CHAPTER XIX
KANGAROOS AND DANCING BIRDS
AUSTRALIA is a country where every other animal carries its baby in its breast pocket. It has one hundred and ten different varieties of marsupials, or animals which have in their bellies pouches in which they carry their young. Some of these animals are taller than a man and some are no bigger than your thumb. Some climb trees, some gallop over the plains, and some spend more than half their time in the water. During my travels I have seen certain varieties in their natural surroundings and I have examined and photographed others in the zoölogical gardens. Every city here has its zoölogical garden, and every town has its museum, so that there is no trouble seeing the wild animals of Australia, either stuffed or alive.
What interests me most is the kangaroo. Before I came here I had an idea that all kangaroos were alike. I now know that there are forty-nine varieties, ranging in size from the great gray kangaroo, the male of which measures from nose to tail tip more than seven feet, down to the kangaroo rabbit and kangaroo rat. The Sydney and Melbourne zoos have specimens of nearly every kind. In them I saw kangaroos taller than I am, jumping around in fields inclosed by wire fences. They had enormous hind legs, which sent them flying through the air as though they were on steel springs. They can leap thirty feet at a jump, and gallop over the country faster on two legs than a horse can on four. But, as they tire quickly, horses can overtake them in the end.
The largest of the kangaroos are the red and the gray varieties, which are found all over Australia. Horses and dogs are bred for the sport of hunting them. The dogs are a cross between the greyhound and the deerhound, fleet of foot and very fierce. When brought to bay, the big kangaroo is dangerous and will attack a dog or a man. With its back against a tree it waits for its enemy. A dog that comes too near is grasped in the kangaroo’s forearms, hugged tightly to its breast, and disembowelled with a rip of one of its clawed feet. The ivory-like claws on the kangaroo’s hind feet are three or four inches in length, and cut like knives. The kangaroo can swim as well as run, and when chased, it will, if possible, take to the water. If a dog follows, the kangaroo tries to drown it by holding it under water.
The kangaroos go about in pairs. One usually sees a male and a female together and the little head of a baby kangaroo is often spied sticking out of the pouch of the mother. When it first sees the light of day the baby kangaroo is not more than an inch long. It has no hair and is almost transparent, like an earthworm. Its mother puts it into her pouch, and there it lies and sucks until it grows big enough to come forth and eat grass. Even then it crawls back into the pouch whenever it is tired or at the least sign of danger, poking its head out now and then to see if the coast is clear. It leaves the pouch for good after eight or nine months, when it weighs eight or ten pounds, and has become too heavy for the mother to carry.
The opossum is the only one of the Australian marsupials to be found anywhere else in the world. Quantities of the fur are exported, to be used as trimming on women’s coats.
Except for the opossum and opossum rat of Patagonia, marsupials are found only in Australia. We import quantities of Australian opossum fur as trimming for women’s coats.
Most kangaroos are plain dwellers and grass eaters. Carl Lumholtz was the first to discover a variety that lives in trees. He found them through the blacks of northern Queensland, and with their help was able to get several specimens. There are some in the museum at Sydney and I am told that others have been sent to several museums in Europe.
The tree kangaroo is a baby beside its big gray and red cousins. Its head is like that of a squirrel, and its body is better proportioned than that of the kangaroo of the plains. It has arms and legs about eight or ten inches long, and a tail a little bit longer. It spends most of the time in the trees, sleeping there in the daytime and coming down only at night for water. It eats tree leaves. This animal is considered a great delicacy by the blacks, who have trained the dingoes to tree it. Then the natives climb, not only the tree in which the kangaroo is lodged, but all the trees near by, in order to catch it if it jumps from one to another.
The musk kangaroo is so small you can put it in your pocket. There is a kangaroo that looks like a rabbit, known as the hare kangaroo, and another called the rat kangaroo. One of the commonest of the small kangaroos is the wallaby, which is killed for its skin, as are many of the other kinds. There is a great demand for kangaroo leather for bags, shoes, and other articles, and quite a lot is exported to the United States.
Australia has a curious little beast which is a sort of link between the mammals and the birds. This is the platypus, which has a bill like that of a duck, and feet so covered with webbing that it can swim. Yet it nourishes its young with its milk. It tunnels in the earth like a mole and is usually found along the fresh-water streams of Tasmania and Victoria. It feeds upon small water insects, shell fish, beetles, and vegetable particles. It is sometimes speared by the blacks, and white men occasionally catch it with night lines.
The life of the platypus is interesting. A pair will live in a little tunnel, one of the openings of which is below the water and the other in the bank just above it. Their nest is in the tunnel, halfway between the two doors, the water door and the land door of their house. Here the female hatches her young, laying one or two eggs for each setting. As with the American skunk, the odour of the platypus advertises its presence for miles around.
Platypus fur is most beautiful, although the animal is so scarce that it is hardly an article of commerce. I have a skin of one about twelve inches wide by eighteen inches long. The fur is as soft and smooth as moleskin, but the bill and the legs are as hard as horn. The skin is sometimes used to make rugs, a good platypus rug being worth at least one hundred and twenty-five dollars.
Some of the queerest animals of this continent are found along the coast. Penguins live on the islands of the far south, and the big-billed pelican is common, especially on the coral reefs off Queensland. There are also seals, and a sort of sea cow, which excited great interest some years ago on account of its likeness to the fabled mermaid. In the first days of Australia one of a party of fishermen collecting bêche-de-mer on the Queensland coast imagined he saw some of these wonderful creatures, half-woman, half-fish. He came running to his companions saying that he had seen some mermaids disporting themselves in blue sea grass. One of them, he declared, had raised her head and shoulders out of the water and looked at him. He had been so terrified that he had fled to the ship as fast as his legs could carry him. Later on the men discovered that the supposed mermaids were the Australian dugongs. The mothers constantly hold their young to their breasts and in this position look not unlike the traditional mermaid.
