The dingo has come, finally
#44—Nature gives and takes, as it has always done.
Welcome to Mind Flexing, your fortnightly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.
In the waning sun of afternoon, when the air in your nostrils is warm and there is still too much excitement in the leaves to call it evening, I walk down to the clothesline to collect the washing. I pass under the branches of a blackwood—Lil's tree named after my cat that disappeared this day four years ago, possibly because of a snake whose company she quite enjoyed, but it's a mystery, really—and from beneath the tree, ahead on the ground I see my daughter's tiny peach sock, some telltale green slobber marking its toe. Earlier that day, while hanging out the washing, the foal in the paddock alongside our line had been nibbling at my sleeve and plucking the hat from my head whenever I leant down into the basket. She's not ours, she agists there, but it's been a pleasure to watch her grow.
She is almost a yearling and, no longer timid, has acquired the confidence to playfully harass me. Cleo, I call her, an Arabian chestnut with a white sock and a blonde mane that looks as if it were bleached with lemon juice under a tangerine sun. When she runs, her tail lifts high into the air, her head regally aloft. She moves with the freedom of a horse unbroken, there is joy and innocence, her prance more captivating than any show pony’s.
She must have really leaned into the (admittedly, limp) barbed-wire fence to reach that little sock, and unable to grasp it properly, it fell, thankfully, although it has now occurred to me to search that paddock for all the socks gone missing of late. Looking up, I see her standing with her mother at the high end of the paddock in the shade of our oak tree that branches over the fence. She flicks her tail at the flies and I turn toward the clothes basket; a movement at the opposite end of the paddock, where the hill arches steeply into the ground before flatlining to the creek, catches the corner of my eye.
A fox, I think, because there are plenty around, but for something 200 metres away, it is too large to be a fox, so I look harder. The black kelpie from down the road? It cannot be. It’s not black enough, it's colouring more like a German shepherd that’s mostly golden with a tinge of black down its spine. It moves like water, constant, fluid, gliding across the grass in a straight line, and in time with its stride it casually turns its head to look at me standing on the hill by my clothesline. It doesn't flinch because I am no surprise. It glides, the curves and twists of the hill hiding it from all but me. My children are laughing in the yard, plucking flowers and turning on taps to fill their watering cans, my marmalade cat is by my feet, and the horses under the oak flick at the flies. They do not see it passing by. They do not see the dingo.
For weeks now, I've heard this dingo's haunting howl from across the creek where the bush-clad hills rise into the mountains. It's the first dingo I've heard this year and unlike the packs that have lulled me to sleep with their song in the past, this dingo is alone. It calls out in broad daylight and nothing answers. I've looked toward the sound, scanning the bush for movement, knowing it sees us, my family, the cat, the foal. It knows all about us, and now it has showed itself to me, the first ever to do so in these parts. I am awestruck, exhilarated, thankful, my eyes hold tight in wonder, and yet I want it gone. I want it to run back into the mountains far away from humans with our guns and traps and poisons. The dingo is safe with me, but there are others.
A little over a month ago while I was in Tasmania, the Victorian government updated its dingo ‘unprotection’ order. Many of you may remember my story Waiting for dingoes, that discussed these unprotection orders, which essentially allow dingoes—a threatened species—to be legally killed under certain circumstances. I expanded on this, with a little side-story about an encounter with wolves, in The dog days aren’t over, which juxtaposed the farmer’s lobby groups’ vocalness of their right to kill dingoes against the inertia and disinterest of the general population, and asked the question, what would we do if we knew more about the lives of our dingoes?
It's hard to know what exactly went on during the Wild Dog Management Review of the past year. Community consultations, held with little notification less than three weeks before the results of the review were announced on September 24, appeared to be box-ticking rather than anything meaningful. There would have been no time at all to investigate anything that came out of the consultations—bureaucracy doesn’t move that fast—suggesting the government had come to its conclusion prior.
The results were a disappointment to those of us that value the rights of Australian wildlife, including Australia’s First Peoples who have been advocating for dingo protections. The unprotection order, which permits dingoes to be killed on private property or by government-controlled programs (like 1080 poisoned baiting) within a 3km buffer zone on public land, has been allowed to continue in the eastern parts of Victoria, of which these alpine mountains form a part. Following the government’s unexpected termination of the unprotection order in the western part of the State in March this year, namely because the dingoes there are believed to be near extinction, it was feasible that such a decision may be expanded to protect this threatened species Statewide. However, farmer backlash to the snap announcement and the government’s likely realisation that it had absolutely no money to help fund the expensive measures required to protect livestock from dingoes—such as dingo exclusion fencing—likely formed the government’s decision long ago.
