Blink and you’ll miss them

There’s no beating around the rapidly depleting bush: our koalas are in big trouble. Eighteen years since the Australian Koala Foundation launched its ‘No Tree, No Me’ campaign to fight koala population decline, the most recent WWF Living Planet Report estimates that koala numbers on our east coast are dropping by 21 per cent every decade, and that NSW koalas—the less than 20,000 that remain—are on track for extinction by 2050.

While South Australian and Victorian koalas face long-term battles against a lack of genetic diversity—a legacy of early 20th century patch-ups after the decimation that was koala hunting and pelt trading—it’s the officially-threatened populations of NSW, Queensland and the ACT that are really in the trenches. Western Australia, Tasmania, and the Northern Territory contain no wild koala ranges.

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