That's the usual scene in the Australian outback.
Birds, late afternoon sun.
The tank, trough, the cattle yard,
and the centre of it all, the windmill.
It's the core of it.
It's the heart of the whole enterprise of this outback country,
the development of it.
And would you believe
the very symbol of success in this country
is also the symbol for death and destruction
for the native fauna and for the whole Australian environment?
No. 9 Well
on the Canning Stock Route.
1,600km north to south, Falls Creek to Wiluna.
Very important place, particularly this No. 9 Well.
Historian, naturalists and pastoralists.
And its real importance is that this place,
once a very important watering place to the Aboriginals,
is the extreme edge of the pastoral country.
Beyond here is desert, not used by white man.
Back this way is exploited land.
And this is the edge, and the edge effect may give us some answers
as to why so many of the animals in this apparently untouched country
have vanished forever.
Apparently untouched,
but this carries thousands of cattle in a good season,
even though it's only one head, or one cow,
per 100 acres or thereabouts.
It's a long way from any particular place.
Drive through the Meekatharra on a good, sealed road
because that serves the cattle country and the mines
and then it's a beef road out to Wiluna
and from Wiluna, a desert track up to No. 9 Well.
What a mess. And this is the centre of life.
Last time I was here, it was quite different.
There was a spring, the tank didn't exist,
the windmill was here, but it was part of the spring.
And all of this destruction
is the result of the use of the land, which in a good season's OK,
but now it's overuse.
All of the cattle that live here,
that normally spread over 1,000 hectares in this vicinity
on little, tiny waterholes - they've all dried up,
and the whole lot have now come in here.
Why did the fellow put a tank on? For that very reason.
When the dry season comes, the cattle walk into the water,
and it's all downhill.
They make their pads and their tracks and they eat out all the vegetation
and as soon as the rains come, the water washes down,
fills the waterholes up, fills the springs up,
and there is no water.
And so to save the cattle - the tank.
And, of course, that is the death of many of the native animals.
(SPITS)
Good water.
Sweet.
And the basis of life for over half the animals in this area.
And also the basis of death.
If you had the time,
you could sit just with your back up quietly against the tank,
couple of branches in front of you, and all of the birds that drink
would come in during the day and drink here.
But within this very drinking are the seeds of their own destruction.
And you might argue
that this permanent water, that the pastoralist has put in,
supports an enormous number of birds.
But the birds that drink water are seed-eating birds primarily.
And they can only fly a certain range around here.
And they're in direct competition with the cattle and the sheep.
And what happens is that all of this country
is eaten out and trodden out and bared and blowing with wind,
the seed is gone,
and so each day the birds have to go further and further out.
And this distance from here to food and back to water
becomes more and more attenuated
until the time comes when suddenly they can't make it.
And then they die.
Under normal circumstances,
even if everything did die it wouldn't matter
because nature would replenish from the surrounding areas.
But if everything dies here now in a bitter drought,
if everything dries up and desiccates and blows away,
the moment the rains come,
the first animals back are the introduced stock,
because they're brought in by man.
Man's own improvements causes, again, the total destruction of the area.
It's almost a complete contradiction in terms.
Imagine water, the very essence of life, to us,
being the thing that destroys animals.
Not very pretty, is it?
But wherever you go in this country - the harshness of it -
death is commonplace.
Corpses, all of the things
that go with death and desolation and destruction.
The four 'D's - they all go with 'desert', I suppose.
And everywhere you look, you find dead animals
caused by drought mostly,
because every time an animal like this dies -
this is a water-dependent animal.
The water dried up,
it had built up here, where it didn't normally live,
the water had disappeared, and the animals die from thirst.
This animal then died as a direct result of the competition
from man's grazing animals.
The cattle and sheep on this fringe country,
which in the good seasons build up in numbers and overload the country,
graze out,
competing with these animals, which have the added water, of course,
so they build up in numbers in good seasons too.
And when the crunch comes, when the drought comes and the water goes,
there's still food, but it's so far from the water
that they can't make it to food and back again.
And yet their death adds to the life of something else,
because underneath this corpse -
look at this.
All of the bodies of the things that lived on the corpse.
There's blowflies and there's bacon beetles, or dermestids.
Ah.
And in there - that's a bitey.
Centipede.
Now, he lives on the larvae of the insects
that live on the roo carcass.
So for every dead animal
there is survival for a whole new lot of animals.
That fellow would be quite bitey with his head end.
Unlike other animals, which sting, these fellows bite.
Put him back in his hole. He's not very happy.
I'm not very happy with him wandering around either
because they do sting.
Because of the proximity of the waterhole
and the lack of cover in this area,
even the most casual observer can see big game...
...and get quite close to them because of their weakened condition.
But the art of a naturalist is to see the non-obvious things.
