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The Dingo in Australia
Broadcast Saturday 23/06/01
Summary:
The real history of the dingo, which could soon become extinct.
Transcript:
Robyn Williams: The dingo has been in Australia for nearly as long as the pyramids have stood in the sands of Egypt. But now the ancient Australian could become extinct. This Science Show special is presented by Jonica Newby.
David Jenkins: I’m quite convinced that within a period of time and I really can’t say how long that would be, but the dingo could very easily disappear as a genetically unique entity. I think it would be an absolute disaster. I mean, they’re such an icon to Australia. To go out in the scrub and hear that wonderful howl, it sends the hair up on the back of your neck.
Eve Fesl: I feel that the dingo has been persecuted as we have been. The myths, the misconceptions, the actions – the dingo has suffered in the same way my people have.
Jonica Newby: The dingo is suffering, and it has suffered. In the last 200 years it has been demonised, marginalised, displaced from settlements and hybridised by European settlers with their European dogs. And in the wake of two centuries of mythmaking about this ‘wild’ animal, mainstream Australian culture forgot some fundamental things - like that the word dingo once meant the Aboriginal people’s tame dog and that many of our First Fleeters acquired dingoes as pets.
This then, is the real story of the dingo in Australia - and it begins on a boat 4000 years ago.
Reading: Aborigines living in the coastal Kimberley region of Australia’s top end sometimes dance a corroboree re-enacting the arrival of dingoes to Australia. Dancing, they transform themselves into dingoes running excitedly up and down the deck of the boat. Finally, they jump overboard, paddle ashore, roll in the sand and shake themselves dry.
Alan Newsome: It’s known that the Macassans were coming across 700 years ago at least and presumably a lot longer. They were trading with the northern Aboriginals and it’s not surprising that they would carry dogs.
I remember off Cairns there was a pearling lugger there when I was a young fellow, some of them were Thursday Islanders and some were white fellas, and they had a dog on board and they had a pig on board. I asked them why there was a pig on board and why have you got a dog and the answer was that, “Oh, when our men are down diving sometimes sharks come around and we try to chase them off, and if we can’t and it’s looking risky for our guys as we’re pulling them up we’ll throw the pig overboard. And if the shark doesn’t go away, the dog goes in”. And this really opened my eyes. So it’s not just a matter of having the comfort of these animals, of course they would eat them if they were in real trouble anyhow. And I can imagine the same issue would have occurred with the people coming across from Indonesia in their boats, their perahus, they would be prone to exactly the same problem.
Jonica Newby: When you picture the reasons dingoes were brought to Australia, shark bait isn’t the first thin that springs to mind. But it just shows how widely useful dingoes were to the sea gypsies that traded through the islands to our north. It was once thought that dingoes were indigenous to Australia and later, that the Aboriginal people must have brought them. But the invention of carbon dating revealed their arrival was too recent for that. And then, one day, while returning from a posting in Aberdeen, scientist Laurie Corbett stumbled on their source.
Laurie Corbett: I stopped of in Bangkok one day and took a little trip around the outskirts, and I was amazed that I saw dingoes running around. To me they were exactly the same as I was seeing in the Simpson Desert in the middle of Australia. So it was probably fortunate that I’d stumbled on Thailand, because if you think about the western influences on South East Asian countries, Thailand most certainly has had the least contact of all. And what that really meant is that there has been domestic dogs for the least time and therefore the population of dingo there are fairly pure. I was able to collect samples, mainly from the dog meat markets because I was able to get intact skulls which I needed to compare with fossils in Australia and also the Australian dingo, and from there - that’s when I started to get into the ancestry.
Jonica Newby: The search became something of an obsession for Corbett who spent the next 20 years collecting skulls and developing measurements to detect dingoes.
Laurie Corbett: For a start, there’s not an awful lot of skulls. The oldest ones are in South East Asia, I’d say in North Vietnam at five and a half thousand years old. Throughout the Indonesian Highlands and so on they vary to maximum of 5000 years and most about 2500 to 3000 years old. In Australia they go back to about 3500 years.
Jonica Newby: Then when Corbett came to the conclusion that the Basenji and American Carolina dog were dingoes and that 14,000 year old bones from Israel and 9000 year old bones from America were dingo-like, a picture began to emerge.
Laurie Corbett: It was probably at the time about 10,000 years ago when people throughout much of the world, including South East Asia, settled down from hunter/gatherers to a more sedentary existence and this gave the wild wolves the chance to form these commensal relationships with people. That they both derived benefit from each other but they’re not dependent on each other for survival.
