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CHAPTER 1

A Failed Circumnavigation

Were it not for museums and their volunteer programs I probably would have become a schoolteacher, my year-12 scorecard having shattered my aspirations of a career in biology. La Trobe University, a newly established institution in Melbourne's northern suburbs, accepted me to study humanities, and I enrolled in early 1974 because nothing else came to mind. I tried to fit some basic biology in alongside studies of Greek tragedy and the fate of the Portuguese seaborne empire, but the early starting times of science lectures proved a fatal impediment to an eighteen-year-old in his first year of independent living. Even withdrawing from the course proved beyond my organisational ability, and when I awoke on the day of the final Zoology 101 exams with the sun high in the sky, I knew that I had failed science with the lowest mark possible.

Specifically, it was a tall, blond Californian with a Mennonite-style beard named Dr Thomas Rich, who had just moved to Australia to take up a curatorship in vertebrate palaeontology at the Museum of Victoria, who sustained my slender hopes for a career in science. I first met Tom while I was in high school, and he did not care that I was a failure in the formal curriculum, but instead gave me his time so that I could learn a little, informally, about palaeontology. Early on he told me that, were I lucky enough to embark upon a career in palaeontology I had to have the will to fail, which was his way of saying that when all looks hopeless you just have to plough on. It was a valuable lesson, and without it I hate to think of where I would be today.

About this time Tom discovered that he had a problem. Some years earlier the museum had collected dozens of kangaroo skeletons preserved in cumbersome blocks of clay. Not only were they taking up valuable space in the overcrowded collection, but Tom had detected among them the plague of palaeontologists — pyrites disease. Iron pyrites form in specimens preserved in oxygen-less environments, and when such fossils come into contact with humid air the pyrites turn to sulphuric acid, causing the bones to decay to grey, puffy dust. Sometimes they even explode, creating chaos in museum dungeons. If the specimens were to be saved, the clay surrounding them had to be removed as soon as possible, and the bones coated to protect them from the air. Tom had no one to spare for the job, so he entrusted it to me.

Each Monday (a day I had no classes) I would arrive at the museum, then a grand, colonnaded Victorian edifice in the heart of Melbourne whose front entrance was watched over by a statue of Redmond Barry — the judge who ordered the execution of Ned Kelly. Tom would meet me in the echoing foyer wherein stood Phar Lap, clear me through security and usher me into the palaeontology collection. This inner sanctum was reached through creaking metal doors tall enough to admit a Tyrannosaurus rex, which opened onto a corridor containing an Egyptian mummy (long superannuated from display), and a gigantic hall filled with wonders — the cast of an Archaeopteryx, the skull of a giant Madagascan lemur, and an ichthyosaur from Germany. Tom's office stood in a corner of this wonderland, and I would often spend an hour or so examining the eclectic specimens, many of them accumulated during Victoria's golden age in the late nineteenth century, when money for acquisitions was no obstacle. But nothing interested me as much as the fossil kangaroos, and one in particular captured my imagination. Known as Propleopus, it was represented in that prodigious collection by just a few teeth. But what teeth they were! Shaped like the blades of a miniature buzz-saw, it was hard to imagine how they worked in a kangaroo's mouth. What that creature ate, how it lived and indeed when it lived, all seemed to be unknown. All I knew was that long ago one had most likely made its way up the Swanston Street hill and passed the site of the museum, for several of its teeth had been found near Melbourne. The rest was a great mystery — one that, despite my poor academic record, I harboured hopes of solving.

Having exercised my imagination in the collections, I would make my way to a tiny laboratory under the stairs in the museum's dungeon, there to clean the fossil kangaroos, and thus occupied I could not have been happier, especially when Tom arrived each lunchtime to heat a can of beans and discuss fossils. Were it not for my university classes and a necessary part- time job, I would have been there seven days a week. But now the long summer vacation was looming, and I was growing increasingly indignant at the fact that even though I was native born I had never met an Aborigine nor seen the desert. So in late November 1975, at the start of the summer vacation, I temporarily set aside work at the museum, and set out to see my country. I was immensely proud of my beaten-up old Moto Guzzi 750 sportster. I'd heard that during World War II her V-twin engine had powered Italian light-armoured vehicles across the North African desert. In my eyes she was a fabulous-looking machine with wide, sweeping handlebars and heavy wraparound wheel guards, her low tank ornamented with a hand-painted eagle. Her sleek lines and allure, I desperately hoped, would enhance my thus far slender success with the beautiful girls who stood out like Venus on the half-shell everywhere I looked. Twelve years at an all-boys Catholic school can do that to you. And it sometimes worked. I briefly befriended a lass with all the allure of a Hawaiian princess who, when riding pillion, enjoyed controlling both bike and rider through masterful application of the joystick. The only trouble was that she loved speed and a winding road, and I soon had to choose between sex and survival. Perhaps such slender victories were enough to inspire my mate, Bill Ellis, to buy another, albeit better preserved, machine. Being tall, dark and strikingly handsome, Bill didn't need a bike as much as I did, so perhaps it was a shared desire for adventure that motivated him. Whatever the case he proved to be an ideal travel partner — fearless, of few words, and remarkably tolerant of my eccentric ways. As we set off from Melbourne with a few dollars in our pockets, intent on circumnavigating the continent at the height of summer, we had no idea that we would never finish the journey.

