban areas. In a new century, it was disallowed except as a last resort. If Queensland’s record of koala protection was minimalist, than that of South Australia was a recipe for disaster. Protective legislation introduced in 1912 failed to prevent koala numbers from declining and by 1924 the one surviving population in the extreme south-east was deemed to have become extinct. As the fiery Professor of Zoology at the University of Adelaide, Frederic Wood Jones, noted tartly, ‘no example of the South Australian race has been examined scientifically and no specimen seems to have been preserved’. During 1923, however, six Victorian koalas were transferred to Flinders Chase National Park at the western end of Kangaroo Island and their offspring released back into South Australia at eight sites between 1959 and 1965, and again in 1969. The government passed its inaugural National Parks and Wildlife Act in 1972, which has helped protect wildlife. The translocations

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and the natural migration of koalas crossing into South Australia from south-east Victoria meant that ‘immigrant’ koalas now enjoy a greater habitation in South Australia than at the time of European settlement. Yet Kangaroo Island, South Australia’s pendant island, named by Matthew Flinders in 1802 on his circumvention of the continent to commemorate the plentiful food supply of one marsupial for his hungry crew, was destined to became a spawning ground for another. By 1960 the koala population had grown to such proportions that they had consumed most of the island’s eucalypt resource of E. viminalis. Despite culling and translocation to mainland sites, by the end of the century their numbers had soared to a spectacular 5000 and their browsing was an abiding threat to the island’s trees. Neither Western Australia nor Tasmania had indigenous koalas. Western Australia offers no record of P. cinereus since remote geological times. Tasmania, while connected to the mainland until some 10 000 years ago, was separated when melt from the last Ice Age swamped the land bridge and halted species such as the koala and the dingo on the other side. Now, animal parks in Perth and within easy driving distance of Hobart, Tasmania, play host to the nation’s iconic animal. No overview could neglect the koala experience in the Australian Capital Territory where, spurred by the long arm of the Australian Institute of Anatomy, the ACT’s attempt at koala protection was fraught with faunal and human drama. Peering from kerosene tins, six koalas were transported during

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1939 from French Island to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve outside Canberra. When fences collapsed in wartime disrepair in 1944 the animals became escapees into the surrounding countryside. No further attempt was made to replace them for twenty-five years, when eight males and eight females were translocated into the Reserve from Victoria. A thousand visitors flocked to see the appealing high-profile imports during March 1969, a number that reached a staggering 12 000 visitors during the Anzac Day weekend in April. But misfortune waited. Within three months, fifteen of the koalas were dead. ‘Mystery illness’, proclaimed an alerted Canberra Times. Was it stress, transportation or adrenal deficiency? Autopsies shed no light: varied medical approaches failed to save the dwindling corps. The animals wasted quietly away down to the last survivor – ‘No Name’, as the local newspaper sympathetically dubbed it. Yet public tragedy fuelled public action. Six koalas were translocated from French Island that year and eight more in December 1970 to produce a small but stable population. Yet this was totally obliterated but for one severely burnt koala when the fierce bushfires of early 2007 raged from Victoria across the neighbouring southern mountains and consumed the native fauna of Tidbinbilla Park. ***** What then had been achieved in koala protection and habitat conservation when the first Koala Symposium was called in

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Sydney at Taronga Zoo Park in 1978 to consider and review the national state and status of the koala? Acts for koala protection scattered variously across the country had secured varying measures of success; independent koala sanctuaries and wildlife centres had grown, translocation had been important in supplementing and sustaining populations in some states, and the koala’s place in the national iconography was rising rapidly. T.J. Bergin, editor of the Symposium report, would go further: ‘The koala’, he pronounced, ‘has come to enjoy an almost unique degree of protection. Its recovery is, in fact one of the few “success” stories of Australian conservation.’ But the preservation of the koala and its habitat had been hard-fought. Local communities, individuals and wildlife preservation societies in two of the eastern states had been the prime movers in relocating koalas to safe places and more sustainable habitats. In New South Wales, conservationists had been especially critical of departmental management of state forests and the lack of preliminary studies to identify koala populations and habitat. A pervasive ‘no questions asked’ mentality allowed large areas to be logged without assessment of native animals – a situation not unknown in other states. Although the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service had become responsible for management and protection, its resources and profile were low. The question of koala export to foreign zoos had also flared into sharp controversy in New South Wales when, early

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in 1959, Sir Edward Hallstrom, the controversial high-profile Chairman of Taronga Park Zoo and owner of a private zoo at his harbourside home, made a personal agreement to send five koalas from his private collection to San Francisco Zoo. Newspapers, a covey of community organisations, societies and councils entered the fray. The Chief Guardian of Fauna declared that he knew of no koala that had survived for long overseas. Urgent letters were sent to state ministers, Commonwealth senators and, at length, to Prime Minister Menzies. To little avail. Officially it was resolved, as the NSW Minister for Customs and Excise soon announced, that the koalas would be exported for breeding experiments on scientific lines; they would be ‘zoo-acclimatised’ before despatch and a keeper from Taronga Zoo and Edward Hallstrom himself would accompany them to San Francisco. ‘Is Australia so lacking in national pride’, exploded David Stead, secretary of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia, in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald in March, ‘that it is not prepared to undertake this important task itself? Conservation bodies are most anxious for government and public support of a major project to study the koala under controlled conditions in a large sanctuary, staffed and maintained as a scientific institution. The conditions in this country are infinitely better to such a purpose than those obtaining elsewhere.’ But off to the United States the five koalas went. Nonetheless, the Commonwealth government could no longer ignore the public mood, nor rhetoric. A Commonwealth

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State Fauna Conference was called mid-year and, by the end of 1959, the Commonwealth government, adopting a rhetoric of its own, announced the introduction of legislation that would commence in January 1960. This specified that the export of koalas, platypuses and lyrebirds, and their skins and plumage, would not be permitted – unless for scientific investigation. San Francisco and San Diego Zoos became the early beneficiaries of this provision. The Koala Symposium of 1978 hence marked a pivotal point in national reckoning. Made up largely of officials drawn from the states, National Parks and Wildlife Services, the Commonwealth and community members, the evidence and opinions clearly indicated a country-wide fault line in Australia’s approach to koala conservation. In short, nearly two hundred years after settlement, there was still an embargo on using koalas for zoological purposes; the only systematic studies had been done by departmental officers or those dependent on government support, and the fragments of that knowledge had not been gathered together. There was, in addition, a widespread lack of planned koala management and a conspicuous want of information on its biology and behaviour. Although, as Bergin maintained, the koala was not endangered, ‘this should not’, he declared, ‘let the animal fall from its pedestal.’ Much from the patchwork of conference conclusions and exchange came from scattered inputs of observation and opinion. Yet the recommendations of the Symposium pinpointed a central issue. Alert to the restriction of zoological research on

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live koalas, its members urged that ‘any rational system of conservation and management relies on animals being made available for research’. While agreeing unanimously that the koala was neither ‘rare’ nor ‘endangered’, the Conference Round Table emphasised the pressing need for further research into the koala’s basic biology (especially its anatomy), its social behaviour, nutrition, ecology and disease. They advised that, in view of the vulnerability of localised koala populations to overgrazing, fire and disease, there was a need for active management and that koalas should no longer be introduced into national parks where they had never previously been recorded. Surprisingly, the view was unanimous that the export of koalas should be permitted to ‘appropriate zoos and scientific institutions overseas’. On the basis of the available evidence and conclusions, it was not easy to subscribe to Bergin’s confident assertion of the success of koala conservation in Australia. But a new consciousness of the koala’s predicament had been articulated. A major new pathway to research knowledge lay ahead.

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The koala thinks the day is for sleeping; the night for living. Thomas Wood, Cobbers, 1932.

We have today a more comprehensive appreciation of its biology than any other marsupial. Anthony K. Lee, Kathrine A. Handasyde, & Gordon D. Sanson, Biology of the Koala, 1990.

The years following the 1978 Taronga Zoo symposium saw a veritable explosion in research knowledge and observations on the biology and behaviour of an animal which had increasingly

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firmed its reputation as Australia’s most popular native creature. Flashpoints of these discoveries filled the pages of a second major koala conference, the ‘Koala Summit’ sponsored by the NSW Parks and Wildlife Services in 1988 that focused on ‘Managing Koalas in New South Wales’. Now exactly two centuries after white Australian settlement, the meeting sought to build on increasing biological and behavioural data and pluck new approaches from a growing spread of university research and community and other local studies, and apply them to the loss of koala habitat and population from expanding development, bushfires, predation and disease. As one observer stressed, it was time that ‘we took a breath and began to realise that we must be very careful in our management of our unique species and our environment.’ It was a point the Premier of New South Wales, Nick Greiner, recently returned from a visit to Japan, strongly emphasised in his foreword to the Summit Proceedings: ‘If the Panda is the international symbol for conservation of endangered species’, he asserted, ‘then the Koala is our diplomat for Australia’s unique fauna, as well as for the Australian bush.’ Two decades after this searching and informed conference, what, then, do we now know about the biology and behaviour of this benign, endearing, physically complex, longadapted and perhaps very cluey animal?

