Wallabies and Curlews

Do you ever wonder what animals talk about? I guess I do. 
I haven’t always been super cool to the animal kingdom, but I’m trying hard these days. Always remember, it’s not just people we share the planet with. The wildlife and the landscape go hand in hand, and it all tells a story. 

Mick

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

I had to quickly duck down to the store the other night, and as I was going past the little park at the end of our street, I noticed a couple of wallabies talking to a curloo. I couldn't hear them, of course, as I was driving the car, and I'm not one to eavesdrop. But I couldn't help but wonder what they were talking about. It seemed an amicable conversation. Curloos and the wallabies don't mind one another. They've been living in that park in our street longer than I've been there. They always got along fine by all accounts. I see them chatting often, sometimes rather solemnly. I'm curious about the intrapersonal depth of their discourse. It's an anthropomorphic interpretation to be sure, but these guys, for all intents and purposes, are just neighbours. Now, I have neighbours in this street too, who I get along with, but talking to them can be excruciating, and sometimes I want to poison their bloody yappin' dog in the middle of the night. I won't though. Is it the same with the suburban woodland creatures? I know they all speak the same language. I watched Blinky Bill when I was a kid. But is it awkward small talk they're enduring? Is it local gossip? Is it news and current affairs of their respective community? Or is it something more? Blinky Bill may even be able to offer some insight. European settlement began two hundred and thirty seven years ago in this country, and it really hasn't stopped. The gist of the 1992 film Blinky Bill the Mischievous Koala is centred around the little bushland village of Green Patch, the home of Blinky Bill and his mum, and their small community of Native Australian animals. When one day humans come in with chainsaws and bulldozers, an American accent, strangely enough, and start tearing down all the trees and they destroy Green Patch. Blinky's mum is taken captive, and he and all his friends are left homeless. Shit gets pretty wild after that, but I won't spoil the ending for you. It's on Amazon Prime, check it out, it's a classic. What I'm getting at is you think they talk about us? Not like obsessing over us, I'm sure they've got much more important shit to talk about, and their own business to attend to every other day. But surely the topic of these noisy, destructive, two legged creatures is an ongoing conversation for them. They're obviously very wary of us. If you walk out into a clearing where there's a bunch of wild animals, what do they do? They all stop what they are doing and look at you, as if to say who's this prick? What's he doing? What's he bloody want? Generation after generation after generation of these creatures have watched human development encroach further and further into their habitat. In their own special way, the animal kingdom has their own stories and knowledge and law passed down to them through these generations. Each year the road toll grows too. Even in our quiet little suburb with its fifty kilometre an hour speed limit, the wallabies are regularly succumbing to road accidents. At a glance, though, the animals appear to be quite comfortable in the environment they share with us, lazily lounging on the neatly mowed lawns of the park and the unfenced front yards of homes in our peaceful little mild mannered street. Plenty of nice green grass to eat or laid right out for them. But it's very much on our terms. In fact, the population of wallabies and kangaroos that live in my suburb are all but landlocked in to maybe a couple of hundred remaining uncleared acres, bordered on all sides by housing, highway and busy main roads, and the ocean. Half of that area is private farmland, and the other half seems to be an illegal playground for dirt bikes, four-wheel drives, and cockheads dumping rubbish. And it only takes a couple of phone calls to the council to complain about this or that for even native animals to become a problem that needs professional attention. I personally really love that we share our homes with them. I feel blessed to have them come up and graze on our front lawn. I think most people in our placid little hamlet feel the same. I wonder do the wallabies though. I only rent my place, and I'm lucky to have it, but even if I could design my forever home, my perfect little slice of paradise, it would most definitely include wallabies out on the front lawn. I wonder though, if the wallabies could design their perfect forever home, would it include me? I'm not so sure. How about the curloo? Have you heard their mournful, sorrowful cries at night? What's that all about? In Aboriginal culture, right across the country and many different language groups, the bushstone curloo is considered a harbinger of death, a morbid omen. To see them getting around through the day you probably wouldn't get those vibes, and it certainly didn't seem like that was the topic of conversation with the wallabies. They are truly beautiful birds, and their babies, forget about it. They are the harbingers of the softer hearted types going Oh my god, I can't even deal. However, it's when they have these babies is when we have most of our interactions with them. Curloos don't build a nest, they just scrape clean a little patch of ground in what all the textbooks traditionally describe as open woodland. Camouflage is their shtick, so they usually like some fallen timber close by, or the base of