Many bat species nest in tree hollows. The Eastern Free-tail Bat or East Coast Free-tailed Bat or Eastern Little Mastiff Bat (Mormopterus norfolkensis) is one such. Very little is known about it because it is not often trapped but it, or something very like it, has been found in the caldera. Another is the White-striped Free-tailed Bat (Tadarida australis) which can form maternal colonies of several hundred in tree hollows of thirty centimetres diameter. The Eastern Long-eared Bat (Nyctophilus bifax) is another rainforest denizen, that is likely to roost among the interlaced roots of strangler figs or in tree ferns. The rare Golden Tipped Bat (Phoniscus or Kerivoula papuensis) is another rainforest bat so tiny that it chooses to roost in the abandoned nests of scrubwrens and gerygones. Unusually its diet consists almost entirely of orb-weaving spiders. There are half a dozen species of forest bats in the genus Vespadelus, and perhaps more. As these can be told apart only by a comparison of their penes, it is more than I can do to tell you which ones live at Cave Creek and which don’t.
Several species of bat have probably taken up residence in the old house. Certainly we find droppings on the floor. One day, in an old tar pot hanging on the house wall, I found the tiny desiccated corpse of an Eastern Horseshoe Bat (Rhinolophus megaphyllus) with her baby in her arms. These little bats fly by echolocation, hunting moths, beetles, flies, crickets, bugs, cockroaches and wasps through the dense forest; somehow this mother and child ended up in the tar pot unable to get out. Of all the creatures in the forest, the bats are the ones we know least, and of the bats, the insectivores are the ones we know least about. It is my fervent hope that a bat specialist will come to work with the bats at Cave Creek.
We can only wonder now which bats used to live in the cave from which Cave Creek takes its name. These days it houses no bats, though according to a visitor in 1908 it was then ‘filled with bats which when disturbed fly about in hundreds; they were so thick in the air that a person kept involuntarily dodging his head to avoid them’. These may have been Eastern Cave Bats (Vespadelus troughtoni) typically found close to escarpments along the scenic rim. They like to hunt the insects feeding on Booyongs, Rosewood, Stingers and Carabeens, all of which are common in the Cave Creek forest. The Large-eared Pied Bat (Chalinolobus dwyeri) is another that lives in sandstone caves close to the forest edge. It was not discovered until 1966 at Copeton in northern New South Wales, at a site that is now under the Copeton Dam. It has been found in Lamington National Park, where it is supposed that it was roosting in basalt. The land at CCRRS is traversed by a broad stripe of sandstone that crops out over the forest and the creek, perfect habitat for Chalinolobus dwyeri.
Placental rats and mice made their way to Australia five to ten million years after the bats. Viewers of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here will have seen C-list celebrities being buried with rats, having rats tipped into their trousers and so forth, and they will have been told that the creatures in question are fierce ‘bush rats’. In fact they are common Rattus rattus, from the nearest rat-fancy. To have been genuine local bush rats they would have had to be Rattus fuscipes subspecies assimilis. This animal is not commensal with human beings and would have left the site of IACGMOOH as soon as it was taken over by television crews in 2002. Though bush rats are supposed to be strictly nocturnal, I have seen them by daylight. I have never seen more than one at a time, and always in the same place on a track about fifty yards from the old house. The rat would pop out of the kikuyu on one side of a track, cross it and disappear into a tunnel in the grass on the other side. The tunnel appears to have been in use for generations, because I have been seeing a bush rat near it for seven or eight years, much longer than the life cycle of an individual rat, which lives only a year. Rattus fuscipes typically has a snub nose, dark feet (hence its name) and a short tail.
There are two species of native mice as well as imported house mice at Cave Creek, but both are elusive and increasingly rare. One is the Fawn-footed Melomys (Melomys cervinipes). I am supposed now to call it a Korril, a word that originates from the language of the Stradbroke Island people, but I’ve never heard anyone call it anything but a mouse. The other is the Hastings River Mouse (Pseudomys oralis), which I’m sorry to say was caught in a deadfall trap by someone seeking to display his credentials as an academic mammalologist.
