You only know what you know.

You never stop learning.

There’s a couple of cliches that we trot out all the time.

  And at the age of 63, I think I know some stuff, limited by my own life experiences, of course.

  Two degrees, a lifetime of reading, a range of different and interesting jobs, and living in both the City of Melbourne and country towns, including a fascinating 7-year stint in Alice Springs, Northern Territory.

  The curiosity that led me to live in different Australian places started with holidays in almost every state when we were children. Dad got us out of the city any chance he could and camping in tents was the norm. When I was 14, Dad, Mum and their mates Laurie and Joan hooked up a couple of caravans, took seven kids out of school and embarked on a two-family adventure driving halfway around Australia over a period of three months. Fifty years later, we all still talk about it.

  So I saw all those things that have become everyday fodder on YouTube. Snakes, spiders, blue tongue lizards, perenties, crocodiles, koalas, wallabies, camels, koalas, wombats, echidnas, emus, pelicans, dolphins, dingoes, birds, birds, birds. I saw them in the wild. How lucky was I.

  Tasmania was not somewhere we visited as a family. I was lucky to go there on a school camp when I was 13 in the 1970s. We stayed in cabins at Cradle Mountain National Park and dealt with possums stealing our food and leeches on our hike. There were no boardwalks back then. I loved it.

  But I missed an important piece of information. And when I wrote Chapter 19 of “Alice A Tasmanian Story” about the family’s travels in the wild, I drew on my personal experiences and a fantastic Tasmanian travel guide written in 1886 by Howard Haywood. This is what I wrote.

 

  "On other nights we heard sounds like a pig snorting but we knew they were just native bears, beautiful furry creatures that we would sometimes see on our travels sleeping in the trees. Robert said if we got hungry we could eat them and I joined the children in admonishing him for wanting to kill the lovely creatures."

 

  I was writing about koalas, originally called native bears. The first time I heard that loud snorting sound I was about 9. We were staying in a holiday house in the bush at Halls Gap, Victoria. The sound was frightening and I got out of bed, wide-eyed, to ask Dad what it was. As I recall, we were taken outside on one of those nights to see the large male koala climb down from the tree and stride across to the next tree which he climbed like a pro.

  Perhaps I created the fable in my own mind that there were koalas in Tasmania and this happened when we were on the school camp at Cradle Mountain National Park. It was after dark and I was by myself, being curious, and climbed down a two metre drop. I glanced behind and saw my friend following a little way behind. She couldn’t see me and there was a nice thick bush right beside me. I hid in the bush. My friend stopped at the top of the drop, looking out into the dark for me. I started snorting and shaking the branches, sounding just like an angry male koala. My friend screamed and I revealed myself, laughing. She thought it was a great joke, asked if I’d do the same to our other friends. Sure, back into the bush I went. However, when she went back to camp playing her terror like a seasoned actor, the rumour went round the camp in an instant that there was a wild animal nearby. Within no time, I had most of the camp including a teacher at the top of the two metre drop. Somehow I didn’t laugh, I snorted and thrashed about and listened to the various responses of curiosity and fear. It was brilliant. Finally, one of the boys decided to be heroic.

  “I’m going to have a look,” he said.

  The teacher’s panicked voice cried, “No, no, don’t go near it.”

  “It’ll be alright,” said the boy. I was about to be sprung, so I thought I’d move to the grand finale. As the boy started to move down the drop, I jumped out, giving the biggest snort I could muster. The boy was so shocked he yelled and moved backwards through the air, one of the funniest things I’d ever seen.

  So when I wrote about the native bears in Tasmania, in my mind they were definitely there. Thankfully, Glenn Carins, a renowned Tasmanian author, edited my book. He wrote, “What are these? Tasmania has never had koalas.”

  At last, 50 years after my koala impression, I had learned an important new fact about Tasmania’s wildlife. Thank you Glenn, for maintaining my credibility, continuing my education and giving me a good laugh at my own expense.