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Deranged
Australia is a place which can grow on you, and there’s plenty of it to do just that. Where else in the world could you wait to meet a wombat to the sounds of an Australian outback song about a chap who took his girlfriend to the pub and just as things were about to get romantic, who should walk in but the bloke’s wife?
The Caversham Wildlife Park, just out of Perth, is a cracker, with almost every quintessentially Australian animal and a farm show complete with dogs rounding up sheep for a crocked shearer to remove the wool from a weathered old Merino. Jaundiced as we are, we were impressed, Bill the Kelpie got a way back out and brought those Merinos in without a hitch, one of the presenters gave us some history and a demonstration of swinging the billy. And then someone else, a wandering Kiwi named Marty, was plucked from the audience to swing the billy just to prove that it could be done successfully by the inexperienced. Which it was! A young Taiwanese woman was tutored in cracking the whip (we learned that the cracking sound is caused by a mini-supersonic boom), lambs came in to be fed by bottle from kids in the audience, and then a cow ambled in to be hand milked by anyone interested in doing so. We weren’t but the thing about this show was that it was pitched just right, with lots of interesting information provided in an easy relaxed way. Unexpectedly, we loved it.
The farm show was a diversion really, we had come to see those Aussie animals and with the exception of the platypus, they were all there. Kaelene got to pose with the Wombat, and the thing about wombats we hadn’t realised is just how big they are. This one was over 30 kg and looked to be about a four foot high dead weight as it sat slumped on its handler’s knee. The wombat was accompanied by a stub-tailed lizard, a Joey, an owl which flew in and devoured, to Kaelene’s delight, a mouse and there were several birds of the coloured variety standing around to say hello.
The Caversham Wildlife Park advertises itself as having 200 species of animals and reptiles. Tasmanian Devils, Quokkas, and Kookaburras, they were all there. So too Camels, Emus, Dingoes (but no outback babies), Wallabies and Kangaroos tame enough to hand feed from a bin of pellets nearby. There were possums (a native and protected species of Australia), Echidna (spiny anteater), flying foxes and several varieties of Ibis and then the Koala, and it may have just been luck that we arrived just as one group was being fed. These creatures sleep 20 hours a day, numbed into a narcotic haze by the gum leaves they eat, but for us they came to life and it was OK to pat one of them while they chewed. Koalas are bigger than we imagined and look quite dopey, it is interesting to watch them sleep, hanging precariously onto a branch or each other, looking as though they could topple to the ground at any moment.
The wildlife park sits within Whiteman Park, 4300 acres of bush and a number of other quite unlikely things. There is a motor car museum complete with a collection of Holden cars (we’ll be back to take a look), a tractor museum and vintage trams and trains and a lolly shop which is all very odd being out in the middle of nowhere. Mind you, Frisbees are banned. We went in search of the Mussel Pool, thinking it was perhaps a place mussels are farmed, but when we got there it appeared to be nothing more than a picnic spot. We were disappointed.
Away from Caversham and Whiteman Park, up north, there is a camel cull currently underway. Four thousand of the humped creatures have been shot and killed in the last few days as part of a programme to reduce their numbers. And this is the fascinating thing; there are more than one million camels in the north-west of Australia.
There are some other curious things which seem as Australian as the wombat; protests. The monotonous demonstrations against climate change or free trade are one thing, but there is one that has taken the attention of the local media, and us. In Thornlie, a man called Richard Pennicuik has climbed up a gum tree outside his house and has camped up there for about a week to try and stop it from being chopped down by the local council. When asked if he would chain himself to the tree, a deranged looking Pennicuik glared at a television news reporter and said that was a ridiculous suggestion. “I’m not an idiot,” he added. His son Rhys, also interviewed, told the reporter that his father could be very tenacious. “He doesn’t look too brilliant but he’s determined enough to stay up that tree for a bloody long time,” he concluded.