Charles Sturt University (CSU) has publicised yet another research project about koalas: ‘No time to lose’: conservation in focus for Save the Koala Month – CSU News
They say “Australia’s iconic native animal, the koala, has alarmingly gone from a species ‘under no threat’ to ‘vulnerable’ to ‘endangered’ within a decade”.
This statement is patently false. In fact, it is only the official listing of the ‘conservation status’ of the subset of the species living north of the Victorian border that has gone from not listed to endangered. The irruptive species is actually in much higher numbers across a much wider area than it was when Europeans arrived in Australia. The official listing is a purely political artifice that has nothing to do with history, science, logic or commonsense.
Some koalas are officially secure one day and officially endangered the next as they move around their large home ranges straddling the New South Wales-Victorian border.
They were an unknown species living in low densities within dense forests when Europeans took up residence in 1788. The first written record of koalas came 10 years later, when ex-con John Wilson, who’d ‘gone wild’ and lived with Aborigines, pointed out some dung to explorer John Price.
The first ‘biological sample’ of koalas, collected in 1802, showed how Aboriginal people valued this rare species. Francis Barallier’s Aboriginal guide Gory exchanged two spears and a tomahawk – very valuable items – for two koala feet – hardly the choicest cuts.
The first published record, in the Sydney Gazette of 21 August 1803, showed why koalas were rare. A koala captured by an Aboriginal man was brought into town and found to be “excessively nice” in its choice of foliage. The species relies on soft juicy young eucalypt shoots for nutrition. These are a rare commodity in healthy mature eucalypt forest.
It’s rather ironic that a nurseryman growing food trees for koalas in an area where they didn’t live naturally has lost $6,000 worth of seedlings to a single animal of a supposedly endangered species that many ecologists claim is reliant upon old growth forests.
CSU PhD candidate Teresa Cochrane would be well advised to look at modern history and science, rather than the Dreamtime, if she wishes to understand the ecology of koalas. I believe that the professor and the two doctors supervising her PhD in Arts Education should encourage her to find some context.
Koalas first irrupted in the foothills of the Blue Mountains during the 1830s after dense young forests grew. Aborigines developed new technology to take advantage. They used stringybark nooses on sapling poles to drag koalas out of trees for easy tucker.
By the 1880s koalas were in plagues. They consequently suffered malnutrition and disease. The humane and pragmatic response of European settlers was to shoot them and use their valuable pelts. But the more adults that were shot, the more young’uns survived to breed. Numbers continued to increase until they crashed in the Federation Drought, when sick trees and sick koalas died en masse. By the 1930s koalas were supposedly extinct in and NSW, SA and VIC.
After the Second World War, people were relieved from an existential threat to democratic society. Thoughts returned to nature conservation. A 1949 questionnaire of public servants working in country NSW identified more than 100 locations where koalas were still known to exist.
By 1976 “the most significant outcome” from a symposium at Taronga Zoo was “unanimous agreement [of 43 experts] that the koala is no longer an endangered species”. There were “large, growing populations”. But, in 1988, National Parks and Wildlife Service organised a ‘Koala Summit’. This was a brilliantly cynical strategy, using the proliferation of an undeniably cute animal to initiate a campaign against sustainable use of our iconic native timber resources.
The campaign has been hugely successful. In 2016, Environment Minister Mark Speakman announced the creation of a new koala park to save supposedly the last handful of koalas, hanging on in a ‘climate refuge’, in the Eden Region. The koalas were actually irrupting in 1980 wildfire and logging regrowth. Subsequent sound recording surveys revealed even higher koala densities than on the north coast.
Now the new Labor Government of New South Wales has apparently realised that ‘conservation’ bureaucrats have been cooking the books. You can find koalas everywhere using fairdinkum scientific survey techniques instead of so-called ‘citizen science’ – more to do with socialism than ecology.
But, instead of outing the bureaucrats, Labor’s targeting the former coalition government. Fair enough I suppose, if you look at the record of former Environment Minister Matt Green Kean who cynically promised to double the numbers of koalas. Koala numbers are a growing problem. Disease, dog attacks and vehicle trauma are consequences.
More importantly, koala plagues and megafires go together. Koalas are breeding faster than ever on all the soft young growth generated by Black Summer. The scrub development is unprecedented. Our next extreme fire season will kill more people and animals than ever before. But the koala is in no danger of extinction.
