Where the wild things are
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 21: Hidden Queensland
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Ashley Hay
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Ashley Hay's biography and other articles by this writer
When we were moving from Sydney to Brisbane this year, people suggested different things I'd need to get used to: hot, sticky summers; the absence of city beaches; and the city's baseline fauna, which apparently ran to mighty flying cockroaches and massive spiders.
Driving north, I traced the line of the Pacific Highway in our map book, registering the dot points of towns as they passed. The red callistemon in my beachside street gave way to the rough-barked apple, Angophora floribunda, of Les Murray's country above Buladelah, which gave way to luminous spots of delicate purple-blue lotus in creeks and ponds further north again. And I watched the colours and shapes of the landscape, close up and far off, morph and change as we drove through a thousand kilometres of Australia's complex mosaic of space.
When we crossed the border at Coolangatta, a huge electronic billboard obligingly increased Queensland's population to 4,253,274 people as if to officially acknowledge us while we sat at a red light, watching and waiting.
In the morning, in our new place, I tried to get my bearings. East seemed to be in the wrong direction, and while I could glimpse the Story Bridge's steel peaks as I looked north (apparently) from our street corner – and my map told me I was only five kilometres from the city's centre, closer than we'd lived to the heart of Sydney – the air was thick with layers of birdsong, the garden was busy with butterflies, geckoes and tiny skinks, and the view directly west revealed the kind of untrammelled mountains and forests that cities tend to push away.
And on the doorstep, shimmering in the sun, lay the most extraordinary bug I'd ever seen. It looked like something out of a cartoon; its red shell was marked with a series of irregular blue spots like a slightly surreal ladybird, and these contrasting colours glistened with metallic highlights – orange, green, purple and an inky, shiny black. It was gorgeous. ‘Oh, that's just a harlequin bug,' said the first entomologist I could ask about it. ‘They suck sap from hibiscus. They're pretty common.'
At dusk, grey-headed flying foxes coasted in the dim light – ‘there's a huge rookery near here; didn't you know?' asked my husband – and troupes of acrobatic possums practised high-wire road-crossings on the electrical cables. Owls mopoked in the darkness; choirs of kookaburras woke with dawn; and lorikeets trailed their brilliance across the sky, hanging like baubles in blossoming trees. A rafter of brush-turkeys was living between us and our local shops in a bit of kerbside bushiness and, closer to the river, sharing space with the white-faced heron we knew from home, a new kind of bird appeared, elegantly dressed as if in full dinner suit.
About the only wildlife I didn't see were the crawly things I'd been promised; sure, we had some spiders' webs, but not a single cockroach, flying or otherwise.
There's a profusion of stories through which you might intersect with a topic as broad as conservation and Queensland's biodiversity, from each sighting of something rare up to policy and legislation. Conservation, at its most basic, dictionary level, seeks the ‘preservation, protection or restoration' of natural environments: it's one person's quest to rid their land of lantana; a biodiversity action plan for Cape York; federal listing of the remaining tenth of Australia's brigalow, just 800,000 hectares. But what picture did the different pieces of conservation make here? What choices faced the people on its various frontlines? And how did those choices sit in a place so trumpetingly proud of its growth, its development?
Feeling a little like a neophyte field biologist setting out with notebook, net and pith helmet, I launched into the unfamiliar ecosystem that was this state, its environment and the people who intersected with both. I was looking for markers and metaphors, the way a biologist might look for a food source, or a habitat.
AUSTRALIA IS ONE OF THE WORLD'S FEW MEGA-DIVERSE COUNTRIES, which span only a tenth of the earth's available land but host nearly three-quarters of its biodiversity. Home to somewhere in the order of seven hundred thousand species, our continent has a high rate of endemism: species found here and nowhere else. The Australian Academy of Science notes that one ‘small, wooded hill in Canberra' hosts more ant species than ‘exist in the whole of Great Britain'. The Queensland Museum claims ‘the average suburban backyard or school ground in South East Queensland is home to more different kinds of animals than some whole countries'.
In this mega-diverse country, Queensland's northern wet tropics and the Great Barrier Reef stand out. Even the crowded south-east corner, home to most of the state's new immigrants, comprises extraordinary botanical richness. The Einasleigh and Desert Uplands, the Brigalow and the Border Ranges were declared national biodiversity hotspots by the federal government's Threatened Species and Biological Diversity committees in 2003 – making Australia the first country in the world to identify ‘hotspot' locations where biological diversity and endemism collided with levels of threat.
The bugs, the birds, the butterflies in my garden were just the tip of the iceberg.
The reason so much wildlife has gathered in the Brisbane area is the same reason so many people are arriving, according to Darryl Jones, director of the Centre for Innovative Conservation Strategies at Griffith University: the pleasant climate and the proximity of such large areas of bush. ‘Mt Coot-tha is only five kilometres or so from the CBD,' says Jones. ‘This is a place where it's still possible to have quolls wandering through suburban backyards.'
Platypuses have been spotted within ten kilometres of the city's centre; echidnas in similarly urban settings, while the vast Brisbane City Council hosts threatened or endangered gliders and the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin, among others. And the Koala Coast, epicentre of Australia's northern populations of these much-loved marsupials, covers this entire metropolitan space, stretching on north to Gladstone, south into New South Wales.
