Vic Jurskis

I reckon the Monty Python team would have been jealous of the creative genius behind NSW’s Koala Strategy. It would be hilarious except for the $200 million price tag to save an irruptive species which is in much greater numbers across a much wider area than before the European ‘invasion’. Apart from Strzelecki, no explorer saw any koalas because they didn’t live in the grassy valleys occupied by Aborigines and sought by pastoralists.

Koalas were rare because they eat soft young shoots – a rare commodity in healthy mature forests. They lived solitary lives in home ranges of a square kilometer or so containing thousands of trees. With big noses and strong limbs, they moved every night sniffing out trees with a flush of soft growth. Dorothy Wall, who wrote about Blinky Bill, understood this basic ecology which seems to escape modern koala experts.

Koalas were so rare near Sydney in 1802, that Francis Barallier’s Aboriginal guide Gory had to barter two spears and a tomahawk to obtain two koala feet as the first specimens. Imagine how much the prime cuts would’ve been worth. Later, they irrupted in new stringybark forests that grew up in the Blue Mountains’ foothills after traditional burning was disrupted. So, Aborigines devised stringybark nooses on sapling poles to drag the newly abundant food resource out of the young trees.  

In 1840, Strzelecki’s exploration party survived by eating koalas while they struggled for 26 days through 50 miles of dense 20-year-old forest initiated by our first megafire. This wilderness was created by a 1789 smallpox epidemic which virtually wiped out the Yowenjerre people.  They’d maintained open grassy forest with their firesticks. The new scrub had no grassy layer to sustain roos or emus, but plenty of browse for koalas.

When Europeans started clearing the scrub in the 1870s, they found plagues of dingoes feeding on plagues of koalas. After some of the most intensive clearing in Australia, twenty megafires in 200 years, and 80 years of short-rotation plantation forestry, there are still high densities of koalas in the Strzelecki Ranges.

As Europeans occupied valleys and established pastures, paddock trees got sick. Declining trees constantly resprouted soft young growth. Koalas invaded the valleys to feast on the new resource. But the declining trees couldn’t sustain the increasing numbers. Koalas suffered overcrowding, malnutrition and disease. People shot them and sold their fur. However, the more adults that were shot, the more young survived, so plagues continued. When leaves frizzled in the Federation Drought, koala numbers crashed.

This cycle of boom and bust has been repeated at various times and places. When unsustainably high numbers, at Pilliga-Gunnedah-Liverpool Plains and on the Koala Coast, crashed during the Millennium Drought, the koala research industry convinced governments that the species is threatened by climate change, clearing, logging, disease, dog attacks and vehicles.

Multimillion dollar multinational charities such as World Wildlife Fund and Australian Koala Foundation told a Senate Inquiry there were ten million koalas before Europeans arrived and started shooting them.   

The Threatened Species Scientific Committee advised the Federal Minister to declare them officially endangered. But they had to split the species by postcode, because they couldn’t hide the well-publicised modern irruptions in Victoria and South Australia. Koalas with postcodes in the 3000s and 5000s are officially safe.  

NSW’s new Environment Minister will carry through his predecessor’s plan to double the number of koalas with postcodes in the 2000s. No matter that they’ve no idea what the numbers really are. But Mr. Griffin has improved the fantastic strategy, announcing a $600,000 handout to the Coffs Harbour Aboriginal Land Council to “integrate traditional ecological knowledge into koala conservation”.

Minister Kean’s plan was cynically brilliant because koalas are already breeding faster than ever on the massive food resource of soft new growth initiated by the Black Summer infernos. The problem with spinning the latest scam is that sustainable fire management would reduce koala numbers. This would be a good thing because it would also reduce other irruptive species like psyllids and bellbirds.

Dense scrubby forests with lots of koalas are not habitat for the truly endangered species such as Hastings River mouse which rely on healthy open, grassy forests with diverse ground layers. That’s why they’re endangered. Scrub and leaf and bark litter and woody debris not only fuel megafires but they choke out the herbs, small seed plants, truffles etc. that support animal diversity.

Hopefully the Minister will repeal the Bush Fire Environmental Assessment Code which prevents traditional frequent mild burning by ordinary land managers of all colours.

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

Related story: NSW Government invests in aboriginal koala conservation: Griffin
This article relates to the ARR.News pages: Open for Debate: Koalas and Open for Debate: Bushfires, Logging, Burns and Forest Management.