Like my Koala essay, this piece records ideas I have held and shared over many years. I have resisted the temptation to begin any serious process of research to support (or refute) the ideas or even the background facts. It is largely a product of “reading the landscape” a process that is the subject of a documentary by Dan Palmer and Dave Meagher but includes remembered observations gleaned from various sources.

Recording this cultural, verbal and remembered knowledge of nature and our part in its change and evolution has been a lifelong passion, and it is an important foundation for permaculture design. As I said in the documentary, reading landscape always generates more questions than it answers but it does stimulate thoughts that occasionally reinforce one another to create hypotheses that may complement the more focused specialised and professional sources of understanding from predominantly reductionist science.

In the 1970s I became somewhat familiar with wombats while living in several bush locations in Tasmania and southern NSW. In Jackeys Marsh I even skinned a dead wombat I found and made a door mat for my hut, following the tradition of Tasmanian bushies of previous generations. I was disgusted that someone would shoot a wombat, but they were certainly abundant and widespread wherever I lived and travelled. That was until we moved to Hepburn in 1985 on the edge of the 64,000 hectare Wombat Forest (named after the town of Wombat which was later renamed Daylesford). I assumed when the town was originally surveyed and named in 1852, wombats were abundant in the area. I imagine the red volcanic soils of Wombat Hill, the site of the botanic gardens, ringed by massive burrows. So I found it curious that I saw no sign of wombats in the farmland, bush, creek lines or river flats. Asking about this state of affairs, locals said there were wombats in the high rainfall pocket at the centre of the forest to the south of Trentham.

This got me thinking: What confined wombats to this pocket when everywhere else I had been, they seemed abundant in diverse types of forest and farmland?

I knew from personal experience, wombats were not particularly phobic of people and they were happy to take over what humans leave behind. During the great fires of 1967, Bill Mollison saved his house at Strickland Ave, South Hobart, along with a wombat who became a sort of pet. His eldest daughter Janet recalled the wombat loved Bill but would charge other family members as they came and went from the house. Bill also told me about visiting ‘The Count,’ the last inhabitant of Adamsfield, the osmiridium rush settlement in the south west wilderness. As they walked along a narrow path between tea tree regrowth to old man’s cottage on what had previously been a street, he indicated (in his educated Oxford English) for Bill to move aside to allow a large male wombat to pass, noting that last week the wombat had bowled him over.

I had watched wombats creating lawns through close grazing of both native and introduced pasture, similar to the way wallabies and rabbits do, but also knew they could cope with coarse vegetation including sedges and roots. I figured grassy woodlands that were predominant in indigenous landscapes would have favoured wombats and the later clearing of the dense regrowth bush that followed the squatter pastoral phase in south eastern Australia surely benefited wombats, even if bushies, farmers and car drivers took their toll.

In Tassie wombats took advantage of dense forest cover and burrows seemed more modest than the giant warrens that I saw on the mainland, especially in the granitic country of southern NSW. I wondered if the mange that wombats can suffer is related to excess sun exposure suggesting good cover and/or burrows within easy range of nocturnal grazing areas might be essential. Being capable diggers, I considered what might prevent wombats making a good and homely burrow. Shallow rocky and hard clay soils would be limiting, while poor drainage and flooding might be additional hazards.

As we settled into developing Melliodora we were also exploring and beginning to make tracks and plant trees on adjacent public land in what we came to call Spring Creek Community Forest, part of the 2000 hectare Hepburn Regional Park surrounding the twin towns of Daylesford and Hepburn. The Regional Park was only declared and named in 1983 from neglected crown land denuded in the gold rush, which in the 20th century was treated as a sort of unacknowledged town common where locals cut firewood, trapped rabbits and ran sheep and house cows to contribute to the household non-monetary economy and reduce bushfire hazard. Post war rising affluence led to a progressive decline in this informal community-based management and by the time Hepburn Regional Park was formalised, the blackberries and other regrowth had closed access along the gullies to all but the most determined adventurers such as us.

As we made tracks, we noticed wallabies and even stray koalas took advantage to move between forage sources but we never saw any sign of wombats even though the conditions seemed to be ideal. The Elevated Plain escarpment had deep volcanic soil ideal for burrows and vegetated by very tussocky woodland forest while the farmland on top of the ‘plain’ included closed grazed pastures ideal for wombats. Along the creekline, below the blackberries and emergent willows, there were substantial deposits of alluvial silt and sand over the rock piles left behind by the gold miners, who in a decade, sluiced away millions of tonnes of soil and alluvium down to the underlying bedrock.

