mortal wombat

Very busy. The amount of wombats reported since our shoot is wild. There’s so many around. When it’s a bit cold, they come out earlier to get sunshine, so people start to see them.

My first interaction with a wombat was on my parents’ property in the Hawkesbury, which is near where we shot. I was on a bushwalk with my dad and I saw a wombat in the distance during the daytime – I was seven or eight at the time – and I wanted to see how close I could sneak up to it. I crawled through the grass, got super close. The wombat turned and looked at me, and I saw this horrible bloody scarring around its eyes, it was missing fur… I screamed and ran away, and so did the wombat. That was the first time I saw a wombat and it was really confronting. When I grew up I learned that that was mange. It’s curable, and so it became my life’s mission to stop it.

Exactly. And now I’ve been treating wombats in the Hawkesbury for about nine years.

For those who don’t know, it’s a medium-sized marsupial, a furry burrowing mammal with a pouch, and it’s covered in coarse brown fur. They often have buck teeth. They’ve got gorgeous big noses and really, really long claws for digging. And they’re super stocky and muscular.

That’s a good way of putting it.

I think they can get up to like 40 kilos. The average adult is between 20 and 40. They’re pretty beefy. I believe Ally was 28 kilos.

Yes, I know. That’s wild!

Yeah, their teeth just keep growing. They’re part of the order Diprotodontia [which includes kangaroos, wallabies, possums and koalas] which means “two giant front teeth” basically. In the wombats’ case, they have to dig through enormous root systems and boulders and incredibly tough soils underground, so their teeth have to continually grow in order for them to be the amazing ecosystem engineers that they are.

Correct.

Absolutely. They’re not out to bite people, but if you gave any animal a reason to bite, I wouldn’t want it to be a wombat. They’ve got incredible jaw strength.

Maybe? If you stuck your finger in there and really wanted that to happen. A lot of people that work with wombats, if they get bit, they get pretty big gashes and extensive bruising. They can go quite deep. It is dangerous. I wouldn’t say they’re going to clean take off your finger every time but it’s possible.

Pretty much. I’ve never seen it happen though.

Yeah, it’s the same parasite that humans get, but we call it scabies on humans.

Er… potentially. It’s very unlikely though. It probably came across with European settlement of Australia on a fox or a dog or cattle or something. Mange is a parasite called Sarcoptes scabiei and it looks a bit like a microscopic spider. It burrows into the skin and feeds on fluid and delicious things down there and lays eggs and multiplies. It starts off day one with a few parasites, the wombat gets a bit itchy – there’s stuff burrowing under its skin – and within a few months, the wombat has lost most of its hair, it’s got scabs and crusts over most of its body… The crusts cover its eyes and ears, so it’s effectively blind and deaf. And it’s very, very itchy and painful. So the wombat is exhausted, effectively naked, blind and deaf, and they often die from those wounds getting fly-blown and infected or from being too exhausted to go on. It’s pretty horrific.

Honestly that was one of my first thoughts when I saw that first wombat. It looked like a walking corpse.

In this species – the bare-nosed wombat – it is fairly widespread. There’s not heaps of research to show the exact prevalence, but there are places like the Narawntapu National Park in Tasmania where the entire population has been wiped out from mange. So, it’s not just an animal welfare issue; it’s causing and contributing to localised extinctions, and when you get enough of those, that’s when your whole species is at risk.

Yeah, you might think of it like nits – deadly nits for wombats. They jump across from one to another; they just have to share a hole or touch each other.

No, this has nothing to do with the horniness of marsupials. I’m sure there has been some transmission from some wild nights, but that’s not leading the transmission. The wombat burrow is the perfect place for the mite to multiply, and you couple that with wombats not having evolved with this parasite, and it just smashes them.

Yeah, it warms my heart so much to see them make that recovery, which could take just a few weeks;  99 percent of the time they have working eyes and ears under the scabs, which is why I say that they’re “effectively blind and deaf” with mange. Once you get rid of the parasite, they go back to being a normal happy wombat.

That’s how it started. Before people knew who to call, I’d go for bushwalks, I’d go for drives, and just see what I could find. And through doing that, and people seeing I can make a difference, I got that local community name where if you’ve got a sick wombat, “Call the wombat guy and he’ll fix it up for you.”

