Original subtitles

Australia, a huge island that has drifted by itself for 45 million years,

is a strange assortment of landscapes.

Until just a few generations ago, they were lightly trodden by people.

This land, with all its curious wildlife, was utterly unknown to western eyes.

But a little over two hundred years ago,

the British came to this island continent...

and declared it theirs.

At first

it was just a place to dump criminals, 16,000 kilometres from home.

But this distant British outpost

would soon become a land of opportunity for those that followed.

Now there's a population of twenty million,

living in some of the most modern, desirable cities in the world.

A whole nation has grown up fast in a land of sun and space.

But how has the big old landscape coped with this rapid transformation?

And now there are so many people here, what has happened to the wildlife?

Australia's most famous animals have had to come to terms with changes.

A koala is a creature of habit

and will doggedly follow the route it knows between favourite feeding trees.

If there is a road in the way, it will simply stroll across.

Koalas are good climbers,

so even if there's a fence between it and a good feed,

it needn't be an obstacle.

If a koala knows there's something to eat on the other side,

it will just clamber across until it gets there.

It's slow, but you have to give it full marks for style.

That's all very well in quiet areas.

But in Australia, wildlife and humans often want the same real estate.

When cities grow too fast,

and trees disappear under the spread of suburbia,

koalas don't change their habits.

They hang on in there, still following their familiar routes.

As long as there are just enough trees left,

koalas will stay around the most unlikely places.

Every time a koala comes to the ground,

it has to take its chances against the hazards of urban living.

But Australian animals have evolved for millions of years in a tricky,

changeable environment,

and even in the face of city sprawl, the toughest survive.

Australia's native wildlife has suddenly been faced with a whole new world.

But sometimes it's the animals that benefit.

Kangaroos eat grass - and in this town near Melbourne,

where a golf course has been built alongside patches of natural bushland,

the local grey kangaroos have hit the jackpot.

In a dry old country like Australia,

all this fresh, green, well-watered grass

is like a banquet for these lucky roos.

It's a vast improvement on what they'd usually get.

These are shy animals normally - but not here.

There may be five hundred kangaroos here,

and some have lived all their lives on the greens among the golfers -

eating grass, raising their families, relaxing in the shade of the trees,

and generally behaving exactly as they would in the bush.

In fact, it's the golfers who have to play around them.

And an audience of kangaroos is enough to put anyone off their stroke.

A rubbish dump might seem a less salubrious place to dine out,

but this one, a few miles from Brisbane,

has become a fast food stop for sacred ibises,

and they thrive in great numbers as a result.

They travel in from nearby swamps,

where they roost, arriving bang on time when the dumpsters unload.

It's a reliable meal -

while they would naturally dig about for crayfish and mussels,

here they can take their pick of gourmet throwouts.

Urban living has its advantages, if you've got the nerve.

And the minute the dump closes at the end of the day,

the birds all disappear, regular as clockwork, back to their swamp.

More than three-quarters of Australia's population lives on the coast,

and so that's where the relationship

between people and wildlife is most obvious.

But the human effect hasn't confined itself to the cities.

Beyond the coast is a whole new world,

and within fifty years of British settlement,

some brave souls had taken on the challenge of living inland.

The contrast between city and outback living couldn't be stronger.

This is the most unpredictable desert in the world.

In Australia's interior,

the temperature can swing from 46 degrees Centigrade to minus 8.

Some years 20cm of rain may fall in a single day,

and in other years, there may hardly be enough to wet the ground.

Australia's soils are dry and impoverished -

on average the poorest in the world.

It's a hard place to farm,

and yet now there are 18 million sheep here, and 30 million cows -

more than there are people.

One of the toughest challenges was the lack of water.

But people discovered that there was water here -

gigantic pools, millions of years old, deep underground.

Pioneering farmers struggled to bring it to the surface,

so that their sheep and cattle would never be far from a reliable supply.

And for the native wildlife, these man-made oases became very attractive.

These animals have had millions of years to adapt to the times when no rain falls.

And suddenly, here was plenty of water.

In the old days, emus and kangaroos would have stayed

close to whatever natural water they could find in this arid landscape.

