Adventures in the South Pacific: The Australian Rainforest

Over the past month, I took an extensive trip to Australia and New Zealand, with the primary intention of observing the wildlife in those places. What follows will be a four-part blog essay on how those places have been impacted by humans, and what sort of human impact I personally encountered during my visit there.
Australia was colonized by humans about 40,000 years ago through what is now Indonesia and New Guinea. These people became the ancestors of today's Aboriginal people, who are considered to be the "natives" of Australia. At the time, Australia as a whole was a much wetter, more densely forested continent than it is now. The area of Australia that we visited--the northern tip of Queensland--is still forested, but much of the interior of Australia is now grassland or desert and is referred to as the Outback.
It was also during this time that many of Australia's large native animals, including twenty-foot monitor lizards, half-ton flightless birds, and wombats the size of hippos, became extinct. It is now believed that human hunting was the reason for this. Today, the largest land animals in Australia are red kangaroos.
Australia's biodiversity is still rich, and most of the wildlife that we saw--including kangaroos, wallabies, flying foxes, cassowaries, lorikeets, and cockatoos-- was native. However, we also saw some introduced species, including mynas and cane toads, both of which were ubiquitous in the more developed areas that we visited. However, the rainforest is under threat as well. Often as we drove from one hiking area to another, we passed by tracts of forest that had been felled to make way for crops.
Yet for all the destruction it has endured, the rainforests of Australia survived in their primal state remarkably well. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for some of the other places we visited.


The southern, or double-wattled cassowary, one of Australia's largest living birds and a highly specialized creature of the rainforest.