A convict settlement in a past life, Maria Island is now a sanctuary for endangered species. Ross Gurden heads there in search of wombats
I had barely disembarked from the ferry when I spotted my first wombat, shuffling across the dusty path just a couple of metres in front of me, says Ross Gurden.
About the size of a pitbull and with a gently waddling gait, this compact, furry lawnmower was clearly on the search for fresh grazing, but I like to think it had come out especially to greet me.
Where is Maria Island?
I’d just landed on Maria Island – a 115km2 lump of forested rock off the east coast of Tasmania – after a 30-minute sail across the Mercury Passage. Following in the footsteps of First Nations people who had been making regular canoe crossings to the island they know as Wukaluwikiwayna for thousands of years, I had just 24 hours to explore a thriving ecosystem that naturalists refer to as “Australia’s best example of Noah’s Ark”.
Myriad creatures call Maria Island home, but it was the wombats that I really wanted to see. And, as it turned out, that was going to be far from difficult.
On the short walk from the ferry port to my accommodation at the long-abandoned Darlington Township, I strolled past several more, including females with their single joeys, all peacefully grazing and seemingly unfazed by my presence. Wombats are mainly solitary (groups, when they do occur, are known as ‘wisdoms’), and it was as if their positions, appropriately spaced out across the surrounding expanse of grassland, had been carefully orchestrated.
Maria Island’s wombats
These were Flinders Island wombats, a subspecies of common wombats, which are numerous across Tasmania and parts of south-east mainland Australia. There are two other species: the southern hairy-nosed, found in a region of Australia’s south-central mainland; and the northern hairy-nosed, confined to two locations in Queensland. With just a few hundred individuals left, the latter is now considered one of the rarest land mammals on Earth.
Australia is packed with small and intriguing marsupials, and wombats are one of the more familiar. Though they aren’t exactly small, weighing up to 40kg, they would have been dwarfed by their enormous ancestor, Diprotodon optatum, which roamed during the Pleistocene and finally died out about 12,000 years ago. Giant wombats, as they were known, are thought to be the largest marsupial to have existed, growing to 1.8m at the shoulder and 4m in length, and clocking up almost 3 tonnes in weight.
wombats are equipped with the ‘world’s deadliest butt’.
Modern wombats have several quirky characteristics. First, they famously pass cube-shaped stools, as many as 100 of which can be excreted in one night. Stacked in a manner reminiscent of stone-balancing, these deposits are used to mark territories and attract members of the opposite sex. Second, wombats are equipped with the ‘world’s deadliest butt’.
Comprising thick bone plates that act as armour and with few nerves, their behinds are used to crush predators’ skulls against the roofs of their burrows. Third, they have continuously growing teeth, an adaptation to a herbivore’s diet of grasses, shrub roots and tree bark. Indeed, there is plenty to love about these charismatic and confiding animals, which have been quite at home on Maria Island for the past 60 years.
Maria Island history
But Maria Island was not always a wild oasis. In the early 1800s, it provided a base for whalers and sealers, and from 1825-1850 it served as a penal colony. The island had been selected for such a service thanks to its plentiful natural resources, which could be exploited through convict labour, and its island location 4km from the mainland.
Yet the expanse of water proved little deterrent to any inmate that could fashion a raft. Maria Island quickly became notorious for its frequency of escapes and had ceased to be a convict settlement by 1832, though it continued as a probation station until 1850. It has also, at various times in its history, hosted fishing and farming communities, and even a cement works, built to process the island’s rich limestone deposits.
Today, other than a few park rangers and tourists – which are visiting Maria in increasing numbers – there are no residents on the island. The buildings have been left to crumble, with the prison ruins now World Heritage Listed, though the barracks have been converted into bunkhouse accommodation.
The natural features that once made Maria Island a suitable penal colony also made it an ideal sanctuary for threatened species. So it was that, in the 1960s, efforts to increase diversity on the island sprang into action. Native pademelons, a species best described as a smaller version of a wallaby, and whose indigenous Australian name translates as ‘small kangaroo of the forest’, were joined by Forester (grey) kangaroos, Bennett’s wallabies, common brushtail possums, Cape barren geese and of course, common wombats. Such dramatic conservation measures led to the island gaining National Park status in 1971.