We were very excited to realise and record how fast the blackberry and especially willows were capturing sediment eroding from the dry forested catchment slopes which, along with sediment from the town, were creating new creek flat alluvial soils. In the 1990s, Spring Creek was the site of pioneering research on willow ecology that supported new approaches to willow management, as alternatives to excavators and herbicide. While my focus continued to be with the water, soil and plants, the absence of wombats led to the following hypothesis.

Prior to European settlement, wombats would have been more abundant on the volcanic country because of more and sweeter grass combined with ideal habitat in deep, loose, free draining red soils. As the gold boom got going, every acre of arable red volcanic soil was cleared and intensively farmed to feed the huge and growing population. Tolerance for wombats digging or even grazing would have been limited. In addition to the humans (mostly with guns), the dogs were almost as numerous. As an old Tasmanian bushie once said to me, ‘Don’t mind the smell, its just an “old badger”; the dogs are waiting for it to soften up before eating.”

The granite country of central Victoria around Mt Alexander (Leanganook) also had prime wombat habitat in the deep sandy colluvial soils below the granite outcrops. It was also cleared, even if the farming was not as intensive as on the volcanic landscapes. The predominant sedimentary country, the source of gold, was also denuded but mostly for timber and fuel. Once the deep lead mining took over from alluvial mining, the demand for mine prop timber was apparently greater than the need for all the above-ground construction of the whole region, including fencing, bridges and buildings.

Before that final desecration, which led to the Ruined Forest Royal Commission in the 1890s, every river, creek and gully that was prospective for alluvial gold had been sluiced to the bedrock by thousands of men working at pace that modern people can barely imagine and with the power of water in the wettest decades Europeans (and their descendants) have ever experienced in central Victoria.

Denuding the forested slopes led to sheet erosion of the thin A1 soil horizon leaving a hard baking surface that to this day remains more like concrete than soil over much of the forested catchments.

It seems to me these conditions deprived wombats of their essential burrow habitat more than their food supply and that they became regionally extinct; except perhaps for the small area in the heart of the Wombat Forest from which they have been expanding for perhaps the last 50 years. About a decade ago we began seeing the characteristic cubic wombat droppings along our tracks, left on mounds, rocks and other protrusions. Apparently the wombats agreed with me that the novel ecosystem of Spring Creek Community Forest was good habitat. Since then we have heard about many sightings further north including the granite country around Leanganook. Wombats have been on the move, albeit slowly, for some decades it appears.

So why did they survive in the high rainfall heart of the Wombat Forest when the gold mining, especially around Blackwood, was as intense as elsewhere in the region? All of the regional landuse impacts I have mentioned affected that area. Back in the 1990s, I thought the soils might be the answer. On the sedimentary country, the higher rainfall top of the Great Divide has deeper topsoil and, perhaps more importantly, the subsoil clays generally have a better crumb structure than the harsh soils in lower rainfall areas. In fact many are classified as “Gradational” reflecting the gradual increase in clay content rather than the sudden change characteristic of the “Duplex” soils. Wombats may have found suitable digging ground right across these landscapes. In the highest rainfall area where they survived, a mosaic of volcanic farmland may have provided ideal edge habitat and pasture. Further, sometimes sedimentary ground in areas with over 1000mm of annual rainfall have red soils are that structurally similar the volcanic soils, even if more leached of nutrients.

Since then, I have thought of another possible factor that allowed wombats to survive and then recover in the high rainfall heart of the Wombat Forest through the intense impact of the gold rush. If excess light and heat are problematic for wombats, these higher altitude, cooler and cloudier parts with a climate and dense vegetation similar to where I used to live in Jackeys Marsh, Tasmania, might have been survivable without so much dependence on large and permanent home burrows.

Postscript

Like my koala essay, this one was written without further research, but curiosity got the better of me about some of the facts of the Wombat Forest history and a quick search led me (of course) to the Wikipedia article. The Wikipedia article further reduced my faith is trusting this source even for non-contentious subjects. This article on the Wombat Forest from the website Victoria’s Forest Heritage provides more accurate and useful information, especially on the scale and nature of timber harvesting over more than 150 years.

David Holmgren
Melliodora
Autumn 2024