Being From early times nineteenth-century observers were familiar with aspects of the koala’s unusual appearance, its wide-eyed 18 0

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gaze, its sedentary habits, its fixed habitation in the eucalypt and its solitary character. But we now know that after its brief gestation period of 34–36 days, the tiny blind koala neonate, no bigger than a bean at 0.5 grams, a ‘grub-like creature’ fresh from placental birth, works its way upward through its mother’s belly fur into her pouch and attaches itself to one of her two teats. Born in a highly undeveloped state, it has far to go. Until recently it was widely considered that the koala had a distinctive pouch, a ‘marsupium’ which, like that of the wombat, opened towards the rear of its body instead of the front. Some current research, however, contends that the pouch faces outward but, when housing a hefty infant, is pulled into a more downward-facing position. Unusual among marsupials, the koala does not clean her pouch. Conealed, the infant takes shelter in its mother’s pouch for about five and a half months, when at the modest size of about 12 centimetres and covered with fine fur, it peers out cautiously upon the eucalyptus world. At six months the cub is fully furred; at approximately seven and a half months, weighing half a kilogram, it emerges to cling to its mother’s belly or her woolly back, but returns to sleep in the comfort of her pouch. After another six weeks the cub, now weighing a kilogram, no longer enters the pouch. It spends much of its time on its mother’s back, but finds shelter clinging to her belly in cold or wet weather, and for sleep. Sitting at ease in the fork of a tree, the mother koala will at times cuddle her baby in her arms. Slowly the cub will begin to venture away, although remaining under its mother’s protective eye. At twelve months the young koala is 18 1

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‘The christening of the bears’. Two koala mothers with young at Koala Park, Sydney.

physically and physiologically independent, although mother and offspring still sometimes sleep back-to-back. A female koala reaches maturity after two years and usually breeds at the age of three. When the Australian spring moves into October, and through summer and autumn into May, she will be sought by a male and her infant (for koala twins are very rare) will be born between November and March. Thereafter she will produce a single young annually up to twelve or so years of age. In maturity koalas weigh 4 to 14 kilograms, noticeably more than other arboreal animals but their weight reflects

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the weight the local tree branches can support. The adult male can be up to 50 per cent heavier than the female. The larger southern koalas of Victoria and South Australia have an average weight of 11.8 kilograms for the male and 7.9 kilograms for the female. By contrast, northern koalas, in New South Wales and Queensland, weigh less – males are 6 kilograms and females are 5.1 kilograms. In general they live between thirteen and eighteen years, depending on stress and environmental factors. The koala’s sturdy skeleton has been carefully mapped and has a close resemblance to that of ground-dwelling marsupials. The powerful upper body is short, lean and muscular, with the tail reduced to a stump. Despite this lack of tail, the koala has excellent balance. The limbs are proportionately very long: the powerful upper limbs are nearly as long as the legs, and give the koala its strong climbing and grasping skills. Distinctively, both front and back paws have rough pads and long pointed claws for gripping tree trunks and branches and levering the koala upwards when climbing. Its climbing strength, however, comes from the thigh muscles which join the shin much lower than those of other animals. The hand or paw of the koala was well described by nineteenth-century comparative anatomists who noted its five similar digits, the first two opposing the other three in a configuration now known as ‘forcipate’. The hands give the koala both its strong grasp and its ability to manoeuvre the small branches with the tender leaves to its mouth. The feet

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have different and more specialised digits which are shorter than those of the hand. The first digit has no claw and is opposed to and separated from the other three. Two of those three digits are slightly fused at their base, and the koala uses them like a comb when grooming. Strikingly, koalas are the only animals that, like humans, have individual fingerprints. From its earliest growth the koala’s head is large in proportion to its body, but it holds a remarkably small brain. As Richard Owen originally noted, the koala’s small brain, its cerebellum and cerebral hemisphere are firmly anchored in a notably large cranial vault. In contemporary times, Tim Flannery flambuoyantly describes the two hemispheres as ‘a pair of shrivelled walnut halves on top of the brain stem, in contact neither with each other nor the bones of the skull’. Marsupials in general are not known for the size of their brains, but the koala clearly considers that ‘small is beautiful’. The brain uses the most energy of any organ and, evolving over time, the koala has reduced its brain size to conserve energy to suit the needs of its slow metabolism. It has, resultantly, the distinction of having, proportionally, the smallest brain in the mammal kingdom. Its brain also has less surface folding and larger hollows than that of other marsupials. Is the koala, then, ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’, as some observers suggest? The visiting high-profile British animal conservationist, Gerald Durrell, dubbed it ‘the most boring of all animals’. But early Australian koala protector, Charles Barrett, observing the animal for long periods in the wild, asserted that

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The brain of the koala, now deemed the smallest in the mammal kingdom, has, adapting, supplied the energy needs of this marsupial over long periods of geological time.

although ‘not brainy’ the koala ‘would pass an intelligence test too stiff for a wombat or a ring-tailed possum’. Lydia Elliot, in her strikingly acute book Little Teddy Bear, affirmed that ‘koalas certainly show memory and inventiveness’. Contemporary postcards and photographs usually show the koala’s head as rounded with a chubby face. Yet its facial structure ranges widely from long and elongated to rotund. Whichever, the koala’s soft whimsical expression and steady gaze invariably draws a response from humans. The reason for this, advanced by thoughtful biologists, is that the koala is one of the very few mammals with a flattish face rather than a muzzle; its forehead is high, its eyes look towards the front rather than the sides, its prominent flattened nose extends backwards towards the eyes. All are traits it shares with humans.

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As its eyes are fairly small and its eyesight is not well developed, the koala’s nose serves as its crucial ‘smell organ’ which helps it to sense danger, identify territoriality and select its food –carefully smelling each leaf before it eats. It also has a highly developed sense of hearing and its ears, proportionately large with a fluffy white tuft, are its conspicuous trademark. In a marsupial country, as hunters and trappers knew well, the koala’s fur is the warmest and thickest of all. Victorian koalas wear the fullest coats, ranging from shades of grey to tawny brown, rust and orange-brown. The New South Wales koala, as the original Latin name P. cinereus suggests, is ashcoloured, a hue which runs through the spectrum from deep steely grey to light and duskiest dark. The short-haired Queensland subspecies, paler grey, seems at times to glow blue and slightly naked in the bright sunshine but it can also be brownish-red or fawn. Against its subtly changing hues the koala sports white hair on its chin, chest and inner forearms, and grey-white hair on its rump where the densely packed hair offers a cushion against hard and sharp branches. ‘When viewed from the ground’, Ann Sharp noticed, ‘the koala’s bottom has a speckled or cloud-like appearance which acts as a kind of camouflage.’ By 1979 it was found that the koala’s back fur offered an insulating ‘protective overcoat’ superior to that of any other marsupial, shielding it from extremes of high and low temperatures and making it impervious to rain and wind. The cluey koala curls in upon itself during wet or stormy weather. Only

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its back is exposed to the elements while the rain runs off it, like water off the proverbial duck’s back. But when temperatures soar above 25–30ºC, the koala moves around from branch to branch, lying on its back and exposing its paler belly hair to reflect the heat. Much has been learnt in the past decades about the koala’s diet, both the variety of the trees on which it feeds and how it manages to acquire its essential energy needs from an exclusive and steady consumption of the water-yielding but lownutrition eucalyptus leaf. Herbivores normally range over wide areas to source their energy requirements. Not so the soporific koala. While the earliest studies of eucalypt choice were done on koalas in captivity, the growth of research on koalas in the wild has revealed that, although they show a certain preference for particular species like the rough-barked manna gum, they eat other eucalypt species as well. No less than twenty-four species of eucalypt have been identified in Victoria which some animals consume, nine of which make up their prime browse. Koalas regularly consume up to 400 grams a day, in four to six sessions over the twenty-four hours. But their options are limited. The eucalyptus itself is a singular Australian plant genus which has thrived in Australia for millions of years and, like the banksia, lives in soil with very low nutrient content. Koalas have accordingly become very fastidious eaters, picking the species with the fewest tannins and toxic chemicals, and choosing leaves at the top of the tallest trees with the highest levels of liquid and nourishment. Importantly,

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it is their choice of food and their unique capacity for digesting it that has led to that other striking feature of the koala’s anatomy, its enormous caecum. The amazing length of the large intestine curled within the koala’s abdominal cavity establishes a faunal record. Now known to be 200 centimetres long and 10 centimetres in diameter, the coiled ‘blind caecum’ opens into the colon and is judged to be proportionately the largest of any animal. The koala has also evolved a battery of high-crowned ridged molar teeth which cut leaves into small pieces. Processing the selected leaves through the vast caecum gives the koala the plant protein, carbohydrates, digestible nitrogen, fats and water it requires for its restricted energy. In short, a mechanism in the digestive system separates the consumed leaf matter into two categories, fine and coarse. The finer, most nutritious leaves are sent into the caecum and colon (the hindgut) and retained for further slow digestion and detoxification of poisonous chemicals; the larger and rougher indigestible leaves and cell walls, which lack nutritional value, become compressed in the rectum and expressed as pellets. These rapidly expelled dry pellets, high in fibre and toxins and low in liquid, reduce the volume of food in the gut and permit the koala to go on eating. The micro-organisms that live in the caecum, ‘the largest fermentation chamber of any herbivore’ notes marsupial expert Tyndale-Biscoe, fuel a form of fermentation that has given rise to the popular myth that the dozy koala is perpetually drunk or drugged.

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‘Not stoned but starved!’ is one reply. Yet the koala’s drowsy daytime state simply reflects its adaptation to a diet low in energy-giving nourishment. As zoologist Leonard Cronin admiringly put it, ‘the koala has come up with some remarkable adaptation to enjoy the quiet life of the gum tree’. Even so, the koala lives near the edge. Essentially a slight animal for all its furry roundness, low in fat reserves, it is unable to go without food for more than twenty-four hours and is consequently highly susceptible to heatwaves, drought, over-browsing in its habitat and any stress which reduces its immune system. Nor has the koala escaped disease. Reports from the 1915–18 period indicate that koalas had declined in the New South Wales tableland and in the Eyre Peninsula of South Australia ‘from disease’, although the disease was not defined. The disease, Chlamydia psittaci, an intracellular bacteria, was identified in koala populations at least as early as the 1940s. It swept through koala populations again in 1985, leaving animals blind, sterile or dead. Chlamydia affects the female reproductive tract, causing infertility; it produces ‘pink-eye’ a form of koala conjunctivitis, and it causes urogenital infection. Although chlamydia is no longer regarded as threatening to the survival of koala populations or likely to cause potential extinction, it still reappears in relation to environmental and nutritional stress. Research continues. For Charles Darwin, who rightly viewed that other Australian oddity, the platypus, as a staunch survivor in isolation, the koala also emerged to fit his evolutionary scheme as a highly

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distinctive animal which, surviving in isolation over long periods of geological time, had become eminently adapted, physically and through its choice of diet, to its unique and restrictive environment.

