Save Us From the Koala!

Koalas have become such a hot-button issue in NSW that they are threatening to split the state government.

At issue is new state legislation that aims to preserve the creatures from supposed imminent extinction. In the wake of last summer’s bushfires, activists have claimed that koalas are in danger of dying out altogether. The Berejiklian Liberal government wants to classify hundreds of species of trees as vital “feed trees” for koalas, trees which rural landowners will be forbidden from clearing. Gladys Berejiklian’s National Party partners are threatening to quit their posts en masse.

Although the political crisis is due in no small part to Nationals leader and deputy premier John Barilaro’s taste for brinksmanship and pot-stirring, the core issue also remains disputed. Are koalas really in danger of extinction? Or have we just mistaken an unnatural abundance of the creatures as normal?

Unlike the plentiful kangaroos which were noted almost as soon as Captain Cook set foot on our shores, koalas remained a rarely seen mystery for decades after the first permanent European settlement.

In 1810 the koala was described as “a solitary animal rarely to be met with”. In 1821, Aborigines told Hume of koalas on a scrubby hill near the Shoalhaven’s source. Between 1817 and 1846, Oxley’s, Sturt’s and Mitchell’s parties explored throughout the koala’s range and saw none.

Partly that is because European humans and koalas preferred vastly different habitats. Europeans valued the open, grassy plains which dominated most of Eastern Australia – an environment where koalas are nowhere to be seen. The reason Tasmania is koala-free is that, when the Bass Strait land bridge was open, it was a mix of savannah and desert which formed a complete barrier to koala migration.

But the grassy open landscape created by millennia of Aboriginal “firestick farming” quickly disappeared after 1788.

After half a century, Mitchell described dense young forests growing where Aboriginal burning had been disrupted. Govett found koalas “numerous” in the young stringybark forests of the Blue Mountains’ foothills. Aborigines made stringybark nooses on poles to catch them.

In 1840, Strzelecki became the only explorer to see koalas. They were in sapling scrubs grown up after Aborigines were decimated by smallpox. A 1789 epidemic swept the country from Torres to Bass Strait. After the Yowenjerre’s firesticks guttered, thick understoreys climbed out of deep dark gullies and covered the ranges now named after the Pole. When dry storms ignited megafires around 1820, eucalypts germinated in ashbeds, thick as hairs on a cat’s back. Saplings fed koala plagues which saved Strzelecki from starvation in the wilderness where there were no kangaroos or emus.

Gould surveyed koalas on the east coast. They were in “luxuriant brushes” from Illawarra to Moreton Bay, but they were “nowhere very abundant” and could “rarely be detected” even with Aborigines’ assistance. He predicted their extinction. Gilbert told him of a sighting at Moreton Bay in 1844. No others were reported there until they irrupted 50 years later. Then their numbers crashed in the Federation Drought.

In fact, since European arrival, the koala problem has more often been one of over-population. So much so, that in many areas koalas have frequently suffered malnutrition and disease as they ate themselves out of house and home. Culling might upset city greenies, but it’s often been the humane response. Mega-droughts like the Federation and Millennium droughts have also served as natural corrections to koala overpopulation.

Grazing native pastures, like mild burning, can keep trees healthy and koalas scarce. From the 1970s, native forests at Moreton Bay were increasingly alienated for urbanisation. With removal of grazing and burning, koalas once again irrupted into unsustainably high densities. The Moreton Bay District became the Koala Coast. Predators, including feral dogs, native carpet snakes and chlamydia, irrupted as koalas multiplied. Young koalas, looking for food and a home, moved into new suburbs where they fell victims to dogs and motor vehicles.

As activists and environmental “scientists” are wont to do, raw data showing an irruption of koala numbers were “adjusted” and “downsampled”. Somewhere along the way, increased sightings became “a small, yet statistically significant, decline” in koalas.

The worst of is that those who imagine that they’re “saving the koala” are, in fact, dooming exploding populations of the animals to starvation and misery. Fostering the spread of dense, highly-combustible eucalypt forest merely results in stacking up loads of fuel for the next mega-fire.

Meanwhile, activist NGOs and their pet academics keep on merrily fabricating numbers – and openly boast of abandoning “empirical data on abundances”.

Their careers and the rivers of funding are thus guaranteed. The suffering and hardship will be borne by landowners – and tens of thousands of starving koalas, when their populations explode yet again.

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