Charles Darwin – In AustraliaFrom the settlement of Blackheath, Darwin began the descent from the sandstone
plateau by a pass that wound down from Mount Victoria to the Bathurst Plains and
which he describes as being worthy of any line of road in England. He had a letter
of introduction to the superintendent of the Wallerawang property, land granted to a
free settler named James Walker, which carried 15,000 sheep. The superintendent Mr
Browne told him that the rapidly growing prosperity on Bathurst Plains was because
the brown pasture, which appears to the stranger’s eye so wretched, is excellent for
sheep-grazing. Wheat was now growing here and he saw how flocks of parrots and
white cockatoos had become very fond of wheat grain. The Wallerawang property was
assigned forty convict labourers who had just finished shearing 7000 sheep. Darwin
described the farmhouse as well stocked, but there was an absence of comfort, as not
even one woman resided there.
Darwin would have expected to see kangaroos roaming the plains and it is telling
that he did not see one. The next day Mr Browne took him shooting but there were still
no sign of any kangaroos. The settlers and convicts hunted them for food and Darwin
thought they would soon become extinct. Despite the lack of any large kangaroos,
their greyhounds pursued a small rat-kangaroo into the hollow of a tree. If Darwin had
been able to examine this small marsupial closely, he would have seen it has retained
some physical characteristics of the possum and provides a link between its possum
ancestors and the modern kangaroo. Darwin does not describe seeing any emus on the
plains and he wrote:
A few years since, this country abounded with wild animals; now the Emu is banished to
a long distance, and the Kangaroo has become scarce, to both, the English greyhound is
utterly destructive; it may be long before these animals are altogether exterminated, but
their doom is fixed.Later that day he walked along Coxs River and was lucky enough to see one of
Australia’s unique and most rarely sighted creatures, the duck-billed platypus. When
a specimen was first brought back to England it was considered to be fabrication
because of its flattened body covered with seal like fur, its broad flat beaver like
tail, its webbed feet and a soft snout shaped like a duck’s bill, and the claim that this
extraordinary creature laid eggs like a reptile. Darwin wrote in his diary:
In the dusk of the evening, I took a stroll along a chain of ponds (which in this dry country
represents the course of a river) and had the good fortune to see several of the famous
Platypus. They were diving and playing in the water; but very little of their bodies were
visible, so that they only appeared like so many water Rats. Mr Browne shot one; certainly87