When droughts were long, many would have died.

But nowadays, with all this water on tap,

no animal need be more than 10 kilometres away from a drink.

And alongside the cattle, the natives have thrived as never before.

Now, there may be 10 million red kangaroos in Australia's arid lands.

It seems that wherever people have struggled

to wrestle a living from the land,

the native wildlife is ready to help itself to the proceeds.

For native birds that have evolved on a diet of seeds,

what better place to feed than a wheat store?

Little corellas flock to storage bunkers in gangs thousands strong,

turning up in greatest numbers just when the harvest is brought in.

They're not put off at all by the heavy tarpaulin covers -

these parrots simply rip through them and eat their fill.

Their beaks never stop growing

and these intelligent birds use them like tin openers.

And being highly sociable, they go around in big numbers.

It's pretty hard to stop this avian smash-and-grab.

Farmers try to scare them off by firing shots...

...but all they do is fly round and land again.

They will finally disappear en masse to their roosts -

but they'll be back again tomorrow.

Parrots have been up to tricks like these ever

since the first settlers began growing crops,

two centuries ago.

But not all Australia's native wildlife is quite so resilient.

There have been many changes since the British first planted their flag here,

and some have had an impact that those early colonists could not have foreseen.

At first, the land they found had seemed like Eden.

But viewed through homesick eyes, it needed a few changes.

The countryside needed taming.

All those messy trees needed clearing, to make room for farms.

And the place would surely benefit from some superior animals.

And so those early colonists set about turning Australia into a little England.

Bit by bit, here was Surrey on the other side of the world -

faintly familiar, but not quite the same.

And the native animals were coming face to face with strangers.

For fifty million years

this continent had nurtured its own private set of wildlife -

and now it was beginning to fill up with a parade of animals

that didn't belong here at all.

And some foreign invaders began to cause serious problems.

When the earliest British colonists arrived,

they brought with them domestic animals from home,

but they didn't keep them fenced.

Plenty wandered off, and the toughest prospered.

Nowadays, wild pigs, descendants from those early porkers,

are rampaging through some of Australia's most pristine landscapes.

Pigs need water to keep cool,

and wetlands are where they do their worst damage.

With their sharp feet and incessant wallowing,

they destroy vegetation and

damage waterholes far better suited to more delicate feet.

They will eat virtually anything,

and are especially partial to the eggs of native waterbirds and reptiles.

They spread nasty diseases,

and with a population that can double in a year,

there are now millions of them.

But pigs were just the beginning.

And some incomers have a shameful history.

1858 - rabbits are brought from England

to give the colonists something to shoot at.

They begin to multiply alarmingly fast -

one farmer has 36 million on his property alone.

They eat all the grass, and push small native animals out of their homes.

And they're still not under control.

1840 - camels are brought from Asia as beasts of burden,

but later abandoned in favour of lorries.

Half a million descendants now roam the outback,

too many for a drought-prone land to support.

1935 - the South American cane toad,

poisonous species, is brought in to eat pest beetles.

The plan fails, but the toads themselves thrive out of control,

poisoning native animals that try to eat them.

Even the most innocent seeming foreigners can be trouble.

In 1822, settlers brought their European honeybees to Australia,

and put their hives where the most flowers grew.

They could then produce abundant honey.

But it was bad news for the bees that lived there already.

In the tropical rainforest of the northeast,

the native bees feed on pollen and nectar,

and some of the flowers need to be vibrated, to release their pollen reward.

It's a relationship that has grown up over millions of years.

But European honeybees can't do this buzz pollination -

they just can't shake their bodies in the right way.

Their method is to steal the pollen

that the native bees have just set on the flowers.

And they have even more aggressive tactics.

They beat up the native bees, stealing the pollen from their backs,

and driving them away from the flowers.

Without proper pollination,

the flowers, and the native animals that rely on them, are at risk.

But of all the invaders that came from the Old Country,

there is one that has really outdone the rest.

Foxes were deliberately brought to Australia from England

a hundred and fifty years ago,

so that homesick British gentlemen could hunt, just as they'd always done.

But those foxes that didn't get caught, started to thrive.

From an original few dozen released,

there are now millions of foxes in Australia.

