Goodbye, Blinky Bill

Deforestation and disease is taking its toll on these native animals, making them a target for extinction

which it shares a common ancestor.

BY GRAHAM SIMS

As we all know, Australia has more than its fair share of strange and unique creatures, such as the platypus, kangaroo, echidna, emu, kookaburra, and so on. At an official level, we don’t have a “national” animal, although the kangaroo and emu appear on several coats of arms or crests.

We mourn the passing of the thylacine, the so-called Tasmanian Tiger, (for which we were responsible), and there is currently a very justifiable concern about the doubtful future of the Tasmanian Devil, infected with contagious and potentially fatal facial tumours.

On the world scene, Australia has a pretty lamentable track record for looking after our unique wildlife heritage and one of our most internationally recognised and loved Aussie icons is now facing a very grim future, almost certainly doomed to extinction in the wild.

The animal concerned is the koala, once called “The Native Bear” and most probably the origin of the ubiquitous “Teddy Bear” of song, cuddly toy and storybook fame ... and supposedly sourced to U.S President “Teddy” Roosevelt, who had such a toy bear.

The Australian author, Dorothy Wall, wrote a celebrated children’s book called Blinky Bill, the story of a young orphaned koala. Although first published in 1939, Blinky Bill is still in print, and has even been made into a film. The koala could lay claim to being Australia’s most instantly and internationally identifiable symbol, adored, (at least until they actually meet one) by overseas tourists, and once used by Qantas in a major promotions campaign, despite the kangaroo being the official symbol of our national airline.

Despite their fluffy ears, boot-button nose and eyes, their cute, furry appearance and supposedly harmless, cuddly nature, the koala, in reality, is not a mega-star in personality, intelligence or sex appeal. Even Prince Charles referred to them, after one or two encounters of the close kind, as “piddling, stinking little beasts”.

The koala desperately needs a new press agent, before it’s too late!

So, where does the koala stand in Aussie culture and environmental science, and what is its likely future? Firstly, there were countless thousands, probably millions, of koalas up and down the entire east coast and in Western Australia, before the arrival of the first Europeans.

They were known to, and used by the Aborigines for their fur and probably as a food source. The dingo, bush-fires and severe drought took their due toll of the animals, but they still thrived.

As was the case with several Australian creatures, early Europeans tried to correlate the koala with a known, familiar animal. Hence it became the Native Bear or Koala Bear. (“Koala” supposedly means “no drink water”). Even throughout my childhood it was still referred to as a Koala bear, although as a marsupial, it is not related to bears. Its closest living relative is the wombat, with

Although the koala is arboreal and has paws suited to climbing, it can run (or bound) quite well on the ground. Indeed its anatomy is closer to that of a grounddwelling animal. Its pouch, for example, slopes backward (or downward), like a wombat’s, and is potentially quite dangerous for a young joey. The wombat’s brain, however, is much larger and more complex.

Early settlers made use of the koala’s fur for hats and rugs, and intriguingly, there is no evidence of it being a clan totem for any Aboriginal group, in contrast to other animals such as the kangaroo, crocodile etc, which were tribal totems.

In the wild, koalas are almost the ultimate loners. Even the 9-12 month bond between mother and cub is broken the minute a new joey reaches the pouch.

The largest (13 kilo), dominant or alpha males are brutal towards all rivals and towards all sexually available females, including their own daughters. In a further mismatch, males are sexually active all year, whereas females (10 kilos or less) ovulate for only a few hours each 35 days. Many males try to mate with available females, but usually only the alpha male succeeds. Even then, the procedure hardly looks and sounds like courtship. Years ago I heard the roars, grunts and screams of “courting koalas”. I was reminded of a bushman’s description of it sounding like “a mad pig trying to sound like a demented donkey”.

After only 35 days, one tiny “joey”, the size of a peanut and weighing only half a gram, is born in the normal mammalian way and, blind and hairless, makes the hazardous journey up into its mother’s pouch, hopefully attaching itself to one of only two nipples. There it remains for 13 weeks (twins are extremely rare). Until comparatively recently, it was thought that marsupial babies (koalas, kangaroos, possums etc.) were actually born in their mother’s pouch, The late Dr Harry Frith of the CSIRO proved that the birth process is the same as for all mammals.

