Scratching the Wrong Itch: Wombats, Mange & Why Systems Won’t Heal

This episode came from noticing a place biomimicry could quietly change the way Pia works, thanks to a wombat called Chardonnay.

She’s treated wombats with mange in the wild. Every few days, hiking in, pouring medicine onto the animal, hiking back out. Weeks of this. Sometimes months later, the mange is back. And the cycle begins again.

Because the mites don’t just live on the wombat. They survive in the burrow.

Treat the host, ignore the habitat, and reinfection undoes everything.

One day, driving home from the mountains, it hit her. She’d been doing the exact same thing with clients. Training teams, watching them transform, then coming back months later to find old behaviours back in place. Not because the training failed. Because the conditions pulled them back.

This episode sits inside that pattern. The places where we keep scratching the wrong itch.

This isn’t motivation or mindset. It’s a design problem.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

Biology: Sarcoptic mange mites survive both on wombats and within their burrows, enabling reinfection even after the host is treated.
Principle: Intervening at the point of impact is insufficient if the conditions that regenerate the problem remain unchanged.
Application: Shifting focus from individual behaviour change to redesigning the surrounding system or “habitat” to prevent recurring failure.

Note on the wombat work:
The fieldwork described in this episode is done with the Blue Mountains Wombat Conservation Group, a volunteer-run organisation treating sarcoptic mange in wild wombats.