Jonica Newby: Does this sound familiar? What Corbett is describing is the origin of the domestic dog. What he realised is that the Australian dingo is the original canid that formed an alliance with humans. When people migrated to the Americas and to South East Asia they took their dingoes with them. Later on, selective breeding produced the breeds we know today, but in pockets, dingoes remained. And in many ways they still sit halfway between a wolf and a modern dog – they don’t bark, they breed only once a year while dogs breed twice and their temperament is more independent, more like that of a cat. In effect, the dingo is a living fossil, the preserved ancestor of all modern dogs. And when it reached Australia it made quite an impact.
Laurie Corbett: Unlike his nearest competitors here which would have been the thylacine and to some extent the devil, it seems that they didn’t have the ability to form socially cohesive groups and the dingo did. So that meant in drought times when everything else went backwards the dingo could form groups which enabled them to catch larger prey like big kangaroos and so forth and more importantly, it allowed them to defend the hunting grounds, it enabled them to defend the water sites. And that’s the main reason for the dingo out-competing the thylacines and the Tasmanian devils.
Jonica Newby: Many dingoes went wild and spelt disaster for some of Australia’s native carnivores, who were soon relegated to Tasmania where dingoes never reached. But for the people, they were a revelation, as anthropologist Colin Pardoe discovered on a trip to an ancient Aboriginal camp site in South Australia.
Colin Pardoe: We got a boat across the stretch of the Koorong Waters. There's this largish sand dune about half a kilometre wide and you come up to the top, to this big, flat, gently rolling, blown-out area with a huge expanse of shell, which is obviously the result of people having eaten many a meal there. And we walked up looking at an area of burials - this is human burials. And I was walking towards the site but I was drawn off just to one side and that was when I could see that there was the outline of a pit. In this pit were the protruding bones of what was obviously a dog, I could see the backbones and ribs in there, and on the ground in front of me was the jaw, skull and upper leg bones of a dog. I’m looking at this and I think hey, this is wonderful. This is clearly a burial. At that point I’d forgotten about the human burials, so we started to map - after I’d got over my excitement - and walking towards the human burials we came across another dog burial and ultimately found five of these dogs in a line separating the human burials from the human occupation areas - that is the hearth and stone tools and whatnots. And I’m standing there on the line between the living and the dead and on that line are the burials of all the dogs, purposefully placed there. You know it’s pretty straight forward when you think about it. In life, the dogs main job is at night to bark to keep the spirits away. But when you bury people and when you’re fully engaged with the spirit world, and ancestors, and ghosts and all that sort of thing, and some of them are malevolent, what better thing to do than to put your dogs in burials in a line around your living site separating the living and the dead and to have all those dog burials taking care of business under the ground.
Reading: Grasshopper Woman and Giant Devil Dingo came travelling into Cape York. Giant Devil Dingo was savage and huge. Grasshopper Woman was boss of that dingo, she used him to hunt and kill men for food. But one day, Butcher Bird Brothers ambushed Giant Devil Dingo and speared him to death. Medicine Man then took his head and skin and made two small dingoes. Breathing life into them he said, “From now on, you are a dingo and won’t eat people. You will be a friend to man and help him hunt for food”.
Colin Pardoe: One of the interesting things in Australia is that you’ve got an area where people didn’t have dogs for all the time they were in Australia. So from 40,000 or 60,000 or how many thousands of years it was that Aboriginal people came here, they were without dogs until about 4,000 years ago, and then dogs arrived and it seems almost immediately they’re incorporated, as they are everywhere in the world, into people’s religion, into their view of life, into their stories, their mythology and as evidence of this you get what I think is the most wonderful story from the top end of Australia, where to see just how important the dog is to society, the dog is the individual that brings fire. He also brings the circumcision ritual, and all you dog lovers who are listening to this, if you look at your dog’s ear, at the back of the ear you’ll see this little flap, like a little fold in the skin. It doesn’t have a name, which is a strange thing for an anatomical feature because anatomists have named every feature of the body. However, the Aboriginal people with this story about circumcision have a name for it, because that little flap is where the dog who brought the circumcision ritual to Australia stored the stone, the little stone flake, that he cut with, which I just think is a marvellous, marvellous story.
Jonica Newby: Eve Fesl, linguist, historian and member of the Gubbi Gubbi people has also noticed a link between dingoes and matters genital in traditional storytelling.
