“Kangaroos snoozing under trees, sea lions basking on beaches, koalas dozing on eucalyptus limbs, and endless white beaches…” stated a recent advertisement for Kangaroo Island in South Australia.
Kangaroo Island has been an oasis for flora and fauna, a “Noah’s ark environment” created approximately 10,000 years ago, when the island was separated from the mainland due to rising sea levels after the last glacial period.
Australia’s third largest island has not been spared in the Australian bushfires. Though it has not seen the devastation of mainland Australia, approximately 48% of the island’s land mass has been impacted by fires according to the BBC News on January 17 of this year.
To many of us, the desolation of Australian habitats, both human and animal, are unfathomable. Before the fires, Jeff Parsons of the UK’s Metro News reported on May 16, 2019, that the Australian Koala Foundation had declared the marsupial ‘functionally extinct’. Koalas have too few breeding adults left to support the species and any kind of genetic disease or pathogen would put the final nail in the coffin, he reported.
The bushfires are making the efforts to save the Koala almost impossible.
To me personally, Australia is especially meaningful. I lived in the Northern Territory for three and a half years when I was a young woman. My son was born in Australia. The people, the wildlife, and the beauty of the land captivated me.
Native Australian mythology, called The Dreaming, describes their Creation story, a sacred era in which ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings created everything. At the beginning of the Dreamtime, the earth was flat and dry and empty… in other words, there was nothing. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Maybe the ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings in The Dreaming should start the Creation again.
Read more about Koalas at: https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/16/koalas-now-functionally-extinct-9565982/?ito=cbshare
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Did Kathryn ever live in Australia?
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