I read the other day that an infestation of
Argentinian ants has been discovered in a small New Zealand town. It took me
back to the second half of 1950, when I first left New Zealand, and moved to
the town of Mackay, in northern Queensland, a tropical area of Australia. We
rented quite a comfortable ground floor apartment, which had a concrete floor,
and quickly found that what we were told were Argentinian ants --- extremely
tiny little fellows --- were our constant companions. If, on going to the washroom
during the night, we stepped on a cockroach, another ubiquitous species, we
didn’t have to bother cleaning it up, because by morning a long line of these tiny
ants would have removed all traces of it. They had a tendency to gather in the
kitchen sink, attracted by any lying drops of water: far from regarding them as
a nuisance, we became quite fond of them, and tried to avoid killing them when
we turned on the kitchen taps.
When, reading about this recent infestation
across the Tasman sea, I discovered how unpleasant were these little creatures,
I have begun to doubt that our little fellows could have been the same
species. The internet contains a remarkable
amount of scientific expertise on the subject of ants, of which there are said
to be more than 3,000 separate species in Australia alone.
That brings me on to a really odd
circumstance, which is that although New Zealand and Australia appear to be
inextricably linked in the minds of outsiders, in fact the two countries are far
apart --- as close as Moscow is to London --- and utterly dissimilar in almost everything
that matters. One of the most evident dissimilarities is that New Zealand is a
country, which, when first discovered by Europeans, was almost totally free of mammals,
apart from human beings, and has always been blessedly free of what might be
called pests, or dangerous creatures. It never occurred to me as a kid that
there could be any danger in just lying down, either in the bush or in open land,
since the country has no snakes, unlike Australia, which has 140 separate
species, and, apart from mosquitoes, very few of the beetles, spiders,
grasshoppers, termites or any other of the creepy-crawlie things that seem to
be always threatening your peace of mind in Australia.
Thus, a strange difference that occurs
between New Zealanders and Australians that I discovered when moving across the
Tasman, is that whereas we in New Zealand grow up in deadly fear of snakes ---
of which we have none --- in Australia they grow up fearful of earthquakes, of
which they have none or virtually none. Aussies remain unmoved by the presence,
even in their houses, of snakes, while in New Zealand we take it totally for granted
that we will feel the earth move on an almost weekly basis.
Not to mention the proliferation of such
fearsome creatures as the crocodiles
that infest many of the Aussie rivers, especially in the north, and, around the
coasts, the sharks that so commonly attack bathers.
I remember one evening in Mackay when my
wife and I had a quarrel about something, and she stormed out of the house in
indignation. She was gone only a few minutes, because she heard so many mysterious
noises in the surrounding undergrowth that she was convinced were made by snakes,
that she quickly sought shelter in the loving arms of a husband who might have
been a total prick, but at least was unlikely to bite her.
Mackay appeared to be a centre for
snake-lovers who dreamed of capturing a taipan, reputed to be the most lethal
poisonous snake on earth. I was there for only six months, but in that time
members of the Sydney Snake Club made several trips north in search of the
taipan, and I remember at least one of them ending in the death of a man who was
bitten as he was trying to get the snake into a bag. At that time, also, none of these efforts resulted in their
getting a taipan to Sydney alive: all of those they captured died in transit.
It was unimaginable to me, but Australians
actually welcomed the presence of a snake in the rafters of their homes,
because they believed they would keep the rat population in check. The trouble
with that theory was that the snakes would eat only until they had satisfied their
hunger, and then go to sleep. I kept
hearing tales of how snakes could take up residence along the top of doorways,
and when these were opened, drop on to the unsuspecting householders. I know from my experience that the local
people were completely unafraid to go into the middle of the road, pick up a
snake, break its back with a quick flick, and so keep the area free from danger.
In that area of Australia the local bush was
of a very straggling, ugly type. The roads inland at the time were not much
more than dirt tracks, and the inland villages nothing more than a collection of
buildings set up in the wilderness, with apparently no thought of municipal organization.
It amazed me that anyone would want to
live in such places. I remember driving the thirty or forty miles north from
Mackay on a visit to one of the off-shore islands, comprising part of the Great
Barrier Reef, and was amazed to see that the bush had been impregnated with
huge mounds built by termites.
Years later while I was on a visit to the headquarters
of the UN Environment Agency in Nairobi, an Australian scientist on secondment there for a time told me most trees in
Australia had been eaten away from the inside by termites. I found it hard to
believe, but as I was researching for this article I came across an article on
termites by seven scientists published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society
B (for biological science) that confirmed what the man had told me. Termites
apparently are divided between cryptotermes,
drywood termites, and coptotermes,
which are responsible for what they call “tree piping”. The difference is that
the queens of the cryptotermes do not produce many individuals, whereas the coptotermes
can produce “colonies of one million or more individuals, with
tens of thousands of aggressive soldiers with long biting mandibles and sticky
glue secretions.” Sounds unpleasant enough, but then they added: coptotermes
“are the dominant wood-eating termite in Australia; they infest more than 85
per cent of trees.”
So now I have it from the horse’s mouth: most Aussie
trees are infested by termites. Wow, that is a hard fact to wrap one’s mind around.
It is a sort of freak of nature that two such countries, only three
days’ sailing apart, should have remained so biologically separate during all
the millenia of their existence. New Zealand,
of course, was practically lain waste between the two great wars by introduced
species. The agent of greatest destruction
was the rabbit, which, free from all predators or competitors, was capable of
turning a landscape into a bare, constantly moving spectacle as hundreds of
rabbits would move over a hillside in which they had placed their burrows. One
legislator many years ago rose in Parliament to suggest that New Zealand should
import tigers, as a means of rabbit control. Fortunately he did not carry the
government of the day with his argument.
When I was a child we used to take a 26-mile drive to the coast, and
we filled in our time by counting the number of dead rabbits killed by vehicles
along the way. There were never fewer than a hundred. They have worked for
years to bring the rabbit under control. At one point the nation was divided
into 100 rabbit boards, each of which had a staff of so-called “rabbiters”
whose job it was to eliminate the pestiferous rabbit within its boundaries. It never worked, of course. Even biological
methods of spreading killer viruses have never succeeded in wiping out rabbits.
However, their number has been very much reduced, and the struggle continues to
this day.
And the rabbit is not the only introduced pest in New Zealand. The
beautiful New Zealand bush, with its population of gorgeous birds, is ridden
these days with feral cats, released by careless owners to become established
as deadly killers of native birds. There are also wild pigs, and various
varieties of deer, all of them introduced from abroad, one of which is called
the wapiti, and is actually a transplanted Canadian elk.
I visited Australia to make a film in the late 1980s. We went to
the Gulf of Carpentaria region in the far north where one of the two biggest
bauxite mines in the world was run by a consortium of international aluminum
companies. At the town of Weipa everything was owned and operated by the company,
Cominco, an Australian outfit, which provided raw bauxite to Alcan in Canada
and Pechiney in France. One day they took us up the Weipa river, where
I was astonished to see many crocodiles sunning themselves on the banks until the
noise of our motor would disturb them, and they would slip into the water.
This confirmed my belief that Australia is a land where some dangerous
animal is lurking in every hidden place, ready to snap at you.
Australians, of course, deny the truth of this, with some reason.
Whereas it is said that in a list of the 30 most dangerous snakes in the world,
all but five are in Australia, that country has developed methods of treatment
for snake bites so effective that although 100,000 people are estimated to die
of snake bites around the world every year, only 27 of them were in Australia.
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