The New Nature Read online

  Today most conservationists in Australia begrudgingly accept that kangaroos need culling. The Australian Conservation Foundation book Recovering Ground (1991) devotes a chapter to roo harvesting. As an alternative to letting cows and sheep ruin the land, harvesting roo meat makes a lot of sense. But overseas the bogey of extinction still bobs up. In 1998 the vegetarian group Viva howled when British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s put kangaroo meat in its stores. Protestors milled outside stores in kangaroo suits and hats strung with corks. Their leader, Juliet Geffatley, claimed in a report ‘The Killing of Kangaroos for Meat’ that four roo species have gone extinct (not true), and warned that the red kangaroo could ‘follow them into oblivion within two years’.2 That old refrain! Paul McCartney supports Viva. I’ll bet neither he nor Juliet has ever heard of endangered spider-orchids or bandicoots.

  Nothing special about macropods predisposes them to harm habitats. Deer in England and North America cause similar woes, and Africa’s elephants are worse. Herbivores often run amok when predators are checked and water is supplied. Kangaroos and wallabies can exploit so much of what we do: felling trees, creating edges, damming water, fertilising pastures, growing crops, grazing cows, controlling predators and translocating threatened species. The point about predator control is significant. For tens of thousands of years the dominant predators in Australia were people and dogs. We cannot hope to manage the land properly without first acknowledging that fact. It’s a point to keep in mind as we turn to the perils facing our trees.

  1  This is the combined figure for red kangaroos, western greys and wallaroos.

  ‘For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?’

  Luke 23:31

  Koalas. Are they endangered treasures or tree-killing pests? Should we be cuddling them, or culling them? In Australia today these are hard questions that need careful answers.

  I first heard about koalas harming trees many years ago when I visited Kangaroo Island, where some of the eucalypts were so ragged they looked as if a cyclone had hit them. But not until I beheld Framlingham Forest in western Victoria did the problem fully confront me. Framlingham, 1200 hectares, was made a hunting reserve for Aborigines in 1861. To settler James Dawson it was ‘a miserable spot . . . selected apparently for its bad cold clay soil, swampy nature, and for the amount of labor necessary to render it capable of growing a cabbage’. Today it’s a treasured oasis of forest bounded by miles and miles of parched paddocks, but one blighted by koalas freed there thirty years ago.

  In February 2001, with friend Stephen Page, I went to the community centre to meet community chairperson Herbie Harradine who, with mother Hope and daughters in tow, led us a kilometre or two to the forest. An eerie vista awaited us. All the eucalypts at the forest edge were dead. We stared at the skeletons of a hundred trees. We drove on further, through stands of intact stringybarks alternating with bands of dead trees. Herbie slowed down to point out koalas in trees. We reached a picnic ground. All the trees to the south were dead. Beyond them lay the fold that holds the Hopkins River, and beyond that dry paddocks. This view didn’t exist a few years ago.

  ‘You’d come up here three or four years ago and see three or four koalas in a tree,’ said Herbie. Almost every manna gum (Eucalyptus viminalis) and swamp gum (Eucalyptus ovata) has since died. The koalas ran out of leaves in 1998. The dying forest featured on A Current Affair a couple of years ago, with elder Lenny Clarke saying, ‘You’re seeing these animals starve before your eyes and there’s virtually nothing you can do about it, and it’s very cruel.’ The Aboriginal owners weren’t allowed to harm koalas released into what was originally an Aboriginal hunting reserve. The government reponded to the controversy by shifting more than 1000 koalas to other reserves. Environment department spokesperson Peter Goldstraw admitted on TV that koalas should not have gone to Framlingham in the first place: ‘So yeah, it’s the department’s fault.’ Biologists Roger Martin and Kathrine Handasyde complained in 1999 that ‘many thousands of koalas undoubtedly starved to death and hundreds of hectares of remnant eucalypt forest were degraded or destroyed’. Herbie Harradine wants the forest managed better in future. ‘The bush has got to be for everything,’ he said. ‘I reckon the bush is more important than the koalas. It’s funny, you see on TV, the koala is endangered. I just wonder what’s running through the elders’ heads, like Mum,’ he pondered. ‘It must be hard for her to see the bush like this.’