Eve Fesl: One of the interesting things when I was doing anthropology was that they said Aboriginal people didn’t know what caused children to be born. But one of the fertility rites that I’ve been witness to, it’s a women’s fertility rite where they carry out a rite in terms of dingoes copulating. It just showed in this particular ceremony where they imitated the copulation of dogs and then babies, puppies and things that everybody, of course everybody knew that copulation resulted in young.
Jonica Newby: One explanation for the dingoes high profile in fertility rites is that when they arrived in Australia for the first time people saw placental mammals with sexual organs similar to their own. Marsupials have quite a different arrangement of the testes and penis, plus females have a pouch. Not so the dingo.
Reading: Its master never strikes it but merely threatens it. He caresses it like a child, eats the fleas off it and then kisses it on the snout. It never barks and hunts less wildly than our dogs, but very rapidly, frequently capturing the game on the run. Sometimes it refuses to go further and its owner has to carry it on his shoulders, a luxury of which it is very fond.
Lumholtz, 1884.
Jonica Newby: It wasn’t always so luxurious of course, and some dingoes were beaten, starved, eaten, or had their legs broken to prevent them leaving. But they were integral to Aboriginal people’s lives – watchdogs, companions and in some cases, good providers, as Eve Fesl found when her own dingoes went on a diet.
Eve Fesl: Yes, one of our dingoes got very fat. We took him to the vet and the vet said, "Look, you’ve got to put him on a diet". But he had the puppies then, so my husband, instead of putting just one on a diet, and that would have been difficult, he put them all on a diet. I used to take the female for a walk along Koonung Creek in Victoria and she used to go for a run and come back. And this day she went for a run and she kept going. It eventually came to a busy road and I thought gee, I hope she doesn’t run across Middleborough Road. I tried to chase her but there was no hope, so I went home and I was really worried. And about an hour later I opened the door and there she was, sitting there, with a parrot in her mouth.
She knew they were all hungry so she went hunting and brought it home. And I nearly cried and I said to my husband, “You’re not putting my doggies on a diet again so that they have to go and get their own food”. But she went out - and you can see how they related to our people when we lived out in the bush, they used to go out and bring the food back.
Jonica Newby: In some parts of South Eastern Australia, dingo fossil skulls even show the signs typical of impending domestication. But this cosy co-existence was about to be shattered. The ancestor of modern dogs was about to meet his descendents.
In 1788 the First Fleet sailed into Botany Bay. On board were Captain Arthur Phillip, his greyhounds and assorted puppies. And when Arthur Phillip first met the natives, well, they had their dogs with them.
Reading: Thus, was our first intercourse obtained with these Children of Nature – about 12 of the natives appeared the next morning on the shore opposite to the Supply. They had a dog with them, something of the fox species.
George B Worgan, Surgeon if the Sirius.
Reading: They have a number of dogs belong them which they call Tingo. They do not bark like our dogs, but howl.
Newton Fowell, midshipman and lieutenant aboard the Sirius.
Jonica Newby: In the dialect of the people around Sydney Harbour the word for wild dog was Warrigal. Tingo meant tame dog.
Reading: As the Indians see the dislike of the dogs to us, they are sometimes mischievous enough to set them on single persons whom they chance to meet in the woods. A surly fellow was one day out shooting when the natives attempted to divert themselves in this manner at his expense. The man bore the teasing and gnawing of the dog at his heels for some time, but apprehending at length that his patience might embolden them to use still farther liberties, he turned round and shot poor Dingo dead on the spot – the owners of him set off with the utmost expedition.
Jonica Newby: When it came to the dingo versus the surly fellow it seems Captain Watkin Tench was firmly on the side of the dingo. But it was another matter when it came to the sheep.
Reading: On my return from this excursion, I had the mortification to find that five ewes and a lamb had been killed in the middle of the day, and very near the camp, I apprehend, by some of the native dogs. Governor Arthur Phillip, May 15 1788.
Jonica Newby: Bad news indeed given how few livestock they had and how close to starvation the colony came in those early years. Despite this, several colonists acquired dingoes as pets, including Governor Arthur Phillip and Captain John Hunter, Commander of the HMS Sirius.
Reading:Of those does we have had many which were taken when young, but never could cure them of their natural ferocity. I had one which was a little puppy when caught, but, notwithstanding, I took much pains to correct it and cure it of its savageness, I found it took every opportunity to snap off the head of a fowl or worry a pig, and would do it in defiance of correction. They are very good natured animals when domesticated, but I believe it to be impossible to cure that savageness, which all I have seen seem to possess.
