A Kangaroo Battue.
Man has to be fed, and therefore game has to be shot and fish has to be caught. The animal life of Australia had little rest when the blacks roamed over the country, but it has still less, now that the white man is in possession. The kangaroo hunt varies from a necessary slaughter of the blue and red kangaroos of the plains, to an exciting run and desperate fight for life at the finish of it, when the game is the big dark forester living in the timber belts that line most of the Australian streams. The battue of kangaroos is often rendered imperative by the rapid increase of the marsupials after the disappearance of their old enemies, the aborigines and the dingo. As regards the kangaroo, matters are apt to become very serious for the grazier. On an average, these animals consume as much grass as a sheep, and where a few score originally existed there soon come to be a thousand. In some places they have threatened to jostle the sheep and his master out of the land; and, in consequence, energetic and costly steps have to be taken to reduce their numbers. In a battue of this description a whole neighbourhood joins. It may seem hard that this aboriginal should be ruthlessly destroyed in favour of the sheep, because he has no wool; but then, if he could reflect, he would see that, fed and cared for as the merino is, yet his fate would usually be the butcher at last.
The battue is not so welcome to the sportsman as the chase of the forester. The 'old man,' when finally run down, backs like a stag into a convenient corner, perhaps the hollow of a great gum-tree, the trunk of which has been partly burned away with a bush fire, and there, with a calm no-surrender expression in his mute face, and just the merest blaze in the big deer-like eyes, waits for the enemy like the splendidly resolute old veteran he is. If he can find a water-pool or river in which to 'stick up,' so much the better for him and the worse for those who attack him. He wades in until only his nervous fore-arms and head are above water, and in this position can keep even a half-dozen dogs from coming to quarters. The forester, standing six feet high, has the advantage over the dogs that, while he stands upon his hind-legs, they must swim.
Of the amphibious platypus everybody has heard. The creature has been playfully likened unto a creditor, because it is a 'beast with a bill'; but its peculiarities do not stop here. As a survival, or a 'connecting link,' it has other qualities that render it an object almost of veneration to the naturalist. It is a mammal, suckling its young, and yet it lays eggs. This fact was long known to bushmen, but it was doubted by the scientific world, and Mr. W. H. Caldwell, 'travelling bachelor,' of Cambridge, visited Australia in 1884-5, to specially study the subject, and his researches proved that, as the bushmen had declared, the platypus is oviparous. On the one hand, the platypus, with its duck's bill and its webbed feet, connects the beast with the bird, and, on the other hand, its peculiar oviparian qualities are held to establish a relationship with the reptile. The name once given it, 'water-mole,' indicates its size, though certainly the platypus has considerably the advantage of the mole. It is larger, indeed, than the largest water-rat. When the first specimens were taken to Europe a hoax, we are told, was suspected, the idea being that the bill and the feet had been cunningly attached to the body; but the platypus is too common a creature for the idea to be long entertained, and so its existence was officially acknowledged, and it received the title Ornithorhynchus. The platypus is a 'survival,' and it is likely to survive for many a generation. It breeds in security in a chamber at the end of a long passage which it constructs from the river banks. It is sensitive to sound, and, as it dives with alacrity, and swims with only its beak above water, a shot is no easy matter. As it is still to be obtained in streams so well visited as the Yarra and the Gippsland Avon, it may be imagined that its existence in other rivers is perfectly secure. Yet its skin is much valued. As a fur it is equal to the sealskin; and if the animal were only larger it would be systematically hunted for its covering.
Australia is rich in the abundance and variety of birds of the parrot tribe, and in the occurrence of peculiar species of the feathered race. She possesses the birds of Paradise, the king parrot, the blue mountain-parrot, the lories, parroquets and love-birds. The plumage of other birds is often of the gayest type. Thus, the blue wren is common about Nutbourne; and this bird, says Gould, is hardly surpassed by any of the feathered tribe, certainly by none but the humming-birds of America. The cockatoo, with white, black, or rosy crest, flies in flocks, and few sights in the world are prettier than one of these flights. When they finally settle on a tree, they cover it as with a snow-drift. Noisy they are, and clever, never feeding in the settled districts without posting sentinels to warn the rest of the approach of the human enemy.
The Platypus.
One of the most interesting birds of Australia is the so-called lyre-bird, the Menura Victoriæ of the naturalist, the 'pheasant' of the settler, and the 'bullard-bullard' of the aborigines, the two words somewhat resembling the native note of the graceful creature. Gould was strongly of opinion that the lyre-bird, and not the emu, should be selected as the emblem of Australia, since it is very beautiful, strictly peculiar to the country, and 'an object of the highest interest.'