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ARTS AND CULTURE

Wandering wombats

  • 18 May 2007

I don’t suppose you’ve had much opportunity lately to study the wombat. In general, this comically named and, one has to admit, somewhat comic looking herbivore is rarely seen on the svelte nature strips or along the bland, clinical streets or in the neat gardens of our capital cities’ better suburbs. Or, for that matter, in those engaging backyards you see from trains, where abandoned fridges, eviscerated motorbikes, sloping-roofed chook houses, sagging blow-up swimming pools afloat with leaves, and random clumps of rhubarb all attest to a terrain inimical to the slow, philosophical wombat.

Where I am just now, however, on the verandah of a venerable, slightly staggering cottage looking out over the lush pastures of Bundanon that run down to the Shoalhaven River, the wombat does not exactly rule, but he and she maintain a substantial, unignorable presence. One of them lives under this shack and innumerable others are, at this mid-morning hour, snoozing in their very large burrows.

Your common wombat probably wouldn’t appreciate being described as a ‘lumbering marsupial’ but truth will out. With a body like a beer barrel and a frankly bulbous bum, any pace above a rolling, honest-to-God lumber would have the stewards reaching for the swab.

When they got over their shock on first seeing a wombat, the early settlers called it a badger. But, according to the experts the wombat’s nearest relative in the odd spectrum of Australian marsupials is the koala, another macropod, which means literally, big footed. Personally, however, I think the wombat has much in common with the frog.

When it comes to fashion and good looks, frogs, like wombats, start a long way behind, what with having comically bulging eyes, a broad, down-turned mouth that seems to signal defeat and disappointment, and a great spreading backside. As if that were not enough, frogs have swarthy, seemingly empustuled skin. Here beyond doubt is a creature which, if not quite the forgotten of God, is certainly languishing in the outer suburbs of the Divine awareness. All very well to protest that in their element frogs are magnificent, true. In mid-leap and at full stretch a frog is a slim gleam of plaited sinew. But imagine frogs pleading some case or other in court—gloomy, pop-eyed, swarthy, big-bummed and cold, like a delegation of malfunctioning thyroids.

Wombats, waiting patiently out in the foyer for their turn in front of the judge, would not look

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