Behind the smile
SCROLL THROUGH THE Instagram account of tennis great Roger Federer and among his snippets on great matches and life on the pro circuit you’ll find a photo of him taken in 2017 on Western Australia’s Rottnest Island with a quokka.
Since that image went viral, a slew of celebrities – including actor Chris Hemsworth, singer Kylie Minogue and surfing legend Kelly Slater – have snapped their faces with the tiny, seemingly smiling, wallabies. So too have thousands of less-famous quokka enthusiasts. At least 66,000 quokka selfies now reside on Instagram. In 2019, before COVID hit travel worldwide, the island experienced an increased visitation rate of 15 per cent on the previous year, a rise the Rottnest Island Authority (RIA) attributed partly to the quokka selfie craze.
Quokkas don’t, of course, smile. They just look like they do. And if you search for #quokkaselfie on the social media platform where the craze began, you’ll now receive this warning: “You are searching for a hashtag that may be associated with posts that encourage harmful behaviour to animals or the environment.”
It seems, however, that there are bigger concerns for quokkas than overenthusiastic tourists.
IT’S ESTIMATED THERE are 10,000–12,000 quokkas on Rottnest Island, which is 30 minutes by ferry from Fremantle. And with the island free of the voracious introduced predators – mostly foxes and feral cats – that their mainland counterparts contend with, they appear to live contented lives.