Doing What, we might ask, do the sleepy koalas do? The answer is, ‘Very little.’ In the heat of the day in an average zoo, [runs the poem of zoologist Ronald Strahan] What’s a koala most likely to do? In the fork of a tree, in a featureless heap, It closes its eyes and endeavours to sleep… And up in the treetops, throughout the long night, They climb and they feed and make love, or they fight. And if they took notice of me or of you, They’d probably think we’re a sluggardly crew. With twenty hours of sitting and sleeping each day, eating and seven sessions of scratching and grooming (to remove deadlocks for they harbour no parasites), koalas have little time for social behaviour. They are night animals, dependent on their sense of smell and hearing, and their social interaction takes place after darkness falls. Male koalas move about more than females and have been known to cover one kilometre at night. There is also some sense of hierarchy in their territoriality and mating behaviour. Alpha

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A koala asleep in its favourite position, a comfortable, forked branch.

males establish their territory close to breeding females, while younger males remain subordinate until they reach full size and maturity. All avoid energy-wasting aggression, although if necessary they will defend themselves with their powerful claws. Male mating behaviour is sharp and brutal. Ascending a tree towards a breeding female, the male embraces her in a complete mount. One researcher, watching a male rushing towards a mother carrying a cub on her back, observed the male climbing over both animals and swinging the female to the underside of a branch. The cub wisely departed to a higher branch. ‘Both animals were scrabbling for a hold on the

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branch. The male gave a series of sharp pelvic thrusts. The female struggled free and climbed upwards uttering short squarks.’ Copulation occupied a swift 45 seconds. In general, when a male climbs a tree occupied by a female, she will utter low snarls which, as the male approaches, grow louder and longer. The male, undaunted, will attempt to hold the female between himself and a tree branch and grasp the fur on her head or neck with his teeth. The female’s usual response is to struggle away from the male by striking or biting his head. Sometimes a male stays in the tree for a second approach. Evidence reveals, however, that older males have numerous scratch wounds and scars on the bare parts of their noses and cuts on their eyelids. Love among the koalas does not appear to be much fun! Not surprisingly, the male plays no part in rearing. The mother is responsible for the physical and physiological care of the young, and its training and enculturation over many months. Between the cub’s attachment to her teat and its first tentative consumption of tender leaves, the mother adopts a distinctive practice (bemusing to old bushmen) of directing the infant to feed for several weeks on a rich semi-liquid ‘pap’ that she produces from her caecum. Once able to live on a leaf diet, the cub plays alone, climbing and jumping in branches during excursions from its mother’s back. Occasional soft maternal clicking sounds and gentle grunts indicate control or danger. Yet solitary animals in the main, communication between koalas is generally limited to mating sounds or protests and to

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Six koalas on a branch at Lone Pine Sanctuary

distance signalling. Their vocal repertoire is limited. Males and females share one cry in common, of fear, which sounds like a baby screaming, a point confirmed by hunters and by Aborigines who were often reluctant to kill koalas for food because of their ‘piccaninny cry’. The male also grunts, but can bellow loudly to communicate his social and physical position ‘somewhat like the braying of an ass’, as Wood Jones remembered, or like a far-off rumble, a cry well-known to humans living in areas where koalas also reside. ***** Across the last twenty years we have learnt a vast amount about every aspect of the koala, which is now the most researched marsupial in Australia. Research on its life and management

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has become a buzzing industry. Bibliographies yield a cornucopia of studies that span diverse disciplinary fields and are sprinkled with investigations that run the gamut of studies into koala mammary glands, milk, tooth wear, diet, the male urogenital system, lymphoid and leukaemia, renal failure, immune response, disease in general, inbreeding, faecal pellets, genetic diversity and gene flow in specific koala groups, geography-specific koala ecology, inbreeding, spermatozoa and the health of zoo koalas, to name but a few. There is also a challenging array of koala management and conservation themes, habitat utilisation, population turnover, translocation and koala abundance, koala movement paths, corridor use in fragmented eucalypt forests, site-specific and project koala conservation, eucalypt dynamics, koala rescue survey and radio collaring, risk assessment, extinction, conservation strategies and many more. No stone – or tree – appears to have been left unturned. ‘How much more do we need to know?’ enquired a research duo in a 2001 overview of koala ecology. The probing has been sustained and wide and, inevitably, invasive. However, when Lee, Handasyde and Sanson completed their long study for Biology of the Koala, they paused in their acknowledgements to thank ‘the bears’ who, they wrote, have ‘maintained their sagacity and charm throughout the long association we had with them’.

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SURVIVOR?

We have simultaneously raised the koala up high in our estimation and lowered its chances of survival … Ours is a love–hate relationship of far-reaching consequences. Ann Sharp, The Koala Book, 1995.

If we knew better how marsupials have survived for so long and why they died out so rapidly, we might know better how to live in this country for the long term. Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe, Life of Marsupials, 2005.

At the start of the twenty-first century, bright orange bushfires, immense and wild, blazed across Australia. They ravaged

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millions of hectares of forest and destroyed hosts of native fauna in the ‘most flammable country on earth’. High in its eucalyptus treetop, the koala has become a special victim. Does the threat and reality of climate change, then, threaten the existence of an animal which has inhabited the Australian continent for millions of years? The koala’s evolutionary history stretches back over immense periods of time. When the Australian continent (along with South America, India, Africa and Antarctica) broke away from the supercontinent, Gondwanaland, in the Mesozoic era some 225 million years ago, it held its own building-blocks of life. The age of the great dinosaurs was passing and the first marsupials had appeared. The gradual formation of the major southern geographic regions also involved the development of life forms that would respond to their particular environments. Isolated from other continents and not needing to compete with other mammals for at least 45 million years, Australia became, in the words of palaeontologist Michael Archer, ‘a laboratory of biological diversity’ and a breeding-ground of highly singular forms. In the process of adaptation, climate and changing vegetation played an essential part. It is estimated that the advent of the eucalypt began with the onset of drier climates in Australia in the Oligocene epoch of the late Tertiary period about 34 million years ago, and it was then that the koala began to shape its evolutionary responses to its environmental niche. The koala, as has been noted, was descended from a group of immense extinct fossil herbivore browsers, Diprotodonta. 19 6

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Bones and teeth of Diprotodonta were found in the Wellington Caves of New South Wales in 1832 and shipped to England for scientific examination, and were named, reconstructed and classified by Richard Owen. Now, over a hundred and thirty years or more since Diprotodon’s identification, Australian palaeontologists working in central and north Australia have pulled back the veil on a slew of new evolutionary forms from the koala’s distant past. Diprotodonta means ‘two front teeth’ and animals belonging to this group have two enlarged projecting incisor teeth on their lower jaw. Out from the earth these vital relics came. The Perikoala appeared in 1957 from the late Oligocene formations in central Australia and was the first koala fossil found from the Tertiary period of some 25 million years ago. The second discovery, of a small koala, Litokoala, was made in 1956 in the Miocene beds (23 million years old) in the same central Australian formation and was described from a single tooth. The Madakoala, retrieved from the late Oligocene beds (25 million years) during 1987, was the same size as the contemporary koala but with a much shorter face. Many more Madakoalas were also discovered at Riversleigh, 200 kilometres north of Mt Isa at the western edge of far north Queensland. By the end of the twentieth century, teams at the rich fossil site of Riversleigh had unearthed more koala-type relics including Nimiokoala from the early Riversleigh Miocene, a distinctive group of koalas with high-crowned teeth. This somewhat aberrant cluster and the discovery of a new, more primitive species of Litokoala in the older Riversleigh deposits clearly 19 7

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indicated that the koala family was widespread across Australia at least some 25 million years ago. How? Paleobotanists conclude that ancestral eucalypt trees thrived in the ancient rainforests of central and northern Australia and that early koalas singled out the trees as their special food source. They developed and persisted in their dependent relationship with the eucalypt as it moved to and colonised drier low-nutrient habitats of Australia. While the exploration of Riversleigh’s ‘lost world’ has opened a treasure trove of palaeontology, the Riversleigh koalas and most of the central Australian ones are rare compared with the representation of other marsupials in Australia’s fossil record. Indeed, the koala’s ‘life history in time travel’ is unusual. It is singularly different from that of the iconic monotreme, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), now known to be the oldest mammal in Australia. There are fossilised remains of platypus dating back 100 million years to the older Cretaceous period in northern New South Wales and its evolution, from massive to modest size, has shown many environmentally adaptive traits that has won it recognition as one of the most sophisticated representatives of the animal kingdom. By comparison, Riversleigh researchers have concluded that, deviating little, but persisting, ‘the living koala is little more specialised than its ancestors, which suggests that it has not edged particularly far along the evolutionary limb.’ Along the classification highway, however, the koala has acquired several defining positions. Within the Diprotodonta

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order it has been grouped with the wombat into a subgroup or ‘superfamily’ called Vombatoidea, reflecting the judgement that the wombat is the koala’s closest living relative. Both animals have a rudimentary tail and only one pair of teats in the pouch (rather than two pairs) and, as the nineteenth-century anatomists, Professors Owen and Forbes, noted, the sperm head of both animals is unusually hooked (sickle-shaped). Such affinities suggest that the koala may have descended from a groundliving ancestor, a view that remains to be proven. The koala has also been given its own family classification, Phascolarctidae, which includes the genera Madakoala, Perikoala, Nimiokoala, Litokoala and their species. It now contains only one living representative, Phascolarctos cinereus. Fossil relics of Phascolarctos cinereus have been found in late Pleistocene cave deposits in south-western Australia (1–4 million years ago) and in a second cave site on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain, both areas where the animal has long been extinct. It is, hence, perhaps premature to make any final evaluation of koala evolution. Nonetheless, the koala, despite its dozy lifestyle and small brain, has plainly remained environmentally mobile and welladapted over great periods of geological, climatic (including ice age cycles) and geographical change, periods that saw the extinction of many Australian mammals. Its survival has led one quizzical biologist to suggest that ‘mindlessness may equate with survival in Australia’. Or, in the words of a longengaged palaeontologist, ‘Providing humans do not continue

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to chew away at the Koala’s preferred habitats, phascolarctids should have no problem outlasting humans!’ ***** What processes, then, have been put in place in the last twenty years to prepare for a sustainable relationship between the koala and humankind? While koala populations have soared to confronting heights in mainland coastal forests and in some southern islands, their distribution in the wild remains patchy. The animal has been listed as vulnerable in New South Wales and in the south-eastern bioregion of Queensland. It is currently considered rare in South Australia, and during European settlement has always been restricted to the far south-east. Its distribution in the three eastern and one southern state runs the gamut from high-density and stable populations to isolated and vulnerable populations in regional pockets, to areas of severe overabundance and of increasing decline. Certainly, state and Commonwealth government departments – under their changing titles of Parks and Wildlife, Conservation,

Environment,

Biodiversity

and

Natural

Resources, and Sustainability – have sought to devise management programs and a medley of strategies to deal with the problems surrounding the high-status koala which continues to inspire enthusiasm and affection at home and overseas. Psychologically, economically and politically, the koala is a national asset, a prominent component of our biodiversity, an acclaimed part of Australia’s natural and cultural heritage

