Greater bilby (the lost suburbanite)

Ask most Adelaide people about the bilby and they picture a chocolate wrapper at Easter — a cartoon stand-in for the rabbit, sold as the cruelty-free native alternative.

Almost none of them know the animal on the wrapper once lived here, in numbers now hard to credit.

The naturalist Frederic Wood Jones set the fact down in the 1920s, in his Mammals of South Australia, already recording something slipping out of living memory: “Not more than thirty years since,” he wrote, “it was usual for rabbit trappers, even in the immediate neighbourhood of Adelaide, to take more Bilbies of this type than rabbits in their traps” (Wood Jones 1923-25).

Read that twice.

Rabbits, by the 1890s, were already the most notorious pest on the continent, and trappers at the very edge of the young city were catching more bilbies than that.

Long-eared, silver-grey, built for digging with forearms like a badger’s and a nose tuned to insects and bulbs a foot underground, the greater bilby (Macrotis lagotis) was, on this evidence, one of the commonest medium mammals of the Adelaide Plains within living memory.

Today the nearest wild bilby lives roughly a thousand kilometres north; across the whole settled south of the continent, the species is gone (Wood Jones 1923-25; Woinarski et al. 2015).

Nobody rang an alarm, because there was no single moment to ring one about: the bilby thinned district by district, a slow bleed rather than a headline, and by the time it was gone from a given paddock its neighbours had already forgotten it had ever been common — the shifting baseline at its starkest, each generation measuring loss from whatever fullness it happened to inherit.

It did not vanish alone.

It was one of close to thirty native mammal species lost from mainland South Australia to land clearing and two efficient introduced predators, the fox and the cat — the fox reaching the Adelaide district by about 1905, within Wood Jones’s own working life, hunting a fauna that had never met anything like it (Woinarski et al. 2015).

Some relatives still hang on: the southern brown bandicoot survives, just, in a few damp Adelaide Hills reserves, last of the whole bandicoot-and-bilby family left in the ranges, its population widely judged to be still working through an extinction debt run up by clearing that finished generations ago (Szabo et al. 2011).

That is why the bilby carries such weight here, out of all proportion to its size: the sharpest, best-documented case of an animal that was ordinary and is now unimaginable, a test of whether you can read a landscape for what it has lost as readily as for what remains.

Reading the country

There is no bilby sign to find on an Adelaide walk today — that is the whole lesson.

Where you can practise the same reading is at the bandicoot’s last Adelaide Hills strongholds: a snuffled, conical dig-hole in leaf litter, rabbit-sized and pointed-nosed, is the closest living relative of the suburb-dwelling bilby Wood Jones described, and a reminder of what the family used to include.