I saw a koala in the wild for the first time last year, on a visit to Kangaroo Island. It was a thrilling moment, captured in frames by my fast shutter-speed eyes and tucked like treasure into my memory. The creature had climbed down from one towering eucalypt and was ambling over to another; catching sight of us humans, it raced — in that awkward, shambling way — to the opposite trunk, wrapped its squat little arms around it and pulled itself up into the safety of the canopy.
It was a soul-enriching experience in a place I'd only seen, until now, in my imagination, a 'zoo without fences' as my guide Kelly Gledhill described this paradise on the drive westwards from the airport.
Curling along that Mallee-rimmed ribbon of road — now immortalised as an ashen, post-apocalyptic moonscape — we saw the first of several echidnas, scurrying furtively across the road and disappearing into the tangle of vegetation on the other side. We halted for Cape Barren Geese ambling across our path; so carefully protected are these ground-dwelling birds, drivers must take care not to hit one or they will be served with a hefty fine.
'This is Australia's Galapagos,' Gledhill said as we glided through its gently undulating interior. 'We've got kangaroos, ring-tailed possums, echidnas, reptiles and birds — and the smallest wallabies in Australia.'
And koalas, of course. But these marsupials aren't native to Kangaroo Island: a colony of 18 koalas was introduced from the mainland in 1923; by 2019, their descendants numbered an impressive 50,000 (all free of the chlamydia that besets mainland populations). So fruitful was their translocation, Gledhill says, population control measures were introduced and some of the colony were sent back to continental Australia.
Turning off the main road, we burrowed now into a verdant tunnel; at the end of it stood one of Australia's flagship properties, Southern Ocean Lodge. Entering its vaulted, glass encased great room, I turned my head from the rolling waves on one side to the rolling bush on the other. Each was an ocean unto itself: the Southern Ocean stretching all the way to Antarctica, the coastal scrub and Mallee woodland rippling largely undisturbed to the island's northern edge.
Rainbows sprung from the ocean intermittently, like some specially-planned light show; some of them arced all the way from one pot of gold to the other. It was winter in this paradise, and moisture had electrified