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and, importantly, one on which the country’s tourist industry substantially depends. Ten years ago statistics revealed that the cute-and-cuddly animal’s benefit to the Australian economy as tourism icon was over a billion dollars a year, a sum that has significantly multiplied today. Hence, while the koala perches placidly in its eucalyptus tree munching on tender leaves and gazing quizzically, at times disdainfully, at the passing parade, science bureaucracies in the eastern states and in Canberra are animated by challenges of considerable complexity. Across the twentieth century, as zoological researcher Dan Lunney reminds us, ‘we in Australia have been guilty of “species-cide”.’ Australia is already a leader in the sixth global extinction episode. Yet, as the peak body – the Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council (ANZECC) – announced in its National Conservation Strategy in 1998, while ‘on a national basis the koala is not yet threatened with extinction … the time to act, to ensure that this does not happen, is now’. It is a theme with which the key independent national advocacy body, the Australian Koala Foundation founded in 1986, profoundly agrees. The difference lies in the perception. ‘Koalas may be one of Australia’s best-known animals’, the Foundation asserted in 2005, ‘but they are threatened by extinction. Less than 100 000 remain in the wild.’ Can extinction be measured? Is it possible effectively to evaluate a species described as isolated, declining, vulnerable,

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Cartoon by Patrick Cook

rare, endangered, even extinct in some areas yet stable, abundant or in pest proportions elsewhere? In a continent of proclaimed biodiversity, can species be rated and prioritised against each other for management attention, research funding and even survival? It is a problem that plainly exercises both mammalogists studying lower-profile marsupials and frustrated invertebrate researchers who pine to attract even considerably smaller support from government and media for their less appealing research pets. Questions abound. Indeed, so confronting are the problems and contrarieties faced by the different states that the koala has been flagged by leading Victorian wildlife manager,

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Peter Menkhorst, as ‘responsible for one of the most intractable wildlife management problems’ in Australia. While the Commonwealth government is responsible for regulating koala exports and runs a National Landcare Program to restore native vegetation that includes koala habitat, for the past decade it has firmly declined to yield to community pressure to place the koala on the national vulnerable species list. However, it has signed the statement of the National Koala Conservation Strategy that ‘in general koala habitat is poorly protected and there is potential for substantial further decline’. Koala administration and management is essentially anchored in the states. Yet, until recently, several operated on a wholly ad hoc basis without specifically defined policy plans. Victoria, which has had a long history of success in koala management, issued its first Koala Management Strategy in 2004. Queensland, with threatened species of koala populations in its southern region, launched its major long-term Nature Conservation (Koala Conservation) Plan and Management Program 2006–2016, focusing on land use and development relating to koala habitat, in 2005. Faced with such plans and strategies and a national strategy that is currently under review, it is difficult at times to see the animal for the bureaucratic trees. All documentation agrees that the key threats facing this postcard marsupial are loss, fragmentation and degradation of its habitat from agricultural, forest and urban clearing and natural disasters such

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as bushfires. Individual states face separate predicaments. Koala populations have been lost from practically all but the north coast regions, the Liverpool Plains and north-western slopes of New South Wales and it is now uncommon, rare or extinct in other parts. Victoria has a wide distribution of koalas over much of the state, with high densities in the southern and north-eastern lowlands, but a sizeable portion of the habitat is fragmented, smaller populations have become isolated and some have suffered near-obliteration from recent bushfires. Queensland faces critical questions of local planning and council participation in its rapidly developing south-east. South Australia has large budget and operational problems due to vegetation dieback from koala overbrowsing on Kangaroo Island, which now threatens the existence of the eucalypt manna gum and the koala itself. Pressure on state and Commonwealth policy flows sharply from the Australian Koala Foundation and from community organisations such as wildlife care networks, wildlife societies, koala carers and local koala conservation enterprises and groups. Tension between advocacy and bureaucracy can run high. ‘Community critics’, said one frustrated science bureaucrat balancing a bundle of economic, political, animal welfare and community concerns, ‘don’t have to manage. They are permanent critics, but they offer few practical alternatives.’ Other commentators from the professional fields of ecology and conservation have offered criticism of ‘triage’ in koala management, dealing with specific critical threats as they arise

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rather than holistically, an approach that, they argue, can entrench old mindsets. The Australian Koala Foundation and other welfare advocates have, however, been successful in persuading governments to reject culling as a solution to overpopulation. Sterilisation and other contraceptive initiatives with long-term effect have been trialled, and some implemented. The Foundation has also pressed local councils with the need for planning processes that will control increasing development incursion into animal habitat. Eighty per cent of koalas, the Foundation noted ominously in 1994, lived on private land concluding that, unless real protection was placed on habitat, the wild koala population would be critically endangered within three koala generations. The Australian Koala Foundation and its energetic CEO, Deborah Tabart, might not be widely loved by the wildlife managers but the Foundation has legitimate claims and concerns. They have surveyed koala habitats Australia-wide and compiled a computerised database, the Koala Habitat Atlas, to map and record remaining koala populations for general conservation use. Across its twenty-one-year history the Foundation has persistently raised the alarm over urban and canine impact on the koala, summoned public and international opinion, and contested scientific opinion on koala vulnerability. It assists local koala projects in New South Wales which it regards as the state with the best protective policies; it has established collaborative enterprises for human/koala

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habitation with a small number of developers and councils on the state’s north coast, and is aligned with koala carers attending to koala care and rehabilitation after bushfires. Essentially, the Australian Koala Foundation and its welfare confraternity hold a distinctly different philosophy from both bureaucracy’s wildlife managers and conservationists who work with whole populations and over long timeframes. They have an innate regard for the life and safely of individual koalas. Hence they reject the Commonwealth Minister for the Environment’s most recent announcement that, viewed across the country, the koala is not an endangered animal. Although the koala is only one player on a vast ecological stage, its flagship status accords it a star part. A recent conference called by the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales and the Australian Museum canvassed the need for a ‘zoological revolution’ that would provide a holistic approach to conserving the landscape in the interests of both humans and wildlife and dealing with it on a long-term ecologically sustainable basis. The key to effective conservation action, its editors Lunney and Dickman assert, ‘lies in the power of perception, the ability to challenge old values and to create and to establish new ones’. Information, including research data, is seen as an essential component in determining the best way to achieve conservation targets and design better solutions but, they warned, ‘it does not generate revolutions in itself, or even show the way forward’. Rather, the ‘revolution’ would involve a complete change that implied that the gap between

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good intentions and good practice can be bridged only by a complete transformation in our land management planning and practices. Lunney, a research zoologist and New South Wales wildlife manager, also earmarked deficiencies in present protection practices that need remedy: The modest restraints that existing laws place on development [he writes] will still allow many vulnerable species, such as koalas, to slide on the endangered schedules, even though the problems of this species have been identified and the solutions carefully articulated … [w]hile the solutions aim to give a balance to human needs and the desire to locally manage the habitat requirements … the rate of implementation of the solutions, such as preparation and execution of shire-wide plans of management for koalas is slower than is necessary … the slide will continue.

Although Lunney concludes that the zoological revolution is arguably under way, ‘as yet it is moving at a speed too slow to match the rate of loss’. Long-time koala researcher, Steven Cork, has carried the criticism further: The single most important biological threat in Australia today [he writes] is land clearance for agricultural and urban development … this process is the largest single

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mistake that our generation is making. In the future we will regret the action. We are doing irreparable damage to the environment that we plan to bequeath to a future generation. The simplest and most obvious strategy that would have the most long-lasting and beneficial consequences for Australia’s biodiversity would be to bring land clearance to an immediate halt. There is enough cleared land.

Yet the cry for holistic management is a long call. As conservation biologists David Lindenmayer and Mark Burgman underline, in a world of market economy and competing economic, social and political interests, achieving such ends will require both a revision of scientific and bureaucratic practices and a major change in public attitudes. Others are more philosophical. Considering that our connection with nature is often considered essential to mental and physical health, biologist Mark Kellert contends that ‘people continue to need rich and textured relationships with natural diversity in order to achieve lives replete with meaning and value.’ Such ideas are communicated to the public domain by the media – a potent outlet for concerns about wildlife – and absorbed by protest groups, local and national campaigns, and community and international pressure groups. Yet attitude change will clearly need to involve hardcore ‘progressive’ developers and the local planning authorities who support them. Ideally, the official motto of the Lone

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Pine Koala Sanctuary – ‘The country is not only for humans’ – needs to gain much wider currency. One of the most confronting challenges facing Australia and its mix of wildlife professionals, conservationists and ecologists is the increasing intensity, range and seriousness of bushfires in this highly flammable continent. Historically, bushfires have decimated koala populations and sometimes caused local extinctions. Press reports of the Grafton bushfires in northern New South Wales in January 1994 likened koala habitat destruction to a ‘nuclear holocaust’. More fires raged through Port Stephens that year, with severe consequences to koalas. The Koala Hospital established at Port Macquarie by the Koala Preservation Society was designed for animals injured in bushfires, as well as road trauma and disease. In November 1994 it housed nearly seventy koalas suffering the effects of recent fires. A three-year study into the Port Stephens fire revealed that high-frequency fires resulted in fragmented habitat and restricted the movement of koalas in burnt bush, resulting in further population decline and genetic degradation. In 2003 fierce and widely destructive bushfires spiralled through north-eastern Victoria and into the national capital. Late in the hot dry summer of 2006, massive bushfires ravaged drought-stricken north-east Victoria for sixty-nine days, burning more than 4 million hectares of bushland. Framlingham State Forest, in the coastal woodland of south-western Victoria, with its high koala population, was totally burnt in

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early January 2007. There soaring flames delivered a grim collection of burnt and dying animals to local vets and to koala carers and other volunteers in neighbouring Warrnambool, who fought for weeks to save hundreds of animals. In highintensity bushfires such as these some wildlife can survive by running ahead of the flames but the koala is particularly vulnerable, as its instinct is to avoid danger by climbing higher and higher into the tree canopy – where the heat and flames are at their most intense. More fortuitously, in the scorching summer of late December 2006, the New South Wales government rushed a rescue team to the Pilliga Nature Reserve near Coonabarabran, where the state’s largest and most genetically diverse koala population was under bushfire threat. A ‘triage in the bush’ was set up, with staff ready to take injured animals to Western Plains Zoo, but on this occasion the key koala colony survived as the low-intensity bushfire did not reach the tree tops where the koalas took refuge. The first long-term study of the effects of bushfire on a population of koalas has shed important light. Focused on a remnant coastal forest near Port Stephens in late 1993–1994 where 70 per cent of a total of 4631 trees had been burnt, it studied some fifty-five koalas over a period of thirty-five months between 1994 and 1997 to determine how the colony had reestablished itself. The selected animals included some wild unburnt koalas, some rehabilitated burnt koalas that had been rescued and cared for locally, and a number rehabilitated after