  After visiting Framlingham, Steve and I drove south towards the coast. Miles from the forest, we spied something in the weeds by the road that made us gasp – a koala. It galloped off and crouched by a hay bale. Then it climbed, with obvious distaste, up an old Monterey cypress near a house. A koala in a pine tree – what a sight! Hungry koalas often strike out from Framlingham on futile expeditions. Most of the manna gums on nearby farms are already dead. This koala had crossed many treeless paddocks on its quest. It looked to be miles from any food. It would probably starve to death.

  When Hope Harradine was a child, there were no koalas at Framlingham. It wasn’t until 1970 that the government released thirty-seven. I surprised Herbie by telling him they had come from far-off French Island, beyond Melbourne. French Island itself had no koalas when explorers found it in 1802. Island legend says they were taken over about 1898 by naturalist Jim Peters of Corinella. He probably took them over for safety after bushfires ravaged the mainland. They proliferated, as koalas do. In the 1920s one keen-eyed resident counted 2300 along 5 miles of road. Gum trees were dying. To save them, farmers sought permits to cull. The government resisted, turning to translocation instead. Residents were paid two shillings and sixpence for every bagged ‘bear’ they delivered. In 1923 fifty koalas were taken to nearby Phillip Island and six to South Australia. In later years koalas were taken to tiny (1000 hectare) Quail Island, just north of French Island.

  Ronald Munro knew Quail Island as a boy. When he returned in 1943, after three years serving in World War II, a shocking sight awaited him. ‘Long before I got within a mile of the island I could see something was wrong,’ he explained in a Melbourne newspaper. The island was brown. Most of the trees were dead. It was ‘a scene of desolation, populated with emaciated bears . . . Hundreds of starving bears, many with little babies clinging to their backs, were sitting up dead trees or slowly moving about in search of food. In some trees, where there were still a few stray leaves, bears were fighting for the meagre meal. Some bears were walking aimlessly about on the ground, too exhausted to climb any more in search of food.’

  Newspapers railed against the tragedy, and a graphic film was shown in a Melbourne theatre. But the Victorian government used wartime censorship to stop the film going abroad, claiming that it was ‘a common sight to see koalas sunning themselves on dead timber’. But soon it was embarrassed into action, removing all 1314 surviving koalas to mainland forests.

  And so it went on. In the years since then more than 15000 koalas have come off French and Phillip islands for relocation to 125 sites in Victoria, with some going to South Australia, New South Wales and the ACT. The two islands became koala farms, ‘teddy bear’ factories pumping out fecund colonising stock. Most of Victoria’s koalas owe their descent to the few founders placed on French Island a century or so ago. They are very inbred.

  Koalas have been returned to forests that lost them to diseases, fires or hunting, and we should be grateful for that. But Framlingham-style problems have erupted in many places. Victoria and South Australia are now bursting with tree-killing marsupials. A koala can down a kilogram of leaves in a day. Colonies can double every three years, and if left unchecked by predators and disease they can decimate whole forests. Koalas will strip a tree until it dies.

  Most koalas in South Australia live where they don’t belong. Kangaroo Island’s stock came from French Island in the 1920s, their descendants going much later to Eyre Peninsula. Hybrid Queensland–Kangaroo Island koalas live in the River Murray area, and the Adelaide hills have
their own complicated hybrids. In none of these places are koalas native. They were originally confined to the south-east corner of the state.

  Kangaroo Island’s eighteen original ‘bears’ had multiplied by 1996 to 5000. Trees in national parks and on farms were dying, and the South Australian government appointed a task force to find a solution. The team, consisting of biologists, a conservationist and an animal welfare person, reached a unanimous conclusion: to cull up to 2000 koalas. ‘Over-browsing of remnant habitat by introduced Koalas is the major Koala management issue in South Australia today,’ they declared.

  But Environment Minister David Wotton was outraged. ‘Is South Australia going to be recognised as the state that permits the repeated shooting of koalas? That would be an international incident.’ Tour operators and the federal government agreed. Australia would lose face in America and Japan. But most South Australians accepted the idea; a poll found two-thirds of them in favour of culling. Statements of support came from the Conservation Council of South Australia, the Australian Academy of Science, the Marsupial Society of Australia, the Australian Institute of Biology, and Eco-Action Kangaroo Island.

