The first record of wombats and their name

 

Canowie Brook, Budawang Ranges (Permian).

In times gone by, walkers in the Budawang Ranges would stop at night in one of the “camping caves”, sit around the camp fire, and talk of wildlife, rocks and things, drinking tea so strong, a spoon would stand up in it, at least until the tea dissolved it. Normally, port would be added to the tea as well, and the tales would get wilder as the fire and the port bottle dwindled. More often than not, somebody would recall the tale of the woman servant in the late 1790s, the one who had a wombat and a platypus fall on her head.

We all knew the story, but nobody ever knew its source. The falling animals had been preserved in spirits (rum) in a cask, and sent from Sydney to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle on Tyne by John Hunter, then the Governor of New South Wales. We knew that the servant was carrying the cask on her head when the base collapsed, drenching her in smelly spirits, and dropping fearsome animal remains on her. She was lucky it wasn’t an echidna, we would tell each other, unaware that William Bligh had found an echidna seven years earlier, so echidnas were no novelty by early 1799.

One of my friends.

Echidnas have been a major interest of mine over several years, because I am a volunteer landcare person in what has turned out to be rich echidna habitat. Echidnas probably evolved from platypuses that came out of the water somewhere in New Guinea, grew spines, and maybe 2 million years back, marched over the exposed sea bed land bridge of those times, into Australia, where they became Australia’s most widespread mammal, from Cape York to Tasmania, to Kangaroo Island and southwest WA, in deserts and on mountain tops, even swimming in the sea.

My friends the echidnas flourish just 10 km from Sydney’s centre, and half a century back, one of my zoology teachers mentioned seeing one in Sydney’s Domain, just around the bay from the Opera House. I was led to wonder why it took so long for the white invaders to see a ‘spiny anteater’, but I think it was because the local Australians ate them:

"Our porcupine, or Australian hedgehog, serves for another native dish, as well as the wombat…"

— Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, vol. 1, 317, 1827.

With more novelties being reported or arriving with every ship, there was a clear market for books with engravings of the plants and animals. George Shaw was one of those who satisfied this new demand from a growing British middle class, enriched by the slave trade, the sugar trade that slavery supported, and the pillaging of assorted colonies like India.

Shaw's "Aculeated anteater"

By 1792, George Shaw had an echidna specimen, and now, for the first time, an echidna was examined, written about and drawn in careful detail. His description will be found, almost at the end of volume 3 of Vivarium naturæ or the naturalist’s miscellany. To save others from my tiresome travails, the weary searcher can either plod through scratchy illustrations of scorpions, pseudoscorpions, worms, corals, butterflies and more, or turn straight to the second-last item in the book, the Porcupine anteater or Spiny anteater. 

Shaw notes that “The snout is long, tubular, and perfectly resembles in structure that of the Myrmecophaga jubata or great anteater”. He adds that its mode of life “…beyond a doubt resembles the Myrmecophagæ, having been found in the midst of an ant-hill; for which reason it was named by its discoverers the ant-eating porcupine. It is a native of New Holland.”

Now back to the woman servant who was carrying Hunter’s cask on her head, and legend has it that she was horrified when the bottom of the cask caved in, drenching her in smelly spirits, a chunky wombat and a platypus skin that, to an untrained eye, must have looked like a creation of the devil. This wombat was probably the specimen Shaw used for his depiction of that animal. But where did the story come from? A thorough search revealed that Gilbert Whitley knew a partial answer, saying the yarn came from T. R. Goddard:

"….Hunter, Governor of New South Wales, sent specimens of the Wombat and Duck-billed Platypus preserved in spirits to the [Literary and Philosophical] Society [of Newcastle upon Tyne] in 1798. These specimens are still in existence in the Hancock Museum…

"An amusing anecdote concerning the arrival of these specimens in Newcastle has been preserved. They were enclosed in a small cask of spirits which was carried from the Quayside to the Society's rooms by a woman. She naturally carried the cask on her head and by some mischance the bottom gave way and the poor soul was nearly suffocated by the pungent and foul smelling spirits.

