Australia, New Zealand and some islands of the South seas

by Frank G. Carpenter

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.