  The government instead launched into a very expensive program to sterilise up to 2000 koalas. In a fifteen-minute operation costing $136 a pop, koalas were neutered and returned to the wild. It was an option no-one liked. Sterilised koalas can still kill trees. And Michelle Grady of the Conservation Council was disgusted by the overall cost. ‘That money would have made a significant contribution to threatened species protection in a state that spends very little on it.’ The Australian Koala Foundation which, like everyone else, would like to see more trees planted, proposed that chlamydia, a disease that renders koalas infertile, be introduced, a solution that was condemned as cruel. Translocation to other states was ruled out because no-one else wanted the koalas either. ‘We have got nowhere to put ours, let alone yours,’ said Victorian government expert Peter Menkhorst. Sterilisation has failed to fix Kangaroo Island’s koala problem, and experts are now calling for much larger culls.

  In Victoria tree death is a problem at Framlingham, Tower Hill, Sandy Point and South Gippsland, and on several islands that were originally koala-free. ‘Where it occurs it’s a bloody nuisance,’ Peter told me. He is hopeful that larger forests will withstand destruction. Leading koala expert Roger Martin doesn’t think so. He worries about the vast Strathbogie Ranges, where burgeoning koala populations may already exceed 100000. He fears complete disaster there, not only for koalas and trees but also for possums, gliders and birds. Peter admitted to me that large forests may go next, nominating the Otway Ranges as a concern. ‘It is possible that we will have a bloody nightmare in the future.’ Roger views culling as the kindest solution. He hates seeing trees die and koalas starve. But culling is deemed politically unacceptable. Peter is pinning his hopes on new cheap methods of fertility suppression.

  Koalas have been killing trees for a very long time. There was a cull in a national park back in 1915. Naturalist Albert Le Souef reported in 1925 that koalas ‘are very thick in the Victorian National Park on Wilsons Promontory, where they have to be reduced owing to their killing out the food trees’. That cull provoked no emotion, but times have changed. Plenty of culling still goes on, but it’s done surreptitiously by farmers to save their trees.

  It’s a curious fact that no koalas were seen during the first decade of white settlement in Australia. Convicts and soldiers toiled in Sydney’s forests hewing trees, hunting game, cutting thatch and harvesting sarsaparilla, currants and greens. They soon saw dingoes, emus, possums, gliders and native rats, but ten years passed before a koala was spied up a tree – in 1798. Four years later the feet of a ‘monkey’ – ‘colo’ to the Aborigines – were obtained. But another year passed before a whole koala was procured, an event so singular it was enshrined in colonial history. Here is Daniel Dickens Mann, writing in 1811: ‘The Koolah, or Sloth, a singular animal of the Opossum species, having a false belly, was found by the natives, and brought into the town alive, on the 10th of August, 1803.’ Sydney was already fourteen and a half years old.

  These animals – koolas, colos, sloths, monkeys, opossums, or whatever name they were known by – were evidently scarce when Sydney was settled. They obviously weren’t living at the densities seen recently – in the 1970s, for instance, 123 koalas were counted in scraps of bushland near Palm Beach. The best explanation for past scarcity is Aboriginal hunting. Koalas are sluggish and easy to find: big meat larders tucked up in trees. No other animal sleeps by day in view of hungry eyes. Koalas were easier to secure than other game. Humans were their main enemies, exacting a much greater toll than dingoes, pythons or eagles. In the aeons before people reached Australia, koalas were probably taken by marsupial lions and hot fires. Rarely do they show up in the fossil record.

