‘Well, we got something,’ said Chris, with his air of an elder statesman who does not want to confess that neither he nor his party knows what his policy is, ‘but whether it will turn out all right or not remains to be seen.’
‘It was a very dicey piece of work,’ I said to Jacquie, ‘and the dice were loaded against us. The only thing in our favour was that we were within four feet of a mentally defective lyrebird who was going through his full display and short of actually pushing the microphone down into his crop, we couldn’t have got any closer, but as far as Parsons is concerned, this constitutes a rather hit and miss type of natural history filming.’
Chris looked at me malevolently but his retort was cut short by the reappearance of Jim, who sauntered out of the undergrowth whistling happily but unmusically to himself. Beaming at us all impartially, he laid the camera on the ground and patted it affectionately. ‘Every one a little Rembrandt,’ he said, ‘you’ve no need to worry, Chris . . . it’s in the bag . . . I’ve got the lot . . . trust Jim.’
‘What have you got?’ enquired Chris, suspiciously
‘All the inner secrets of a lyrebird’s life,’ said Jim airily. ‘There they were, galloping to and fro, stamping their feet and carrying on like mad things. I’ve never seen anything like it since I was at that Palais de Danse in Slough.’
‘What did you get?’ said Chris trenchantly.
‘I’ve just told you,’ said Jim, ‘everything, lyrebirds galloping about shaking their tails at each other, the lot. While you were all mucking about here, I just nipped off into the undergrowth and got it. Saved the series, I have. Still, we can always share the Television Award between us.’
It was quite some time before we could get Jim to tell us simply and concisely what, in fact, he had got, which turned out to be one of the best bits of film that were taken on the trip.
Irritated by the lack of co-operation on the part of the lyrebirds, he had plunged off into the undergrowth when he had heard them calling, and had come upon a scene which very few people witness, let alone are able to film. In a valley with sufficient light for photography to be possible, he had discovered a cock lyrebird who had wandered over the strict demarcation line into the territory of another cock bird. The result had been something quite spectacular. The owner of the territory had cast his mist-like tail over his head and stamped forward to do battle, lurching from side to side, stamping his feet and bobbing his head. The whole thing looked like a Red Indian war dance. The other bird knew that he was intruding but, in order to save face, he had to put up some sort of aggressive show, so he, too, cast his tail over his head and proceeded to stamp and sway. Both birds were uttering loud, ringing and doubtless derisive cries at each other as they did this. With their tails practically obscuring their bodies, they looked like glittering, animated waterfalls on legs, and the rustling of their tail-feathers was like the sound of wind among autumn leaves. Eventually, honour having been satisfied, the intruding lyrebird retreated and Jim had come back to us in a state of jubilation. So, in spite of being incessantly rained upon and being subjected to the coldest weather I have experienced outside Patagonia, we had been successful in filming the lyrebirds.
The next task we had to tackle was to try to film leadbeater’s possum. This is a small and rather enchanting animal that had quite suddenly disappeared – or so it seemed – from the face of the earth. It had originally been discovered in 1894 and was known from several museum skins; then it vanished and everyone was convinced that, as its range appeared to be limited, it had become extinct. In 1948, to the astonishment of incredulous naturalists, a tiny pocket of leadbeater’s possum was discovered in the eucalyptus forest not far from Melbourne. The exact location was kept a secret, for fear that crowds of well-meaning naturalists and sightseers would troop up there and disturb the terrain.
Quite naturally, therefore, when I mentioned to Mr Butcher that we would very much like to film leadbeater’s possum, he gave me a look in which suspicion and commiseration were nicely blended. He explained that, although they knew the location of the leadbeater’s possum, they knew nothing about the extent of its habitat nor, indeed, the number of individual animals that inhabited the area, and therefore we might go tramping about the forest for weeks on end without catching a glimpse of one. With the cold dampness of Sherwood Forest still lurking in the marrow of my bones, I smiled bravely and said this did not matter, provided we had the faintest chance of seeing this elusive marsupial. I added that of course we would still keep the exact location secret, but if we could get some shots of the possum, it would be a tremendous achievement for us and would aid in the conservation story that we were endeavouring to tell on film. We were quite prepared, I said (lavishly condemning Jacquie, Chris and Jim), to tramp about the forest for nights on end in order to try to catch a glimpse of leadbeater’s possum, if only Mr Butcher would unlock his lips and vouchsafe to us the exact location.
