Life by Tim Flannery

Author:Tim Flannery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

Oolacunta!

2004

I’M WRITING THESE words in 2003, on my way home from London where I’ve been studying some of Australia’s most interesting mammals. It’s been a sad pilgrimage, but a necessary one, for the only surviving examples of the long extinct creatures I’m interested in reside in London’s Natural History Museum. Its collections are the richest and oldest in existence—the spoils of an empire—and they include a treasure-trove of Australian mammals housed in a cavernous storeroom filled with tall green cabinets, whose drawers bear the scientific names of the occupants. Pull a drawer out and you will see their stuffed bodies lying row upon row, as neat as soldiers on parade.

It is a strange feature of Australia’s historic extinction epidemic that it struck most fiercely at those species that seemed most secure. The native rats and mice that once swarmed over the inland in countless millions suffered a greater depletion than Australia’s marsupials and monotremes; while among the marsupials it was those paragons of success, the kangaroos, which lost the most species.

Looking at the taxidermied remains of broad-faced potoroos, nail-tailed wallabies and desert rat-kangaroos, I feel as if Britain has taken the heart of my country. The desert rat-kangaroo, eastern hare wallaby and crescent nailtail once thrived right across the land stretching out 11,000 metres below me, but the plants they browsed now go unclipped by their dainty teeth, while the tribes and predators they fed must make shift without them. Perhaps, I secretly hope, my studies of the ecology of these vanished creatures will assist in regaining that equilibrium, for until we know what we have lost, we cannot make good the damage.

As I write, outside the plane a vermilion line announces the coming of the day. I’ve seen it often enough from below, but from up here it is a miracle. Galah-grey clouds stretch from horizon to horizon, sculpted by winds into a monochrome rippled beach, through which the rising sun spills a lava of pink—an eerie rose glow from below, piercing the cloud in strange patches.

My jetlagged mind is suddenly thrown back twenty years, to the other side of that ripplefield of cloud. I’m in the loneliest desert on earth, wandering towards camp after a day spent searching for fossils on the shores of a dry salt lake. I move along the crest of a blood-red sand dune, its summit a maze of dead-looking clumps of cane grass and sandy blow-outs. It’s been a long, hot day, and my water ran out hours ago. There’s not a sound, not even the wind, to remind me that I share the Earth with another living creature.

My eyes are trained to scan the ground for the tiniest fossil—I usually find the lost earring, the contact lens, the money on the pavement. Now I see a minature black dragon, its body thrown into an S-shape that is half buried in sand at my feet. My tongue rasps against the roof of my mouth as I muse on the tricks that an exhausted and dehydrated brain can play on you.

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