Jonica Newby: Meanwhile, the local Aborigines were equally intrigued by these newfangled European dogs, and were keen to acquire them. Especially because, unlike dingoes, European dogs bark. Useful in a society whose laws include revenge killings in the night.
Reading:Being themselves sensible of the danger they ran in the night, they eagerly besought us to give them puppies of our spaniel and terrier breeds, which we did; and not a family was without one or more of these little watch-dogs, which they considered as invaluable guardians during the night; and were pleased when they found them readily devour the only regular food they had to give them – fish.
David Collins, Judge-Advocate and Secretary of the Colony..
Jonica Newby: So keen were the locals on these new dogs, that when ensign Francis Barrallier became the first European to explore inland in 1802 he found that five hounds had preceded him. Unfortunately though, they were helping spread the seeds of the dingo's eventual destruction. Not only were European dogs displacing dingoes because they were better pets – more obedient – they were also better breeders. Dingoes breed only once a year, and only the dominant bitch may reproduce. Modern dogs breed twice a year, and any old can have a go. But worse was to come.
Robert Darby: When large numbers of sheep started arriving in Australia the situation changed quite sharply, because the poor old sheep were a very easy target for this very skilled and fierce hunter. And once the plains and woodlands became covered with these sort of furry hamburgers on legs the dingo had a great time and the views of the settlers changed quite a lot and they began to get all sorts of unkind epithets. They were regarded as cowardly because they wouldn’t stand around and get shot; they would sneak of into the bush to avoid pursuit and quite often the epithet of 'devil' was applied to them. And they were even accused of having poison venom in their bite, because if a dingo found a flock of sheep it would quite often run among the flock and take bites out of as many as it could possibly grab and usually the sheep died as a result of these injuries. But the folklore spread that there was actually poison in the dingo’s saliva.
Eve Fesl: Remember, this is also the big macho image; these people coming to this wild untamed land and we didn’t have any tigers, and people-eating animals and the kangaroos hopped away. So I guess they had to find something that built up the macho image of going into the wild savage land. I mean, all through the mythology of the white invasion you’ll find, you know, these brave heroes, fighting the outback, fighting the land, fighting the animals, fighting the people.
Jonica Newby: Eve Fesl and before her historian, Robert Darby. The arrival of the sheep unleashed a campaign of trapping, shooting and poisoning. Dingoes became the bad eggs in society associated with thieves, vagabonds, bushrangers and of course, with the ultimate rogues – one's opponents in parliament.
Robert Darby: The first reference to politicians calling their opponents dingoes I think is in the 1860s and becomes a fairly regular term since then. It’s curious that John Robertson, who was the architect of a New South Wales Election Act, I think in the 1860s, according to some reports was referred to as Dingo Jack. It’s possible that that was a name actually given to him by the squatters, because they felt that he was taking the land out of their hands and giving it to the poor selectors.
Jonica Newby: But there were more sinister forces at work. From the beginning, dingoes were aligned with Aborigines. The settlers turning on the native dog coincided with their turning on the people.
Reading:The dingoes have become avowed enemies and the rifle and poison are exterminating them from localities where once they were numerous, and thus the dingo, like the aboriginal, is doomed to extinction.
Reading: The most widely known black fellow in the district was Mr Wilson. He and his gin was a childless couple, but amply made up for this deficiency by an ever-increasing retinue of canines. In time, these became a public pest. So a conspiracy consisting of my brother Louis and Owen, our local chemist was entered into – Owen to supply the strychnine and Louis to procure from the butcher little gobbets of beef. About a dozen of these baits were prepared and taken to the camp. The hounds made a massed rush at the intruders, but the shower of lovely chunks of meat stopped the canine avalanche. Very soon they began to show signs of acute gripes. One streaked across the paddock and after a series of contortions expired almost at the feet of "Jinny". She, seeing the awful tragedy that overtook one of her pets, shrilled an agonised call to her husband, Mr Wilson. Dead and dying dogs met their eyes all over the place and they both broke into tears and grabbing a dead body each, they carried them down to the beach in front of the Pacific Hotel. Here they sat in the shade of a bottlebrush tree, each nursing and crying over the corpse of their mangy tykes and there they remained, utterly grief-stricken, till the sun went down.
Jonica Newby: Eve Fesl believes the killing of the dogs was part of a wider war on her people – even to the point of helping enslave them.