a tree, or the long grass and vegetation on the edge of the park at the end of my street. In the springtime, or the build up to the wet season, when the weather's getting warmer, while you're out on your morning run through the parkland, or the path along the river, or the track out behind the footy ground, places you always go, you can all of a sudden be confronted by a not even two feet tall, hissing, seething, feathered battle axe, wings out, tail feathers flared, with a murderous stare that only the most devoted and fiercely protective loving parents possess. They've got a lot of front. Plovers too, actually, let's talk about them for a minute. The masked lapwing plovers lay their eggs literally in the middle of the grass, right near where everybody does everything. And hell hath no fury like a mother plover scorn. Just the shrill sound of their high pitched raspy stutter from the safety of your back patio is enough to invoke a mild flare up of PTSD in many people. They can render a simple springtime walk out your back gate a non option.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

To us, it begs the question, which is often screamed in situ Why the fuck would you lay your eggs there? You know that people are here all the time.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

To them, they are simply doing what they do. I guess it's all about perspective. I could cough on all night about habitat loss and how animals are forced into different and more urban environments due to development and pollution and what have you. But what if it's something even deeper? Who's to say that the neatly manicured lawn near the shopping centre, where thousands of people walk every day, isn't a sacred sight to these creatures? A place where once upon a time was ideal breeding habitat for them. A location a location deeply rooted in their bird family culture from maybe thousands of years of the same bloodline raising their chicks there every season. Maybe one day someone goes and builds a five-story government building there, and the adjacent lawn is the best they can do to try and uphold an intrinsic family tradition with as much dignity as they can muster, looking abolics to the white world, but playing the hand they were dealt with their chests out and chins up. Sea turtles traverse thousands of kilometres of ocean every year for different reasons, and come back to the same stretch of beach each season to lay their eggs. The same beach they themselves hatched on. It's called natal homing. It's a real thing. We're dealing with native animals, endemic to certain areas. What will the quakker do if Rot Nest Island keeps metropolising and eventually turns into something like the island of Manhattan? Their roots are deep. I might be getting carried away. I live on the corner of our block, and one day a couple of years ago, about five in the afternoon, I was mowing the front lawn. Out of nowhere, five or six seemingly panicked kangaroos, including an enormous male, came charging down the road as if something was chasing them. They were full noise. A couple on the road, a couple up on the nature strip of the houses opposite us. Most of them kept going around the corner and tore off round the block. But the big one crossed straight over the road and onto my next door neighbour's grass. I'd stopped and was watching the whole event go down, still hanging onto the mower singing away in front of me. None of the homes on the street's front yards are separated by a fence. So this big roo stopped for a second on the neighbour's patch, looked at me, then in only half a dozen rapid fire bounds, put himself to within ten feet of me and my little Victor mower, which I had now cut the engine to. This was a big kangaroo, an eastern grey. I'm six feet tall, and this guy was my height at the bottom of the slope of our front lawn. He was jacked too, shredded. Anyone who has seen a big roo up close will know I'm not exaggerating. I swear to you, this whole scenario is one hundred percent a true story. By chance I was standing next to the gate that leads into our backyard, and by this time I was getting ready to bail. The roo was standing up to its full height, and it was really intimidating. Then he kind of balked me, you know, like faked me out. I went to run through the gate, but I stopped because he stopped. Then he jumped at me. He nearly landed on the mower. I dived in through the gate and slammed it behind me, absolutely spraying as I went. He did that one jump, then took off flat out back up the road. Gone. He literally got less than two meters away from me, and I have no idea why. That actually happened to me. For a second I truly believed I was about to be beaten up by the proverbial boxing kangaroo. I don't know what initially spooked them into racing up the street like that, but maybe I was just the first person he saw after it happened, so the big guy blamed me. He felt he needed to talk to me about it. I really don't know. But I'll tell you something I do know. The very moment I was behind that gate and I was safe, with my heart pounding out of my chest, mind you, I was immediately taken back to something that happened to me when I was about twelve years old. I was riding my motorbike quite a long way from home. I was out in the bush riding on all these fire tracks, tracks that I knew pretty well, but they were fairly out of the way. It could literally be days without anyone driving in there. I was on my own too. Anyhow, I loved it in there. The place was alive with kangaroos as well, and it was a fairly run of the mill activity to come across a mob and chase after 'em, which is exactly what happened to me that