  When Aborigines lost their lands, koalas were free to increase. In 1844 both koalas and lyrebirds were said to be multiplying where tribes were declining. Harry Parris had the same idea in a later era. Growing up along Victoria’s Goulburn River in the 1880s, he remembered crying koalas stirring his childhood sleep. Then Parris learned of an earlier settler, in the 1850s, who went for three years before seeing a koala. Intrigued, he pored over old accounts of the district, beginning with explorer Major Mitchell. ‘I carefully read over twenty books and not one of those men saw a bear in the Goulburn country,’ he found. Yet a settler in 1868 could shoot five in one tree. ‘So I think I can say there were no bears on the Goulburn when the white men arrived,’ Parris concluded, ‘and I believe this is because they were an easy meal for an aborigine . . . I therefore contend that the bears increased as the blacks decreased, and in the fifties and sixties they spread over a greatly increased area and apparently lived and thrived in red-gum country . . .’ Koalas in the past were scarce throughout their range; explorers and pioneers seldom saw them. John Gould said they could ‘rarely be detected’.

  Trade in koala furs boomed in the late nineteenth century, by which time koalas had become common enough to kill. A million skins were sold in Queensland in 1919 alone. That vast trade can’t be reconciled with early accounts of the koala’s scarcity unless we assume an exploding population. The slaughter that so concerned early conservationists was only possible because Aborigines had stopped harvesting. One hunter had replaced another. This point was conceded at a koala summit in 1988 by leading conservationist Vince Serventy. Koalas have enjoyed two booms: one after Aborigines were disposessed, and another beginning in the 1930s when legal protection began.

  This history of the koala is the version leading experts endorse. To write it I drew upon the prize-winning book The Koala (1999) by Roger Martin and Kathrine Handasyde (a good read), and also upon Peter Menkhorst’s Mammals of Victoria (1995). Meanwhile the Australian Koala Foundation claims that koalas are dying out. They can’t understand why the federal government won’t list them as threatened. We have leading biologists such as Tim Flannery calling for the culling of something the AKF insists is endangered. It’s a controversy most greenies and biologists steer clear of, because emotions run so hot. The AKF has conceded that koalas are killing trees in the south, but worries about koala declines in parts of Queensland and New South Wales where lowland forests are giving way to farms and homes. Trees remain on the hills but koalas need the lusher gums on river flats to get them through drought. Here is the AKF newsletter for April 1998:

  People who don’t have much experience with conservation are incredulous with disbelief when they hear it. Some think we’re exaggerating about it. It should be a national outrage but people find it too hard to believe.

  There is no law that truly protects the KOALA. One can be put up on charges for intentionally ‘harming’ a koala but there is almost no penalty for killing an entire population by clearing a patch of bush.

  This is true, but it’s also true for most animals. Conservationists live with the pain of knowing that people keep destroying what so many other species need. We co
uld extend our moral concerns and treat other species better, but that would mean curbing our indulgent way of life. Koala activists want us to expand moral rights just to koalas. The AKF is lobbying for a national koala Act. But why pursue this and not a platypus Act or a bell-frog Act or Acts for everything? Why privilege humans and koalas above all else? Should governments divert funds away from endangered species into koala protection, which is what happens? Sure, koalas in some places are dying out, but so are most species. In central Australia brushtail possums are vanishing (a real tragedy), and on Lord Howe Island pied currawongs are now critically endangered. Even grey kangaroos are doing badly in Tasmania. Australia is bursting at the seams with genuine threatened species. Venting moral outrage so selectively seems un-Australian to me, a retreat from egalitarianism. But I suppose that for many Australians koalas symbolise nature. Treat them well and we can pretend we treat nature well. Harm a koala and the illusion collapses.

  Roger Martin believes koalas capture our hearts because they remind us of babies and teddy bears. The koala’s head–body ratio, 1:3, matches that of a one-year old baby. Pictures of koalas beside human babies have appeared in koala books along with text about the ‘teddy bear syndrome’ and ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ for affection. A koala in a tree is really a baby on a mother’s hip. Koalas are cuddly, slow, visible by day, with a flattened face and high forehead. To harm them seems inhuman. But harm them we must, unless better sterilisation techniques emerge soon. We can’t keep losing trees and letting koalas die cruel deaths.

  Koalas are only one agent of tree death in Australia today. Wherever we fragment forests or take out timber, remaining trees may die – from mammals, insects, plants or disease. Sometimes a foreign disease is culpable (Phytophthora and Mundulla yellows), or rising salt, but often the culprit is native. The problem is often labelled ‘dieback’, but the causes vary. Bell miners and psyllid bugs we considered before, and some of the other culprits rate a mention here.