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injuries not related to the fires. All were tracked night and day via eartags and transmitters. The findings of the study revealed that koalas can persist in burnt sites (some trees begin regeneration after three days); that the tagged koalas settled permanently in burnt trees as soon as three months after the fire; that they maintained a relatively high reproductive rate and showed no difference in reproduction or survival between rehabilitated and unburnt animals; and that resource depletion from intense bushfire appeared to be only short term in a community of fire-resistant eucalypt species such as E. robustus and E. angophora costata. Yet it also showed that neighbouring unburnt areas were essential to sustain populations in the months immediately after fire. Given that the 1998 National Conservation Strategy considered bushfire was one of the greatest threats to wild koala populations, these findings are a key outcome. They emphasise that future planning should focus on the variety of eucalyptus species which koalas are shown to use, not on individual trees in the landscape, and that above all it is essential to retain patches of untouched habitat that can expand into the regenerated burnt areas. Widespread bushfire challenges, however, remain. With the rising evidence of climate change and the advent of highintensity megafires that sweep across a drought-afflicted landscape with staggering speed and heat, Australia faces critical and long-term problems. ‘Australians’, the editors of Australia

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Burning, Cary, Lindenmayer and Dovers, warned, ‘now need to adapt to their fire-prone land.’ They see an urgent need for interdisciplinary approaches to fire management linked with local expertise, and more studies such as the one discussed above. As they suggest, ‘the animals contain the crucial information needed for their conservation’. Their overriding point, however, is the need for Aboriginal participation in solving this formidable Australian problem: ‘The use of fire by indigenous people’, they write, ‘has been to create and maintain conditions necessary for survival – particularly the supply of plant food and vegetation which supported animal food … Their frequent low-intensity burning of the ground and understorey layers of woods and forest limited the number of high-intensity conflagrations prior to European settlement.’ There is now a ‘universal agreement that we must seek dialogue with traditional knowledge’. Where, then, are the answers? How can humans find a way of living harmoniously and in an ecologically balanced way with nature, in which economics, human expectations and attitudes all play a part? The time has come, perhaps, to reach back into history to earlier farsighted koala protectors, and reprise David Fleay’s simple yet enduring message: ‘May we never forget that their [the koala’s] survival depends entirely on us.’

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The koala sits there to be a koala David Schaap, Unit Manager of Koalas, Taronga Zoo.

Innocent and benign? ‘If you think the koala bear is the cute, cuddly little teddy bear of a thousand travel posters’, runs one Australian Information Service press release, ‘talk to Australian wildlife ranger Bob Eames who has caught more than 1000 of them.’ Thinning out the thriving population of koalas on Phillip and French Islands for transfer to the mainland, despite his skill with net and non-choking noose, Eames was clawed, nipped, urinated on and chased by koalas which did not like being jerked out of their trees.

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But nothing surpasses the story of a volunteer helping to move twelve koalas from an island off Tasmania to the Victorian mainland. This luckless assistant, having clambered up a gum tree, found himself grasped in the strong arms of the large male koala he had sought to net. They fell, locked together, to the ground with the volunteer on top of the beast. There he realised that the koala’s legs were clamped firmly around his middle, its powerful arms were clasped round his chest and its teeth were gripping his groin! In anguish and alarm, he found he could only detach the koala by falling into a nearby pond, holding the sturdy koala underwater and tearing himself away. Stunned but free, the shaken volunteer watched the koala get to shore, return to the tree and, with a baleful look, start to climb it. He called his story ‘Killer Koala’. Happily for others brought into direct contact with the koala it is a very different story. Such was the experience of the volunteer koala carers in Victoria who established special rapport with many koalas burnt in the Framlingham forest fires, brought in suffering horrific burns and trauma. Rescued by Wildlife Victoria volunteers and members of the state’s Department of Environment and Sustainability, treated and made comfortable and secure by trained carers in their homes, the koalas become docile and dependent, often nestling in the carers’ arms. Such responses, said one carer, are never experienced with other marsupials such as kangaroos or flying squirrels, and rarely with wombats. Bonds made with koalas can run deep.

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Senior licenced wildlife shelter operator, Lorraine O’Brien, was a leader in the battle to save the victims of the Framlingham fire. Nearly two hundred koalas arrived at the shelter: twenty-one died, eighty-one were accommodated in her house and enclosure, and seventy were eventually released by Victoria’s Department of Environment and Sustainability into unburnt regions. Feeding sick adult koalas, she recalled, was not easy – ‘they grow to like room service’. Fresh eucalyptus leaves were brought in daily by a roster of volunteers, while carers also looked after twenty-five orphaned babies who required round-the-clock care and nourishment. Deborah Tabart, known widely as the ‘Koala Woman’, underscores her long period of protective service with the koala’s praise. ‘The koala has taught me a lot about conservation and the human condition’, she says thoughtfully. ‘I have seen researchers be cruel to them and I have also seen wild koalas return to their carer for a bottle of milk and then go back into the wild.’ Alert to the message that the koala has become the ‘ambassador of the bush’, she adds, ‘I confidently allow the koala to teach me about what the environment means.’ She sees this role as ‘very humbling’ and concludes that ‘until we as a human race have respect for animals and the environment we will never learn to treat each other with love and respect.’ Tourists add to the swelling acclaim. The industry annually contributes millions of dollars to Australia, and tourists from overseas are potent enthusiasts for the ‘Australian pet’.

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Deborah Tabart, CEO of Australian Koala Foundation since 1988, has a long and spirited record of fighting for the wellbeing and survival of the koala.

A 1997 international visitor survey found that half the visitors coming to Australia, notably those from Japan, Taiwan and Korea, expressly sought out zoos and wildlife parks. The Australian Tourism Commission noted that 75 per cent of European and Japanese visitors are attracted by natural features and that ‘Koalas top the list of animals’. Given the extreme difficulty of seeing a koala in the wild, parks, sanctuaries and zoos are vital and ‘koala viewing is big business’. ‘Don’t ask me to explain the godlike worship Japanese people have for koalas’, said one tourist guide. ‘They buy books and videos and

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all kind of koala souvenirs, turning their interest into a major industry.’ With equal enthusiasm, four students from Singapore recently summed up the koala phenomenon: ‘We love them – they are simply, simply, simply, simply irresistible!’ Australian zoos, where koalas selected for their ‘niceness’ are placed in the carefully monitored koala enclosures and offer visitors a personal ‘close-up’ experience, have given an enormous fillip to koala popularity, as have the many parks and wildlife sanctuaries dotted across the country. Handling the animals is not allowed in some states, although Tabart argues that the practice is not entirely negative as cuddling a koala can entrench a lifelong feeling for the animal and encourage people to become protectors. The number of overseas zoos that harbour koalas has also grown spectacularly in recent years. While the idea of exporting koalas to foreign zoos drew lively criticism in the 1950s and 1960s from zoologists and animal welfare conservationists worried at the prospect of poorly resourced facilities and animals confined in dank concrete and steel enclosures, the sanction gained for ‘research investigation’ purposes from the national Koala Conference of 1978 spurred international endeavour. Japan, not surprisingly, was one of the first countries to respond, importing its first two koalas in 1983. The following year Tama Zoological Park, Tokyo, acquired four female and two male koalas from the New South Wales government. Three infants were born there, to rapturous applause, across the next

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five years. Two males and three females were subsequently despatched to Higashiyama Zoological Gardens in Nagoya, sister city to Sydney. Since the 1980s seven more zoos have acquired koalas, including Tokyo, Hirakawa Zoo, Kagoshima, Kobe Oji Zoo, Saitama Children’s Zoo, Tennoji Zoo and Kanazawa Zoological Gardens, Yokohama. By 2007, however, the overall number of koalas in Japan had declined, stimulating koala breeding programs in which koala males are lent between zoos to enlarge the population. Ever resourceful, Japanese craftspeople make paper out of koala faeces and jewellers encase faecal pellets in resin. Other Asian countries have joined the koala rush. Chiang Mai Zoo became the first zoo in Thailand to house koalas when four animals were shipped there from New South Wales zoos in 2006 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the king’s accession to the throne. China entered the koala stakes under sanction of the Commonwealth Minister for the Environment that same year. Six koalas were transferred from Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary on the Queensland Gold Coast to the famous Xiangjiang Safari Park in Guangzhou province. Since then, three koalas have given birth, one producing twins, a 1-in-10 000 chance, so rare in captivity that the last twins were born in Taronga Zoo forty years earlier. Australian compliance rules for koala exports are, nonetheless, highly demanding. Foreign zoos are required to have cultivated eighteen different eucalyptus species before receiving the animals (several Japanese zoos reared mini-forests of

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over forty different kinds of eucalypt). The koalas require four months in the sun during spring and summer when the temperature is not higher than 30ºC, and an air-conditioned koala house; and apart from all that, prescribed daily measurements of food intake, weight and droppings must be made. In several cases, koala staff from Asian zoos have pre-trained at Taronga Park Zoo. Despite these precautions and controls, animal welfare groups and the Australian Koala Foundation seriously demur about koala export. The Foundation is outspokenly critical of zoos that focus on exhibiting koalas to draw in large local revenue while contributing nothing to koala conservation in the wild. Outside of Asia, koalas have also been a zoological drawcard. They sit amid the eucalypts in zoos in Toronto, Antwerp, Paris, Vienna, Germany, Belgium, Madrid, Lisbon, Pretoria and Israel and at least eleven zoos in the USA, where the San Diego Zoo has the longest involvement and the greatest reputation in koala breeding. Britain, for all its early interest in the animal, sports only one zoo with a resident koala, at Edinburgh, where, in 2005 – with a negative nod at breeding – two male koalas were transferred from San Diego Zoo. The USA has been an active supporter of the koala. American Express International gave generously to the Commonwealth government’s Koala Conservation Program of 1985 while, in the wake of keen lobbying by the Australia Koala Foundation of the US Fisheries and Wildlife Department

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during the 1990s, the Clinton administration listed the koala as an endangered species to protect it from extinction. It is, however, during the early years of this century, that developments both in koala breeding and koala control have come to prefigure notable changes in koala management approaches and policies in Australia, and by extension overseas. Nothing could be more ‘up close and personal’ than the escalating collection and preservation of koala sperm for artificial insemination in Australia, and on the other side of the spectrum, the move to koala sterilisation. The announcement late in 2006 that a team of scientists from the University of Queensland and the Zoological Society of London, working with three Queensland sanctuaries – Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, David Fleay Wildlife Park and Dreamworld – had been able to extend the shelf-life of koala sperm from two hours in the wild to forty hours in the laboratory flagged a major milestone. The fragility of koala semen initially posed problems, but six ‘test-tube’ babies were born using the diluted semen during 2006 and twenty-five by 2007. In May 2007 the Premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, while visiting the United States, announced that koala semen could now be chilled for seventy-two hours, enabling it to be transported around the world. ‘We are now well on the way’, he said, ‘to achieving our Queensland koala conservation plan to have artificial insemination become the primary method of introducing new genetic diversity into Queensland and to overseas populations of koalas at zoos.’ Riverbanks Zoo in South Carolina has been chosen to trial the technology. 220