"Apart from her physical nausea one can picture her mental horror on seeing a strange creature, half bird, half beast, lying at her feet."

—T. R. Goddard (Hist. Nat. Hist. Soc. Northumb. Durham & Newcastle upon Tyne, 1930, p. 23).

So far, I have been unable to sight the original journal, and there must surely be earlier accounts of this event. Science is like that…

Anyhow, having that sort of mind, I began wondering about the wombats. You see, one of the sins of my old age is to write a lot about Australian history, and so I could pull this from my files:

"A male wombat was brought from the islands in Basse’s Straits, by Mr Brown, the naturalist attached to Captain Flinders’s voyage of discovery. It was entrusted to my care, and lived in a domesticated state for two years, which gave me opportunities of attending to its habits…"

— Everard Home, An Account of some Peculiarities in the anatomical structure of the Wombat, with Observations on the female Organs of Generation, 1808, 304.

For ten years after the white invasion, the wombat was unknown in the settled areas around Sydney. Working on North Head, and wearing an identifying uniform, people sometimes ask me at times if we have wombats there. I answer no, adding that I suspect the area is too small to sustain a population of wombats, but also noting that I have never yet seen an Indigenous engraving that showed a wombat, anywhere near the coast.

More to the point, it took ten years for the invaders to see a wombat, so I don’t believe they were common around Sydney harbour, but all of a sudden after 1798, it was raining wombats (and not only in Newcastle on Tyne!). It might have been a simple matter of the wombats being eaten before that, but I somehow doubt it, as I suspect that sandy coastal soils cannot sustain a wombat burrow, but as the invaders spread further out, they began to see wombats.

In November 1797, a runaway convict named James Wilson surrendered himself to the authorities in Sydney. Wilson, they said in their cheerfully superior way, had been living with “the savages”, who had adopted him, and he returned, wearing only what David Collins called “…an apron formed of a Kangaroo’s skin, which he had sufficient sense of decency remaining to think was proper…”

From his lack of clothing, it was clear that Wilson had been fully accepted by “the savages”, not so much because he was naked, but because the lack of clothing revealed that he bore the scars on his shoulders and chest which identified him as an initiated man (and not as a victim of a bunyip!). Wilson said he had travelled out a hundred miles in all directions, seeing animals unknown in the settlement including “… a bird of the pheasant species”, probably meaning either a lyrebird or a brush turkey.

When the convicts of the First Fleet came ashore, they had little idea of where they were in the world, and for a short while, those prisoners who ran away thought China was within walking distance. Just a few hills in this direction or that, and they would be in another country, they told each other. Ten years later, many of the convicts were more sophisticated. China was off the list, but they now believed in a mythical settlement of white people, three or four hundred miles (around 600 km) southwest of Sydney.

Where the would-be escapees would have had to go.

There were even written travel instructions circulating, complete with a compass rose to make them appear absolutely genuine. Above, I have plotted this, and the specified route would take escapers through the rugged Snowy Mountains and into eastern Victoria, somewhere between Albury, Shepparton, Sale and Mallacoota. Nobody knew the country, but there were “maps” being passed around.

Governor John Hunter was a decent sort of person. As an educated man, he knew there could be no mysterious white civilisation out in the wilderness. He worried that gullible convicts would die in agony or end up returning to an almost equally agonising punishment after pointless travels. He wrote to a magistrate at Parramatta, instructing him to go to Toongabbie, where most of the believers were working. As it would be impossible to reason the convicts out of their beliefs, the magistrate was to tell them that four picked men would be allowed to start out and satisfy themselves of the impossibility of escape in that direction.

More importantly, three experienced men would be sent with them as guides, to make certain that they returned safely. On the allotted day, a large mob turned up, all agitating to be allowed to go, but in the end, they selected four of their number. The convicts, though, had come up with a cunning plan to hijack the expedition, with a larger body absconding, meeting the party at a pre-arranged spot, murdering the guides and then proceeding to the safety of the fabled white colony.

Luckily for the plotters, this foolish scheme was discovered and four soldiers were added to the group, foiling their plan. One of the guides was Wilson, who was a bushranger in the original sense of the word, not a thief, but one who ranged freely through the bush. (The modern ‘thief’ sense emerged in about 1805.)