Eve Fesl: I think it began in South Australia, and I remember reading the first reports that had been made about South Australia where they actually boasted that they didn’t take Aboriginal people for slaves as they did in other states. Our people, the Aboriginal people, were forced into small communities because their land was taken and it was dangerous to move. But what they did was kill the hunting dogs, so people were forced to the point of starvation and had to work, do menial work in order to get food. So it was a process of forcing people to the point of starvation to get free labour. They weren’t actually enslaving people as they had done in Western Australia and the other states under the Protection Act.
Jonica Newby: How did you conclude this? I mean this is not a common interpretation of history.
Eve Fesl: I know it isn’t. But just remember, a lot of the history of indigenous people of Australia is not written by us, it’s written from people outside our culture. I actually spoke to the son of one of the policemen who was ordered to go and kill the dogs and I said to him, did your father know why he had to go and kill the dogs. And he said, No, Dad said he just got the order, go and kill all the dogs, the dingoes. And he used to go out to the camps and kill all the dingoes and people were crying and upset because they’re seen as our brothers and sisters in our cultural aspect. So I mean, you can’t help but sit and cry with them really, in your heart.
Jonica Newby: By the beginning of the 20th Century dingoes had been displaced from all but the most remote Aboriginal camps. They were virtually wiped out of South Eastern Australia and the building of the great Dingo Fence was underway. And few remembered that the dingo had ever been anything other than wild.
Field recording/dingo trapping:
Jonica Newby:Well, I’m in Kosciusko National Park at the moment, driving along a very bumpy dirt track in a 4wheel drive, and with me are two professional trackers. We’re out setting some traps today, and hopefully we’ll see some dogs in them in the morning. We’ve come out of the bush now and into a vast treeless plain. It’s quite stunning actually, a natural amphitheatre surrounded by hills and mountains covered in bush. And the dogs have just seen something. Out in front of us are two dogs that have been let out to see whether they can find dingo messages. One has gone and peed on a spot and then the other tan kelpie has done so as well. I suspect this is the spot where we’re going to be the traps. What sort of trap is this?
Andrew: It’s called a jump trap. It’s rubber jawed and that rubber on there protects any damage to the animal.
Jonica Newby: You’re actually putting a log next to the trap as well and covering it in grass. Why’s that?
Andrew: Well, the trap’s got a chain on it and the chain goes on the log, so when the dog gets caught he can pull and he’ll drag the log along. If you spoke the chain into the ground he could damage his foot. What do you reckon Bill, a bit of grass on top of that>
Jonica Newby: How long have you been trapping, Bill?
Bill: Since ’76.
Jonica Newby: And how do you think young Andrew’s shaping up?
Bill: He’s going well. It’s something I always say, that you’re gifted with for some reason. Like, you can show a lot of people how to and what to do, but yet they can’t do it.
End field recording
Jonica Newby: In the mid 20th Century there was a push to put more science into understanding the dingo, and when Alan Newsome took on the job he was very grateful for the dog trapper’s gift.
Alan Newsome: We then got to know the doggers in Victoria, and with a bit of beer changing hands as a standard currency they would keep the scalps, they’d keep the skulls for us and they’d keep the guts for us. And they were all checked in the laboratory for what they ate, and sheep was coming through very, very low. They were eating kangaroos, they were eating wallabies, they were eating possums, they were eating lizards, and the figures coming in just weren’t matching the concern. But you put yourself in the grazier’s hands; he’s got a nice paddock he’s been saving up the back for when his lambs come in, and he moves them out there and suddenly a couple of dingoes emerge. And they didn’t mind killing one or two, but what they could not stomach was, you know, six, seven, eight being killed.
Field recording/dingo trapping:
Jonica Newby: The dogs have let us know that there are dingoes around; this time from the back of the truck. The red kelpie, the older dog, Bill isn’t quite sure how old she is, somewhere around 9 she says but she’s been 9 for quite a few years now. Anyway, she can actually smell dingoes from the back of the truck even travelling at 70kms per hour, according to Bill, and she barks. Then they know to stop the truck and go and find the spot for dingoes.
She must be worth her weight in gold. I mean, do you think she’s pretty special?
Bill: Oh, well, she’s special to me. She’s made me awfully lazy.
Jonica Newby: Well, this must be a good spot for dingo traps, because the elder kelpie has just urinated on the spot. An excellent sign.