Impressed, either by my imbecility or my devotion to duty, or both, Mr Butcher sighed lugubriously and said that he could arrange to send us out to leadbeater’s possum country, guided by one of the young scientists who had actually rediscovered the creature, but he could not guarantee what results we would get. However, just in case we were disappointed, he said, if I cared to follow him, he had something to show me. Whereupon he took me down to the large Wildlife Department laboratory, full of spirit specimens, charts, diagrams and other accoutrements of a scientist’s trade, and led me to a small, upright cage, not unlike a cupboard with a wire door. Opening it, he thrust his hand into a small sleeping box inside and produced, to my incredulous astonishment, a pair of wide-eyed, fat and exceedingly friendly leadbeater’s possums.
It was as incredible and as thrilling as suddenly being presented with a pair of live dodos or a baby dinosaur. They crouched, soft as velvet, in my cupped hands, peering up at me, their noses and ears twitching, their big, dark eyes still slightly bleary from having been extracted from a pleasant siesta so unceremoniously. They were about the size of a bushbaby with sleek, soft, mole-like fur, handsomely patterned in ash grey white and black, the hair on their busy tails so fine that it looked like spun glass. They had rather squat, fat, good-natured looking faces, and tiny, delicate paws. When they had recovered consciousness to a certain extent, they sat up on their hind legs in my hands, portly and sedate, and accepted a couple of mealworms with an air of condescension. Mr Butcher explained that, having rediscovered these charming little creatures, they thought it would be advisable to capture a pair and try to establish them in captivity in case anything untoward happened to the colony. After we had gloated over the enchanting little marsupials for some time we took pity on them and returned them to their bedroom to continue their interrupted sleep. Then Mr Butcher introduced us to Bob Wanerke, a handsome young Australian who seemed about seven feet tall and as wide as a barn door. Bob had been doing some studies on the leadbeater’s possum, and he said he would be delighted to lead us to their last stronghold, although he did not guarantee that we would see any We said that we quite understood, as we had had similar experiences before.
The night was moonless and bitterly cold when Bob appeared to lead us to the leadbeaters. The four of us sat huddled in the Land-Rover, wearing every stitch of clothing we could find, and still our teeth were chattering. We followed Bob’s vehicle out of Melbourne and for some time we drove through fairly open country; then the road started to climb and we entered deep, tall eucalyptus forest, the tree trunks looking even more weirdly distorted than normal in our headlights. As we climbed higher and higher it became colder and colder.
‘Come to sunny Australia,’ mused Jim, ‘that’s what they say. The country that’s ninety in the shade and where everyone has a suntan. All a load of old codswallop.’
‘I must say that is rather the impression you get in England,’ I agreed. ‘I never thought it would be as cold as this.’
‘What we want are a few hot-water bottles or a warming pan or something,’ sai
d Jacquie, her voice muffled from the depths of her sheepskin jacket.
There was a short silence while I tried to remember if I had packed a bottle of Scotch.
‘I once,’ said Jim reminiscently, ‘set fire to a bed with a hair drier.’
We absorbed this item of information in silence, each of us trying to imagine how even Jim could have achieved such a task. At length we gave up the unequal struggle.
‘Well?’ I enquired.
‘It was when I first got married. My wife and I were living in a furnished room. The landlady was a real old female dog – you know the sort: couldn’t do this and couldn’t do that; scared the pants off me, she did. Well, it was damned cold then and the only way we had of warming the bed was my wife’s hair drier. Worked a treat, I can tell you. You put a couple of pillows on each side, hair drier in the middle, pull the clothes up and Bob’s your uncle, you’ve got a lovely warm bed in half an hour.’
Jim paused and sighed lugubriously.
‘Then one night,’ he continued, ‘something went wrong. Before we knew what was happening, whoosh! Whole bed on fire. Flames, clouds of smoke, feathers everywhere. We were more frightened of the landlady than anything else, in case she found out and threw us into the street in the middle of the night. I’d thrown water on the bed to put the fire out and this contributed to the mess. Took us half the night to clean it up and we spent the rest of the night in chairs. Next day I had to smuggle the mattress out and buy a new one. Never again. Hot-water bottles for me now.’