I had decided to use the trip to collect specimens of comparative anatomy. To this end, and blissfully unaware of the need for a permit even to touch a native animal killed on the roadside, my bike was equipped with a small strap-on esky behind the pillion seat, inside of which rattled a large and gruesome-looking defleshing knife. I had thought far enough ahead to decide that I would donate any specimens collected to the museum, but more immediate issues had evaded consideration.

We headed west for Adelaide and then Perth, and it was only when we stopped, roadside, beside my first intended specimen — a splendid male western grey as large as myself — and set to work with my knife, that it occurred to me that other travellers in the South Australian outback might find such activities unsettling. Almost as soon as the thought formed in my mind the rumble of an approaching car was heard and, suddenly embarrassed at the spectacle I presented, I walked briskly away from the prone roo, whistling into the air and trying to hide the 50- centimetre-long knife behind my back. Ever tolerant, Bill agreed that we should camp nearby so I could perform the gruesome deed under the cover of darkness. After eating Irish stew from our billy I set out, parking my bike in front of the carcass with the headlight on so that I could see what I was doing. The job was made unduly difficult because I had neglected to sharpen my sabre, and after a long, bloodied struggle it became evident that to retrieve the all-important skull I would have to use the weight of the carcass to separate the neck muscles. Wet with blood and lurching under the full weight of the dead marsupial, I was so preoccupied that I did not hear the approaching rumble until it was too late. As the car accelerated past I glimpsed the family inside, horror-struck, mouths agape, staring at the frenzied bikie who was waltzing drunkenly with a disembowelled kangaroo on a lonely country road. As they disappeared into the distance I finally detached the head, after which I impinged on Bill's good humour yet again by boiling it, to remove the flesh, in our all-purpose billy.

Although our route kept us close to the coast, the green fringe of the continent soon gave way to the muted colours of the interior. It is surprising how narrow that life-giving fringe is. Nowhere in Australia is far from the outback, and every centimetre of the country is touched at some time or other by its winds, dust and flies. The flat dry inland was an utterly unfamiliar landscape, and one for which we were ill-prepared, for the Guzzis were possibly the worst bikes to take on such a trip. Mine did not even have air-filters, instead sporting elegant bell-mouths on its carburettors. But we didn't care. We were nineteen, and we were free.

On the Nullarbor, nothing among the low blue-tinged bushes stretching to the horizon stood higher than my knees. The sun baked our skin and the mirage ate up the distance, creating a sense of going nowhere. For hour after hour there was nothing but a road and a line of power poles stretching in both directions — a scar through the blue-green of the saltbush — with no sign of life.

But life there was, for the locusts were swarming. The first we came across were tiny and struck our legs like bullets — painful even beneath leather boots. The next swarm, still wingless, was larger and could leap a little higher, but their bodies were softer. The next lot had sprouted wings, and they struck anywhere. Driving into a locust cloud at 120 kilometres per hour was like driving into a living hailstorm. Any exposed skin was soon stinging with pain, and we struggled to see the highway ahead through visors smeared with the white and yellow fluid of squashed insects.

Then there was a sign: 'Head of the Bight'. We followed the dirt track, fatigued as the heat and the still, stifling air caught up with us. We got off our bikes and walked a few metres to where the endless plain suddenly ceased, as if sliced by a sabre far sharper than my own. After days of unvarying flatness the terror of the crumbling vertical cliff at our feet was compounded by the Southern Ocean, which raged with such force at its base that I could feel the shock of the waves through my boots. Its booms made me stumble involuntarily backwards to the heat, flatness and still air of the inland.

As we rode on we discovered other living things in that seemingly desolate landscape: an emu with a stately stride, a red kangaroo lying in the shade of an insignificant bush. Close to the Western Australian border, mounds began to appear. They marked the burrows of southern hairy-nosed wombats, some of which were large enough to crawl down. I squeezed head-first into one, vainly hoping to spot a wombat, and was surprised at how cool it was inside. A chance to venture further underground soon arose. Cocklebiddy Cave is a huge cavern lying beneath the Nullarbor Plain a little to the north of the road. We parked our bikes before clambering down to a yawning pit. It was an awesome space, cool and gloomy as a cathedral, but what fascinated me most was the scattering of small bones, mostly of native mice and rats, which had become extinct on the Nullarbor only thirty or forty years earlier.

