Koala: A Historical Biography

By Ann Moyal

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.

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Jul 25, 2008
• ISBN: 9780643099180

Book preview

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.

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.

‘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

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 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.

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 the natural history fraternity, specialists and amateur naturalists alike, who most eagerly awaited and monitored scientific information from the colony.

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

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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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