In purely professional terms, says Professor Hugh Possingham, director of the University of Queensland's Ecology Centre and former chair of the federal government's Biological Diversity Advisory Committee, all this keeps him in this part of the world. ‘Australia has more biodiversity per capita than pretty much anywhere else on the planet,' he says. ‘There's no doubt about it, if you're interested in biodiversity, there's no better country to be in – and no better state to be in. I can find more birds in the suburbs of Brisbane on a weekend morning than I'd see in Britain in half a year.' Brisbane offers him the best interaction between his work's intellectual world – which develops systematic conservation planning tools and contributes to debates about setting conservation's priorities – and its natural world: ‘It keeps me excited about the whole thing.'
It's also a place, as Jones says, that happens to have ‘woken up to find itself with the second fastest growth rate of anywhere in the world'; two thousand people are moving to Queensland each week. And this intersection of people and biota doesn't always elicit responses as positive as Possingham's. ‘People complain about the "invasion" of brush-turkeys here,' says Jones, ‘or they see the populations of animals that are managing to survive in the city – like possums, or flying foxes – as "pests". There's no sense that these things were here well and truly before the city was, that they belong here.' A yard full of lorikeets is remarkable to a visitor, says Deborah Turnbull, a wildlife carer. But for most residents, ‘put forty in a tree outside their bedroom window at five in the morning and all they do is complain'.
Engaging people is the challenge. For some, it happens via their own gardens, or bushwalking, or fishing; for others, it's organisations such as the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (WPSQ). And for others again, it's injured fauna. When Turnbull started to research the training and mentoring of wildlife carers for a PhD, there were around two hundred rescue groups operating around Queensland, and roughly two thousand carers. Most people, she says, want to take care of ‘the furries ... birds aren't as pretty as possums, and they don't cuddle back.'
There are always perennial favourites among species: when WPSQ runs programs that teach people how and where to spot platypus and echidnas, it takes inquiries from all over the state. But perennial favourites don't necessarily equate with conservation priorities. ‘The general public are probably aware of some of the iconic species that are threatened or endangered – and some species that they probably think are threatened aren't, like the platypus,' says Rebecca Richardson, Queensland's state co-ordinator for the World Wildlife Fund's Threatened Species Network (WWFTSN), which runs in partnership with the Australian government.
At the state's Environmental Protection Agency, Sara Williams, the manager of its Threatened Species Strategy and Policy Unit, is trying to revolutionise the way Queensland thinks about its flora and fauna, and about the pragmatism of working out what to save. ‘Yes, we're leading the world,' she laughs. ‘The traditional approach in conservation is to start at the top of a critically endangered list and work your way down – we weren't getting anywhere fast, and we kept focusing on the same few iconic species. I was asked to come up with a more strategic approach that looked at our resource allocation, our efficiencies – and I hate using this term, but where you can actually get the biggest bang for your buck.'
She pulls a thick spiral-bound file across the table, the final draft of the Cape York ‘Back on Track Biodiversity Action Plan', and one of fourteen her team will prepare to cover the state. ‘These things are written with a five-year timeframe,' she says, ‘so you have to say, over the next five years, what can we realistically achieve?' They worked first with scientists to identify species most at risk, then with various Natural Resource Management (NRM) boards to determine how each NRM region would weigh the criteria for assessment. ‘Having farmers, graziers, local government, big businessmen, and green people sitting in a room together,' says Williams, ‘and having them come up with an agreed weighting – we were thanked several times because these people hadn't realised they had so much in common, and that they did all want to look after things.'
For the Cape York plan, fifty-one species were identified as having critical or high priority, including the Apollo jewel butterfly, five turtles, nine birds, seven bats and the dwarf saw fish. The major threats to each have been identified – and correlations drawn between common threats faced by numerous species. Feral pigs are an enormous problem in Cape York, threatening nine different organisms. ‘Pigs are one of the few threats to both marine and terrestrial species,' says Williams, ‘and by using all the available records, we can plot the areas on the Cape where those threats are greatest. Then we can start to see some of the regions where it's important to focus our actions.'
Once you can do that you can start to prioritise allocation of funds. ‘You can say, "I have $100,000 available for the year; out of these actions, which will be the most effective – which am I going to choose?" That's where Hugh Possingham's work comes into play.'
‘It's basically saying money matters, when so much of conservation prioritisation has ignored that,' says Possingham, ‘and that's like doing your shopping with the price tags ripped off everything. Which no one does, unless they're filthy rich. Traditionally, we rank species in terms of threat of extinction, and then spend the money on the thing that's just about to go extinct. That may cost $100 million – but there may be fifty things we could save for half a million dollars each and secure them in perpetuity.'
‘Of course people do find this confronting,' says Professor Helene Marsh from James Cook University, from whose work the Back on Track framework is derived. ‘When we made our earliest presentations, there were a lot of people from conservation groups who didn't want to accept that we just can't save everything. But I did feel that while determining species' extinction risks was worthy work, the far more challenging concept was how do you spend your public money most effectively?'
‘We also wanted to assess species on an equal basis,' says Williams, ‘so that some of these other species that aren't as sexy – like the insects – do get a guernsey. If everybody's focused on iconic species, we lose focus on other things, and just saying that an iconic species can be a surrogate for the other things you know you need to focus on – well, in my experience that doesn't always work.'
‘Working out what the problem is and getting your approach right is the key,' says Bob Beeton, chair of the federal government's Threatened Species Scientific Committee and an associate professor at the University of Queensland's School of Natural and Rural Management Systems. He's interested in what he calls Queensland's ‘pioneering course', but then, at the federal level, he's always advocated a landscape-based approach, rather than a focus on single species, which he sees as leaving one ‘a bit like a cat that sits on a porch with its mouth open, hoping for a bird to fly in ...'