New Worlds Wild Down Under

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 200 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 20 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 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 been faced with a whole new world.

But sometimes the animals benefit.

Kangaroos eat grass, and in this town near Melbourne,

where a golf course has been built beside 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 - a vast improvement on what they usually get.

These are shy animals normally, but not here.

There may be 500 kangaroos here,

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

eating grass, raising families,

relaxing in the shade of the trees, exactly as they would in the bush.

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

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 near Brisbane is a fast-food stop for sacred ibises.

They thrive in great numbers as a result.

They travel 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 take their pick of gourmet throw-outs.

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.

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

so the relationship between people and wildlife is most obvious there.

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

Beyond the coast is a whole new world.

Within 50 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.

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,

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 sheep and cattle would have a reliable supply.

For the native wildlife, these man-made oases were very attractive.

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

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 now, with all this water on tap,

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

Alongside the cattle, the natives have thrived as never before.

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

Wherever people have struggled to wrestle a living from the land,

the native wildlife seems 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.

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'll 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 planted their flag here.

Some have had an impact 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 50 million years,

this continent had nurtured its own private set of wildlife.

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.

The earliest British colonists brought 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,

rampage 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 eat virtually anything and are especially partial to the eggs of native water birds and reptiles.

They spread nasty diseases and, with a population that can double in a year, there are 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, push small native animals from 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, a 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 -

bad news for the bees that lived there already.

In the northeast tropical rainforest,

the native bees feed on pollen and nectar.

Some of the flowers need to be vibrated to release their pollen.

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

But European honeybees can't do this buzz pollination.

They can't shake their bodies in the right way.

So they steal the pollen the native bees have just set on the flowers.

And they have even more aggressive tactics.

They beat up the native bees,

steal the pollen from their backs and drive them 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 150 years ago

so 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, there are now millions.

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

200 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 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 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 aren't 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 100 years and was thought to be extinct.

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 40 of them left in the whole of Australia,

it may be Australia's rarest mammal and need intensive protection,

but it's not extinct

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

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

A search is going on to find Australia's most legendary, obscure bird -

a little green parrot that looks like a fat budgie.

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

Said to run around the grasslands of Australia's dry interior,

it hadn't been seen for 80 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 -

evidence that there might still be night parrots running about out there, somewhere in the darkness.

There were campaigns to ensure that anyone who spotted one in the vast 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 right in the centre of Australia.

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

I came over and there was a lot of birds sitting around in the trough.

There was these two unusual birds that I'd never seen before.

They were pale green, they were...a parrot,

and for me, quite obviously, it must have been a night parrot.

Alex has lived here for 40 years

and he knows the birds of the outback pretty well.

It didn't look like the birds we knew, it wasn't a budgie.

It had a very short tail for a parrot, it was yellowish green

and had brownish oblong markings on his chest and the front of his wings. It was a night parrot.

Couldn't have been anything else.

If the night parrot does exist, this is the kind of place it would live,

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

It's the holy grail for ornithologists - none more devoted than Richard Jordan.

Parrot, parrot, parrot, parrot!

Parrot, parrot, parrot, parrot!

Well, this is as good a place as any.

It's a small chance, but, er, it's...it's promising.

They're mainly active at night but, in the day, they'll be hiding probably in these clumps.

Parrot, parrot!

It may be Australia's least-known bird,

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

and couldn't cope with changes brought by farming.

The search goes on.

Even old birds' 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.

But it is, to say the least, unlikely.

Quite a few people have said they've seen night parrots,

but it can't be authenticated without that physical evidence.

And there hasn't been any other apart from that one dead bird.

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.

They lived over the whole continent and 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 disappear.

Now, all over Australia, they are helping rediscover lost animals.

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

Western scientists had only found 20 in almost a century.

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 search.

The footmarks?

Oh, yes, that's its tail mark and...

Beautiful.

We should set some traps here. This is a really good burrow.

When he was a young guy, he grew up walking round in the desert, not knowing that white people existed.

His schooling was basically the schooling of following tracks, learning about animals.

Norman, despite his age, can see much better than me, he can point things out that I can barely see.

You can't develop the incredible range of skills they have from spending their life in the bush.

-What's that one?

-Fox.

-A fox has come through here,

probably hunting for that tjakura.

Catch him, eat him.

Finished up, yeah.

It seemed that Western science had been looking in the wrong place all those years.

-Tjakura.

-Oh, yeah, a beauty.

It's a beauty, isn't it?

Nice big, fat one.

190...

So the skinks had always been here after all,

and the local people knew their behaviour well.

They knew they came out at night from 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 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, 80km off the northwest coast of Australia,

has been separated from the mainland for 7,000 years.

No introduced animals have been able to get here and trash the place. 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 100 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.

500 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 pipe work.

They're not at all shy

and will even use the mechanical structures as shelter from the heat.

In this extraordinary place,

giants cruise around the oil tanks quite unfazed.

Perenties are Australia's biggest lizards, and this one's 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 wildlife is treated on Barrow.

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

Some animals do 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 a 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 50,000 of them living it up on Barrow alone.

And this is a burrowing bettong, a tiny kangaroo

that spends its days underground.

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 has long been free of dingoes and foxes and is a sanctuary for some remarkable animals.

MEWLING AND SQUEALING

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 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.

RUSTLING AND KNOCKING

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 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 it's easier to break into a lunch box.

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

GROWLING

Devils will be devils, always ready for a punch-up over a scrap.

But mostly, it's just a lot of noise.

Go on, get out!

People and wildlife have become entangled with each other.

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

Melbourne's night sky is filled 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 one bite, 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 40km 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 30,000 bats took up residence in a piece of imitation rainforest

in Melbourne's elegant Botanic Gardens.

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 can't stand the wear and tear of so many hefty animals.

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 settle somewhere else.

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

Australian animals are diverse and peculiar.

Some have declined in the face of human changes, others have thrived and are doing better than ever.

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 Brisbane suburbs to one particular park.

These are completely wild birds,

taking advantage of the fact that people want to see them up close.

When they've finished their free meal of artificial nectar, the parrots disappear 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 so little regard for native wildlife

that they brought blackbirds and nightingales from England.

Now, 200 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 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.

Subtitles by Mary Easton BBC Broadcast - 2003

E-mail us at [email protected]