If there is one silver lining, (well, two, if you count that the earlier decision to end dingo killings in the western part of the state still stands), is that the Wild Dog Bounty program, which paid $120 per wild dog killed, has been scrapped. DNA testing has showed that, contrary to popular belief, the overwhelming majority of what have been assumed to be interbred wild dogs are in fact pure dingoes.
And this is how I know that the magnificent creature cantering across the paddock before me is a dingo. I have heard its howl echo through the hills, and I wonder if it has crossed the road and seen the five calves birthed just the other week. I hope, for its sake, that it hasn’t. The calves have strengthened fast, but they’re little knobbly knees reveal their fragility. The former owner of that farm once set traps for the ‘wild dogs’, though he said it was a waste of time—the ‘wild dogs’ being too clever to fall for such a trick. There are always foxes around here, but he was certain the style of the instigating attack—a chunk had been bitten from a cow’s hind thigh, leaving it to wander around with a gaping hole in its body—was typical of a ‘wild dog’. The cow was put down and the traps caught nothing. He didn’t keep a protection animal, like a working dog or alpaca, so rather, he formulated his own deterrent, mustering his sheep with his ATV into a special holding pen for the night. The pen’s fence was laced with bird netting and at each corner, solar powered lights would flash brightly through the night. From the shed, blaring loudly into the perfect silence of the dark was a talkback radio station, tormenting the dingoes—and us. You can hear a conversation from a kilometre away in the echo-chamber that is my valley. Thankfully, the radio also annoyed his wife and that little deterrent, while reportedly effective, was short lived.
Once, when the farmer was away in the next valley, I saw two foxes run through his paddock in broad daylight, and knowing that to be unusual, and that the sheep were lambing, I went over to chase the foxes back into the State Forest. Some distance from the others, in the shade of the bushland, I found a ewe that had given birth just moments before and as I watched her clean the birth fluids from the babe lying in the grass like curdled panna cotta, a second one slipped out and onto the ground. The foxes were right there with us, somewhere, the smell of lamb tethered to their tastebuds, so I sat down and stayed with the newborns until they were on their feet and able to walk over to the flock.
A bounty on foxes—an invasive species—remains, with this year’s price having risen from $10 to $14 (oddly, just a fraction of what you once got for a native dingo, and what’s still paid for a dingo in other parts of the country, like Queensland).
The new owners of the property live in the city and keep it as a holiday home. They don’t own the cattle and their calves—I’m not sure who does—and I don’t know how they would react if they knew a dingo was about.
Some nights I hear the horses galloping through the paddock, their thundering hooves spooked by something concealed in the dank darkness.
Nature gives and takes. It’s a delicate balance and one that we should respect and meld with. We can’t be the only ones who take. I think of the endangered gang gang cockatoos that annihilate my hazelnut crop each year, and how I love to stand by as they cheekily drop the shells on my head; and I think of the bower birds, which would eat my veggie garden to its core, even the pumpkins, if I didn’t protect it with netting; I watch them from the windows with my daughters as we tell stories about them and their blue treasures. I think of the wedge-tailed eagles that soar above and how my neighbour is adamant they were taking his chickens. I think of the snakes, magnificent and strong, and I think of Lil.
The dingo turns its head to look at me one last time as it slips out of view behind the curve of the hill and I remind myself not to let the children out in the garden alone. I tell the dingo to go back up into the hills. I’m not aware of poisoned baits being used in those ranges. You’ll be safe there, I say, as long as you stay precisely 3km away from the others.
Things I’ve enjoyed on Substack this week:
A conversation about 'The Lady in the Looking Glass'—by
Tash speaks to the delightful
about this Virginia Woolf classic.When the wind blows from the east, fish bite the least—by
A beautifully contemplative piece by Kate, as always.
Whatever the question, community is the answer—by
Sally’s focus on community is exactly what the doctor has ordered this week.
Things I did instead of doing my tax—by
Because there is more to life than death and taxes.
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Yes a big thank you for your love and protection of dingos, we need them to build healthy ecologies. And they are magnificent! . And a big thank you too for the shout out 🙏
Thank you for sharing this Alia, and also for sharing my work! I didn’t know much about the plight of dingoes, but always wondered ‘what the heck is a wild dog, if not a dingo?’ - I am most definitely going to read more on this topic.