Once your eye is in,
once you know what you're looking for and how to look,
there's signs of life everywhere,
even in this completely desolate area.
There's a little stump there. There's a burrow going into it.
There's a rock here. There's a burrow going under it.
One animal can own a whole area.
Not exactly a territory, but something like a territory.
And he'll move around that at night-time,
because that's the cool time,
that's part of his survival technique,
and when daylight comes, he goes into the bolthole nearest to him.
So that burrow and that one and that one
and that one
possibly all belong to the same animal.
And to find him, you go along and dig them all out.
But in this case he's been a bit unlucky.
He must've been getting in late and he's left a track.
And so we know he's under this one.
Not magic, just observation and training,
awareness of what you're looking for.
Well, let's have a look at him.
Can't see him, because his burrow goes down further.
And he's pushed the dirt up behind him
to stop the hot air going down the burrow after him.
Dig him - ah, here we are.
Not very deep.
Come on.
Oh, dear. There he is.
This one is called the dragon gecko.
Named after a famous explorer, Bynoe, who was in the north of the country.
Very attractive animal.
Can't leave him in the sun too long. It's enough to kill him.
They come out at night.
They can utilise holes in the ground
or they can utilise bark or they can utilise even cow droppings -
is enough for insulation.
They eat insects, things like termites,
which also utilise this -
all the little sticks and the cow droppings are all chewed.
Even kangaroo droppings. They're chewed by termites.
So there's a whole wealth of food and it's nice, succulent, juicy food.
And they don't lose water.
Every time we breathe out, we expel a certain amount of water.
So do other mammals. But these things don't do it.
And, of course, the cold blood means that their body temperature
adjusts to the air temperature around them.
And once they get down to the ground fairly deep, and it's cool,
they cut down on their food intake.
And when the dry time comes, if they go down far enough,
they can stay really quiet for a long time.
So geckos are really,
in spite of their very fragile and gentle appearance,
are really very fine survivors.
I think we'd better put him back.
But because we've destroyed his burrow a bit,
we'll give it a bit of a hand.
Dig it out a bit. Put him in.
There you are, little man. And we'll cover it up.
There.
Different places, different faces.
If we put the log over...
...we can have a look here.
Yes.
Come here, little man.
That's a burrowing skink -
a lizard that's on his way
to becoming just the same as a legless lizard.
Look at his methods of protection.
Colouration - from above he's the same colour as the ground,
and from the side he's the same colour as the ground.
His legs reduced to almost nothing.
Two toes on the back leg.
No toes at all on the front leg.
And a great big long tail, which, again, is full of food,
full of storage.
Beautiful animal.
One of the specialised desert inhabitants.
His eyelid has got a transparent disc in it
that allows him to have his eyes closed burrowing through sand
and still not get grit in his eyes.
Marvellous adaptation.
Again, he was using the ground plus the bark,
plus the log itself.
Getting the maximum cover
in this very, very critical level of existence,
where to make a mistake...
The lethal temperature of the sun will take out an animal like this
in something like 10 or 12 minutes.
And then he's dead.
Just put this log back.
Like always in the bush, leave the home intact.
This is a very special hole
and it needs a special technique to get the animal that makes it.
First job is...
...pour down some water.
The purpose of that
is that the burrow wanders around under the ground.
And the water follows down quickly. And so you can follow it.
Ah, and there he is.
That's a scorpion,
a female, by the size of her, ready to lay eggs.
I've got the dangerous part in my fingers.
The claws don't matter.
She can use them to nip, but they don't hurt.
They just close on.
This scorpion, if it stung you, would make you sick for one or two days.
The really bad one up in this country is much smaller -
a little tiny thing.
And it can kill. It has killed people in Australia.
So they're one of the overrated dangers of the outback country.
If I put her down on the flat of my hand,
she won't sting.
If my fingers were on the end, she'd sting that.
She has to sting something she can reach.
If we just use a stick, and there's the dangerous part there.
Now, you might think because I've destroyed this one's burrow
that that's the end of the animal.
Not so, because all we need to do is put the soil back over
and the animal will then work its way out tonight and be quite OK.
The popular concept of desert is empty sand wastes,
Arabs and things like that.
And Australia is mostly desert.
But our deserts are quite different.
Stone, gibbers,
salt flats,
sand and rock.
And this rock is the greatest reservoir of wildlife
in the whole desert area.
It's called breakaway, and it's got everything.
Of all the desolate areas in this desolate landscape,
this has got to be the worst.
The tops of these breakaways,
where water runs off, wind howls across,
and yet there are still things living here.
Like this bush.
A little mulga.
At least, it looks like a little mulga.
But in the mulga family it's one of the real old men.
It's almost died dozens of times in its 300 years of living.
That's right - 300 years.
This bush has been bonsaied by the extreme elements.
Its cousins down on the flat are 20 feet high,
where they get the good conditions.