End field recording
Alan Newsome: Well, the first thousand dingoes we saw in Central Australia, something like 85% or 90% were by themselves and we thought oh, these animals are loners, and indeed that’s what we assumed. Then we’d see an occasional couple together and you'd think, oh, yeah, it’s mating time and so on. And then there were a few threes, and then a few fours and basically we honestly felt that they were some kind of accidental gettings together. The big surprise came when we were working down the south coast, down here and up in the mountains, and we used to hear this howling going on which seemed to be grouped together at night. And I’d think, how many is that? Oh, three or four. And then one night there was no doubt there were six howling. And I thought, Lord, are they different groups or are they the one group? So, I wanted to go down and have a look and the fellows said you’ll chase them away and on the third day I said, I’m going. He said he was coming with me. And we snuck in.
We knew who the dominant male was cause he’s a slightly different colour, and first up we see him, he’s trailing an oestrous bitch around, and then a howl came from way up the valley and we looked up and it was a dominant bitch that had a radio on, they were going off at a tangent. And I said, do you think they just go to one another? They went somewhere else and then we could see they were munching on something. And it’s intriguing to watch, the dominant always feeds first and here’s the subordinate, the female, the number one female and she would have this pained look on her face. It used to amuse us no end, to see the pained look and she’d look around tentatively to see if she was going to get a bite and then she’d look away and finally, he’d have had a gutful and she’d get all she wanted. And we could hear all this other yipping going on in the air and we didn’t know how many mutts there were up in the hills, but there were two or three of these. So, I was one side of a huge snow-gum and my mate was on the other side and two brumby horses came out and started to graze and we were just watching, and suddenly he said, they’re coming out. He said, there’s two, there’s three, there’s four. I said I’ve got to see this. He said, don’t move, don’t move, and then he said, there’s five, there’s six. So here we’ve got two animals over munching and six others come out and they spy these brumby horses. They sort of formed a ring around it and just sat down and watched. And the horses got extremely skittish and we thought Lord, they must be attacking the brumbies and that’s what this big pack is all about. Anyhow, the brumbies took off and tore off into the forest, but these guys then kept going across towards where the other two were munching on something. What they’d been munching on was a six month old foal.
Jonica Newby: Newsome was joined by Laurie Corbett and over the next twenty years they made many exciting discoveries about dingoes, including that in cattle country dingoes were friend rather enemy because they suppressed rabbits and kangaroos. But they were beginning to get worried.
Laurie Corbett: For a kickoff, we knew hybrids were about because you'd see these obvious looking mongrels out in the bush sometime. But by and large most of the animals looked like good dingoes. And then, in Alice Springs we maintained a colony there where we wanted to look at hybridisation but we had to make our own. One or two generations started to look like a good dingo but its breeding pattern is like that of a domestic dog for three or four generations, i.e. have two oestrous cycles a year rather than one, and so that’s when I guess I first started to think there could be a serious problem out there, because all those animals we’ve seen looked like dingoes may not be.
Field recording/dingo trapping:
Jonica Newby: It’s the next morning and a mist has come up in the night and it’s quite lovely, I must say, with all the autumn leaves now turning gold and the mist in the background. Let’s hope that the dingoes have been tempted into our trap by this lovely morning. Or, failing that, by the expert urinations of Bill’s dogs.
Well, the red kelpie whose name I’ve discovered is Freda, has been on the job and she’s been barking all the way along this track, which suggests that a dingo has actually been along the track before us. But so far, even though we’ve checked ten traps, still no sign of a dingo.
End field recording
Laurie Corbett: The best studies, or the most data comes from south eastern Australia, from Victoria actually. Forty years ago when we did our first studies down there roughly 50% of the population were pure dingoes. Twenty years ago only 17% were pure. So in the last 20 years, if the same rate of hybridisation has occurred, then there’s probably none left at all.
SFX: Dingo growling
Barrie Oakman: OK, the guy doing all the growling at the present moment was born in the wild, caught in a place called Crocodile Hole and Camel Creek up near Kununurra.
Jonica Newby: While Corbett was doing his best to alert the scientific and park management community about the problem, concern was arising from a different direction.
Barrie Oakman: My grandfather was one of those people that was involved in the establishment of the Australian working dogs, so from the time I was a very young lad I was exposed to dingoes. The dingoes that I had been seeing as a boy began to disappear. So I then decided that what I should do was keep a few dingoes. And I started scattering the genes around to the right type of people with a hope that we could get a gene pool working and start to save the dingo, because it was quite obvious to me from what I was seeing that the dingo wasn’t going to last very long.