The koala also has a strange, internal, tubular organ, some 2 metres long, thought to be the equivalent of our human appendix. It is now known that this organ, called the caecum, is a means of slowly processing and neutralising the toxins in the eucalyptus leaves which form the koala’s diet. And here is another of the koala’s oddities. It was long thought that the koala lived and thrived on eucalyptus leaves alone, and only those from a specific type of gumtree. It is now known that it will eat the leaves of over 30 types of eucalypts, but all of them, to varying degrees, are toxic.

Furthermore, the toxins are strongest in the newest, freshest, greenest leaves, which are precisely the ones koalas seem to prefer. Hence the 2-metre long caecum has to slow down the koala’s metabolism, so that the minimal, manageable amounts of toxins actually get into the koala’s system.

Despite their fluffy ears, boot-button nose and eyes, their cute, furry appearance and supposedly harmless, cuddly nature, the koala, in reality, is not a megastar in personality, intelligence or sex appeal

Western Sydney’s Doonside, very helpfully explained that although koalas seem to thrive in captivity, (just as well, given their grim future in the wild), they’ve never been able to wean them off their toxic dietary preference. Although they will occasionally nibble on a piece of fruit, they soon return to their beloved gum-leaves. Even specially prepared food pellets are rejected. Despite this, they can live twice as long in captivity as in the wild, where 10 years is their life expectancy. Evan mentioned with pride that Featherdale has “an old girl, 19 already ... and still going strong!”

One doesn’t need to be Einstein to realise that, in the wild, a slow moving, slow eating, slow breeding, eucalypt dependent tree dweller such as the koala requires extensive forests of gum-trees, or at the very least, appropriate corridors of them, through which it can range, feed and breed in safety. It no longer has them!

The koala’s habit of spending up to 19 out of 24 hours sleeping or resting, is not, therefore, “laziness”, but a necessary means of processing and safely digesting its potentially dangerous diet. If it tried to be constantly active, it would die. It’s now also been discovered that as soon as the baby koala attaches itself to a nipple, the mother koala exudes a “pap” from her caecum to help her joey cope with her potentially toxic milk.

In the wild, koalas have also been observed eating leaves from the acacia (wattle), boxtree, native cherry, tea-tree, native kapok and swamp paperbark, even pine-needles. All of these contain toxins.

I was intrigued to know whether, in captivity, koalas could be persuaded to eat fruits or non-toxic plants etc. Evan Harris, a senior keeper at Featherdale Wildlife Park, in

The extensive and rapacious deforestation up and down the entire east coast of Australia and our forests’ replacement by modern development foreshadow the extinction of the koala in the wild. Tokenistic bits of parkland and scattered trees are not enough to save it.

And as if this weren’t enough, the defenceless koala has been hit for six by another scourge. Increasing numbers of wild koalas, (and even some in captivity), are infected by an insidious, sexually transmitted disease called Chlamydia. Its external symptoms include “wet rump”, but, even more seriously, it affects the reproductive organs, especially in females, leading to sterility and death. There now seem to be very few populations of wild koalas not affected.

Zoo-kept koalas can, of course, be monitored and treated, but Featherdale’s Evan Harris indicated that there are now several forms of Chlamydia-related diseases and retro-viruses making the koala’s future, without our help, even grimmer.

With sadly typical hypocrisy, koalas have been “protected” in Australia for 100 years (in Victoria since 1898, NSW since 1909 and Queensland since 1927).

A few pitifully underfunded researchers strive to find the cause of, and cure for, the koala’s life-threatening diseases; dedicated lobby groups, zoos and carers do their very best for those that come under their care ... but as John Williamson’s song, Goodbye, Blinky Bill so poignantly says, it’s not enough.

Sure, in reality, the koala is not the sweetsmelling, cute and cuddly, loveable “Teddy Bear” we mythologised it to be. It is, however, a unique Aussie icon, struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile environment which we have changed for our own, selfish benefit.

It deserves a better fate than its likely one.