I was interested to stumble across a letter written to the editor of the New York Times in 1992. It was an attempt to water down an earlier report in that very reputable publication that the koala was in dire trouble and on the fast track to extinction. The letter was sent by a Mr Christopher Sweeney, Counsellor, Public Affairs at the Australian Embassy in Washington at that time.
Here is Mr Sweeney’s letter:
Funny then, that history shows that there has been very little investment in koala research and that, for the most part, it has been progressed by not-for-profit organisations and tertiary institutions in recent years on the smell of an oily rag. Indeed in 2010 koala experts are crying out for a meaningful investment in koala research, and particularly in the area of koala disease.
It’s interesting too, that Mr Sweeney was posted in the USA, because without the intervention of the USA Government, Australia would be very unlikely to have any koalas today. It was the USA who thankfully halted the koala fur trade in the early part of last century. By this time koalas had become extinct in South Australia and numbered only in their hundreds in other states. Koalas remained on the country’s radar and, in 2000, the USA listed the species as vulnerable to extinction. The assessment for the same conservation status in Australia has not been so straightforward, with a review presently being undertaken and an announcement due by the Federal Government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee by September this year, some ten years after it was listed by the USA.
It begs the question, did Mr Sweeney know the situation was dire for koalas, even then, and his letter was simply PR “spin” - or were he and other senior government officials simply ignorant to the reality of the situation?
Re-reading Mr Sweeney's resolute letter, I can only lament that had koalas been the beneficiary of serious government investment and so-called “sophisticated” management and research programs for the best part of the last twenty years then surely this amazing, yet acutely vulnerable species, would not be looking down the barrel of extinction yet again.
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