Wildlife Australia Magazine Wildlife Australia Magazine Winter 2020 Edizione posteriore

KOALAS are more than an Australian icon – they are among Australia’s greatest assets.

For tourism marketing they are hard to beat – most visitors to Australia have a koala experience on their bucket lists. Koalas are also a wildlife conservation icon that can help to sway public opinion against developmental habitat destruction (sometimes).

In this edition we look at the outstanding research conducted by the Koala Action Group in the bayside township of Cleveland, near Brisbane. One of Australia’s most comprehensive wildlife radio-tracking projects in an urban area, aided by helpful and concerned locals in the region, it tracked a colony of koalas clinging to a small habitat in the midst of suburbia in 2016–17, and visually followed since.

The result? Encouraging evidence of the resilience of koalas to adapt, despite constant risks from traffic and dog attacks, so long as the food trees are healthy and plentiful enough. The new problem? The encroachment of 3600 dwellings as part of an approved marina development at adjacent Toondah Harbour.

Images of struggling koalas also illustrated the tragedy of catastrophic bushfires on Australian flora and fauna in 2019–20. Our report focuses on the species brought to the brink that are located in the World Heritage Gondwana Rainforests of Australia.

Controversially, revered palaeo-biologist Michael Archer says we should not be too worried about koalas – numbering in the 400,000s today – but concentrate on more fragile species that are on the brink, such as platypus and the ‘superfragilistic’ mountain pygmy-possum.

Also in the mix is Tim Low’s appreciation of Australia’s Reptile Action Plan; Gisela Kaplan’s extraordinary new book, Bird Bonds; Victor Steffensen’s enlightening and transformative book on Indigenous cultural burning, Fire County; and an encouraging report on Wildlife Queensland’s trailblazing work on spotted-tailed quolls in Logan City, Queensland.