Our biggest placental mammals are our dingoes. I was walking alone on the edge of the forest only days after I first slept at CCRRS, when a big blond dingo with a plumy tail came trotting down a pademelon track to within a few yards of where I had come to a stop. He had been sniffing amongst the undergrowth and hadn’t seen me until that point. He stood and looked. I looked back. I vaguely remembered that you’re not supposed to stare dogs in the eye, because it is confrontational, so I broke the gaze once or twice. I didn’t dare turn my back to him because it might have triggered his chase reflex, so I stood my ground and talked to him, as is my wont. The path was steep and he was slightly above me, motionless, his golden eyes looking intelligently into my face. Then he wheeled and trotted back up the path. I watched his plumy tail floating above the undergrowth until it disappeared.
I have seen him several times since, and even managed to catch him on video. The last time I saw him it was broad midday. I was sitting on the verandah of the old house, reading, when some small unfamiliar sound made me look up. Plumy Tail was standing a hundred yards away keeping nit for his pack, as they crossed the main track on their way to the creek. I was too late to see the leader of the pack, who would have been a senior bitch, but even so I counted more than a dozen animals, as well as a horde of smaller pups of whom I could see just tail tips and the odd ear. Plumy Tail stood still, head up, ears pricked, gazing down the track towards me as they trotted over the crossing and into our planting, almost as if he was showing them to me. Then he too was gone.
Plumy Tail has at least one rival, a darker ginger dingo whom I’ve seen once or twice from a distance. Now that the forest is growing up we see dingoes less often, but we hear them more and sometimes from very close quarters. They emerge at night from their refuge in the forest to take prey in the neighbouring cleared areas, usually young lambs. Every now and then we get a circular advising us that 1080 baits are being laid, as long as all the landowners within a five-kilometre radius consent. This has the effect of rendering the baiting impossible, which is just as well. We couldn’t agree to the baiting of wild dogs if we wanted to because, in an attempt to protect quolls from ingesting the poison, baits may not be laid within 300 metres of a forest edge. There is now nowhere at CCRRS that is more than 300 metres from a forest edge.
A dingo is a dog, nowadays called Canis lupus dingo; domestic dogs are also Canis lupus. The two can and do breed with each other. One school of thought holds that dingoes have become more dangerous because of interbreeding with introduced dogs, which has weakened their shyness trait so that they no longer avoid humans. This is probably bunk. From what I see of dingoes at Cave Creek they are quite capable of observing humans and familiarising themselves with them. They certainly know me a lot better than I know them. They are as easy to tame and train as any other dog breed. They were essential members of Aboriginal communities, as hunting companions who found, harassed and sometimes took game, and as guardians who identified hazards before humans became aware of them. Yet, from the beginning of settlement ‘wild dogs’ have been persecuted. Steel-jaw traps were set for them; they were shot and poisoned with strychnine, with small regard to the degree of suffering involved. In Queensland between 1932 and 1967 doggers collected 685,000 dingo scalps. Since 1968 ‘wild dogs’ are poisoned with 1080, sodium monofluoroacetate, a toxin derived from West Australian pea species. The thinking was that because the dingo was introduced from Asia only 4,000 or so years ago, it had no immunity to 1080, but native species could ingest it without ill effect. There was never any good reason to believe that the immunity acquired by south-western fauna was shared with the fauna of the discontinuous eastern region, but for nearly forty years the idea was acc
epted, along with an equally ill-founded notion that this method of killing was humane. Anyone who saw a dog die of 1080 poisoning knew that it wasn’t. In 2007 a Queensland drover called Bill Little, thirty of whose cattle dogs had been poisoned with 1080 over the years, told ABC TV news programme PM: ‘You get up in the middle of the night and your dog’s screaming in pain and he’s climbing the wall of your van, you’ve got to get out in the middle of the night and shoot your best dog.’
At CCRRS the dingo is not a problem that we need to solve. We have no livestock to protect from predation, or from the diseases thought to be carried by dingoes. The way I see it the dingoes have more right to our mountains than do sheep. One morning the workforce surprised a dingo bitch who had chosen to give birth on one of our warm mulch-heaps. She ran away, leaving four newborn pups. When she didn’t come back, Luke took the pups home to his mother who reared them. They were supposed to be going to a dingo sanctuary in Victoria, but when tests were done to find if they were pure bred, it turned out that they were only fifteen-sixteenths, mongrels like the rest of us. They are still living over the hill with Luke’s mum.