day. I ran into a mob of about thirty or so eastern greys, so I upped them straight away. They spread through the trees a bit but still followed the track, which was good because I kept up with them. I never planned on herding on it any of them, it was just the thrill of the chase. They got out into this bit of a clearing where the fire tracks met a crossroad. These were literal dirt tracks, not maintained gravel roads or anything fancy like that, wide enough for four wheel drives, but sandy soil. The sand got pretty heavy at this intersection, and it slowed me right down. I was still trying to keep up with the mob, but the law of inertia had the final say, and I stacked it face first into the ground. It wasn't real spectacular, and I wasn't hurt at all. I was wearing a helmet. I bounced back up and checked that I was in one piece. The bike had stalled, so I could hear all the roos cracking through the scrub, and I watched them disappearing into the trees as I tried to pick it back up. That's when I noticed a big one had stopped and was looking at me. The motorbike was a heavy old farm bike, a Suzuki 185, and I was a skinny twelve year old sinking up to his ankles in boggy sand. This big old kangaroo bounded back over to me as I was busting my ass trying to get the bike back upright. It was enormous. It felt like it was twice my size, and it got to about four or five meters from me. I started panicking and dropped the bike again. He took another bounce or two my way, and I felt my insides burn. I was terrified. I had nowhere to run. I looked for a stick or something to throw at him. I had nothing. I tried to roar at him, but my voice cracked, and all I could manage was a pitiful, squeaky get away and my eyes had welled up too. I could see him breathing heavy, not puffed out from the chase, but worked up. He threw his arms up kind of in exclamation and made a bit of a snort at me. Then he turned and took off with the rest of the mob. I was shaking and on the very edge of bursting into tears. It took me a while to calm down, and when I did and I had the bike up and going, I left with my tail fairly between my legs. I felt like I'd just been given a big serve by my dad, or had a school teacher deservedly put me in my place. At that point in my life, I had known of a man being killed by a kangaroo, and had known locally of dogs attacking them but then being overpowered and having their last rights read. Had it been his intention, I would have quite quickly became the first human killed by a kangaroo in sixty two years. I'll use some poetic license here, as the scientific world forbids me from using human behaviour as a benchmark for interpreting what animals are thinking. But I truly believe that that granddaddy kangaroo came over to give me a piece of his mind. I feel to this day he could see I was just a kid, and he told me get on your bike, piss off and leave us alone, or I'll boot you in the ass. It was the nineties, and you could still threaten kids with violence back then. I didn't tell anyone about that for years afterwards. I don't think those two incidences are connected, though the Bush Telegraph is an extraordinary thing. The trees have had their own Wi-Fi connecting the land forever. But I do know firsthand that the animal folk have things they wish to discuss from time to time, be it with us or each other. I've had a lot of time to observe animals, just hanging out, doing their thing, intermingling with one another. In my younger days I spent a number of years working in zoos and on crocodile farms. I like animal watching as much as I like people watching, and zoos are a great place for both. I've seen some really fascinating stuff. There are future podcast episodes on that alone. However, one last little tale I'll give you doesn't come from the zoo, but of all places a mine site. A couple of years back I spent a few months in the camp maintenance team at a mine in a pretty remote part of northern Australia. The place had a fairly healthy population of agile wallabies. It was the green grass of the watered lawns they were there for. Otherwise I couldn't have imagined a shitter place for a wallaby to hang out. Just the smell of the joint was toxic, and the twenty four seven floodlit hum of non-renewable resources being turned into six figure salaries only a kilometre away made my skin crawl. I won't get into that though. As well as the wallabies, there was a resident olive python, a big one too. She would have been pretty close to four metres in length, and nearly the girth of a roll of toilet paper, obviously because of the abundance of small wallabies. She lived under the wet mess, which is the bar in my language, which is also a very popular place directly after shift change at about quarter past six in the afternoon. Let that set the stage for the final act. Here we have three or four wallabies milling around the edge of the wet mess in the shade. The first couple of office workers very safely unload themselves from a land cruiser with their squeaky clean steel capped safety boots and file diligently into the bar for a cool drink after a hard day's OHNS meetings. Fairly routine stuff. Neither hominid nor macropod pay each other much attention at all. When all of a sudden, as silent and deadly as a UV ray, and with the speed and precision of a lightning strike, a wallaby, the exact size and weight of a three-year-old child, in the space of about a quarter of a second, is seized by the shoulder and has four or five coils of scaly olive grey reptilian jujitsu master give him a full body choke out. A deafening, high-pitched shriek is heard across the camp from one of the mine workers en route to