The dugong is somewhat like a porpoise. It has a smooth round body, a broad, fat tail, and two anterior flippers, which are short, thick, and fleshy. Its head has a rounded muzzle and the mouth of the male has projecting tusks. When fully grown the dugong is from eight to ten feet in length, but it sometimes attains to as much as twelve feet. The animals gather in herds of from half a dozen to forty and swim about together. The females, which are more numerous than the males, cry like human beings when suckling their babies.
The dugongs are found chiefly in the tropical waters about the north coast. The natives hunt them under the direction of white men, chasing them in boats or bark canoes, and spearing the cows with harpoons. The best place to strike is through the tail, for the animal is quite powerless once its tail is lifted out of the water.
The natives are fond of dugong flesh. They cook and eat it, boiling down the fat for the oil, which has a medicinal value like that of cod liver oil. The hides and the large tusks of the male are marketable.
I wish I could show you some of the odd birds of Australia. The continent has more than seven hundred varieties, some of which are found nowhere else. In the Brisbane museum I saw scores of different kinds of parrots, some as white as snow, others of a delicate pink, and others as red as blood. The lyre bird, which is one of the most curious of all, has a tail shaped just like a lyre. The satin-bower bird builds a playground near the tree where it has its nest. This is a sort of platform, sometimes three feet in diameter, made of sticks woven together. Over this the male birds build a bower of woven twigs, decorating it with all the beautiful things they can find. They weave gay feathers among the sticks, and put bones and shells here and there. Some of the bowers found in the vicinity of settlements are ornamented with pieces of broken china and glass. One variety decorates the bower with fresh flowers every day. These bowers are not nests nor are they the homes of the birds. They are supposed to be the rendezvous, or courting places, where the males dance and strut before their lady friends.
The young bower birds are bright green, but when full grown the males are of a deep, shining blue-black closely resembling satin. They have blue bills, yellow at the tip, and their legs and feet are yellowish white. The females are green and brown, with bills of a dark horn colour. The birds are found all along the east coast of Australia and in many parts of the interior.
You may know the little poem by the small boy who was indignant at having his pennies put in the Sunday-school box. One verse reads:
I wish I were a cassowary
In the wilds of Timbuctoo.
Wouldn’t I eat a missionary,
Skin and bones and hymn book, too!
Australia is the land of the cassowary. In part of the country there are thousands of these great birds, which resemble the ostrich and the emu. The ostriches and the emus live on the open plains. The cassowaries are found in the forests and brushwoods. They are wary birds and seldom come out of the jungles. I have seen a number of them during my stay in Australia. The bird is about four and a half feet high, with black feathers, brown at the base. It has eyes like an eagle, and a long, thin neck, with a naked head, and flat but powerful bill. The cassowary’s legs are very strong and look more like clubs than bird legs. They end in three large claws like those of an emu.
Sydney is not only the fastest-growing city of Australia but also the commercial metropolis of the South Seas. About the size of St. Louis, it handles the bulk of the trade of New South Wales.
Most of Australia’s wheat still goes overseas in sacks, loaded in ships by belt conveyors, but the grain elevators being built in increasing numbers permit the grain to be handled in bulk at less cost.
The companies operating the world-famous silver and lead mines at Broken Hill and the steel works at Newcastle have been large buyers of American mining machinery and of plant equipment and tools.
American automobiles dominate the market in Australia. Here the motor-car is now regarded as a necessity, especially in the back country where distances are great.
The emu is the national bird of Australia. It is larger than the cassowary, and is often five or six feet in height. It is much like the ostrich, except that its legs are shorter and its body more thickset and clumsy. Its dull brown plumage spotted with gray looks more like coarse hair than feathers, and emu skins are sometimes used for rugs. The cassowaries have no hair on their heads, but the heads of the emus are completely feathered, or I might say haired. The wings are so short that they are invisible when held close to the body. The birds are quite dangerous and can kill a dog or a man with a kick.
Hunting emus is one of the favourite sports of Australia for which dogs and horses are specially trained. The best time for a hunt is early in the morning, when the birds go out to feed on grass. The dogs are taught to catch the emus by the neck, else they may be killed by the bird, which kicks backward or sidewise like a cow. In some sections the settlers try to destroy them, to save the grass for the sheep. They send out men to hunt for the nests and break the eggs. On a back-block sheep station fifteen hundred eggs were destroyed at one time, while in one county of New South Wales ten thousand emus were killed in nine months. In the thickly settled portions of Australia they have been practically exterminated. The aborigines hunt them for food, eating the flesh with the skin on it. They are especially fond of the hind quarters, which taste not unlike beef. Emu eggshells are sometimes mounted in silver and used as milk jugs or sugar bowls.
Among the kingfishers is the kookooburra, or laughing jackass. Its hoarse cry is like a laugh and can be heard for miles through the forests. This bird has a head about as big as its body, but its laugh is a thousand times bigger than both body and head. It says, “Ha! ha! ha! hoo! hoo! hoo!” contemptuously laughing again and again, until at last it puts the nerves of the bush traveller on edge. It eats snakes, lizards, and other reptiles, and for this reason is protected by law.