Everyone loves the cute quokkas though few realise that they were hunted and bulldozed into extinction in Western Australia and avoided annihilation only because a few remained on Rottnest Island and now generate vast wealth as tourist selfie subjects.
We have our own NSW North Coast quokka equivalent, the gorgeous truffle-eating northern coastal potoroo, smallest of the kangaroos.
Tragically there are no islands for them to hang out on and they are now on the very edge of complete extinction.
For many millions of years, potoroos have tended their delightful garden, the scribbly gum, banksia, cypress pine, wildflower heathland coastal sand plains where they act as eco- system engineers.
They dig the truffles out of the sandy soil, aerating and turning it over, spreading the fungal spores that the plants need to grow in association with their roots. The truffles feed the plants and the plants feed the entire ecosystem.
This ecosystem has been around for over a hundred million years and once spread along the Gondwa- naland coast all the way around ice-free Antarctica to South America and Africa.
It is the habitat where flowers, butterflies, bees, songbirds and marsupials evolved. It possesses some of the most ancient of flowering plants like the prehistoric banksias, scribbly gums, and hundreds of others.
It is full of honeyeaters, whipbirds, fairy wrens, grass- birds, whistlers, warblers, robins, finches, treecreepers, rainbow bee-eaters and critically endangered birds like glossy black cockatoos, ground parrots, bush stone- curlews, bush-hens, and grass owls.
Sacred Wallum
This endangered bushland is full of unique mammals like the tiny, nectar-feeding blossom bats that hover above the flowers at night, and marsupials like the endangered pygmy pos- sums, koalas, squirrel gliders and spot-tailed quolls.
Tiny carnivorous marsupials like the dunnart, planigales and antechinus live alongside long-nosed and brindled bandicoots, and ancient egg-lying echidnas. It is full of unique reptiles, frogs, and invertebrates, some like the Wallum froglet and sedge tree frog are critically endangered.
Sacred to the Bundjalung and known as Wallum this now endangered bushland covered much of South-East Queensland and the New South Wales coast. Like the once vast subtropical rainfor- est it has been decimated, not by agriculture but by urban development.
Until recently the potoroo was still acting as a keystone species maintaining the last small Wallum wildflower heathlands at Cudgen until preparation for a housing estate exterminated them.
They have also gone extinct at Tyagarah. Some are hang- ing on at Wardell, though the highway upgrade bulldozed right through them.
Some of the last surviving northern coastal potoroos now exist at Brunswick Heads adjacent the western shore of Simpsons Creek. This was determined by ecologists Jill Smith and Mick Andren of the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, Ecosystems and Threatened Species division, along with ecologists David Milledge and David Scotts.
Their distribution was mapped in the September 2018 edition of the Australian Zoologist, published by the Royal Zoological Society of NSW. One would have expected that action would have been taken by govern- ment to protect the potoroos and several other critically endangered species from complete extinction.
They are only just surviv- ing in four undisturbed, threatened, and critically endangered ecological communities at this location. Undisturbed old growth forest full of 400-year-old trees, 230 of them, the oldest trees in Byron Shire full of rare nesting hollows care- fully studied by government ecologists.
Approved for annihilation during lockdown
Science, our life-supporting natural environment, our community, our mental health, and our survival means nothing to money and power.
The NSW government and their Northern Regional Planning Panel (NRPP) ignored the fact that a massive real estate development proposed adjacent the Simpson Creek Sanctuary Zone of the Cape Byron Marine Park and the Bayside Estate at Brunswick Heads risks exterminating these protected endangered communities and species.
They approved the last Wallum potoroo habitat for annihilation during the pandemic lockdown so you may have missed the three-hour-long community consultation.
Byron Shire will be remembered as the location of the last mass extinction event.
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