Friends, the following has nothing to do with anything, except a brief reference to hunting which has wholly justified (in my mind) posting it here 😉

I have lately been reading early European explorer accounts of their experiences in Australia. Most are not well known here and I imagine all but unknown elsewhere. The following is an account of a Dutch ships Captain, Francois Pelsaert, of his discovery of a peculiar cat he found on an island off the west coast of Australia in 1629.

They weren’t explorers, but a merchant ship that wrecked on a reef. While the captain and small group of sailors left on the ship’s boat for help, the remaining 300 or so dutch men and women had to survive for 4 months. By the time the captain returned a veritable lord of the flies situation had occurred, where some dutchmen had been exiled to a smaller neighbouring island and 125 of the unexiled had been executed for various ‘crimes’. What must the natives have thought??

Back to the ‘cat’:

“November 1629 – On the 15th the wind was SSW, with seemingly fine weather. Therefore, in the name of God, we weighed anchor and set sail from the luckless Abrolhos for the mainland on the ENE course… The sea abounds in fish in these parts: they are mainly of three kinds, but very different in shape and taste from those caught on other coasts. All islands about here are low-lying atolls or coral-islets and rocks, except two or three…

We found in these islands large numbers of a species of cats, which are very strange creatures; they are about the size of a hare, their head resembling that of a civet-cat; the forepaws are very short, about the length of a finger, on which the animal has five small nails or fingers, resembling those of a monkey’s forepaw. It’s two hindlegs, on the contrary, are upwards of half an ell in length, and it walks on these only, on the flat of the heavy part of the leg, so that it does not run fast. Its tail is very long, like that of a long-tailed monkey; if it eats, it sits on its hindlegs, and clutches its food with its forepaws, just like a squirrel or monkey.

Their manner of generation or procreation is exceedingly strange and highly worth observing. Below the belly the female carries a pouch, into which you may put your hand; inside the pouch are her nipples, and we have found that the young ones lying there which were only the size of a bean, though at the same time perfectly proportioned, so that it seems certain that they grow there out of the nipples of the mammae, from which they draw their food, until they are grown up and are able to walk. Still, they keep creeping into the pouch even when they have become very large, and the dam runs off with them when they are hunted.”

Haha, ‘cat’. This was the first detailed account of a member of the kangaroo family by a European. Here is a more contemporary description of the animal:

http://www.perthzoo.wa.gov.au/animals-plants/australia/australian-bushwalk/tammar-wallaby/

Jim