On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

After this the forest rested tranquil for a little while. Rolling myself tightly up in my blanket, I turned on my side and laid my cheek against the earth, mossy and sweet-scented, sweeping aside with my hand all the little nobbly gum-seeds. Away back in the scrub a lyre-bird gave a hoarse, angry cry—on one never-to-be-forgotten day in that same spot I had seen one of these shyest of all the denizens of the forest, with his lovely tail spread, treading arrogantly with his great feet across the very moss where I lay—then there was another spell of silence, broken only by the whispering of the leaves and an odd little complaining sound, where, high up above my head, a dead bough had fallen across another and sawed gently backwards and forwards, with a note like that of a ’cello.

A tree fell in the distance, with no tearing shriek of perturbation, but with a resounding crash, which told me that its death had come to it, perhaps months before, and that only now were its neighbours letting it slip from their supporting arms to the earth, where unnumbered seedlings would, in a few weeks, spring to life over and around it. Another silence—during which I lay and watched the moon climb up over the tree-tops, the way the ibis had come—and then a harsh, guttural complaint broke on my ears from just above my head. “Ug-g-g-, ug-ug, ug—?” It was an opossum just awaking from his cosy sleep. I could almost see him shake himself and snap his little sharp white teeth. “Ug-ug, ug,” he seemed to say. “What a nuisance! Another day’s work all to start over again! tut, tut!” Then a little pouched mouse hopped airily out into the moonlight right under my very nose; sat upright, stroked his whiskers thoughtfully, and started off, on what cannibal orgy I almost trembled to think, remembering Mr. Hall’s story of how fifty of these bloodthirsty beings were sent to the University—were sent, I say, for but two arrived—with a little heap of skin and fur to tell the tale; while, in the very bottle in which they were put to be chloroformed, the survivors indulged in a mortal combat. There are other tiny pouched mice in parts of the State which jump like kangaroos, but that night I was not in range of them; and this one cannibal creature was the only one of his kind that I saw.

By the time the mouse had passed, literally brushing by me in search of a more sizeable prey, the owls had started, and the doleful cry of “More pork, more-pork!” echoed from tree to tree. More opossums began to stir, leaping and scolding among the boughs, while all the undergrowth seemed alive with the oddest rustlings and little whimpering cries. Of a truth night in the forest holds an infinitude of wonder and delight, but little enough of sleep, unless you are so inured to it as to cease to start and wonder at every sound. Once there were Titanic marsupials as large as a rhinoceros, and phalanges monstrous as any polar bear, and giant kangaroos a dozen feet high, and a wombat as great as an ox, in these very woods, away back in what I believe is called the Eocene Age—and what must the stir and turmoil of such a night have been in those days, when all these small people make such a bustle now from dark to dawn!

The mammals in Australia are divided into two groups, to one of which—the egg-laying mammals, or prototheria—only two specimens belong, all the rest coming under the other section, the theria. The platypus and the spiny ant-eater, which comprise the first group, are—to the superficial eye—as different as any two animals can well be, the anteater not being unlike a slender light-coloured English hedgehog in appearance, and covered with similar prickles, while the platypus is covered with the softest and closest of brown fur. I have a little toque made of platypus—in defiance of all law, for, rightly enough, the weird little animal is most strictly protected—which has often been taken for a very close, fine sealskin. The platypus has a wide bill, like a duck, and webbed front feet; but its hind-feet have claws on them, rather like an otter, while it lays eggs and suckles its young, and does everything else by means of which it is possible to puzzle the zoologist. It is an intensely shy creature, and, living in the burrow by the river’s edge, as it does, is as much at home in the water as on land, and very difficult indeed to catch a glimpse of.

Once I numbered among my friends a very likeable vagabond, who for years earned a sufficiency of food by selling the eels he caught in a bend of the River Yarra, about three miles above Melbourne. He had no roof over his head, excepting the trees, or perhaps an empty cattle-shed in the wettest weather, and he possessed neither wife nor children nor domestic impedimenta of any sort, nor any wardrobe—except what he carried on his back—while he was so frankly idle—apart from his occasional and leisurely occupation of letting down eel-lines—that at the last census he wittily suggested he should be described as a gentleman. This man told me—and I believed him, for he had nothing to gain by lying—that he had seen a platypus in that very bend of the river; but, though I crept out evening after evening and watched untiringly in the same place, I never met with the same luck; perhaps because I had not, like him, such fine “estates in time,” as Charles Lamb would put it.

