White Beech: The Rainforest Years (52 page)

When the winter solstice is past, the male antechinus begins to think about sex, and then about nothing but sex. He forgets to eat, prowling the neighbourhood incessantly, desperately seeking a receptive female. Stress hormones drain his body of muscle and fat. His immune system breaks down. When he meets his receptive female he acquits himself of a bout of acrobatic sexual intercourse that may last up to twelve hours, until he rolls off dead. Of all the possible adaptations to a harsh environment this seems one of the harshest. In the laboratory scientists succeeded in keeping male antechinuses alive after mating, only to discover that when the season began the next year they produced no semen. Their testes were shrivelled ‘a bit like those of 80- or 90-year-old men’, according to zoologist Pat Woolley. Woolley is deservedly famous for her work on the morphology of the dasyurid penis, which resulted in the removal of five of twelve antechinus species and their identification as members of new genera, because of basic structural differences in penis shape.

The male antechinus having fulfilled his reproductive duty is not allowed to hang around while his mate gestates her dozen young, which travel through her fur from vagina to pouch after about a month, stay feeding in the pouch for five weeks, and are then left in the nest while she forages on her own. After three months they will be weaned, unless she eats them first. The female antechinus does not eat her offspring because she is hungry. If she eats any, she will eat either females or males, never both. It is thought that raising males, who grow faster, may be less onerous for her, while raising females who will be around when next she comes into season will diminish her own chances of successful mating. As she will not live for a third season, the issue becomes unimportant in her second. In 1960
Antechinus flavipes
was bred in the laboratory to see if it could serve as a laboratory animal; it was deemed too difficult to handle and too slow to reproduce, and so escaped that fate (Marlow).

The Common Planigale
(
Planigale maculata
) is another, slightly bigger, carnivorous marsupial mouse that lives in the rainforest and never comes into the house. It is not, as is claimed on many a website, the world’s smallest marsupial.

Three species of gliders have been found in the Cave Creek Forest, the Sugar Glider (
Petaurus breviceps
), the Squirrel Glider (
P. norfolcensis
) and the Yellow-bellied Glider (
P. australis
). The odd thing about all of these is that people who consider themselves to be animal-lovers are prepared to keep these flying creatures grounded in captivity. The Sugar Glider is the smallest and commonest of the Australian species. By spreading its patagium, the membrane that stretches from its fifth finger to its first toe, as it launches itself, the airborne Sugar Glider can travel up to 150 metres through the air, steering itself by altering the angle of its legs and tail. It is a highly social animal, living in family groups of up to eight adults plus the young of the current season’s mating, and very active, foraging for up to 80 per cent of its waking time. This wonderful creature is now being bred in numbers for the American pet trade. A pet glider will never know the joy of flight and nights spent foraging in the scented canopy.

The Squirrel Glider, slightly bigger and slightly less cute than the Sugar Glider, is not so far being bred as a pet, but it is kept in captivity. According to the Mammal Society of Australia ‘A group of up to 4 Squirrel Gliders can quite happily live in a suspended cage 4x4x10 with the floor of the cage being three foot off the floor.’ How this esteemed organisation, which is dedicated to providing information regarding ‘keeping our native Fauna in captivity’, measures happiness is nowhere explained. Poor old
P. australis
is considered vulnerable in the wild and is therefore sometimes doomed to be kept in captivity as it is at the David Fleay Wildlife Park on the Gold Coast, where ‘dozens of threatened species are kept’ ‘for research, breeding and education’.

Cave Creek is supposed to be home as well to the tiniest glider of all, the Feathertail Glider (
Acrobates pygmaeus
), no bigger than the smallest mouse. This little creature too, though its conservation status is of least concern, is another being bred in captivity. The first European zoo to be successful in breeding it was at Poznan in Poland; Polish Feathertail Gliders are now being supplied to zoos all over Europe. Though you might dream of travelling from one zoo to another to collect them and bring them home, in Australia it is against the law to release into the wild any animal reared in captivity.

All four glider species live in the Cave Creek canopy, on a diet of gum, nectar, pollen, insects, manna and honeydew, and seldom come to the ground. They are said to prefer eucalypts for their abundant nectar, which they need all year round, but our rainforest trees also flower at all times of the year, and the canopy affords plenty of dry nest sites in even the pouringest rain. I would be a liar if I said that I had ever seen any of these little creatures going about their business at night far above my sleeping head; I see them often as patches of roiled fur on local roads. One of the most powerful motives for rebuilding habitat in Australia is the longing to reverse the persecution, suffering and annihilation that is the lot of so many Australian mammal species, from the tiniest to the biggest. They are all, even the gentlest, resilient and tough. Give them a chance and they will take it.

Among the most cruelly persecuted of Australian mammals were possums, which, from the early years of European settlement, were classed as vermin. A correspondent wrote to
The Argus
on 21 March 1857:

On moonlit nights especially, they pour down in great numbers, when neither corn, wheat, fruit, nor vegetables escape their attacks, and in many instances the amount of damage done is really serious . . . owing to the disappearance of the blacks, with whom the opossum is the principal article of food, they have increased to an astonishing extent. It is no uncommon thing, we are told, to shoot forty or fifty in one night, and the fear is, unless some means of extermination are adopted, they will become almost the sole occupants of certain portions of the bush.

The belief that the extermination of the Aborigine had led to an explosion in the possum population was held by many.