Superbly adaptable, they have spread almost everywhere, even in deserts.

Two hundred years ago, Australia was full of strange little animals,

all flourishing in a landscape where there were few big predators.

But now they all became the perfect, fox-sized meal.

They had no idea how to react to this new enemy.

And suddenly they began to vanish.

A disaster had begun.

Australia's native animals were being hit from all sides.

They were being devoured by new predators.

Their food was being eaten by foreigners with bigger appetites.

And their habitat was being taken from them, so that the land could be farmed.

Many native animals, once numerous, quietly disappeared.

And they're still going now.

Since the British arrived,

54 species of mammals, birds and frogs have gone.

In the desert, almost half of all the mammal species have become extinct.

This shocking decline has no parallel anywhere else in the world.

Australia's most famous extinct animal

managed to hang on for a while in Tasmania.

The Tasmanian tiger was one of Australia's few big carnivores,

but it had been driven from the mainland by dingoes,

and the remainder killed by farmers who accused it of taking sheep.

In 1936,

the year it was finally given official protection,

the last one died in a Tasmanian Zoo.

But although the picture looks grim,

things are not always what they seem.

In the far southwest corner of Australia there once lived a small,

pointy-nosed marsupial called Gilbert's potoroo.

It hadn't been seen for over a hundred years,

and was presumed to be long extinct, the victim of the usual troubles.

Then, in 1994, one was spotted.

It wasn't lost after all - only hiding.

Although it's the size of a rabbit, it eats almost nothing but fungi,

which it digs for in deep undergrowth.

And it only comes out at night. No wonder it was hard to spot.

There may be fewer than forty of them left in the whole of Australia -

in fact it may be Australia's rarest mammal,

and it needs intensive protection.

But it's not extinct.

And it goes to show

that Australian wildlife is easy to lose in such a big place.

What else might there be hiding out there in the vastness?

There's a search going on to find

Australia's most legendary and obscure bird -

a little green parrot that looks like a fat budgie.

It was named the night parrot, because it's probably nocturnal.

It's said to run around the spinifex grassland of Australia's dry interior,

but it hadn't been seen for eighty years.

Everyone assumed the night parrot was just another museum piece.

But then, in 1990,

one was found in Queensland, squashed at the side of the road.

Here was evidence that there might still be night parrots running

about out there, somewhere in the darkness.

There were campaigns to make sure that anyone who spotted one in the vast,

lonely landscape would know what it was.

Long-distance road-train drivers were even shown pictures of what to look out for.

And then came a report that a live one had been seen in a remote cattle station,

called Newhaven, right in the centre of Australia.

The farm owner, Alex Coppock, is convinced of what he saw.

Around his cattle trough, drinking with the other thirsty birds,

were two unfamiliar birds he'd never seen before.

They were definitely parrots,

but not the usual ones.

Alex has lived and farmed here for 40 years,

and he knows the birds of the outback pretty well.

These strangers certainly weren't budgies, or ringnecks.

They were little fat birds, and had very short tails,

and oddly marked green feathers.

Checking what he'd seen against old illustrations,

Alex was sure that the birds

at his trough really were night parrots.

If the night parrot does still exist,

this is the kind of place where it would live,

with spinifex clumps to hide it during the day, and plenty of water.

It's the Holy Grail for ornithologists, none more devoted than Richard Jordan.

He looks in the places

that seem most promising,

in the hopes of flushing the secretive little birds

from their hiding place.

But there's not a glimpse.

It may be Australia's least known bird,

but it seems that it was a sitting target for foreign predators,

and it couldn't cope with changes brought by farming.

The search goes on.

Even old bird's nests are checked,

in case a fragment of night parrot feather has been woven in.

Even this would be evidence.

But in 13 years of searching Richard has found nothing.

Nightfall is the time to watch.

This is when these secretive birds would come to drink,

with all the other birds

that rely on these remote waterholes in the middle of the desert.

But it is, to say the least, unlikely.

Many people claim to have seen the night parrot,

but so far, none can prove it.

The only solid evidence there's been,

was that one squashed bird found in Queensland, and the search goes on.

