Environmental Engineering Reference
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to have been deceptive, that a dingo could not have stolen her infant. It took years for her conviction to
be overturned. Others simply do not like the animal. “Dingo” is Australian slang for a coward.
Some reckon that after five thousand years it should be regarded as a native. New South Wales state
legislation recognizes it as a native dog.
3
Conservationists have taken a similar view in working to pre-
vent the genetically “pure” Australian dingo from interbreeding with domestic dogs. There may be some
complicated cultural associations going on here. “The dingo narratives affirm the notion that colonists
can be indigenised,” writes Adrian Franklin, a sociologist at the University of Tasmania, in his topic
Animal Nation
. In other words, it makes Europeans feel less like colonists and more like genuine Aus-
tralians.
4
When European colonists established permanent settlements in Australia in the late eighteenth cen-
tury, they tried to make the land productive, and introducing species was the method they chose. Most
introductions failed. In the 1860s English-born Peruvian adventurer Charles Ledger smuggled more than
three hundred alpacas over the Andes to Chile and then shipped them across the Pacific to Sydney, where
the New South Wales government paid £45 a head for them. They all died soon after. Imports of agoutis
and Angora goats also failed. In neighboring Victoria, the list of failed introductions also included lla-
mas, eland, and birds such as linnets, yellowhammers, robins, grouse, quail, and ostriches.
But there were successes. Camels brought in the nineteenth century for construction work were set
free once trucks took over. There are today more feral camels in Australia than there are camels of any
sort in the deserts of Arabia. The English shipped foxes to Australia so they could hunt them, but instead
the foxes went hunting, taking koalas, marsupial rodents known as bilbies, birds and their eggs, mice,
frogs, fish, lizards, bats, and much else. The landscape came to resemble parts of Europe. English nov-
elist Anthony Trollope was a fan. In 1873, after visiting his son, a sheep farmer in New South Wales, he
noted how “in some districts . . . the English rabbit is already an almost ineradicable pest; in others is the
sparrow. The forests are becoming full of the European bee. Wild horses roam in mobs of thousands.”
5
By 1890, Australia also had one hundred million sheep (
Ovis aries
). Their grazing changed the pas-
turelands. Sheep grazed and trampled the grasses that held the soil together. Australia had previously
been grazed by animals with padded feet that tripped lightly across the grasslands. The newcomers had
hooves—“hobnails rather than rubber soles,” as author William Lines put it in
Taming the Great South
Land
. As a result, the clay cracked in the sun and the hillsides collapsed. Meanwhile, farmers cleared
the land of its dry brush and forest to make more room for the sheep. They planted European grasses,
and even where they did not, their sheep distributed the seeds of alien plants carried in their wool all
the way from Europe. Ryegrass, cocksfoot, white clover, furze, and thistle all spread in that way, says
Lines, replacing Mitchell grass and other natives. Sheep, and the changes that their owners made to ac-
commodate them, changed Australia. Yet virtually nobody blames the sheep for the state of Australia
today. They blame the rabbit, which farmers hated because rabbits ate the grass planted in arid areas for
sheep.
When an English settler named Thomas Austin took twenty-four European rabbits (
Oryctolagus cu-
niculus
) to his ranch near Geelong in 1859, he wanted nothing more than to feel at home. The shipment
also included hares, partridges, blackbirds, and thrushes. But the rabbits liked their new home best. They
bred like, well, rabbits. As their numbers grew, Austin invited shooting parties to hunt them, but the an-
imals outran the guns and escaped. Soon there were millions of them. Rabbits were undeniably aggress-
ive adventurers, racing north through Queensland by the 1880s, defying bounty hunters and the best
efforts of the Intercolonial Rabbit Commission. They easily traversed the Nullarbor Desert and burst
through a thirteen-hundred-mile fence erected to keep them out of Western Australia.
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