But up here, the struggle is such that it's formed and shaped
and it'll never reach more than that.
If it gets a bit bigger,
the wind is able to get under it and flip it over.
So every part of this land is used.
Even these bare tops -
something takes root and holds and begins to change the whole thing.
(SNIFFS)
(SIGHS) What a lovely thing.
Australian sandalwood,
a stunted little tree that grows right across the dry country.
Enormous trade between China, Singapore and Australia
in the early days.
This wood was very valuable
and people came out and they pulled the trees out with horses and wagons.
And they only left these little plants.
Anything with a trunk smaller than that was left in the ground.
But the leaves are very succulent.
And the cattle like them. So do sheep.
And you can see this bush has been really chopped about by cattle.
They've broken the branches down...
...getting at the foliage.
Sandalwood is a tree that bears a fruit -
a nut, about that size.
And it was the staple diet of one animal, the stick-nest rat.
Because this is rocky country and because there's sandalwood here,
it's very likely there are stick-nest rats in the area,
or were at one time.
First sign of spring in the desert.
The first animals to move are the big carnivorous reptiles.
(HISSING)
Come on.
(HISSES)
(CHUCKLES)
Beautiful thing.
This is the perentie, the pontowai of the Aboriginal people.
The black lizard.
It's a goanna.
Been in aestivation, sleeping, for the cool time of the year.
Just moving now.
Shedding skin.
Peeling off, little bits flaking away on the tail.
Badly infested with ticks.
Probably got onto him during the period while he was dormant.
And fairly skinny.
Yes, hasn't got much condition. He hasn't started to eat yet.
Probably because they're a big, active animal,
they need their food more than the others.
Even though they can go for a long period without,
they do need it more than others.
True goanna, of course, with the forked tongue.
That's how you tell them. Lovely fellow.
The really noticeable thing about this landscape
is the number of reptiles on it.
Wherever you go -
the tops of the hills, the sand plains, under the bark of trees,
you find reptiles.
They seem to be specially adapted to this condition.
And I think it's probably because of their cold-bloodedness.
For half of the year, at least, when the temperatures are cold,
they're away in hiding.
And for the other half of the year, they have a period of activity.
They're not water-dependent.
The foods they eat are available all the time -
insects, white ants, other lizards, all those sort of things.
And so they survive extremely well.
The hotter it gets, the faster they get.
Well, up to a point.
There are lethal temperatures for these animals.
And each one has his own lethal temperature.
Goannas have got the highest range of all.
They can stand very hot temperatures.
But if it gets too hot,
this fellow would probably find his way over to a water trough,
or a spring or a pool somewhere
and plunge in and just lie in the water
with just his nostrils sticking up.
And he'll stay there and soak.
And then he'll probably feed
on a zebra finch or something that comes in.
Beautiful animals, though.
Very fond of goannas.
Look how sluggish he is. Really cold still.
When the heat is really on,
these caves are the final refuge for the animals in this desert area.
The caves go well back
and stop the wind taking away the air and drying animals out.
And that great, thick rock visor above the caves
stops the penetration of the sun.
This one looks like it might have been a dingo's lair.
A few chewed bones.
Deep hole.
Oh. Just a minute.
Yeah. These are owl pellets.
These pellets are the bones and fur that the animals don't eat.
They're brought up. They're thrown up from the owl's throat.
There's the skull, for instance, of a native rodent in that one.
There's the bones and skull of another native rodent.
There's the jawbone of a marsupial mouse.
Little tiny mice that are carnivores, like native cats.
But there's not much point in trying to sort this out here.
That's something that is far better done in the camp.
So all of that material can go back with me.
I'll just bag it.
Imagine getting enthusiastic about this stuff - owl pellets.
And yet I am, for very good reason.
It doesn't look much, unless you're a scientist,
but that's a bandicoot jaw.
And no bandicoots have been seen anywhere in this country
for something like 90 years.
And the last, very ordinary looking piece of bone.
But from its size and shape it can only belong to one thing -
the stick-nest rat.
Now, by the time you add that
to the chewed nuts
that we found occasionally along the breakaway,
it adds up to one thing.
There's sandalwood here.
There's bones here that could be recent.
And it means the possibility of these animals still being here
is pretty high.
And so it's most important to go back to do two things -
to finish getting out that owl deposit,
if there's any more bone there,
and to look for a stick-nest rat.
Being a naturalist is a lot of hard work.
Every once in a while you get a break.
In this case, this.
An animal that's thought to be extinct,
is regarded as extinct,
and yet in this area
there are green, fresh leaves,
which means this nest has been in use within the last five years.
The stick-nest rat. Obvious, isn't it?
That's a real stick nest.
The report of that will now have to go back to the museum.
And through the museum, proper scientific investigation
and survey of this area
will tell us whether the animal is still alive or not.
(THEME MUSIC)