Jonica Newby: At the time, it was illegal to keep an entire dingo, but the threat of a crackdown in 1991 prompted Barry Oakman to lobby for the law to be changed in New South Wales. Meanwhile in Victoria, Eve Fesl was also campaigning for the legal right to keep her dingoes. If politicians were used to be called 'dingo', how would they respond to a real one?
Eve Fesl: We were waiting for the Minister and Tuku came in and decided, Oh, I’m going to sit down here and he went and sat in the Minister’s chair before I could stop him. The Minister walked in and there was the dog sitting there instead of him. It was quite funny. Ad so he hopped down and by this time all the staff were creeping to the door with biscuits to feed him s they could have a pat. And we gave a little deonstration of how he was good at obedience. He’d come second out of 150 dogs at obedience, so the minister could go back and say he’d seen one who was very well-behaved and that he’d actually patted one.
Jonica Newby: It was hard to resist. In 1998 Victoria legalised the keeping of registered dingoes. In 2000, New South Wales followed suit. Unfortunately though, unlike Victoria where strict obligations are made on dingo owners, such as having high fences, New South Wales placed no restrictions. Meanwhile though, the dingo breeders had a more pressing problem. The only sure method of detecting a pure dingo was to kill it and to measure its skull – not much use for a breeding program. Then, last year, geneticist Alan Wilton of the University of New South Wales had a breakthrough with a DNA test.
Alan Wilton: We were very lucky to find one that showed quite a marked difference. Such that when we compared the captive dingoes that we’re using as a reference population and domestic dogs we didn’t find any similarity between them at all, and we’ve been able to continue there looking for more markers that are similar to that.
Jonica Newby: All told, 20 markers have been found and to Barry Oakman’s relief, many of his breeding stock seem pure. While Barry, Eve and others were lobbying to reclaim the dingo as a tame dog, progress was also being made on the wild dingo. In 1995 the dingo was officially recognised as a native animal in the New South Wales Threatened Species Conservation Act. Then in 1998, an extraordinary project was set up which, for the first time, combined the interests of farmers and conservationists.
Field recording/dingo trapping:
Jonica Newby:Well, one of the traps has been sprung and it’s gone. That means there maybe a dingo with a trap attached nearby.
David Jenkins:There he is, he’s up there, Bill. (footsteps) He’s a bit unhappy about being caught.
Jonica Newby: OK, he’s caught now. Bill’s got the loop over his ears and in the jaw tight, so his head can’t really move and David’s coming in behind to grab the hind legs.
David Jenkins:We’ll tip him over.
Jonica Newby: OK, he’s on a white platform that they’ve brought up here with seatbelt type straps on it, and the dog’s about to be strapped onto the table.
David Jenkins:I’m putting a radio tracking collar on him so we can follow his movements around the park and to see if he comes out into sheep country. But mainly we just want to see where he goes, and then we’ll put a microchip in him just in case the collar malfunctions. And I’ll also make a small hole in his ear and use that for DNA testing later to get a feel for how much dingo and dog there is.
End field recording
Jonica Newby: Biologist David Jenkins is in charge of this multipurpose project.
David Jenkins: We have so many different stakeholders in the project and all of them have different agendas. The farmer’s basic agenda is to somehow stop the dog killing the sheep, and as far as the National Park is concerned, they have some responsibility in this also. But they also are charged with preserving native species within the boundaries of their parks and I guess they’re pretty keen to look after purebred dingoes and not hybrids. So they’re particularly interested in what we’re doing with respect to the DNA testing.
From preliminary analysis it would seem that there are a significant number of individuals where we can’t detect any hybridisation, of the order of 20 to 25% and then there are a majority of individuals seem to show a presence of what look like a small amount of dog genes in the gene pool there; which to me is a little bit of a surprise, I expected perhaps to see a large proportion of the population being almost totally dog. So it gives some hope in the preservation of the dingo in the wild if we can introduce the right management practices.
David Jenkins:We’ll all stand on one side, round here and she’ll go that way. Mind your fingers Bill, I speak from bitter experience. That’s it. Well done. OK, ready. We’ll get her up. Stand by, one, two, three…..
Jonica Newby: And she’s run off into the scrub, right as rain. (end field recording)
Jonica Newby: But is she. Peter Fleming is a scientist with the Vertebrate Pest Research Unit of New South Wales Agriculture and co-author of the recently released book on how to manage sheep predation and conserve pure dingoes - a much harder ask.
Peter Fleming: At the moment there isn’t a plan, however there are some ideas. For instance, the south east of Australia is the place where most hybridisation has occurred but there may still be places where pure dingoes, because of their social structure, have been able to maintain the purity of the gene pool there.