This is a huge country,

and the most vulnerable animals tend to be the most cryptic.

So how do you find out if they even still exist,

let alone help them survive?

Ask the people who know the land better than anyone.

Australia has been inhabited for 60,000 years.

Until the British landed,

there were maybe half a million people,

in a place three-quarters the size of Europe.

But they lived across the whole continent,

and they knew the wildlife intimately.

Aborigines had long been managing the landscape.

They regularly burned it, to clear the way for hunting,

and to encourage fresh plants to grow.

The native wildlife had become tuned in to this new regime.

When white people came, the Aboriginal population dwindled to barely a quarter.

But their skills didn't vanish entirely.

And now, all over Australia,

they are helping with the rediscovery of lost animals.

A lizard called the great desert skink had been missing for decades.

Western scientists had only found twenty in almost a century.

But when Aboriginal landowners helped the search,

the skinks began to reappear, always on Aboriginal land.

In Uluru, the locals called it tjakura

Now traditional owners, like Norman Jackeleri and scientists,

like Steve McAlpin,

pool their skills in the continuing search.

Norman knows this area intimately, it's his home.

As a young child he was taught to recognise signs

and follow animal tracks by his grandparents.

As a scientist, Steve relies on Norman's special knowledge,

that has only come from a lifetime spent in the bush.

But now, they are teaching each other the skills needed to find

and study these elusive animals.

What's that one?

Fox

So, there's a fox come through here,

so they're probably hunting for that tjakura, I reckon.

There are predators here, foxes are a problem,

but this was definitely skink country.

It seemed that western science had been looking in the wrong places,

all those years.

Tjakura.

Oh yeah, a beauty.

It's a beauty, isn't it?

...lt's an animal that Norman is quite familiar with.

190...

So the skinks had always been here after all,

and the local people knew their behaviour well.

They knew that they came out at night from their big family burrows in the sand

to feed on desert plants and hunt for insects,

leaving their distinctive tracks.

But something else became apparent.

In order for the lizards to thrive,

the land must be burned in the traditional way.

It may seem drastic, but this has been going on here for thousands of years.

The skinks need habitat like this,

selectively burned to provide just the right amount of cover

and fresh new growth on which they feed.

But even with such intensive care,

while all those foreign predators roam at large,

the mainland is still a dangerous place

for much of Australia's wildlife.

It seems unfair, but the only safe place is on an island.

Luckily Australia is surrounded with thousands of islands, large and small.

Without these natural refuges,

a further nine mammal species would be extinct in the jaws of mainland predators.

Barrow Island, 80 km off the northwest coast of Australia,

has been separated from the mainland for 7000 years.

No introduced animals have had a chance to get here and trash the place,

and the difference it makes is enormous.

Here the natives can really relax.

There is such a wealth of wildlife on Barrow,

that it was made a nature reserve a hundred years ago.

But there's a further twist to the tale.

Oil was found here in 1954,

in amounts too valuable to ignore.

This top class nature reserve became a major oilfield.

Five hundred wells sprang up across the island.

What would become of all the wildlife?

It seems they're doing pretty well!

The kangaroos that live here are called euros,

and they thrive in the spinifex among the pipework.

They're not at all shy,

and they'll even use the mechanical structures

as shelter from the blistering heat of the summer sun.

In this extraordinary place,

giants cruise around the oil tanks quite unfazed.

Perenties are Australia's biggest lizards, and this perentie is after something.

On this desert island, where fresh water is in short supply,

a dripping air conditioner is a luxury.

It's not easy to get a drink round here.

Rules are strict about how the wildlife is treated on Barrow -

no animals can be brought to the island, and nothing can be taken away.

And some are doing even better here than they would on the mainland.

At night, when the oilmen have their supper,

strange nocturnal creatures emerge, lured out by the smell of the barbie.

This is a golden bandicoot.

It used to be common on the mainland,

but introduced predators virtually wiped it out.

Nowadays it's almost only found on islands,

but there may be fifty thousand of them living it up on Barrow alone.

And this is a burrowing bettong,

a tiny kangaroo that spends its days underground.

In fact, it's the world's only burrowing kangaroo,

and it comes out at night to feed.