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

I remember how quiet it is out there, City Girl Me. So quiet, it's loud. Twigs snapping under our boots. The sound of the creek that we're heading for and can't see yet. Cockatoos squawking somewhere overhead. And then the silent ones. A red-bellied black snake coiled on the rock ahead. Leeches working their way into our socks as we slip and slide along the riverbank. We're following a very analogue GPS vibe. Bits of ribbon tied to foliage. We're wearing awkward backpacks. Not heavy, just incredibly clumsy. Especially when you're trying to climb over a barbed wire fence with a bull staring you down. And suddenly very aware you're not as nimble as you were a few decades ago. Me and a teammate out treating wombats with mange. I'm Pia, and this is Feral by Design. This episode is about wombats. Mange, bullying, and toxic workplaces. Eventually we reached the burrow we called Chardonnay, because it's right near a winery, and you absolutely need a sense of humour when you're doing this kind of work. This is how the treatment works in the wild. We make a very simple flap that sits at the entrance of the burrow. It's a piece of core flute, usually repurposed from old election signs and real estate boards. You know the ones. We wedge a vegemite lid in the middle, a little like a tray. We pour the medicine into that, set it in place, and then we walk away. So as the wombat comes and goes from its burrow, it bumps that flap and the treatment tips along its back. And that's it. It's very low-tech. It's a bit ridiculous. It is surprisingly effective. And yeah, sometimes that flap still has a politician's face on it. The jar lid usually ends up right where their mouth should be. Anyway. So there we were at Chardonnay's borough. We poured the medicine into the vegemite lid, set the flap, and hiked back out. And we'd be back in a few days. Then the next week, and the week after that. Treating mange isn't quick. The treatment roster can run oh eight to twelve weeks depending on how severe it is. And standing there pouring that medicine, part of me was already wondering if this was one I'd be coming back to to start all over again in a few months' time. Because this happens. You treat a wombat for weeks, they recover, and then months later there's a sighting, and the mange is back, and the whole cycle starts again. I try not to sit with that thought for too long. The mite responsible is Sarcoptes scabiae, likely introduced here by European settlers and their dogs. So wombats never evolved with it, so their defences get overwhelmed fast. You rarely see a wombat out during the day, they're nocturnal. So when you do see one out in daylight, something's wrong. Usually something's really wrong. The first time I actually saw Chardonnay, not the burrow, she was out at midday, just sitting, not grazing, I remember this, not moving. Mange does that. It makes them so miserable they stop caring about their own safety. The scratching isn't casual, it's desperate. The same spot over and over until these raw patches start to replace the fur. The mites burrow into the skin, microscopic tunnels where they live, breed, and feed on skin cells. The wombat's immune system goes into overdrive trying to fight it, right? But it can't keep up. The immune response itself becomes part of the problem. A crusty armour that cracks and bleeds, it's awful. Secondary infection piling in through those open wounds, so the wombat scratches harder, loses more fur, and loses more body heat. Mange affected wombats are out during the day because they're desperate. They forage longer, they move more slowly, they drink more, all trying to compensate for this massive drain of energy just existing in a body that's being starved and is under siege. Without treatment, they usually die within months. And here's what makes this cycle so brutal. The mites don't just live on the wombat, they survive in their burrows, and sometimes up for two weeks. And wombats rotate between burrows. So even when we treat Chardonnay, she can walk straight back into a contaminated burrow, or another wombat can use hers and pick up the mite she's left behind. The reinfection cycle continues. You can't just treat the wombat. You have to deal with the burrow too. But we can't. We can't treat every burrow. So we treat and retreat. Treat and retreat. Just hoping that that cycle eventually breaks. And that's hard to sit with. Because wombats are critical ecosystem engineers. They're the largest burrowing marsupials, in fact, on Earth. Can you tell I love them much, much? Their tunnels aerate soil for soil health, they provide fire refuge, and they create stable shelter for dozens of other species. So watching an animal that holds that much of a system together slowly unravel, that stays with you. On the drive home from the mountains that day, this is about four years ago now, I think, I kept thinking about Chardonnay. Actually, both Chardonnays, if I'm honest. The wombat, of course, but also the glass of wine I was very much looking forward to. Somewhere between the turnoff and the freeway, it clicked. I'd been doing the same thing with my clients. See, as part of my work in innovation, I trained teams in creative behaviours, how to shift mindsets, embrace uncertainty, test ideas, speak up when you're not sure, those kinds of things. One training workshop I'm thinking of, people left energized, transformed, almost born again. They left with tangible techniques and tools that they could use immediately and they could see that. I left feeling like I'd made a real impact. But a couple of months later, I came back for the follow-up coaching sessions, and the old behaviors were back. Not because the training failed, and not because people didn't get it, but because the environment hadn't changed. Meeting structures still the same. Reward systems stayed the same. Safe ideas funded quickly, risky ones quietly sidelined. Leadership behavior stayed the same. Lip service to innovation, with real decisions still being made very much behind closed doors. Performance metrics stayed the same, efficiency over experimentation. So the team reverted. Not because they were weak and not because they were lazy, because the conditions pulled them back. Just like Chardonnay, walking back into a contaminated burrow. I was treating the host and ignoring the habitat. This episode is biomimicry at a systems level. It's about understanding where destructive cycles keep getting recreated, about intervening where that recurrence is actually being generated, not just where the damage actually shows up. The design principle I extracted from this and applied to my work is designing for reinfection resistance by shifting conditions, not just intervening harder. That realization didn't suddenly make my work easier. Hell to the no. But it did change where I intervene. When I've been able to, with training briefs, I've stopped treating the training itself as the main event. Instead, I try to work on the burrow at the same time, where all that training has to survive. The routines people keep rubbing up against every single day. The decision gates they have to squeeze through. The signals that quietly tell them which behaviours will actually be protected. Sometimes that's meant action learning on something real with real stakes and me there alongside them, so they can focus on the learning as we go, and enough permission from above that it doesn't get treated as a side project. And sometimes, to be honest, it's meant being prepared to not intervene at all. I've had some tough love conversations, calling out that without some of those habitat conditions, anything I add is likely to wash away with the next downpour. And sometimes, even as a first Chardonnay step, I've just tried to change one small part of the habitat, just to give something for the work we'd done to cling on to. Maybe that's a process shift or many action learning projects, I find they work really well. Or a corner of the space in the workplace that looks and feels different. Or simple rituals that signal you're allowed to behave differently here. And then I watch what happens. And once you see this pattern, you see it everywhere. Bullying in schools, same cycle. We punish the bully, treat the host, but leave the habitat unchanged. The toilet blocks still have corners where no adults look. There are blind spots in the playgrounds, in canteen queues. The same corner of the playground still belongs to those same kids. Supervision patterns that never move. So bullying resurfaces. Different kid, same system. Host and habitat always. So here's the uncomfortable question, but I know you're up for it. Where is my reinfection cycle? Where do I keep intervening at the surface, treating the host, whether it's myself, my teams, my clients, while avoiding the harder work of changing the conditions that keep pulling us back? Because I do this, we all do. We work on ourselves, we try harder, we adjust our behavior, but if the conditions around us stay the same, we end up right back where we started. Recognizing the conditions is one thing. Being able to change them is another, isn't it? Once you start seeing through this lens, you notice how often doing something replaces actually changing something. Not because we're naive and not because we don't care. It's because changing habitat is harder, it's slower, it's messier. It sometimes might mean redesigning uh power or space or incentives, norms, family dynamics. And sometimes we don't have the authority or the tools, or even the appetite to do that yet. So we patch. Some cycles don't just exhaust systems. They quietly exhaust the people who keep caring inside these systems. And that's not a motivation problem. It's a habitat problem. Let's be clear. The world needs people willing to haul backpacks through muddy, snaky country with vegemite lids and old election signs. Random. But maybe we also need to get better at spotting where we're stuck in our own reinfection cycles. Because when the same problem keeps coming back, it's rarely just the individual response, is it? It's the conditions around it. Sometimes the deeper work is simply admitting this. The cycle won't break until those conditions that keep creating it change. Even if you don't yet know how or when or whether it's fully possible. So instead of asking, how do I patch this again? Get curious and try asking different questions. Why does this keep coming back? Where in the system is it being recreated? And what would actually have to change for it to stop? And underneath all of that, my favorite question I use a lot, am I treating the host or am I dealing with a habitat? Next time you find yourself stuck in a loop, whether that's workplace, drama, schoolyard politics, uh whatever it looks like for you, notice whether you're just doing something or whether you're trying to change something. I haven't been able to get back to the valley for a wombat shift for a while now, but with this episode, I'm treating thoughts, not parasites. I'm Pia, and this is Feral by Design. Nature owns the patent. Some assembly required.