Laurie Corbett: Nowhere in Australia are there totally pure dingo populations. The last bastion, so called, was in Kakadu National Park but in the last two or three years we've picked up hybrids. And it’s because domestic dogs are allowed into say Jabiru and various Aboriginal camps have domestic dogs out there, so once that process starts there’s an exponential change, not a linear change.
Jonica Newby: That’s the trouble now facing managers like Peter Fleming. Even if one can identify pockets of pure dingoes, how does one maintain them? Think of the practicalities in Kosciusko, for example. Can we stop the 25% of animals that are pure dingo ultimately mixing with the hybrid majority? Could we go in and cull all the hybrids. Even if it weren’t impossibly costly we don’t even have the technology to test dingoes on site. That’s why scientists like Corbett and Fleming are pinning their hopes on islands, either virtual, maintained by barriers, or real. And at the moment, there’s only one.
Reporter: Fraser Island is the world’s largest sand island and is famous for its wild dingoes which are believed to be Australia’s purest strain. But there have been a number of incidents on Fraser Island involving dingoes and children.
Aboriginal commentator/Fraser Island:Just like any other savage dog in our society, in the city, they should be put down. But that doesn’t trigger off a mass slaughter of the whole population.
Jonica Newby: In all the hype about the Fraser Island dingoes, few seem to have commented on their national importance. Given the difficulties of controlling hybridisation on the mainland, this island may be our only real hope of maintaining a pure wild dingo into the future. But even here – how pure are they, really?
Laurie Corbett: About a third of the population on Fraser Island is hybrid, contrary to what people say about the purest things in the world, that’s rubbish. If you’re going to cull them, try and cull out the hybrids then match the dingo population to their natural food supply.
Alan Wilson: People do do that sort of thing for detecting illegal whaling. They have little portable laboratories, so it might be possible in the long term, to set up something like that where you could get an answer in the field with 8 or 10 hours, even less, of capturing an animal. But we don’t have large amounts of money for this sort of research.
Jonica Newby: And what about those who are putting so much passion into reclaiming the tame dingo and preserving it that way? Well, even that has potential drawbacks.
Peter Fleming: If it comes down to the only way we can conserve a genetic group it may be to do it in a sort of museum approach or a pet approach. However, the risks are that as soon as you bring an animal into a pet situation they change. For instance, they’ve done work with foxes in Russia. They selected for one trait and that trait was lack of aggression, and they changed all sorts of things in a 40 year period. They changed them so they got spotty and they got piebald animals. If you conserve them by making them pets you’ve got to acknowledge that they are going to change and you won’t have a dingo any more you’ll have a breed society definition of a dingo. You’ve only got to look at what’s happened in 100 years to the Siamese cat. You’ve got this thing that's totally different to what used to conserve the sanctity of the King of Siam’s palaces.
Jonica Newby: Today’s pet dingoes may not be living in palaces, but they are living in modern society. They can never return to the symbiotic lifestyles in hunter/gatherer communities. Unless we’re careful about dingo breeding we will lose them anyway.
So what do those closest to it think will happen? If we continue as we are, what will we see in 100 years time?
Alan Newsome: A land full of hybrids and feral domestic dogs and the same overseas. I mean Thailand, as I mentioned before, they are pretty pure over there, but that’s changing there too and once the process stars it snowballs. So I don’t know, 50 to 100 years time, there’ll be no pure dingoes left anywhere.
Peter Fleming: I’m a bit more optimistic than that. I think a lot of the accidental processes that have existed and have prevented hybridisation occurring in the vast majority of Australia to the north west, a lot of those processes are still going to remain because it’s still going to be fairly uninhabitable sort of place, so you’re not going to get the interaction with domestic dogs out there. However, if you look down the south east, we’re probably only going to end up with pockets.
David Jenkins: I don’t think we are going to lose it completely. I rather fancy that pure dingoes are going to be in defined areas that we have to look after very carefully, and there are a number of people around Australia who have small populations of dingoes that are absolutely pure. They might become absolutely crucial in maintaining the pure animal, but goodness, I don’t know where it’s all going to end.
Eve Fesl: I just feel that the spirits of my people are with me in the spirits of these dogs.
Robyn Williams: The Dingo in Australia was written and presented by Jonica Newby. Readings were by Earle Cross and Drew Forsythe. Music by David Page. The Science Show is produced by Polly Rickard and Janita Palmer. I’m Robyn Williams.
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