It too hangs by a thread on the mainland, but here it's safe.

To watch these animals fearlessly looking for scraps,

it's easy to see how effortlessly a predator could pick them off.

But not here.

Australia's largest, most famous island is also a wonderland of lost wildlife.

Tasmania too has long been free of dingoes and foxes,

and it's a last sanctuary for some remarkable animals.

This is the only place in the world where Tasmanian devils still live wild.

They've long been gone from the mainland,

but here they thrive as they've always done,

living in tangled forests and screaming at each other over scraps of carrion.

There are other oddities in the darkness -

strange spotted cat-like animals, called tiger quolls.

They too are rare elsewhere.

But Tasmania is no remote wilderness.

It's full of people,

and the wildlife has to take its chances alongside towns, roads, and farms.

This is a busy sheep farm, but it too has some surprises.

At night, when all the farm workers have gone home,

strange things start happening in the shed.

A Tasmanian devil has been sheltering under the floorboards.

And a tiger quoll has made her home in the roof.

The quoll is raising her babies here,

and leaves them up in the rafters while she comes down to find something to eat.

She and the devils wander round the shed at night,

looking for food left by the farm workers.

Quolls are carnivores,

and she'd kill live prey with a bite to the back of the neck.

But sometimes it's easier to break into a lunch box.

Tasmanian devils too like to scavenge, but it's not always quite that easy.

Devils will be devils,

and always ready for a bit of a punch-up over a scrap.

But mostly it's just a lot of noise.

People and wildlife have become entangled with each other.

Even in the heart of the busiest cities, they are forced to live together.

The night sky of Melbourne is filled every night with thousands of enormous bats.

Grey-headed flying foxes, native Australians, are struggling in the wild,

because so much of their natural forest habitat is being cleared.

Here in town, they find everything they need.

Just a flight away, there are orchards full of fruit,

exactly what these fruit bats love best.

And they have some exasperating habits.

The bats may take just one bite, and then sample the next,

like a picky child, leaving a trail of half-eaten fruit

and some very annoyed farmers.

At dawn they fly the 40 kilometres or so back to town,

following the course of the river and the roads.

They're heading back to roost for the day.

And this is where they chose.

Nearly 30 thousands bats took up residence in a piece of imitation rainforest,

in Melbourne's elegant Botanic Gardens.

Here in the garden it's a few degrees warmer than the surrounding area,

and with so much food nearby it suits them very nicely.

But this number of bats has become too much for the trees.

Many of the plants here are rare and fragile,

and none of them can stand the wear and tear of so many hefty animals,

some of which can weigh a kilogram.

So here's a dilemma -

a Botanic garden that wants to preserve its precious trees,

and a native bat that's on the endangered list.

There are ongoing efforts to persuade the bats to leave

and settle somewhere else, where they'll cause less havoc.

There's a strange love-hate relationship between Australia's wildlife and people.

Australian animals are diverse and peculiar,

and while some have declined in the face of human changes,

others have thrived and are doing better than ever.

But for better or for worse,

there are few places in the world where they are quite so familiar.

And in spite of the sophistication of the Australian way of life,

people still yearn to have contact with wildlife.

In a land where almost everyone lives in towns,

thousands of visitors pay to watch a spectacle like this.

Every day, hundreds of rainbow lorikeets

fly in over the suburbs near Brisbane

to one particular park.

These are completely wild birds,

only visiting to take advantage of the fact

that people want to see them up close.

When they've finished their free meal of artificial nectar,

the parrots will disappear again to their roosts.

No-one is quite sure where they all go.

Humans encourage them, and they're exploiting human generosity.

The first European settlers had such little regard for the native wildlife

that they brought blackbirds and nightingales from England,

to make the place feel more like home.

Now, two hundred years later,

there's a growing appreciation for the remarkable

nature of the landscape and its animals.

Australia's people and native wildlife are bound together,

and there's no going back.

In some places the land has changed beyond recognition,

and dozens of unique animal species will never be seen again.

But despite everything,

an incredible wealth of strange, tenacious animals is still here.

Wildlife remains,

even in the heart of cities,

and wilderness is never far away.

Modern Australia is still a wild and special place.