The Mountain Brushtail Possum or, as it is now to be known, the Short-eared Possum (
Trichosaurus caninus
) that makes its home at Cave Creek is black with a rather plain doggy face and a big wet pink nose. Although Queensland possums had a slight advantage in that they were usually smaller and their skins less luxurious than those of animals from the cooler south, awareness of the ‘opossum threat’ led to more and more clearing of the forests that were known to harbour them. Loggers noticed that possums and gliders leapt from trees as they were being felled, while koalas clung on all the way to the ground. Thousands of animals must have perished in agony when they fired the felled wood, and yet enough survived to demolish the monocrops for which the native vegetation had been destroyed.

Killing native animals was one of the few amusements available in the bush. In 1911 a letter to the
Brisbane Courier
lamented: ‘It is the universal and deplorable habit of men and youths to go out with rifles and remorselessly slay every native animal they see – Australians like themselves – simply because it is guilty of the heinous crime of being alive’. (21 June)

Trade in native animal skins had been going on at least since the mid-1870s when Queensland traders began advertising for skins ‘kangaroo, wallaby, native bear, pademelon, opossum and squirrel’. When the prices for possum skins were good, farmworkers were only too ready to down tools. In 1902 a correspondent of
the
Brisbane Courier
asked: ‘Why should I work for a squatter at a pound a week and tucker when I can earn £3 a week and tucker and be my own boss at possum snaring?’ (13 June)

Snaring or ‘possum-choking’ saved the cost of ammunition. The snares were simple affairs of twisted twine and wire. The usual method of setting a snare was to fell a sapling, attach the snare to it with a running noose, and prop it against a tree. The possum almost invariably chose the sapling as the easiest means of getting up the tree, and so ran its head into the snare, to be found hanging by its neck when the hunter made his rounds. He would then finish it off with a sharp blow on the head and free it from the noose. When cyanide became more readily available owing to its routine use in mining operations, possum hunters began to use it to poison waterholes. Cattle, horses and sheep as well as all the native species that used the waterhole would perish, but nobody cared because the profits were large. Hundreds of possums could be taken from a single poisoned waterhole. The practice was outlawed, but it continued nonetheless.

By 1911 the wholesale torture of possums had begun to have a perceptible effect on numbers (
BC
, 6 September). The Queensland government declared closed season on possums from October to June because the fur industry itself was in danger of collapse, if possums were not to be given an opportunity to rebuild their numbers. When times were hard, as they were regularly in the early years of the century, labour unions pressured the government to allow an open season. Supporters of the possum pointed out that young are to be found in the mothers’ pouches at all times of the year, and demanded a total ban on possum killing, to no avail. As long as the price was right, the slaughter would go on. ‘Opossum skins are worth anything from 25/- to 50/- a dozen in the Sydney market, according to variety and quality, and when it is stated that as many as 100,000 skins are sold in Brisbane at one time, to say nothing of those that are sent to Sydney, the slaughter that is going on may be realised’ (
BC
, 24 September 1910). During the drought of 1915 an open season was brought in specifically so that dairy farmers could survive by snaring possums. In 1922 a million possum skins were sold in the Queensland fur market, and in 1923, 1,200,000 (
BC
, 31 March 1924).

Few voices were raised in defence of the possum but the persecution of the koala caused uproar. There could be no pretence that the koala was a pest; everyone knew that ‘native bears’ though numerous did not damage crops of any kind. In 1884 Carl Lentz saw ‘nine bears on one little gum tree . . . the bush was full of koalas in those days’. In those early days Henry Stephens could ride the half-dozen kilometres between Tagabalam and the Pocket and see twenty-nine koalas (Hall
et al
., 19–20). A Bill to protect the Native Bear introduced by the Hon. W. Villiers Brown in the Queensland Legislative Assembly in November 1904 failed for lack of time (
BC
, 24 November 1904; 4 February 1905). By 1910 ‘the inoffensive native bear ha[d] almost disappeared from most parts of Queensland’. Even so, in 1915 the Queensland government announced an open season for koalas as well as possums. The justification was that impoverished families could use the skins as currency to buy food. Readers of the
Brisbane Courier
, who did not include struggling bushies, gave instant voice to their disapproval. A correspondent identified simply as ‘Sympathy’ wrote to the editor on 22 July:

I can’t speak for other districts but in this one (Wide Bay) mostly every female bear has a baby on her back. Only this morning I was driving on a bush road and saw a bear with a baby on its back. The harmless creature looked at me so pitifully. I drove on, but not half a mile away I heard a shot, then another, and drove back and saw a scalper had shot the poor brute, but it got into a limb of the tree and stuck there, though dead with the baby clasped in its arms. I lectured the man, but his reply was, ‘The season is open’. We know it is, but I am afraid it is the wrong season, and if this goes on the children following us will never see a native bear; they will be wiped out. Though I did not see it I was told by a settler that he had come across a dead mother skinned, and the baby a few yards away crying.

Despite the outcry a second open season was allowed in 1917. A third, in 1919, saw more than a million koalas shot, poisoned or hanged (Evans, 168). For eight years thereafter the koala was protected in Queensland, though skins procured illegally were still being traded, according to the retiring president of the Royal Geographical Society of New South Wales, J. R. Kinghorn, usually as wombat skin (
BC
, 23 July 1928). In 1927, to almost universal disgust, the Queensland government announced an open season on koalas for the month of August. As a character in scores of children’s stories, the koala had become the favourite pet of Australian children, bringing gladness ‘to many a lonely little heart in the back-blocks where pleasures are very few and far between’ (
BC
, 19 July 1927). Bunyip Bluegum, hero of
The Magic Pudding
by Norman Lindsay, published in 1918, is the best-known of a succession of koala heroes. On 28 July 1927 ‘Con. D’ thought fit to impersonate a koala in the
Brisbane Courier
:

I do not hamper the white man’s work

 or live on his fields of grain;

But I’m doomed to die the dingo’s death,

 for his greed and gain.

And the tall gums whisper a sad goodbye –