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Such programs aim to foster genetic diversity, boost koala numbers in captivity, overcome the infertility effects of disease and stress and, in the words of one biologist, act as an ‘insurance policy’ for the survival of the species. In addition Victoria and South Australia have taken steps to conduct sterilisation trials that offer an alternative to culling or translocating koalas. A long-term contraceptive device, implanted between the shoulderblades of female koalas, is expected to be effective for six to eight years. A second practice, being trialled on Kangaroo Island by the government of South Australia, targets male koalas, sterilising them by inoculation. Wider research in this field continues. With such new invasive approaches, the animal’s flourishing iconic status and a commercial culture that introduces millions of fluffy koala toys (first seen in Australia in the 1930s) into homes across Australia and in billowing numbers overseas, how much can a koala bear? In the midst of all the ‘love-ins’, one of Australia’s most imaginative cartoonists, Patrick Cook, sees the national favourite in a decidedly different light. A latter-day Norman Lindsay with a more probing take on the koala’s character, he perceives it as quite a sardonic and savage little beast. A small angry koala with a pen clenched firmly between his teeth, or in other determined pose, has formed the cartoon signature of his weekly Bulletin column on politics and life. Cook believes – and his masterly, cynical and purposeful little sketches reflect it – that when it comes to koalas, ‘we think we’re looking at them, but they are looking at us!’ 221

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Patrick Cook cartoon of angry koala (‘looking at us’).

Tim Flannery, however, has catalogued the koala (among other Australian fauna) as a vital contributor to international scientific research: ‘In scientific disciplines from reproductive psychology and evolutionary biology to medicine’, he writes, ‘they are hailed as a unique and precious heritage … providing insights into the way the world and we ourselves work.’ It is a resounding testimony. As Gerard Krefft remarked presciently, and in some wonder, in his The Mammals of Australia in 1871, ‘the koala has survived against the odds’. The odds, unquestionably, have sharpened. Yet, riding out centuries of invasion and settlement, with a long memory of the history of the earth, the koala, as we know it, continues to look down from its high perch among the eucalyptus leaves – benign, private, serene, if at times wistfully curious, ready, it appears, to face another unpredictable century.

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Note In pursuing the koala across its long relationship with the Aborigines and during the centuries of white occupation in Australia, and its growing presence as an iconic figure in the national culture, I have used many published and some unpublished sources. I gratefully acknowledge the many works of natural history and of social, historical and literary commentary listed in this select bibliography on which I have drawn. I acknowledge with thanks the permission of Harper Collins to publish an extract from The Magic Pudding, 1918 and 1990. Archer, Michael, Suzanne J. Hand, & Henk Godthelp (2000). Australia’s Lost World. Prehistoric Animals of Riversleigh. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council (1998). National Koala Conservation Strategy. Environment Australia, Canberra. Australian Dictionary of Biography. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1966–2006. Australian Koala Foundation [website]. www.savethekoala.com Barrallier, Francis (1897). Barrallier’s Journal. Journal of the expedition into the interior of New South Wales, by F.

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Barrallier, ensign with the New South Wales Corps. Historical Records of New South Wales, 5: 759. Government Printer, Sydney. Barrett, Charles (1943). Koala: The Story of Australia’s Native Bear. Robertson & Mullens, Melbourne. Bennett, George (1834). Wanderings in New South Wales, Batavia, Pedir Coast, Singapore and China: Being the Journal of a Naturalist in those Countries during 1832, 1833, and 1834. Chapter V. Richard Bentley, London. Bennett, George (1837). A Catalogue of the Specimens of Natural History and Miscellaneous Curiosities deposited in the Australian Museum. James Tegg, Sydney. Bennett, George (1838). ‘Letter to Richard Owen, 14 April 1838’. Owen Papers, British Museum of Natural History and Australian Joint Copying Project, National Library of Australia. Bennett, George (1872). ‘Letter to Prof. Richard Owen, 22 December 1871’. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 9: 314–321. Bergin, T.J. (ed.) (1978). The Koala. Proceedings of the Taronga Symposium on Koala Biology, Management and Medicine. Zoological Parks Board of New South Wales, Sydney. Blainville, Henri Marie de (1816). ‘Prodrome d’une nouvelle distribution systématique du règne animal’. Bulletin des Sciences par la Société Philomathique de Paris, 108: 13–124. Bonyhady, Tim (2000). The Colonial Earth. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

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Brown, Robert (1803–12). ‘Phascolarctos Koala’. Manuscript notes, Zoology Library, British Museum of Natural History, London. Brown, Robert (1897). ‘Letter to Sir Joseph Banks, September 1803’. Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 5: 228. Government Printer, Sydney. Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de (1749–1804). Histoire Naturelle: Générale et Particulière. Paris. Burnet, Noel (1934). The Native Bear Book of Australia. WA Pepperday, Sydney. Caldwell, W.H. (1887). ‘The embryology of Monotremata and Marsupialia. Part I’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B 178: 436–486. Cary, Geoffrey, David Lindenmayer & Stephen Dovers (eds) (2003). Australia Burning. Fire Ecology, Policy and Management. CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne. Cook, Kenneth (1986). The Killer Koala. Tortoiseshell Press, Sydney. Cook, Patrick (1985). Ten Years of Cartoons by Patrick Cook. Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Cork, Steven (1987). ‘Introduction to the Marsupials’. In Koala: Australia’s Endearing Marsupial, (ed. Leonard Cronin). Reed Books, Sydney. Cronin, Leonard (ed.) (1987). Text by M. Archer, S. Cork, S. Hand, S. Phillips & M. Smith. Koala: Australia’s Endearing Marsupial. Reed Books, Sydney.

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Cunningham, Allan (1818). ‘Journal 1818’. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Cunningham, Peter (1966). Two Years in New South Wales [1827], (ed. D.S. Macmillan). Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Cuvier, Georges Baron (1816–17). Le règne animal. Deterville, Paris. Darwin, Charles (1859). On the Origin of Species. John Murray, London. Department of Sustainability and Environment (Vic.) (2004). Victoria’s Koala Management Strategy. Biodiversity and Natural Resources Division, Department of Sustainability and Environment (Vic.), Melbourne. Environment Protection Agency (Qld.) (2005). Nature Conservation (Koala) Conservation and Management Program 2001–2015. EPA Queensland, Brisbane. Eliott, Lydia S. (1939). Little Teddy Bear. Collins, London. Faulkner, A.S. (1923). ‘The life of a native bear (koala) in captivity’. Australian Zoologist, 3(3), 7 June: 112–113. Field, Barron (1819). First Fruits of Australian Poetry. George Howe, Sydney. Flannery, Tim (1994). The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People. Reed Books, Sydney. Fleay, David (1960). Living with Animals. Lansdowne Press, Melbourne. Flinders, Matthew (1814). A Voyage to Terra Australis: Undertaken for the Purpose of Completing the Discovery of that Vast Country, and Prosecuted in the Years 1801, 1802, and 1803 in His Majesty’s Ship the Investigator. G. & W. Nicol, London. 226

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Forbes, W.A. (1881). ‘On some points in the anatomy of the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus)’. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London: 180–195. Franklin, Adrian (2006). Animal Nation: The True Story of Animals and Australia. UNSW Press, Sydney. Gammage, Bill (2002). Australia under Aboriginal Management. 15th Barry Andrews Memorial Lecture, University of New South Wales and Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, 31 October. Gould, John (1845–63). The Mammals of Australia. 3 vols. The author, London. Gould, John (1863). Introduction to the Mammals of Australia. London. Govett, William Romaine (1836). ‘On the animals called “Monkeys” in New South Wales’. The Saturday Magazine, 31 December. Harris, Max & Alison Forbes (1967). The Land that Waited. Lansdowne, Melbourne. Home, Everard (1808). ‘An account of some peculiarities in the anatomical structure of the Wombat, with observations on the female organs of generation.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, 98: 304–312. Howlett, Norma L. (1979). ‘The bear you couldn’t buy: shooting koalas in Queensland 1927’. Bowyang, 1(2), September–October. Hundloe, Tor & Clive Hamilton (1997). Koalas and Tourism: An Economic Evaluation. Australia Institute Discussion Paper No. 13, July, Canberra. 227

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Lindsay, Norman (1918). The Magic Pudding. Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Lindsay, Norman (1965). ‘Conversation with Norman Lindsay by Keith Adam’. Record No. 279770, Oral History Program, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Lindsay, Norman (1978). Norman Lindsay’s Bears, Selected by Keith Wingrove. Macmillan, Melbourne. Lunney, Daniel, Chris A. Urquhart, & Philip Reed (eds) (1990). Koala Summit. Managing Koalas in New South Wales. Proceedings of conference held at the University of Sydney, 7–8 November 1988. New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney. Lunney, Daniel & Chris Dickman (eds) (2002). A Zoological Revolution: Using Native Fauna to Assist in its own Survival. Royal Society of New South Wales/Australian Museum, Sydney. Lunney, D., S.G. Gresser, P.S. Mahon & A. Matthews (2004). ‘Post-fire survival and reproduction of rehabilitated and unburnt koalas’. Biological Conservation, 120: 567–575. Lunney, D., S. Gresser, L.E. O’Neill, A.Matthews & J. Rhodes (2007). ‘The impact of fire and dogs on Koalas at Port Stephens, New South Wales, using population viability analysis’. Pacific Conservation Biology, 13: 189–201. Mabberley, David (1999). Ferdinand Bauer. The Nature of Discovery. Merrill Holberton/Natural History Museum, London. MacKay, C.V. (1940). ‘Biographical note’. In The Action of Muscles, (Colin MacKenzie), 2nd edn. Lewis, London.

