Vic Jurskis

Koalas are an irruptive species. They eat soft young shoots which are scarce in healthy mature forests, so they are naturally rare. After Europeans disrupted Aboriginal burning and occupied grassy valleys, dense young forests grew in the hills, and trees in valleys declined, constantly resprouting soft young shoots. Koalas bred up in the hills and invaded the valleys.

Their browsing pressure exacerbated tree decline so they began to suffer malnutrition and disease. People responded by shooting them and using their fur. By the 1880s an export industry developed. But the more adults that were shot, the more young survived. The valley populations crashed when leaves frizzled in the Federation Drought. Some crashed again in the Millennium Drought.

But research using effective survey methods shows that koalas are generally increasing with expanding National Parks and Lock It Up and Let It Burn conservation polices. The valleys are occupied by towns, so the koalas are moving in. Disease, dog attacks and road trauma are symptoms of irruptions, not causes of decline.

The experts admitted that the evidence they provided to the TSSC for the initial listing and the ‘upgrade’ was entirely made up: “A quantitative, scientific method for deriving estimates of koala populations and trends was possible, in the absence of empirical data on abundances”. There are many more koalas over a much wider area than there were when Europeans arrived. CSIRO Publishing| Wildlife Research

There’s nothing scientific about the TSSC assessment. Koalas are already breeding in response to the soft young growth after Black Summer. Before the fires, I showed the NSW Koala Inquiry photos of a young koala in unburnt dense scrub south of Eden where the experts say they’re extinct. I explained that lack of gentle burning, koala irruptions and megafires go together.

I sent them photos of exactly the same site after it was incinerated. They declined to publish the photos and dismissed my evidence.

John Gould found koalas very scarce and predicted their extinction in 1844. In the 1930s, the experts claimed they were extinct in NSW and SA and nearly extinct in mainland Victoria. The supposedly last natural population in the Strzeleckis has survived 20 megafires in 200 years, starting around 1820 and including Black Thursday 1851, Red Tuesday 1898, Black Friday 1939 and Black Saturday 2009. It is still in unnaturally high numbers.

In 1976, 43 experts gathered at Taronga Zoo unanimously agreed that there were “large, growing populations” and koalas were in no danger of extinction. Only one of the 43 was involved in providing the recent ‘evidence’ to TSSC and he declined to put his name on the ‘expert’ paper I quoted above.

There is a huge animal welfare problem as a result of koalas increasing in declining scrub-infested forests and dispersing into suburbia, but no koala conservation problem. Our world-famous small mammal extinctions occurred after scrub choked out the diverse ground flora that fed them. There was no logging or clearing in the arid areas where they mostly lived.

We could save heaps of money and reduce human and animal misery by reinstating healthy and safe landscapes with low densities of koalas in the bush where they belong.

Related story: Increased protection for koalas: Ley

Vic Jurskis has written two books published by Connor Court, Firestick Ecology and The Great Koala Scam.