We were now quite high up in the hills, deep in the eucalyptus forest and a number of miles from Melbourne.
Presently Bob’s vehicle ahead of us turned off the main road and headed down a rough track that seemed to lead into the heart of the forest, but after a couple of hundred yards we came to a clearing in which was a tiny hut. Here we stopped and disgorged ourselves and our equipment. Bob had brought a number of hunting lights with him (the sort that you strap to your head and that work from a battery slung at your waist) and these we now put on. Then, when the rest of the equipment was ready, we set off in single file down the rough track into the forest. We walked slowly and quietly, stopping every now and then to listen, flashing our headlights all around us. The silence was complete. It was as though all the eucalyptus trees the moment before had been performing a wild, abandoned dance, and had frozen suspiciously into immobility at our appearance. You could have heard a pin drop; the only sound was the faint scruff of our shoes in the leaves. We walked on for a quarter of a mile or so in this uncanny silence: we might have been in a cave in the depths of the earth, with the eucalyptus trees like weird stalagmites sprouting up around us. Presently Bob came to a standstill and beckoned me.
‘From here onwards for about a mile is the area where we generally see them,’ he whispered, and then added depressingly, ‘if we do.’
We moved slowly on and we hadn’t gone many yards when Bob suddenly froze and shone his light at the forest floor some twenty feet away. We stood quite still and held our breath. From the bushes ahead we could hear a faint rustling, the tiniest whisper of sound. Bob stood quite still, flashing his lights to and fro like a lighthouse. For some time nothing happened and the rustling went on, then suddenly, in his torch beam, appeared one of the weirdest-looking little animals it has been my privilege to meet. It was about the size of a rabbit with an elongated, whiffling nose, bright beady eyes and pointed, pixie-like ears. It was clad in rather coarse-looking, yellowing-brown fur and it had a rather rat-like tail. It pottered through the fallen leaves, its nose working overtime, pausing now and then to scratch with its neat little feet in the leafmould, presumably in search of insects.
‘What is it?’ whispered Jacquie.
‘It’s a long-nosed bandicoot,’ I whispered back.
‘Don’t be facetious,’ she hissed, ‘I want to know.’
‘I can’t help its name,’ I whispered irritably, ‘that’s what they’re called.’
The long-nosed bandicoot, oblivious of my wife’s disbelief, was now walking through a drift of fallen leaves, ploughing them up with his nose, like a curiously shaped bulldozer; then he sat down suddenly and scratched himself with great vigour and concentration for a moment or so. This relaxing occupation completed, he sat in a sort of trance for a few seconds, sneezed violently and suddenly, and then bull-dozed his way off into the undergrowth.
We drifted on for a few hundred yards and came eventually to a clearing among the great trees, and here we got our second indication that the forest was not as lifeless as it seemed. Standing in the clearing we shone our lights up at the topmost foliage of some giant eucalyptus trees and suddenly, in our torch beams, four eyes gleamed like gigantic rubies. Moving slowly round to a better vantage point, we saw the animals to which the eyes belonged. They looked, at first sight, like a pair of huge black squirrels with long, smoothly furred tails: they were half in and half out of a hole in the trunk where a great branch had been ripped away and left a hollow. Disturbed by the lights, they moved out of the hollow and made their way along a branch and this enabled us to see them more clearly. They really were only squirrel-like in shape – there the resemblance ended. They had furry, rather leaf-shaped ears, and round, vaguely cat-like faces with little boot-button noses; you could see along the sides of the body a loose flap of skin now, as they were sitting, folded along their ribs in scallops like a curtain. I knew they were possums of some sort but I could not place them.
‘What are they?’ I whispered to Bob.
‘Great glider possums.’ he whispered back. ‘They’re the largest of the glider possums – they’re fairly common up here. Wait, and I’ll try and make them fly.’