I dropped my bag at the bunkhouse and headed out for a stroll, the island’s beauty laid bare as the sun set. Sitting on the balcony of a tumbledown house, I watched the island descend into darkness with wildlife all around me. A mob of kangaroos calmly bounced across the grass, presumably to find better grazing. Yet another wombat came so close that I could hear it effortlessly chomp the grass, occasionally looking up as if to keep an eye on me. I couldn’t help but wonder how the prisoners would have felt years later, had they got the opportunity to admire the wildlife that now roamed the island on which they were once incarcerated.
Later, perched on a walkway outside my digs under a starry sky, I met another of Maria Island’s inhabitants. As a zookeeper, I am accustomed to having my personal space invaded by animals, but a wild creature brushing past in the darkness is an altogether more interesting experience. Turning on my head torch, I locked eyes with a southern brown bandicoot staring up at me. Rat-like marsupials that sport pointy snouts, bandicoots are omnivorous, foraging in leaf litter for fungi, plant roots and insects as well as fruits, seeds and other plant matter. After deciding that I was not something on which to dine, the creature hopped off into the darkness.
Wombats have few natural predators, particularly on an island, but one creature with a taste for these marsupials has arrived here in the recent past. In 2012, 15 Tasmanian devils were translocated to Maria Island to provide a back-up population free from devil facial tumour disease, a condition that has wiped out a colossal 80 per cent of the species elsewhere in its range.
Their arrival has brought mixed blessings. Data suggests that they have helped to restore ecological balance to the island by controlling numbers of common brushtail possums, which have been described by scientists as overwhelming the island, but they have also decimated the populations of some of the island’s nesting seabirds.
Monitoring of scat has found that wombats are also a component of the devil’s diet, though there is no evidence that they prey on adults, and there has been no negative impact on Maria Island’s wombat population. There has also been positive news about the plight of the Tasmanian devil as a whole, with the spread of facial cancer slowing after what has been described as an amazing evolutionary response.
After a night in the barracks, I woke to a warm and cloudless sky. The east coast of Tasmania has a milder climate than much of mainland Australia, with average temperatures ranging from the teens to the mid-20s. I hiked 11km to the top of Bishop and Clerk Peak, which, at 620m above sea level, is the second-highest point on the island after Mount Maria (711m).
Wombats don’t appear to be early risers. Not a single individual was to be seen as I set out on my walk. As if to compensate, a bandicoot showed itself five minutes into my journey. Unlike the bold individual I had encountered the previous night, this one stayed well away, maintaining a statue pose. Bandicoots are nocturnal, hence the unease at being visible in the light of the early morning. As I continued to climb, the terrain swiftly changed from grassland, where wombats mainly reside and thrive, to forested areas where bandicoots and pademelons are much more at home, taking advantage of the additional cover offered from potential predators. I reached the top to breathtaking, birds-eye views.
Back down in the township, I sat on the balcony of an old house for a spot of lunch. Suddenly, out popped a wombat mother and joey from under the adjacent building. As with many of the ruins here, its foundations have been repurposed as a burrow system. Wombats are in fact the planet’s largest burrowing herbivores, digging using their front claws and pushing soil backwards with their hind feet and rump.
They create subterranean systems up to 30m long and several metres deep, furnished with various entrances. The burrows are used to rest, hide from predators, and keep warm in winter and cool in summer. Wombats tend to have overlapping home ranges with multiple burrows, so these dwellings are often shared. The nonchalant pair grazed right in front of me, then the mother moved off, effortlessly navigating the messy assault course of bricks and ruins, her offspring breaking into an exuberant trot behind her.
My 24 hours were nearly up. I took a final stroll around the grasslands before heading to the ferry port, where the island delivered one last memorable moment. There, right by the path, was a mother and joey wombat.
I like to think they’d come to see me off.
Ross Gurden is a zookeeper at the Berkshire College of Agriculture Zoo and wildlife photographer from Oxford. You can see more of his work @rossgurdenphotography.