The “native-companions” are among the strangest sights of the Australian Bush, and if you are lucky enough to see them dancing out in the open on a fine moonlight night, you will not be likely to forget the sight. I do not know if they are a species of crane, but they are certainly very like them in appearance—tall and slim, and of a delicate grey colour; while if some forerunner of Mr. Turveydrop’s was responsible for their mien and deportment, he might well be proud of his pupils. They do not play about at random as some animals do, apparently intoxicated by the night air and the moonlight, but they literally dance; with a decorum and grace which belong, in truth, to the days of the dandies. Picture, if you can, an open stretch of country, moonlit and veiled in light mist; the white, ghostlike trees, and these shadowy figures stepping so lightly, bowing and bending with such solemn grace; twisting and turning in a maze of intricate figures, seemingly governed by some unbreakable law of etiquette, like ghosts from bygone ballrooms.

All the Australian birds, however, seem to me extraordinarily different from the English birds in character and expression, as well as plumage and note. They are less simple, or guileless, if one may use such a word. They are wild with the sort of wildness that gives one the idea that they are the imprisoned souls of wood-fawns and satyrs, older and wiser than any other birds, with an odd sort of cunning in their aspect. I have watched them again and again beside the pool of which I speak, which seems, indeed, a veritable show-ground for them. There the mud-larks, rather like our water-wagtails, only much larger, come there with the most wanton flutter of broad black and white tails, to disport themselves upon the patch of green at its verge. And the laughing jackass and cockatoo, wild-duck, and even an occasional wild-swan; lories and galahs, and innumerable little green and grey birds; owls and hawks, the blue goshawk, and the rare white hawk.

But these are not all the strange characters to be found in the book of Nature, which lies open before us in the Australian Bush—a book of fantastic contradictions, of Rabelaistique twists and turns, and of the oddest humours. There is the flying squirrel—which does not fly, and is not a squirrel at all,—with a long fold of skin stretching from the front to the back leg at either side, enabling its possessor to glide through the air for a considerable distance, though always from a greater to a lesser height. And there are kangaroos—though not in Victoria—which climb the trees and browse on the top of the highest eucalypti; and birds which hatch their eggs, after the manner of reptiles, in the warm sand or gravel; and there are so-called legless lizards, peculiar to Australia, and the water-holding frog found in the central deserts, which can blow its body out with a sufficiency of fluid to support it for a year or more in a dried-up mudhole—completely independent of any “Wowser.” And there is a fish with a lung, and in Gippsland an earthworm 7 feet long, and the thickness of a man’s finger—fit bait for the leviathan, indeed.

There are now in Victoria 4,016,995 acres of state forests and timber reserves, apart from the other tracts of forest land, and this in spite of the fact that ever since the white man put his foot in the state he has been, year in, year out, stubbling up and cutting down, burning, and ring-barking. Once up in the woods above Macedon I remember coming across a tiny two-roomed cottage in the heart of the forest. For the distance of a hundred feet or so the ground had been cleared at either side, save for ragged stumps, while all around tall trees stood in thick ranks, like the straight white pillars of a cathedral, in the middle of which the tiny homestead appeared like an altar, with the curl of blue smoke uprising from its chimney as incense; the only tree quite near, and, indeed, towering over it, being one gigantic gum, on which, even as I lingered there, the men were busied with their hatchets; and I remember it seemed to my mind an incredible piece of vandalism that such a beautiful tree should be destroyed, the one possible shade that the little house could hope for through the blazing summer day; more particularly as there were miles upon miles of forest all round if they needed wood.

I stood and watched the men at work till they had chopped all round the tree, leaving only a slender spindle of wood in the centre, when, by the help of ropes which they had already fastened to it, it was dragging, crashing, to the ground. It hurts me horribly to see a great tree fall, for it seems to tear the very heart out of one with its last rending cry. Something in my throat chokes me, and my eyes grow misty. To see a tree fall, or a mighty ship launched, both overpower one with the same intense excitement. Birth or death—they are much the same in their first breath—joy or sorrow, they tear you alike.