Every day I meet animals going about their business. I have become used to surprises and still they keep coming. I had finished writing this chapter, and was putting the laptop away when I heard a rustling in the gathering dusk. I leaned over the verandah rail and peered into the heaving vegetation. Whatever was causing the upheaval seemed fairly clumsy. Every now and then I glimpsed a round bottom parting the fern fronds. A bandicoot, I thought. But then it climbed onto a rock and I saw that it had a beak and spines.
An echidna. An echidna! Tachyglossus aculeatus. A creature more ancient than a marsupial. A monotreme! I felt weak at the knees. I had thought that the rainforest was too wet for echidnas, and here, calm and comfy as you like in the sodden forest, was a wild echidna. It rambled off down the gully we have planted with Bangalow and Walking-stick Palms and my heartfelt blessing went with it.
Whenever a truly wild creature lets me see it behaving naturally, I feel a blessedness, as if I had been allowed to enter a realm far more special than the celebrity A-list. When I look up from a book, and see a few yards away a pademelon grazing with her joey, I feel vindicated, as if I had won acceptance as an animal in my turn. Lots of people are persuaded to spend lots of money on shelter and food for wild creatures, when all they have to do is to stop making lawns and weeding and tidying up, and turning the bush into an outdoor room. While it’s not true that all you have to do is to let your garden run to seed, before wild vegetation and wild creatures will return to it, it is true that if you remove weeds and do your best to restore the original vegetation, the endemic animal species will reappear as if by magic. You won’t be able to keep a dog or a cat or even hens, because all of them do tremendous damage to wild creatures, but you won’t miss them, because all around you the bush will rustle with to-ings and fro-ings of a vast range of creatures great and small. A patch of rescued bush is a sanctuary where the special creatures who evolved with the vegetation can stave off extinction.
This book must end, but the story will continue. As the forest community at Cave Creek rebuilds itself, we will do our best to record the process on the Friends of Gondwana Rainforest website.
Epilogue
It is done. The project is now run by Friends of Gondwana Rainforest, UK registered charity No. 1145364, UK charitable company No. 7842375, and we are well on the way to transferring the property to an Australian not-for-profit company. Am I bereft? No. If I have not learnt in my seventy-four years that to love and care for something you don’t need to own it, then I have learnt nothing. The day I gave away all the cash I had to the rainforest was one of the happiest days of my life. Giving the forest back to itself is taking a little longer.
The process has not been easy. I and my faithful co-directors were given the wrong advice and set off on the wrong foot. In less than a year of little sleep I realised I had to find expert advice and regroup. Part of the difficulty was that conservation charities are new and their rationale is poorly understood. It is not enough simply to restore a forest as a storehouse of biodiversity from which future generations will benefit much as one might endow a library or a museum; the charity had also to claim an educational function. I pored over other rainforest charities’ mission statements, and, after a minor tussle with a Commissioner, the concept was eventually accepted. The most intractable difficulties were those that affected the interface between the UK charity and the Australian administration. We were not helped by expensive lawyers’ bigging up their own role by exaggerating the already considerable complexity of the operation.
Why Gondwana Rainforest? Because that’s what the Cave Creek forest is. As such it’s a treasure house of species that have survived almost unchanged from the Cretaceous, when the world was divided into two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana. When Australia was part of Gondwana it was covered with subtropical rainforest, which remains the most ancient vegetation type to be found in the great south land. Many of our plant families, the Lauraceae, the Cunoniaceae, the Winteraceae and the Eupomatiaceae, for example, can trace their descent back to the dawn of the evolution of flowering plants a hundred million years ago.
Over the millennia the drying of the continent and the firefarming of the indigenous peoples favoured the dominance of sclerophyll vegetation that encroached on the fire-sensitive rainforest leaving it to survive in sites that were isolated and disjunct. You will find it also growing in gullies surrounded by fire-scarred eucalypts, or by treeless pasture degraded and eaten out by hard-hoofed animals, or by strip and open-cut mines.
