..not generally natural to where wombats delve. Many fragile metres of foil and fibreglass were regarded as a mere inconvenience to its general construction and mining operations and were demolished both rapidly and noisily in the small hours of a winter morning as it waddled and crumped its way under the house to directly underneath where I was sleeping. To say that I woke with a start is an understatement as it did sound like the seven dwarfs were in full swing with pick and shovel. I thought that an extensive tunnel-and-chamber complex was being developed and that even though wombats are solitary animals in this case a consortia of Vombatidae had been developed and that our house would disappear into a newly wombat-made cavern.
In the Bible it may say ‘and so it passed’ but in this case it looked like it had come to stay.
No doubt the flood of warm air from the broken ducting made the intellectually diminutive beast more comfortable, but we were now largely bereft of warmth. And of course it is particularly cold at the moment here in the outer fringes of Melbourne and I did think it better that I have the benefit of expensively warmed air than the rather better insulated wombat.
Well, the ducting has been repaired by me – crawling under the house was a speciality that I didn’t need to revisit – but keeping the beast out is a different matter. These animals have a protected status and you just cannot attempt to pick them up and take them elsewhere. It is not even legal. Wombats are very territorial and will savage any interlopers into their territory, so putting a carefully wrapped marsupial into the boot and dropping it in a nearby municipality is not a nice, or proper, thing to do. Actually, trying to pick one up is not recommended either as they are made to the same specific density as depleted uranium and those claws, so artful adapted to digging through clay and rock, may do one a little damage to one’s flesh.
The idea with wombat proofing is to make ingress impossible but egress easy by leaving a one-way door on their favourite way out. Wherever that might be. Get it wrong, and wombats will walk through heavy duty mesh right beside your cunningly created door because that is what they do. Something to do with limited brain power or just an interesting sense of humour. And of course they can still decide to dig under whatever barriers you have put in their way, although excavating through bricks, chicken wire on the ground or concrete blocks is another matter. As I have proved.
Now, I am not the heaviest of sleepers at the best of times, but as the fortified perimeter was being established I became attuned to the slightest scruffle, actual, potential or imagined. In the small hours of the morning when wombats start the night shift and begin brewing their breakfast coffee, washing the dishes and going to the bathroom the noises instantly alerted my heightened senses. I would awake with a mighty adrenalin rush that prevented me from sleeping for the next eight hours. The person in the mirror soon resembled the horrified mask of Edward Munch’s “The Scream”. Not worth $119,922,500 however that one version fetched in 2012. As one commentator said about the buyer “If they did understand it, they would do something more generous with the money.”
Strangely I have never seen the beast that walks in the night - although others have - so to me it was just a cacophony of unwelcome sounds that a created an image of a red-eyed fiend that waited until I had dropped off before deliberately creating as much of a ruckus as possible. Most likely it came from a few doors down where a kind couple had raised an orphaned wombat from infancy and then let it roam free. Thanks.
But I think, hope, pray that I have finally won the battle. The past few nights have been quiet and though the neighbours’ dogs still bark that might be at anything from a possum to a fox. Or a passing wombat.
There is a triangular green sign on our front gate that says ‘Land for Wildlife’. I hereby give notice that this does not include the land under the house.