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MacKenzie, Colin (1919). The Comparative Anatomy of Australian Mammals. Jenkin Buxton, Melbourne. MacKenzie, Colin (1940). The Action of Muscles, 2nd edn. Lewis, London. Marshall, Alan (1966). The Great Extermination: A Guide to Anglo-Australian Cupidity, Wickedness and Waste. Heinemann, London. McQueen, Humphrey (1978). Social Sketches of Australia, 1888–1975. Penguin, Melbourne. Menkhorst, Peter (2007). ‘Exploited, marooned, re-introduced, contracepted: a history of koala management in Victoria’. In Too Close for Comfort. Contentious Human and Wildlife Encounters, (eds D. Lunney, A. Munn & W. Meikle). Zoological Society of New South Wales, Sydney. Merricak, John R., Michael Archer, Georgina M.Hickey & Michael S.Y. Lee (2006). Evolution and Biogeography of Australasian Vertebrates. Auscipub, Sydney. Moorehead, Alan (1966). The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767–1840. Hamish Hamilton, London. Moyal, Ann (1986). A Bright & Savage Land: Scientists in Colonial Australia. Collins, Sydney. Moyal, Ann (2001). Platypus: The Extraordinary Story of how a Curious Creature Baffled the World. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, and (2004) Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Mozley Moyal, Ann (1976). Scientists in Nineteenth Century Australia: A Documentary History. Cassell Australia, Melbourne.

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Mulvaney, Derek J. & John H. Calaby, (1985). ‘So Much that is New’: Baldwin Spencer 1860–1929. A Biography. University of Melbourne Press, Melbourne. Norman, F.I. & A.D. Young (1980). ‘Short-sighted and doubly short-sighted are they. A brief examination of the game laws of Victoria, 1858–1958’. Journal of Australian Studies, 7, November. Norst, Marlene J. (1989). Ferdinand Bauer: The Australian Natural History Drawings. British Museum of Natural History, London. Organ, Michael (unpublished). ‘The discovery of the koala: Hat Hill (Mount Kembla), New South Wales, 1803’. Owen, Richard (1836). ‘Notes on the anatomy of koala, Phascolarctos fuscus, Desm.’. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, Part 4: 109–113. Owen, Richard (1866–68). On the Anatomy of Vertebrates. 3 vols. Longmans, Green & Co., London. Owen, Richard (1877). Researches on the Fossil Remains of the Extinct Mammals of Australia. J. Erxleber, London. Paterson, William (1804). Letter to Sir Joseph Banks, 10 March, Banks Papers. CY3008, 327–328, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Perry, George (1811). Arcana; or, The Museum of Natural History. London. Phillips, Stephen (1987). ‘The Koala and Mankind’. In Koala: Australia’s Endearing Marsupial, (ed. Leonard Cronin). Reed Books, Sydney.

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Price, John (1895). ‘Journey into the interior of the country New South Wales, January 1798’. Historical Records of New South Wales, 3: 820–821. Government Printer, Sydney. Reed, A.W. (1978). Aboriginal Legends: Animal Tales. 38–39. A.H. & A.W. Reed Pty Ltd. Sydney. Robin, Libby (2003). ‘Collections and the nation’. Historical Records of Australian Science, 14(3): 251–289. Robin, Libby (2007). How a Continent Created a Nation. UNSW Press, Sydney. Robin, Libby (2006). ‘Weird and wonderful. The first objects of the National Historical Collection’. reCollections, Journal of the National Museum of Australia, 1(2). Sharp, Ann (1995). The Koala Book. Pelican, Gretna. St-Hilaire, Etienne Geoffroy (1826). Dictionnaire Classique d’Histoire Naturelle. Paris. Strahan, Ronald (1997). The Incomplete Book of Australian Mammals. Kangaroo Press, Sydney. Strahan, Ronald & R. Martin (1982). ‘The koala: little fact, much emotion’. In Species at Risk: Research in Australia (eds Richard H. Groves & William D.L. Ride). Australian Academy of Science, Canberra. Strzelecki, Paul Edmund de (1845). Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, London. Symonds, Sally (1999). Healesville Sanctuary: A Future for Australian Wildlife. Pizzey Walker Arcadia, Melbourne.

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Tabart, Deborah (1990). ‘The Australian Koala Foundation’s role in koala conservation’. Koalas: Research for Management. Proceedings of the Brisbane Koala Symposium, 22–23 September. Thomas, Sarah (ed.) (2002). The Encounter, 1802. Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Troughton, Ellis (1941). Furred Animals of Australia. Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Tyndale-Biscoe, Hugh (2005). Life of Marsupials. CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne. Vallance, T.S., D.T. Moore & E.W. Groves (eds) (2001). Nature’s Investigator: The Diary of Robert Brown in Australia 1801–1805. Australian Biological Resources Study, Canberra. Walsh, Grahame L. (1985). Didane the Koala: from a Legend of the Bidjara People of the Upper Warrego. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia. Waterhouse, G.R. (1841). Mammalia. Marsupialia or Pouched Animals. Vol XI: 295–297. The Naturalist’s Library, Edinburgh. Waterhouse, G.R. (1846). A Natural History of the Mammalia. Containing the Order Marsupiata, or Pouched Animals. Vol. 1: 259–264. Balliere, London. Watts, Peter, Jo Anne Pomfrett, & David Mabberley (1997). An Exquisite Eye: The Australian Flora & Fauna Drawings 1801–1820 of Ferdinand Bauer. Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney.

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Wheeler, Alwynne (1993). ‘The zoological manuscripts of Robert Brown’. Archives of Natural History, 20(3): 417ff. Wheeler, Alwynne & D.T. Moore (1994). ‘The animal drawings of Ferdinand Bauer in the Natural History Museum, London’. Archives of Natural History, 21(3): 309–344. Wood Jones, Frederic (1923–24). The Mammals of South Australia. Government Printer, Adelaide.

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ILLUSTR ATIONS Page 5

Drawing of the flightless emu and its egg by George Raper, 1791. Ink and watercolour; 47.6 x 31.5 cm. Inscribed ‘Emu of Port Jackson. References – 1. A body feather of the natural size – 2. Its egg 5 inches by 3 3/4 – from the only one yet seen.’ Reproduced courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London.

13

Reproduced courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

18

Ferdinand Bauer, pencil drawing. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

27

Engraving from a portrait by H.W. Pickergill. Linnean Society of New South Wales. Reproduced courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

38

George Perry. The Koala, or New Holland Sloth. Engraving, Arcana, or the Museum of Natural History, London, 1810. Reproduced courtesy of National Library of Australia.

44

Engraving from G. Cuvier, Le Règne Animal, vol. 4, Paris, 1817. Reproduced courtesy of National Library of Australia.

62

William Govett, Sketches of New South Wales, The Saturday Magazine, 31 December 1836. Reproduced courtesy of National Library of Australia. 235

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68

Dr George Bennett. Lithograph. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

89

John Gould, oil painting by Henry Williams, c. 1839. Reproduced courtesy of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

104

Richard Owen, Researches on the Fossil Remains of the Extinct Mammals of Australia. Reproduced courtesy of National Library of Australia.

129

Reproduced courtesy of the John Oxley Library, Brisbane.

130

Illustration from the cover of the Australian journal Bowyang vol 1 (2), September–October 1979. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

134

‘The Boy from Manly’ published in Lone Hand. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia. Copyright H.C. & A. Ghad.

143

Original pen and ink drawing for The Magic Pudding 1917. Reproduced courtesy of the Dixon Library, State Library of New South Wales. Copyright H.C. & A. Glad.

149

Photograph by George Serras, National Museum of Australia. Reproduced courtesy of the National Museum of Australia.

149

Photograph by George Serras, National Museum of Australia. Reproduced courtesy of the National Museum of Australia.

158

Noel Burnet. The Native Bear Book of Australia, W.A. Pepperday, Sydney. 1934. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia. 236

Il l us t r at io ns

162

Lydia S. Eliott, Little Teddy Bears, 1939. Drawing by Alan Wright.

165

The Age 12 May 1938. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

168

F. Lewis, Victorian Naturalist, vol. 70, March 1954.

182

Photograph by Sam Hood, 1938. Reproduced courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

185

Hugh Tindale Biscoe, Life of Marsupials, p. 233, CSIRO Publishing.

191

Reproduced courtesy of John Manger.

193

Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

202

Reproduced courtesy of Patrick Cook

216

Courtesy of Deborah Tabart.

222

Reproduced courtesy of Patrick Cook

Colour plate credits Plate 1

J.W. Lewin, watercolour on paper, 1803. Reproduced courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

Plate 2

View upon the Nepean River at the Cow Pastures, New South Wales. Joseph Lycett, c. 1775–1828 (published 1825). Print, aquatint. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

Plate 3

Plate 4 from a collection of 49 original watercolour drawings of animals by Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826), from the H.M.S. Investigator expedition to Australia, 237

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1801–1803. Reproduced courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London. Plate 4

Plate 7 from a collection of 49 original watercolour drawings of animals by Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826), from the H.M.S. Investigator expedition to Australia, 1801–1803. Reproduced courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London.

Plate 5

This ruminative koala painted by Dr James Stuart, naturalist and Surgeon Superintendent of the Quarantine Station at Sydney’s North Head, was one of a series of artistically accurate depictions Stuart made of animals living in the sea and woods around the station which he bequeathed in 1842 on his early death to his friend W.S. McLeay.

Plate 6

Joseph Lycett, c.1817. From Drawings of the natives and scenery of Van Diemen’s Land, 1830. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

Plate 7

John Gould, Koala, Phascolarctos cinereus. Coloured lithograph, J. Gould, The Mammals of Australia, London, 1863. Engraving by H.C. Richter. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

Plate 8

Bunyip Bluegum. Reproduced courtesy of the Norman Lindsay Society & Museum. Falconbridge, N.S.W. Copyright H.C. & A Ghad.