When I bought the land at Cave Creek the World Heritage site that extended from its southern boundary along the Dividing Range almost as far south as Newcastle was known as the Central Eastern Rainforest Reserve Area. In 2007 it was renamed Gondwana Rainforests of Australia. This broken chain of isolated sites, in all fifty separate reserves, covering 3,665 square kilometres, represents the most extensive area of Gondwanan rainforest to survive anywhere in the world. Just how little that is can be seen by taking a look at the map on the website of the Australian Government Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (sic), which makes embarrassingly clear that crown land is set aside for reserves only when it is unsuitable for any kind of exploitation. These bits and pieces are now all that remain of the Gondwanan subtropical rainforest. Many of the individual fragments are too small to provide the larger animals with a range big enough for them to maintain their genetic diversity. A significant number were heavily logged state forests that have simply been dubbed national parks, with no commitment to removing the weeds and pioneers that have colonised the damaged forest, let alone to restoring the original vegetation. Many are now mostly sclerophyll and fire-prone.
The Australian Dividing Range is the eastern extremity of the Samfrau orogenic belt, which originally ran along the southern edge of the southern supercontinent of Gondwana. As Gondwana gradually broke up during the Mesozoic and the five main fragments separated and rotated to form South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Antarctica and Australia, the Samfrau has been reduced to the Andean range of South America, the Ross range of Antarctica and the heavily eroded Great Dividing Range of Australia. The Tasmanian rainforest is also Gondwanan and a World Heritage Site, but it is to be known as the Tasmanian Wilderness.
Friends of Gondwana Rainforest are concerned for subtropical and temperate rainforest wherever it survives. CCRRS is our flagship, where we learnt how to rebuild a forest and how exciting and gratifying it is to give it your best shot. What we are doing there can be done elsewhere, and we exist to help it happen, not only among our neighbours in Australia, but in New Caledonia, in New Zealand, in Chile, in Argentina, in southern Africa, in Madagascar, in India and Sri Lanka, wherever fragments of the ancient Gondwanan forest survive.
The received wisdom is that only plant and animal species surviving on public land can be protecte
d. In fact, public nature reserves generally suffer from systemic lack of funding. They are usually poorly staffed, poorly equipped and poorly managed. What little funding they receive has to be justified by providing a public amenity. National parks are obliged to spend their slender means on parking, toilets, picnic tables, barbecues, signage, and may even choose to provide facilities for off-road bicycles and four-wheel-drive vehicles, before investing any energy or resources in protecting and maintaining their plant and animal assemblages. At Natural Bridge fortunes are spent on blowing leaves off the paths, in case tourists should slip and fall. In twelve years, not one penny has been spent on removing weeds.
Once I might have thought of handing CCRRS over to the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, in the hope that one day they would begin to take their responsibilities seriously and set about conserving and protecting habitat, but that was before state governments all over Australia decided that, if they were to grow revenue to run the parks, they would have to allow luxury resort developments in them. Now more than ever it is clear to me that if conservation is to be done at all, it will have to be done by dedicated individuals and organisations on privately owned land.
Eco-tourism is not the answer. Animals are not performers and their behaviour is not a spectacle. Whales are already sick of being watched. People who come with cameras are as much hunters as people who come with guns. I was once lucky enough to find myself off the south-east coast of Sri Lanka on a small fishing boat that suddenly and unexpectedly ran into a pack of hundreds of sperm whales, all ploughing northwards through the ocean swells. At first the whales were curious and playful, but after an hour they became agitated and began breaching and slapping the water with their flukes (something these whales don’t often do). Try as I might I couldn’t persuade the captain to turn the boat around and let the whales be. He was excited, the tourists were excited and screaming, and the boat’s diesel engine was driving the whales mad. We didn’t give up chasing the whales until there was barely enough fuel left to get us back to shore. Eco-tourism means interference and interference means disturbance. Australian animals are very sensitive to stress; all they ask is to left alone. The greatest irony is that by the time the luxury developments are built in wild Australia the animals the tourists will come to see will have retreated up into the deepest gullies of the most rugged ridges, beyond the reach of their spotlights and their four-wheel drives. Our threatened plant and animal life needs space and quiet if it is to survive.