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in what is now a dedicated wilderness area.
    Nor have I ever seen the distinctively rectangular wombat dung here, or found a wombat burrow. Whenever I’ve seen the latter in the past, in sandy country far from here, they were very obvious. We had a veritable wombat city on our previous bush block, near Merriwa. You couldn’t miss seeing the holes—unless you’d fallen in one first. I used to worry about the kids disappearing down them, as such burrows can be up to 20 metres long!
    The wombats there kept to their trails no matter what petty human structures, like fences, were erected in their way. You’d be an idiot to build your house over a track belonging to one of these furry bulldozers, weighing about 40 kilograms when grown.
    That was where I got to know wombats— Vombatus ursinus : sounds like a bad actor doing a German accent, but in Latin the ‘ursinus’ bit means bear-like. These quaint, lumbering characters are more closely related to koala ‘bears’ than to any other marsupial, and probably shared an ancestor about 25 million years ago.
    Of course neither of them is a bear, and they live in totally different ways from each other, but they each have a backwards-opening pouch containing only two nipples, a tail so short as to be negligible, and certain internal similarities, such as digestive features, that set them apart from other marsupials.
    My books tell me these ‘Common Wombats’ do inhabit forested mountains, and there are certainly plenty of native grasses and sedges here for them to eat, but because my own experiences with them have been limited to sandy areas, I wouldn’t have thought my rocky ridges an appealing habitat, powerful diggers though wombats are.
    Yet the day after that fire went through, I saw a blocky black animal trundling purposefully down the small ridge opposite our house clearing. I was incredulous, but it was unmistakably a wombat, even though it was the wrong colour. No other marsupial has that solid shape, with the distinctive flattened battering ram of a head, the flat rump and short legs.
    And colour no longer counted, as most of the living animals we saw had charred fur and would have been blackened anyway from their sooty environment. We few humans certainly were.
    Where had this one wombat come from and where was it going? They are solitary animals, but in my post-disaster zone this one seemed tragically so, perforce rather than by choice. Since there must be very few around here, I wondered if any others had lived. Would this dark and determined survivor find a mate when the time came?
    I could only hope so.

REDNECK BOYS

    Last year the country was given many extreme displays of how chaotic our climate has already become. After weeks of rain here, the sun finally remembered how to shine. Glad to be rid of that relentlessly grey sky and sleety rain, the animals came out to make the most of the warmth. A sodden fur coat can’t be all that comfortable.
    I saw a small gang of young male Red-necked Wallabies basking on the grass just outside my house yard, so I edged up to the fence for closer scrutiny. They did look up, but were too sun-drowsed to bother about me, and eyelids drooped sleepily again.
    They’re an attractive wallaby, comprising my biggest population of hoppy marsupials. Their soft fur is subtly coloured in greys and reddishbrowns, with smart black trim in well-chosen places—perfect camouflage in my tawny tussock-floored and bracken-studded forest. The small dark front paws are often held poised and loose, sometimes crossed, so they look like the neat gloved hands of shy schoolgirls.
    On that occasion I could see more of their white to pale-grey undersides, for many of them were propped, leaning further back on the base of their tails than usual, to allow maximum sun on their bellies. From the looks on their faces it was bliss.
    At less relaxed times, these young wallaby males front up to each other with