He picked up a stick and approached the trunk of the tree. The possums watched him with interest. Reaching the base of the tree, Bob hit the trunk a couple of mighty whacks with his branch, and immediately the possums’ air of benevolent interest changed to one of panic. They ran to and fro along their branch, chittering to each other like a couple of spinsters who have found a man under the bed. The fact that they were some seventy feet above Bob and quite safe did not appear to occur to them. Bob belaboured the trunk of the tree and the possums grew more and more panicky; then one of them – uttering a cat-like mew – launched himself off the branch into the air. As he left the branch he stretched out his arms and legs to their fullest extent and, as the flaps of skin along the side of his body became taut to act as ‘wings’, he assumed a sort of shoe-box shape, with a head one end and his long tail streaming out at the other. Silently banking and weaving with uncanny, glider-like skill, he skimmed over the clearing and came to rest on a tree trunk some eighty feet away, with all the ease of an expertly made paper dart. The other one soon followed him, drifting and banking through the air, and eventually landed on the same tree, only a bit lower down. Once they were reunited they both humped themselves up the trunk and disappeared into the thick foliage at the top of the tree. I had been very impressed by the flight of these lovely creatures, particularly by the distance they had covered, but Bob told me that this was a comparatively short glide: they had been known to cover a hundred and twenty yards in one glide and in six successive glides to cover five hundred and ninety yards.
Although the creatures we had seen so far were fascinating, we still had not caught up with our main quarry, so we pressed on into the forest. We had been moving so slowly and meandering through the undergrowth with our lights that we felt we had been walking for miles, whereas in reality we were only about a quarter of a mile from our starting point. We had one false alarm when we saw a lesser glider up in a tree; in size and shape it looked, in the torchlight, just like a leadbeater’s possum, but it proved its identity for us by launching itself into the air and floating away through the branches like a flake of wood ash. It was getting on for one o’clock now and the cold was so intense that I felt as if both my feet and hands had been amputated at the wrist and ankle. I was thinking longing thoughts of log fires and hot whisky, wh
en Bob came to a standstill and shone his torch beam into some low eucalyptus scrub ahead of us, then took three quick steps to the right, and from this new vantage point raked the foliage with his beam. Suddenly his light centred on one particular spot and there, sitting on a branch some twelve feet away, fat, furry and completely unconcerned, was a leadbeater’s possum.
Although I had already seen the live ones in the Wildlife Department’s laboratory at Melbourne, it did not detract in any way from the thrill of seeing that rare little marsupial squatting among the eucalyptus leaves in its native forest. I kept my torch beam steadily on him and drank in every detail. He was sitting sideways on to us, blinking his large dark eyes as if in mild expostulation at the brightness of our torches; after a moment he attempted to sit up on the branch and give his whiskers a combing, but the branch was too narrow to allow such a manoeuvre and he fell off, only saving himself in the nick of time with his front paws. He clung there, struggling to get his hind limbs back on to the branch, looking like a portly and very amateur trapeze artist who has only just made the trapeze. Eventually he managed to haul himself back, and after a short pause to regain his breath he ambled slowly down the branch in a preoccupied sort of way; then, without warning and with a speed and agility extraordinary for one of his rotundity, he leapt to another branch some six feet away, landing as softly as thistledown. Here, to our delight, he was joined by what appeared to be his mate, She came running out of the leaves and they greeted each other in a series of tiny, breathless squeaks. Then the new arrival squatted on the branch and proceeded to comb the fur of her mate, while he sat there looking exceedingly smug. They seemed completely unconcerned by both the lights and our whispered conversation, but at that moment I moved rather incautiously and trod on a stick that broke with a report like a small cannon going off. The two possums froze in the middle of a passionate embrace and then, like lightning, they turned and in three graceful jumps they had disappeared into the gloom of the forest. I cursed my stupidity, but comforted myself with the thought that we had been incredibly lucky to see these rare little creatures at all, let alone spend ten minutes looking in on their private lives. We made our way back to the clearing where we had left the cars, and went into the little hut. Here we soon kindled a roaring and aromatic fire of eucalyptus wood, and sat round it, thawing ourselves out with the aid of hot whisky and water, heavily laced with sugar. Then, when our bodies once more belonged to us and we were glowing with heat, we climbed into the Land-Rovers and started on the long drive back to Melbourne. It had been an evening I would not have missed for the world.