her first knockoff beer as the takedown happens only metres from her in full view. It sends the wallaby's companions into a frenzy. One takes off, while the others bound around in shock and confusion for a moment before teaming up and counterattacking the giant snake, jumping up and raining blows down on the reptile with their powerful legs and clawed feet. That's when I turn up. The python has copped a few good ones, and has a couple of gashes on her back. The fight back from the wallaby's mates overwhelms her, so she bails. She uncoils her prey and seeks refuge back under her wet mess building. The damage is done though. The little agile is dead. That had taken less than a minute. She slithers back under the bar. The wallaby's friends are still bouncing around in circles, freaking out as a bus pulls up from the site, dropping off forty thirsty high viz clad mine workers. It's pretty public carnage. One of the guys from my crew, Doug, picks up the poor lifeless body and puts it in the back of one of the little buggies we get around in. He takes it away and dumps it in the scrub where nobody can see it. That was wild, pure lore of the jungle unfolding in the Western world's wasteland. David Attenborough shit, and a fight at the front door of the pub but no one had been drinking rum. The happy ending to that story, depending on which way you see it, was later on that night, after a shower and dinner and a windown, Doug said good night to everyone and turned in for the evening, but not before quietly sneaking out to finish one last job. He had thought about it throughout the night and felt for the snake. Big pythons like her only eat once every two or three weeks or so. They'll go even longer in the cooler months. She had fought pretty hard for that kill and expended a lot of energy in the process. She would have been relying on that feed, especially now as she had been injured herself. In the darkness, with nobody around, he went back out to where he'd dumped the wallaby earlier on. The dingoes hadn't found it yet, and as it had only been there a couple of hours it was still fresh. He brought it back up and dropped it on the pavement up the end of the wet mess where the big snake was often seen. What was the alternative? It dies for absolutely no reason at all and rots in the scrub? It didn't take ten seconds and she was onto it, eagerly taking back her hard fought meal. Without words, she gave Doug a Fuck man, thank you so much. You don't know what this means to me. So back to the curloo and the wallabies. What would an oppressed nation of clearly sentient beings have to talk about in the face of our aesthetic pleasure, comfort and luxury? Why should I assume they are talking about us? Surely the world doesn't revolve around me and my species, does it? Anyway, it's really none of my business to be fair. I'm living on the stolen land of the bushstone curloo and the agile wallaby. Can't I at the very least let them have a private conversation? I'm just exploring an idle thought I had, crawling down a rabbit hole of distraction to hide from the crushing reality of living in a world that cuts down trees that magpies and cooker barrels nest in just to build another shopping centre, but then goes broke and doesn't build it after all. And you don't have to listen to a word I say. I'm just a socially awkward, middle aged, undiaged, autistic man who is a born-again greenie that lets cane toads live in his backyard because he rightly believes that it's not the cane toad's fault they are here, and humans have had a far more devastating impact on the environment in the last ninety-one years than the cane toads ever will, and in inflicting harm on the couple that live around my place in perfect harmony with the few species of native frogs that live there too will have absolutely zero impact on the wider problem. There you go. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Hey um, thanks very much for tuning into the podcast again. I bloody think that's really cool. I hope you enjoyed it this week. I've got to be honest, it was a bit of a mission to get it recorded. I've kind of been trying two days. But I got it down. I'm sitting outside again in the backyard at night. I've actually got the fire going. I don't know if you can hear the odd little crackle and pop from that. Um I'm out beside the trapper's hut with the fire going. It's a beautiful, clear, starry night. I can hear plenty of curls out there tonight. Or to call the council. Get him shot. I'll fucking wake up the cat. It's had a hard day out eating birds. Native birds. It's got an early start tomorrow. I've got to take it into the get groomed. No, all that's a lie. I don't have a cat, and I would never call the council on the curloo birds. I love them. I did go for a walk down the park earlier though. And there was I said get A to the wallabies and the kangaroos. There was plenty of them around tonight. I got a bit of a firewood stash down there. About 18 months ago, just before Christmas, they came in and um pushed heaps of those little trees over, a bit of scrub and cleared it and dug a couple of huge drains for some storm water runoff. But they left these two big giant piles of little trees, little Malaleuca trees, just all piled up there. And that's actually what I built the Trapper's Hut out of. I went down there and raided and got all the good, strong, heavier bits of ones. I've still got to put it online. I said I'd do it last week. I'm going to get a video up on Instagram of the Trapper's Hut so you can have a look at it. But yeah, there's still a couple of big huge fire uh piles of bloody wood there I'm using for firewood. So I snuck down there