Koala by Danielle Clode

Author:Danielle Clode [Clode, Danielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743822647
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.
Published: 2022-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

14

Koalas Far and Wide

The river that runs through Adelaide was named by the Kaurna people for the river red gum forest that once followed its meandering course, from the hills across the Adelaide Plains to the wetlands on the coast. Karrawirraparri was said to reflect the path of the Milky Way across the sky. For millennia, the local inhabitants would have mapped that starry path across the plains with a mirrored trail of glowing campfires along the creeklines.

Koalas, too, must once have occupied these river red gum forests, as part of an interconnected population that spread across the south from the far west coast of Australia to the east. Although whether they shared these lands with the earliest people is uncertain.

What is certain, however, is that koalas are reclaiming these ancestral territories. They are following those same paths along Karrawirraparri and its creeklines, tracing the remnants of the river red gum forests back across the plains, into a world transformed beyond recognition.

Today, the starry path across the Adelaide Plains has dimmed and darkened. At night, the creekline wanders like a lost shadow through a sea of city streetlights. The red gum forest has been chopped down and reduced to a handful of remnant trees in intermittent patches along the banks. And the chain of seasonal billabongs – linked with gravel creek beds that once surged with winter floods and dried to a trickle in the hot summers – has been controlled, constrained and barricaded into a series of stagnant dams, drains and conduits known, somewhat euphemistically, as the River Torrens.

After two centuries of abuse and disfigurement, the river is slowly being restored. Parklands now stretch along its length. Introduced species have been reclassified as weeds and are being replaced with native plants. Swales have replaced drains, frogs fill reed-lined waterholes with harmonious vibrations, the river red gums and other eucalypts stretch their vast shady canopies overhead as joggers, walkers and bike riders share the paths beneath. And where the trees spread their canopies, the koalas have followed.

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