Wilson knew his way around the bush, so he went with the party when they set out on 14 January 1798. Ten days later, the soldiers returned with three of the convicts. The soldiers had been instructed to come back, once they reached the foot of the mountains, but the three worn-out convicts said they had seen and suffered enough, and begged to be allowed to return with the soldiers.

The rest of the party straggled into Prospect Hill, on the outskirts of the settlement, on 9 February, praising Wilson for keeping them alive. They said they had seen creeks and a large river, but like Wilson’s yarns, some of their tales must now be taken with a grain of salt.

They claimed to have met few natives, but those they saw were dressed in skins from head to foot, which was possible but unlikely in summer, and they reported seeing a fat mountain wallaroo. They returned with a specimen of a lyrebird and reported dining on ‘a kind of mole’, apparently a wombat, but that was the limit of their achievements, and eating its meat had taken priority over collecting skeletons and skins. Still, Sydney had certainly heard of this animal in February 1798.

Almost a year later, on 12 January 1799, Matthew Flinders and George Bass reached Sydney in the sloop Norfolk, after examining Van Diemen’s Land and Bass Strait. They brought back what David Collins called “a new quadruped” (though, as we will see, this “new” is open to question). It was alive, and survived for six weeks before dying, when its skin was pickled. We will meet this animal again later in Newcastle in the north of England, but Collins’ account continues with a description of the animal: it is clearly a wombat.

"Its length, from the tip of the tail to the tip of the nose, is thirty-one inches, of which its body takes up twenty-three and five-tenths. The head is seven inches, and the tail five-tenths. Its circumference behind the forelegs, twenty-seven inches; across the thickest part of the belly, thirty-one inches. Its weight by hand is somewhat between twenty-five and thirty pounds. The hair is coarse, and about one inch or one inch and five tenths in length, thinly set upon the belly, thicker on the back and head, and thickest upon the loins and rump; the colour of it a light sandy brown, of varying shades, but darkest along the back.

"The head is large and flattish, and, when looking the animal full in the face, seems, excluding the ears, to form nearly an equilateral triangle, any side of which is about seven inches and five tenths in length, but the upper side, or that which constitutes the breadth of the head, is rather the shortest. The hair upon the face lies in regular order, as if it were combed, with its ends pointed upwards in a kind of radii, from the nose their centre."

— David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2, January 1799, 111, 1802.

How Collins depicted the wombat.

In point of fact, Sydney must already have heard, at the very least, in vague terms, of the wombat, even before Wilson’s party returned. In November 1796, a merchant ship named Sydney Cove had left Bengal, on a voyage to Port Jackson. The vessel began taking on water in mid-December, somewhere off the coast of Western Australia, and by mid-January the ship was making from 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20 cm) of water in an hour, from a leak that seemed to be under the starboard bow.

The crew removed all of the goods in the forehold, but they could not access the leak from inside, so on 13 January, they hauled a thrummed sail down, over the bow. This action was rather like fothering, the method used by James Cook when Endeavour was holed on a reef: the sail had rope and yarn added to give it a rougher and tougher surface. This covering reduced the leak, but failed to stop it entirely. The ship hove to, but in high winds, sails were being lost, ripped apart.

In late January, three crewmen died from the exertion of their frantic pumping, but by now, they were rounding Van Diemen’s Land, and sighted Maria Island, off the coast of Tasmania. Heading north in a gale that became a perfect hurricane, they moved in towards Preservation Island, and they ran the ship aground on 9 February, 1797.

They got some of the cargo ashore, and landed. A longboat set off for Port Jackson with 17 men to get help, but this boat was wrecked on the northern end of 90 Mile Beach in eastern Victoria, so the men set out to walk up the coast. Three survivors reached Wattamolla in Sydney’s Royal National Park on 15 May 1797, where a fisherman collected them and carried them to Sydney. When they recovered, they reported seeing coal seams in the Illawarra, and probably mentioned the mutton birds and wombats they had eaten.

