The Western Woodlands Project

How does Australia fall into the Gap in Nature?

Cécile van der Burg
NPA's Sydney-based Woodlands Project Officer

CECILE VAN DER BURGH* revisits an important book by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten, A Gap in Nature, to see how some Australian species have fared in the past. The following review and extracts are from this beautifully-conceived book...

And the result is as shocking as it is exciting. As you turn the pages a forgotten world reveals itself. Fascinating drawings by Peter Schouten of 103 animals from all over the world, mostly from Islands, cover the pages. They look out of the book into the world they once inhabited, forever extinct. The real canvasses of illustrations are life-size and it took Schouten four years to complete them.

As Flannery states, the species in this book "represent the tip of the extinction iceberg". In the book "we only deal with the most obvious of the vertebrates, ignoring all frogs, fish, invertebrates and plants known to have vanished in recent times. "

"Australia was the first continent to be stripped of its giants. It lost over sixty species ... [including] massive kanagaroos and formed tortoises as long as a Volkswagen Beetle."

When considering whether a species should be included in the work, Flannery followed four principal criteria:

• It must be a mammal, bird or reptile whose extinction occurred between 1500 and 1999
• It must be known from material sufficiently adequate to allow accurate illustration to be made
• It must be accepted that the organism in question represents a full species, not a subspecies
• It must be widely accepted that the species is extinct (There is a biological convention stating that, except in highly unusual circumstances, a species is not proclaimed extinct until 50 years after the last reliable sighting.)

One hundred and three species were identified to fit these criteria. A surprisingly high proportion of animals described in this book are from Australia (see table opposite). In the back of the book, 105 animals are listed that did not make it into the book because they failed one or more of the above criteria. Australian animals are also common on this list.

The book is designed to travel with the exhibition around the world, to show people what human impact has done and may do. Flannery makes the claim that the destruction of our planet's most amazing animals is the direct result of destruction by humans - and he states that we are living in the sixth age of extinction.

"Extinction must be regarded over the vastness of evolutionary time as the fate of all species - as unavoidable as deaths and taxes. Some people, economists among them, have used this insight to argue that there is no need to worry about the extinction of species in the modern world. Theirs, however, is a flawed reasoning, for there are periods in history where the rate of extinction is so rapid that whole ecosystems are destabilised and swept away. Then the earth becomes a less productive, less stable and more impoverished place".

"Our present age is one such time, and it is our species that has brought things to their present, sorry, state; for this is, as Richard Leaky so ably put it, the sixth age of extinction", he writes. "The last time the planet experienced a comparable carnage was 65 million years ago during the demise of the dinosaurs and just four times previously over half a billion years of evolutionary time have extinctions on this scale occurred".

Flannery writes: "This sixth age of extinction did not begin, as you might imagine, with the arrival of the industrial era a few hundred years ago. Instead, it first dawned at least 50,000 years earlier, when our species first left its African cradle and began its spread across the face of the earth...We cannot be certain, of course, about anything that happened so long ago, but evidence is growing that a common thread runs through extinctions of the last fifty millennia and that the Homo Sapiens, either directly or indirectly, is that thread".

He also writes: "Australia, we now know, was the first continent to be stripped of its giants. It lost over sixty species of marsupials, reptiles, flightless birds, including the rhino-sized marsupial diprotodons, massive kangaroos, six-metre long goannas and horned tortoises as long as a Volkswagen Beetle", and "Many, if not all, were swept away at around the time that the ancestors of the Aborigines arrived on the continent, some 46,000 years ago. Other continents followed, losing their giants".

According to the book, "A second phase of extinction began when humans left the continents and began to colonise the world's Islands...five hundred years ago there was still a scattering of islands which had not been pillaged by humanity, and which retained faunas that were a faint echo of this grand world".

"That was all to change, however, as Europeans were gripped by a new spirit of adventure." It all started with Columbus' bold undertaking in 1492.
A third wave of extinctions occurred after Europeans settled other continents, importing their European ways of life. Many of the last individual animals were caught by enthusiastic collectors not realising that with taking three animals, they took the whole species with them to their museum.

Flannery describes these non-living remnant populations to make the point that there is still a human lack of respect for these creatures.

"Some eighty skins and seventy-five eggs held in museum collections of the world are all that remain of the great Auk today", he writes, and "the only specimen I have seen [of the St Lucy Gina Rice-rat]… inhabits the Natural History Museum. Whoever stuffed it did a poor job. The specimen, which is about the size of a small cat, is now falling apart and it is so fragile that it bears a label with a strict injunction not to touch it".

I can only suggest that readers access the book to see what else Flannery has to say about these creatures of the past and the Musea that house them. This beautiful book is itself a collector's item.

A Gap In Nature: Discovering the World's Extinct Animals
Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten
Text Publishing, 2001,
rrp $50 (hardcover)

CÉCILE VAN DER BURGH
is NPA's Sydney-based Western Woodlands Project Officer.
From the Netherlands, she also has a great interest in
international flora and fauna protection.

For more information:

'Saving What's Left' and the accompanying socio-economic analysis.

Available on www.npansw.org.au/wca-bbs

For Government information on the assessment go to www.racac.nsw.gov.au

Email Cécile and Bev at

View NPA's integrated tourism concept "the Orana Loop Initiative" for Brigalow and the Orana region

Last update: 15/05/03

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