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INDEX

Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council 201 Australian Capital Territory 173–4 Australian fauna British view 40, 51–2, 55–6, 132 national pride in 132, 144 naturalist’s neglect 125, 126, 155–6 Australian Institute of Anatomy 154 Australian Koala Foundation 201, 204, 205–6, 219–220 Australian Museum 93, 97, 101, 206

Aborigines 4, 8–9, 86 aid to European explorers 7, 9, 56, 58–61, 90–1 dreamtime stories 73–80 fire burning 83, 85, 212, Plate 6 history 71–2, 75–6, 81 hunting 35, 59–61, 80–1, 91 land management 83–5, 212 impact on koala populations 81–83 knowledge 6–7, 75, 76 koala names 6–7, 9, 11, 13, 20, 47, 78 policy needs for traditional knowledge 212 see also Bennett, Dr. George; Gould, John Acclimatization Societies 120–1, 132, 156 Angas, G.F. 93 Archibald, J.F. 133 Arnold, Joseph 53–4 Atkinson, Louisa 121 Australian Association for the Advancement of Science 125–6, 155–6

Banks, Sir Joseph 2–3, 8, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 23, 26, 29, 33, 36–7, 67 Barrallier, Francis 8–9, 80–1 Barrett, Charles 114–5, 184–5 Baudin, Nicholas 30 Bauer, Ferdinand 12, 16, 18, 19, 22–4, 26–9, 33 Beattie, Peter 220 Beaumont, William and James Waller 156 239

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Commonwealth 176, 177, 201 criticism of 206 export policy National Koala Conservation Strategy 211 see also Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council Cook, Captain James 1, 2, 17, 29, 37 Cook, Patrick 202, 221, 222 Cook, Steven 207–8 Cotton, H.V. 132 creationism 63, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 111 Cronin, Leonard 189 Cunningham, Allan 56–7 Cunningham, Peter 118–9 Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary 220 Cuvier, Georges 12, 43–5, 46

Bennett, Dr. George 55, 65–9, 72, 82, 89, 108 co-operation with Owen 94, 96–7 Bergin, T.J. 173, 178 Billy Bluegum 135, 136–7 Blainville, Henri de 41–3, 45 British Association for the Advancement of Science 109 Brown, Robert 12, 15–7, 20–3, 24–6, 27, 31–2, 33, 36, 52 Browne, Thomas 55 Bulletin 133, 135,136, 221 Buffon, Georges 39–40, 58, Bullock’s Museum 37, 41 Bunyip Bluegum 137–138, 140–2, Plate 8 Burnet, Noel 128, 157–8 Burgman, Mark 208 caecum 64, 75, 95, 106, 188 Caldwell, William 107Cary, Geoffrey 212 Cazneaux, Harold 163 children, as protectionists 164–5, 169 Chlamydia psittaci 189 Clarke, Rev. W.B. 125 Clift, William 99 Cobb, Vincent 148, 149 Collins, David 4, 89

Dampier, William 6 Darwin, Charles 61–4, 67, 96, 99, 100, 102, 108, 189–90 Darwin, Erasmus 53 David Fleay Wildlife Park 160–1, 220 Desmarest, Nicholas 45, 46 Dickman, Chris 206

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I n de x

Grafton 209 Pillilga Nature Reserve 210 policy for 221–2 Port Stephens 290, 210–11 see also Aborigines Flinders, Matthew 15–17, 24 fossils 48, 99–101, 196–8 Diptrodon Litokoala 197, 199 Madakoala 197, 199 Nimiokoala 199 Nototherium 48, 101, 104 Perikoala 197, 199 Zygomaturus 104 Forbes, W.E. 105–7, 199 Franklin, Adrian 51, 56, 132 Franklin Sir John and Lady 88 French expedition 30 fur trade 116–9, 123–5, 157–8, 168, 171, see also New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria

Diprotodon 48, 101,104, 104–5, 197, 198–9, see also fossils Dovers, Stephen 212 Dreamtime stories 73–80 Dreamworld 220 Durrell, Gerald 184 Dutch navigators 6 Dyson, Edward 137, 163 Eames, Bob 213 Edwards, Frank L. 163–4 Elliot, Lydia S. 163, 185 emu 4, 5 Endeavour 1, 2, 6 European settlers and impact on landscape 117–121, 122, 147, 160, 203–4, 207–8 and slaughter of fauna 93, 113, 117, 122, 123 evolution 62–4, 99–100, 11, 189–90, 196–200, see also Darwin, Charles Eyre, Edward 84

Gammage, Bill 71, 84–6 Gilbert, John 87, 88 Gould, John 87–93, Plate 7 Goldfuss, G.A. 45, 46 Govett, William 57–61, 62 Greiner, Premier Nick 180

Faulkner, A.S. 156–7 Field, Baron 54, 65 Flannery, Tim 71, 101, 184, 222 Fleay, David 159–161, 212 fires 122, 195–6, 209 Framlingham Forest 209, 214–5

Hallstrom, Sir Edward 176 Hancock, Keith 117

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behaviour 33–6, 90, 103–4, 113–6, 163, 179, 186–7, 190, 193 biology 7, 21–2,36, 49, 95–8, 103, 105–7, 110, 147–9, 179, 181–4, 186, 194 brain 106, 184–5 in captivity 11, 66, 105–6, 114, 115–6, 156–7, 158 classification 25, 36, 39–40, 41–2, 45–6, 49 diet 67, 77, 159–60, 187–8, 189, 198 evolution, 196–200, see also Darwin mating 191–2 sperm preservation 220–1 status 164, 180, 200–1, 206, 216–7 sterilization 220, 221 see also Aborigines; fossils. Koala Hospital, Port Macquarie 171, 209 Koala Park 157–9 koala sanctuaries see Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary; David Fleay Wildlife Park; Healesville Sanctuary; Koala Park; Lone Pine Sanctuary; Tasmania; Western Australia.

Handasyde, Kathrine 194 Harris, Alexander 85 Healesville 153, 157, 159, 160 Home, Everard 34, 47, 57, 92 Hooker, Joseph 63 Howlett, Norma 126–7, 128 Humboldt, Alexander 16 Hunter, Governor John 4, 8, 10, 11 Huxley, T.H. 49, 87, 108, 147 Iredale, Tom 31 Jones, Sir Robert 150 kangaroo 4, 37, 54, 69, 90, 111, 149 extinct forms 101, 132 Kangaroo Island see South Australia Kellert, Mark 208 King, Governor Philip 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 23 Krefft, Gerard 101–4, 222 koala aggression 213–4, 221 anatomy Plate 3 appearance, early accounts of 7, 10, 20–2, 35, 37–9, 42, 43–4, 47–8, 56–7, 58, 66, 163

242

I n de x

applications of koala shoulder 148–151 specimen collection 151–3, 154 McLeay, Alexander 64–6 McLeay, W.S. Plate 5 McQueen, Humphrey 123–4 management policies 178, 180, 200, 203, 204–5 problems 200–2, 207–8 research on 194 ‘zoological revolution’ 206–7 see also Commonwealth; New South Wales; Queensland; South Australia; Victoria Marshall, Alan 82–3, 119–120, 124 Melbourne Zoo 156–7, 159 Menkhorst, Peter 167, 203, 204 Mitchell, Surveyor-General Thomas 57, 84, 120 Moorehead, Alan 1 Mueller, Ferdinand von 125

Koala Summit 1998 180 Koala Symposium 1975 177–8 Lamb, Charles 55 Lee, Anthony K. 194 Leichhardt, Ludwig 84 Lesueur, CharlesAlexandre 30 Lewin John 12–3, 14, 23, 45–6, Plate 1 Lewis, Frederick 122, 166 Lindemayer, David 208, 212 Lindsay, Norman 131, 144, 145, 161 cartoons 133, 134, 1135 see also The Magic Pudding Linnaeus, Carl 5, 23 Linnean Society of London 6, 32 Linnean system 5, 52–3 Lone Hand 135, 137 Lone Pine Sanctuary 155, 157, 159, 208–9 Lycett, Joseph Plate 2, Plate 6 Lydekker, Robert 121–2 Lyell, Charles 63 Lunney, Dan 201, 206–7 Mabberley, David 19 Mackay, C.V. 150 MacKenzie, Lady 153 MacKenzie, Sir Colin 146–154, 155

National Koala Conservation Strategy 203 Nepean River 41–2, 46, Plate 2

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K OA L A

New South Wales community criticism 170, 175 destruction and fragmentation of habitat 169, 170 distribution 170, 204 fur trade 123–5, 168–9 hunting 123, 169 koala status in 200 legislation 126, 168–9, 170 protective policies 205 see also fire

policy see Commonwealth; New South Wales; Queensland; South Australia; Victoria Price, John 7–8, 9 Queensland 159, 160–1 control breeding 220 distribution of habitat 171–2 fur trade 126–9, 129–30, 131, 144, 171 hunting 127–128, 130 impact of settlement 160, 171–2 Koala Management Strategy 203, 204 koala status 172, 200 legislation 126–7, 128, 171 P. cinereus adustus 126, 186 translocation 172

Norst, Marlene 28 O’Brien, Lorraine 215 Oldfield, Thomas 126 Owen, Sir Richard 67–8, 73, 94–102, 106, 108, 150, 184, 197, 199 Palmer, Vance 127 Parkinson, Sydney 29 Peron, François 30 Paterson, LieutenantGovernor William 11, 32–3, 34–5, 56 Perry, George 37–41, 45, 56 Phillip, Governor Arthur 3 platypus 4, 8, 13, 41, 42, 53, 61–2 , 91, 96, 98, 160 classification 34, 108–11 fossil record 198

Raper, George 4, 5 Riversleigh 197, 198 Robertson, George 139 Robin, Libby 147, 151 Royal Society of New South Wales 111 Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales 206 Sanson, Gordon 94 Saturday Magazine 57–8. 62

244

I n de x

Tenison-Woods, Julian 125 Troughton, Ellis 123 The Magic Pudding 137–9, 140–3, 144, Plate 8 Tyndale-Biscoe, Hugh 188, 195

Schaap, David 144, 213 Scot, Harriet and Helena 103 Sharp, Ann 186, 195 Shaw, George 53S Skottowe, Thomas 55 Smith, Bernard 19–20 Smith, J.F. 165 Solander, Carl 29 South Australia Kangaroo Island 172, 173, 221 koala’s disappearance from 126 koala status 200 legislation 172 sterilization and contraceptive trials 221 translocation into 172–3 Spencer, Walter Baldwin 86, 146–7 Stead, David 129, 176 Stearn, William 28 St. Hilaire, Geoffroy 42, 43, 46 Strahan, Ronald 190 Strzelecki, Paul 117 Stuart, Dr. James Plate 4 Sydney Gazette, 10, 11

Victoria distribution 12, 166, 204 hunting 122–3 koala management strategy 203 legislation 126, 166 P. cinereus victor 123 sterilization trials 221 translocations 165–8 see also fires Wall, Dorothy 161–3 Waterhouse George 93 Waterhouse, G.R. 46–8, 92, 96 Watling, Thomas 4, 55 Wellington Caves 99, 102–3 104 Western Australia 173, 199 Wheeler, Alwynne 25 White, John 4, 55 Whitley, Gilbert 31 Wilson, John 7 Wilson’s Promontory 122–3, 167 Wingrove, Keith 136

Tabart, Deborah 205, 215–6 Taronga Park 157, 219 Tasmania 173

245

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Wood Jones, Frederic 115–6, 172 wombat 6, 7, 96, 123, 126, 149, 150, 151 affinity with koala 43, 95, 97, 106, 199 Wright, Judith 129–30

zoos (international) 156, 157, 217, 218–19 China 218 Edinburgh 219 Europe 219 Israel 219 Japan 217–8 Spain 219 South Africa 219 Thailand 218 USA 177, 219, 220

Zoological Society of London 25, 37, 46, 47, 94, 105, 220

246