AUSTRALIA’S STORY

Taranaki Daily News, 9 November 1935, Page 18 (Supplement)

AUSTRALIA’S STORY

STRANGE FREAKS OF NATURE. PREHISTORIC ANIMALS. The discovery of the fossil bones of giant kangaroos and wombats 15 feet deep in the soil of Victoria, Australia, is a new reminder of the great antiquity of these types of animals in the island continent. A thrilling chapter of history is written in the bodies of Australia’s animals, a history comprising an era when all the continents were connected by landbridges, and a later chapter when, after an ice age, Australia, like England, became detached from its surroundings and formed an island.

When the world was young Australia had animals like those of other lands, differing little from reptiles, and laying eggs as the duck-billed platypus and the echidna (last of their order) continue to do; both are marvellous survivals from ancient days. Higher types gradually arose about the earth, animals like the opossum, sheltering their newly-born young in pouches. As far as science has been able to piece the story together, these creatures reached Australia by way of the trees, in which they lived, ate and reared their offspring. Passing from tree to tree as monkeys and sloths still do, they made a tree-top path to the great south land, and when the land-bridges broke down there they stayed, to develop along lines without parallel in the rest of the world. With a territory extending over three million square miles to themselves the tree-climbers slowly modified their habits; they descended to the ground; they altered the character of their limbs, and consequently of their movements. AN AGE OF GIANTS. Some, the kangaroos and the wallabies, developed bodies like those of deer, with long hind legs, with which they leap like jerboas. Only within what is modem ages, considered in terms of geological time, have a few species, the tree kangaroos, returned to the old climbing practice.

But not all became some assumed a wolf-like form, and some became Australia’s version of a lion, which carried its cubs in a pouch. As in all other favoured lands the animal life of Australia passed through that extraordinary phase producing races of giants. Kangaroos became giants; an imitation of a huge rhinoceros appeared; wombats, which survive as an Australian parallel to the English badger, produced a terrific animal, the diprotodon, standing over six feet at the shoulder, with colossal teeth and a skull over three feet long. The age of the giants passed, and the biggest thing left was the kangaroo, which, growing all its life, runs its full course in about 12 years.

All these old animals were pouched; nearly all Australian animals are pouched to-day, the only ones in the world except the American opossums. The new discovery in Victoria dates back 100,000 years. There may have been men there then, the marvellous men who arrived in boats, taking with them the dingo dog, now wild and a scourge of sheep. There story in nature stronger than Australia’s. _