Macropus giganteus
We’re driving to Canberra.
One of my oldest friends, and me.
I don’t drive so I’m keeping her company, letting her talk so she
doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel. It’s a
thirty-eight degree day and from Melbourne to Canberra is a nearly
seven-hundred kilometre drive. It’s two
days before Christmas; we’re going to our families.
There are Kangaroos everywhere:
lying dead and brutalised on the sides of the highway, their bodies sometimes
as soft and tranquil as a toy animal but more often their flesh and blood and
bones torn and shattered and smeared on the rough bitumen. Sometimes Australian Ravens (Corvus
coronoides) flap listlessly from the corpses but more often the dead
animals are alone. There are so many;
too many even for scavengers to make use of.
As my friend and I joke about the numerous kayaks and jet-skis and
trailbikes we see being towed up and down the highway we barely mention the
marsupial slaughter that constantly confronts us. They say travel is as much about the journey
as the destination but we just want the journey over with.
The Hume Highway is flat and direct, and only
Holbrook with its famous submarine is now left unbypassed. Cars promenade along its main street in both
directions; just outside town witches hats mark the starting point of new road
works. Other towns pass as merely names
on exit signs, optimistic arrows off the highway: Wodonga; Tarcutta; Thurmoola.
When we arrive in Canberra
at last we pull over so my friend can take a phone call. I stare out the passenger-side window, trying
not to listen. In the trees is a shape
and it might be a kangaroo or it might be just a pile of sacks and sticks. If it’s flesh it is so long dead that its
form has disappeared into the waving golden grass. Cars rush past us, their wheels juddering on
the small white humps that stud the road, warning of the approach of one of Canberra’s notorious
roundabouts. The shapeless thing in the
grass is left abandoned and unnoticed.
On Boxing Day I go with my
parents to their holiday house, on the Brogo River
near Bega. With us are two of their
oldest friends, visiting from the UK.
They’ve never seen Brogo before; I think at first that they have but I
soon learn that I’m wrong. I spend time
with them, and with my parents, but I haven’t been here for months so I spend
time alone, too, re-exploring old paths.
Walking up the road from the house to the gate on the morning of the
first day I stumble upon a small but healthy group of Kangaroos gathered around
an old dam. On the second night, after
everyone’s gone to bed, I hear Boobook Owls (Ninox novaeseelandiae)
hooting mo-poke in the full moon and
I go searching for them. I find two; as
I approach the first one I disturb an unseen Kangaroo whose thudding footfalls
in the scrub panic the owl into flight.
The second owl is not so cautious, and I stare at it for minutes on end.
Its eyes shine dazzlingly bright in the
beam of my torch. As I stare it
defecates on the branch below it, a long white spatter, and as a response to my
intrusion I can’t fault it. The next
morning I leave the breakfast table when I hear a Superb Lyrebird (Menura
novaehollandiae) calling in the gully; I expect it to hear me stumbling
towards it and to run shrieking down the hill, but instead it allows me to
watch it scratching in the dirt beneath a fig tree. I almost stop breathing when I see its long,
plumed tail trailing behind it. Usually
Lyrebird songs are resonantly loud and accompanied by a dance, the shimmering
of that long tail, but this morning, practicing outside the winter breeding
season, the bird sings softly to itself as it forages, like somebody whistling
while they work.
Our friends from the UK have only
a few weeks in Australia so I try to find as many animals as I can for them,
but it seems as though every creature I spot is gone by the time I can point it
out. King Parrots (Alisterus
scapularis), Spotted Pardalotes (Pardalotus punctatus), Satin
Bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus), all fly away. The two
Wedge-tailed Eagles (Aquila audax)
that have circled the valley in front of the house for years never appear. After two days, though, our luck changes: it
begins in Bermagui, with two enormous Stingrays (Myliobatoidei) that are patrolling the waterfront where a
fisherman is throwing freshly caught fish into the water. Tourists point and laugh as the man’s small
dog tiptoes along the wharf and barks excitedly at the pack of Great Cormorants
(Phalacrocorax carbo) and Australian Pelicans (Pelecanus
conspicillatus) that scrabble for each scrap of flesh. That evening, driving back to the house well
after dark, we stop for an Eastern Grey Kangaroo that is standing in the middle
of the left lane of the road, directly in front of us; it lollops unhurriedly
into the bush. Moments later I spy
another standing like a ghost just outside the beam of the headlights –
“Kangaroo on the left” I say, hoping to alert our friends, but when my father
reacts by immediately pressing the car’s brakes I remember all the dead
kangaroos on the side of the Hume; I remember that Eastern Grey Kangaroos are
the main cause of traffic accidents back in Canberra. I watch the edges of the road all the way
back to the house.
We all drive back to Canberra the next day; the
day after that my old friend and I drive back home. Back to Melbourne. My brother is with us now, too. We notice that the road is new; we see, for
the first time, that a week earlier we’d been driving on the old tarmac, and
that to double the size of the Hume
Highway the government has simply laid down two
bright new lanes alongside the old ones.
Now the old road that went in two directions only goes in one; now it’s
only the old road that goes to Canberra.
The Kangaroos die as readily on
the new road as on the old: their corpses punctuate the long drive once more. Red Foxes (Vulpes vulpes), too. We wonder if perhaps there are so many dead
animals on the road because there are also, out there in the bush, so many ones
that are newly alive. I recall the
scores of Grey Fantails (Rhipidura albiscapa) and other small
insectivorous birds I’d seen at Brogo; I recall the recent rain and think, we are in a time of plenty.
Image sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org
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