Australia's vanishing mammals - a glimpse into my past life

I was saddened to read this article, about the escalating extinction of Australian mammals the other day. Once upon a time, when I was doing wildlife research up in Far North Queensland, I had dinner with Tim Flannery – before he was Australian of the year and the face of climate change and was simply an exceptional mammalian biologist. Over dinner he regaled me and a few others with tales of his adventures hunting for tree kangaroos in the jungles of Irian Jaya. His monograph on tree kangaroos is still one of the most beautiful books I own.

While I was up in Townsville I was doing research on one of those small-medium herbivorous, critical-weight-range marsupials he mentions in this article. From there I went to Toowoomba, where I researched and wrote recovery plans for two endangered species (the Bulloak Jewel Butterfly and the Julia Creek Dunnart, if you are wondering), and also went out to Idalia National Park to monitor the Bridled Nailtail Wallabies. Then the funding disappeared with a change of state government (perfect example of the bureaucratic problems he discusses also) and I had to get another job. The lack of research funding within the agencies that manage Australia's biodiversity is one of the reasons I am no longer working in that field. So everything in that article is close to my heart.