Each case is really different. I get the time of day and the rough location they saw the wombat – generally sick wombats stick to a schedule, so if they saw it at 3pm in this paddock, if I come back the next day and wait in the same spot at 3pm, odds are I’ll find them. They can’t go too far if they’re blind and deaf. And then I’ll map out the entire home range of that wombat, and monitor every single burrow in the area, so I don’t lose it mid-treatment. And then I treat it every week until the wombat is cured, and that is either me applying it directly to the wombat or putting burrow flaps on the burrows in its home range. Imagine a doggy door you put on the entrance to the burrow, and when they push under the doggy door, it tips a little bit of medicine on their back.

That is actually one of the treatments we use, yes. You don’t need to treat the wombat head to toe. It has been suggested on Instagram that I go around giving wombats little bubble baths. That’s a lot more fun than what I do. My whole life is like a wild goose chase. I could stake out a wombat at someone’s property for like three weeks in a row and see nothing, and then suddenly I’ll find it, I’ll be creeping up on it for 20 minutes, the wind will change, and it’ll catch my scent on the wind and I’ll have to chase it down the burrow. It’s complete chaos.

Oh yeah, I spent my whole childhood climbing down into wombat burrows. They’re pretty big. You’re probably too tall to get in there, but I can just do it now. Much easier when I was a kid.

Of course on your belly! You’re crawling and contorting through the hallways. I wouldn’t recommend anyone go down there. It’s easy to get stuck.

Well, when I was a kid it was the next frontier. One time I got stuck and my feet were dangling out of the burrow. I was thinking to myself “If I die they’re just going to find two shoes at the entrance to this burrow.” But I got out.

I think it’s a misquote from an old study. Because they see me chasing a wombat in an Instagram video and people are like “Oh, so you can run as fast as Usain Bolt, because wombats can run 40km per hour.” No. But they are fast.

Oh yeah. I’ve had times where I’ve caught one in the net and it’s had a sudden burst of courage and it’s taken off and the net’s got caught in my shoe and I’ve been dragged through a paddock.

They chew through them all the time. And when I’m treating them with burrow flaps they tear those apart all the time.

Well, Australia has the highest mammal extinction rate in the entire world. I don’t want wombats to be next on that list.

Yeah. Last year I basically ran out of money because I’d been paying for all the medicine and supplies and petrol and everything myself for all these years, and a really good friend of mine encouraged me to make a Go Fund Me, so I put together a little Instagram Reel showing who I am and what I do, asking for money because I couldn’t pay for the medicine any more. Now I have so much money for treating wombats – I think I’m set for a decade. It makes me cry every time I think about it.

Ah, yeah… There’s a vast array of people that have joined my journey. I’ve had people from all parts of the world saying “We didn’t know what wombats were and we want to support you” – all really positive amazing stuff, and then there’s the other message requests in my DM folder…

No! They haven’t been domesticated.

No, no…

My favourite kind is the most common, the bare-nosed wombat, particularly the ones in the Hawkesbury country. Believe it or not I can tell the difference between one of my wombats and one that’s say, two hours south.

Mine are the cutest. They’re the best.

Yes! My favourite wombat is Wilma. Wilma is one of the first wombats that I ever treated. He lives at my place and he’s a boy. For the first three or four years I thought Wilma was a girl. And then I decided to check. I learned everything I know about wombats from Wilma. He’s just such a gentle, curious soul. And over the months I treated him, in the early days, he got super comfortable with me being around. One of my earliest memories with a wild wombat is one night, I was lying down outside of his burrow, staring at the stars, and he came over and lay down next to me, and fell asleep beside me while I was watching the stars. So, there were shooting stars overhead and Wilma snoring beside me, and I thought to myself, “This is not just some wild animal…” Wilma showed me that, just like people, they all have their own personalities, their own friends and families, their own favourite things to do or favourite patches of grass… Now I don’t think of them as just random wild animals. When I see a wombat I think, “That’s an individual with a life and a personality.” So, Wilma’s super-duper special to me. I’ve known Wilma for probably nine years now and I still see him every couple of weeks. Or he’ll come and do a square poo on my driveway.