On 19 June 1797, His Majesty’s schooner Francis, sent from Port Jackson by Governor Hunter on a rescue mission, reached Preservation Island. This entry is from Collins’ own account, in March 1798, a month after the return of Wilson and his adventurers.

"By the Francis, the governor received one of the animals on which the people had chiefly lived during their abode on Preservation Island. It was brought to him alive, but thin and faint for want of food, which, owing to its state of confinement on board the vessel, it would never take. It, however, appeared to recover on shore; and, although during the short time it lived, it was not observed to eat during the day, yet there was reason to think it was not so abstemious in the night. It was offered flesh; but this it would not touch, although it was supposed to visit the nests of the puffin which burrowed on the island.

"This animal had been found to the southward and south-westward, by Wilson and his companions, who shot one, and, in their want of provisions, might be said to feast upon it. They observed, that it resembled pork in flavour, though not in colour, being red and coarse. It was very fat, as were the kangaroos which they found in the interior; differing in that point very widely from any kangaroos which had been before seen; not a particle of fat having ever been found on one of them.

"The mountain natives named this new animal Wombat, and said it was good eating; but it was wholly unknown to those [natives] who were admitted into the settlement."

— David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol 2, 72, 1802.

So while Collins had clearly heard of these animals, the “new specimen” in 1799 must have been the first one he actually saw. He left naming it to the experts, and they weren’t slow in coming forward. First off, George Shaw wrote it up in 1800 as Didelphis ursina, calling it the “largest of all the Opossums”. He also called it Phascolomys ursinus and Vombatus ursinus in the same year (there is no letter W in Latin).

Note the species name, because that part survives to this day. Shaw’s genus name was open to alteration, but the specific epithet was firm and established, just as aculeata (or aculeatus) must apply to all of the legitimate names for the echidna. As we have seen, the genus Didelphis includes the North American opossums and they are not very wombat-like, so a new genus name would be needed, once people looked at actual specimens. Joachim Johann Otto Voigt called it Didelphis wombat in 1802, though this was barely noticed.

George Shaw was a bit of a splitter, a person given to creating a new genus for each new find, but “splitter” probably needs explaining. Let me say that I am not a professional taxonomist, but in my younger days, I trained in the craft, and I have known a lot of taxonomists. So I understand the tribe, but I look at them much as an anthropologist views a fresh culture, and I know taxonomists all fall into one of two classes: lumpers and splitters. The lumpers want to shovel all the new finds into an established genus or species, while the splitters want to erect a new taxon for each and every new find. George Shaw dubbed the kangaroo Macropus, which he said meant great-foot, though I prefer Bigfoot. He was, as I say, a bit of a splitter.

In France, there was an arch-lumper who had opposite views. Georges Buffon thought for a while that spontaneous generation involving mice being formed from a dirty shirt and wheat, and things like that, might really happen. From that, he saw little value in classification at all:

"There are really only individuals in nature, and genera, orders and classes exist only in our imagination."

— Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, Premier discours, 1749, volume 1, 12.

For some reason or other, Buffon kept using the name Didelphis, avoiding ‘kangaroo’, and using Cook’s name ‘jerboa’ in its place, and the 1812 translation of Buffon’s Natural History called the kangaroo “the New Holland jerboa”, but that's a side issue.

Étienne Geoffroy re-coined the name Vombatus in 1803, but Shaw had got there first. Either way, the common wombat is Vombatus ursinus today. The last tricky bit is that Latin names have a built-in gender at the end, and so ursina had to become ursinus to match the masculine Vombatus. It took some time for people to stop calling the wombat Phascolomis or Phascolomys, but it did happen, eventually.

Even in the 1850s, the phrase “Phascolomys wombat of Péron et Lesueur” was common. In reality, that name was given by Lesueur & Petit in 1808. As the reader will now perceive, the gentle art of naming things is, in reality, a minefield, and with lumpers and splitters on the scene, the minefield has teeth, and that is why I said little about wombats in my new book on echidnas.

But I would love to track down the origin of the cask yarn. Where did Goddard find it, or was it like our fireside chats, enlivened by port, just an oral tale, perhaps embellished over the years?