We paused just east of Kalgoorlie to admire the knotted, greasy trunks of the gimlet gums, and strode over the thin crust of dried moss and lichen, which along with the last flowers of springtime suggested that this could sometimes be a gentle land. But now it was flat and dusty, the mallee a maze of uniformity where you could easily get lost. Among the knotted trunks we saw lizards and birds, and more of that subtle beauty that is so characteristically Australian — a warty grey mallee-root, a gum tree shedding its old bark in flakes and fine strips. Then, in a small clearing, we stumbled upon an arrangement of mouldering sticks on the ground, and some sturdier branches still standing. It was the remains of an ancient gunyah, though how long the bough shelter had lain decaying there we could not tell, nor could we fathom why an Aborigine had chosen that obscure place to rest. Certainly it was of a size to allow one person only in its shade.

Over the years the vision of that gunyah has frequently returned to me, and I've imagined a solitary Aboriginal hunter returning to it with a catch of rabbit-sized marsupials, to spend the night in comfort. For someone who had never met an Aborigine, and who had spent their life amid the European grandeur of Melbourne, that gunyah came as a deep shock, for it put my society in context and made the Aboriginal occupation of Australia a palpable, recent reality. I was learning that in very recent times this land had been wrested, often violently, from its original owners. And that entire ecosystems had been destroyed by sheep, the axe and the plough.

Captain Cook's Kangaroo

If you ever see a fresh kangaroo carcass lying beside the road it is well worth stopping to take a closer look. There is not an ounce of fat or wasted muscle on their perfectly proportioned frames, and even in death their grace and beauty — which extends from the tips of the slender limbs to their long and curved eyelashes — is sublime. But what kind of kangaroo are you looking at? This is not an easy question to answer, for the larger kangaroos belong to a group of around twenty species that are classified into three genera or subgenera, depending on whom you ask. They are Macropus (the grey kangaroos, whose name means 'big foot'), Osphranter (a name of obscure origin, for the red kangaroo and euros) and Notamacropus, a name given by Lyn Dawson and me to a dozen or so stripe-faced wallabies, which means 'striped kangaroo', but which is also a joke, for we wanted to emphasise that these creatures were 'not a Macropus', the genus in which they were once classified.

For now we will concentrate on the larger kinds — the splendid, desert-dwelling red kangaroo, the euros of the rocky ranges, and the grey kangaroos of Australia's better-watered south and east. Does your victim of the internal combustion engine have silken fur, a thick white tail and white on the sides of its muzzle? If so it is the grandest of them all, the red kangaroo, which incidentally is not always red, but sometimes grey or red- grey. If the creature has a nose like a dog, your deceased friend is a euro. If, however, it is greyish with dark tips on its tail, hands and feet, and long, straight claws on its toes, it is a grey kangaroo. But you have only just begun your identification. In travelling from Melbourne to Perth, for example, you are likely to encounter two distinctive species of grey kangaroos, while if you travel Australia's north you may stumble upon as many as three euro species.

The eastern grey (Macropus giganteus) can be seen in pastures and forests from Cooktown to Tasmania, while the western grey (Macropus fuliginosus, which can be divided into three distinct subspecies) is found from Perth to western New South Wales. In the 1980s I was fortunate enough to meet the man who announced that eastern and western greys were different. Today John Kirsch teaches biology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, but in the mid-1960s he was an American studying in Australia on a Fulbright scholarship. John, a 'confirmed bachelor' who lives with his dog a little way out of town, describes Madison as 'The faggot buckle in America's Bible belt', a statement others may dispute, but which seemed accurate enough to me. He kindly invited me to stay with him when I visited, and was busy straining rice through an old sock (newly washed, I hoped) when we got onto the subject of grey kangaroos. The kangaroo shooters John spoke to had long recognised two kinds of greys, as had many pastoralists; eastern greys are a clear grey colour and lack a distinctive odour, while western greys are chocolate-coloured and, if male, reek of curry. This rather unexpected odour is produced from a gland on the chest, and were western greys inhabitants of the subcontinent it may well have led to their early extinction. But to many Australian nostrils the odour is overwhelming. Roo shooters call the large males 'stinkers', and avoid them when they can, and Aborigines such as the Adnymathanha of South Australia prefer other food if it is available. (It is possible that the western grey only entered Adnymathanha country in the Flinders Ranges after European pastoralists dug stock wells.)

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Excerpted from "Chasing Kangaroos"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Tim Flannery.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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