tonight for a bit of research and development for the podcast. It was a lovely evening too to go for a walk down to the park to hang out with the wildlife. Oh, something going on at the park. Actually, the other night, uh driving home from work, I come past there on the way to my house. I noticed a couple of kids out in the park, like 11, 12-year-olds. And one little bugger had like ripped a green ant nest out of the tree, and he was chasing his mate with it. And I thought that was pretty funny. It took me back to working at one of those crocodile farms years ago. And with these two young clowns working there, they're always playing jokes and pranks on each other. And one afternoon, our mate was leaving work. Yeah, see you's later, and he drives past the window down. This other guy rips a green ant nest out of a tree and threw it in his car. Like hit him, it broke apart on him while he was driving his car. Oh, dickheads. One time walking, we had this big lagoon, like an enclosed lagoon full of breeding crocodiles. There's like 40 crocodiles in there, it's pretty hectic. Um, and there's three of us going for a walk through there. It was like the you know, in the wet season, in the thick of the breeding season, and we were just sort of doing a scout around seeing if there was any more nesting activity, if any of the girls in there were scratching up some nests, looking to lay some eggs. And one of these idiots, I don't know, it's his like purpose in life was just to mess with wildlife every chance he gets. He's carrying a stick and notices a big paper wasp nest in a tree and just decides to poke it with the stick while we're surrounded by huge crocodiles. And now we've got to do a runner through this crocodile lagoon getting attacked by wasps. Like I said, dickheads. Um, but this particular lagoon was where I was kind of thinking about when I said that bit about how I love animal watching from working in the zoos and stuff. Um in that time of the year while they're breeding, crocodiles are pretty fascinating creatures to watch if you just can I don't know, have that opportunity to sit down and see them in a natural environment like that. There was mainly females in there, you can only have about four males in a lagoon that size, or you know, a body of water that size in the wild, you wouldn't really encounter too many places where there's that high density of crocodiles. And two of these lads, we had like one dominant male in the lagoon, his name was Spartacus, and he was a touch over four metres, you know, he's a pretty big croc. And this young up-and-comer fancying his chances as the boss of the lagoon, and he sort of just bang on four metres, you know, a couple of real big crocs, and they had this amazing fight, like you'd always see sort of tiffts and stuff like that. But I sat down there one afternoon after the place had shut, and it went on for nearly 40 minutes, I reckon. These two big crocs just lined up, giving each other these massive big headbuts out in the middle of the water, floating there, and they'd sort of, you know, flick their tail and give themselves a bit of a swim up, and then just bang, smash their heads together, and teeth were flying off, and their faces were all busted up and cut and bleeding, and Christ, it was epic, it was just insane, it was so savage. And yeah, I don't know, that's that's one of the extreme ones I get to see. But I just love seeing animals in their, you know, natural environment doing what they do. It's a really cool thing, it's such a privilege to have been able to see that sort of stuff, and yeah, I guess you do get a lot of cool stories out of it. And it was in the end, the smaller of those two crocodiles eventually backed down, and Spartacus retained his title as the man about the lagoon. I'll definitely do a podcast on crocodile soon. I think I said I'd do that the other day, but um I guess I forgot. Yeah, I'll I've got a got a crocodile one. I've got some cool stories, and I'll weave into something for you. That's about it though for this week. Um thanks very much to Snoopoo, God bless you, leaving me a five-star rating and a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Um, everyone can do that. That'd be great if you'd leave a five-star review. That's nice and juicy, and that really helps me get the word out there a bit more. So, by all means, and yeah, don't forget to subscribe or follow or whatever it is on the platform you listen, just so you know when the next episode comes out. Um speaking to a guy through the week, he couldn't work out how to do it on Spotify. It was like a bit confusing. I don't know whether there's been an upgrade or something on the app, but you just like hit the three buttons, get to my podcast, open up one, then hit the three buttons that says go to show or go to podcast, and hit that, and and it just says follow, follow show. So death jump on that wagon, that'd be great, and you know, tell your mates, send it around, share the love. I'd really appreciate that. Uh follow me on the socials too, on Instagram at Mick Newton underscore storyteller, and Mick Newton Storyteller on Facebook. Go and have a look there. I'll chuck up some photos of the trapper's hut so you know what I'm bloody talking about. And maybe a little photo of my my setup here tonight, it's kind of cool. But um I think I'll I'll leave you as be Thanks again for for you know listening and hanging out with me until next time. You know the deal. Tell everyone you love that you love them. Be kind to everybody that you come across. And you know, be polite to the wallabies and the curls as you walk past. Say hello. And I'll catch you all next time. Peace out.