KOALA
The koala has international appeal
and used to be the symbol of
the Australian airline Qantas, but
political will to save the species is
in short supplyGUARDIANS
One of the world’s species most at risk from climate change, the koala is
suffering a plummeting population as urban sprawl eats into key habitat.
Can politics and radical thinking prevent localised extinctions?s a tourist attraction and national icon,
Barry punches well above his weight. This
6kg koala is one of the stars of the Port
Macquarie Koala Hospital, in New South Wales,
and thousands of tourists travel to see him and his
fellow patients each year. An accidental ambassador
for wildlife, he could well be a significant force for
conservation in Australia.
Barry has been a regular patient at the hospital
over the past few years, presenting the medical
team with the full suite of problems that typically
beset these marsupials. “We see between 250 and
300 koalas each year,” explains hospital supervisor
Cheyne Flanagan. “Chlamydia is the main issue,
but that’s closely followed by traffic accidents and
dog attacks, as well as a host of weird and wonderful
complaints from skin diseases to lymphomas.”
Suffering from a pronounced spinal deformity,
Barry is now a permanent resident at the hospital.
“We get a lot of males showing this kind of scoliosis
of the spine,” says Cheyne. “As the deformity
worsens, the pressure on the lungs increases and
back in the wild he would end up struggling to
breathe, unable to feed and left starving at
the bottom of the heap.”
Visitors to the hospital are ableto watch surgery and treatment in action, and
Cheyne believes this is a vital part of their role to
educate and inform. “What we do isn’t all cute
and cuddly,” she explains. “People can even watch
as we’re euthanising koalas. Some choose to walk
away, but we want to show the reality. We hope
that they learn a little here and it turns into a desire
to get involved in koala conservation.”
And public support is vital if conservationists are
to tackle the worst excesses of urban development,
one of the biggest threats to the species. “Here
in Port Macquarie we have this incredibly fertile
red, volcanic, basaltic soil. So you get a high
density of koalas because the nutritional level of
the eucalypts is so great,” says Cheyne. “But it also
grows magnificent landscape gardens, which means
people want to live here and developers want to
build on what is prime koala habitat.”Urban threats
While Port Macquarie boasts Australia’s biggest
population of coastal koalas, other parts of the
country, specifically those along the east coast, have
seen disturbing declines. Moreton Bay, in south-
east Queensland, was once a hotspot, but over a
30-year period the region has undergone rapidPhotos by SUZI ESZTERHAS
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