Koalas, and taxpayers, betrayed by NSW old-growth forest destruction
We found her next to the house, a young female koala trying to struggle to her feet, but falling back exhausted in the grass, unable to reach her food trees.
The 1500 young trees that I planted just over three years earlier to provide habitat stood nearby, ready to sustain her. But even as I urgently called the Friends of the Koala Hospital in Lismore I feared she'd never make it back to feed on them.
It was agonising, waiting for the rescuer to come, not being able to ease her distress. It appeared evident she was suffering from chlamydia, flies buzzing around her in the hot sun, as she tried to summon strength to haul herself upright to wave them away.
Even if she had a chance of survival, the infection would most probably have rendered her barren. Stress had been the cause of this tragic scene – cars, dogs, but basically the overwhelming loss of habitat. She would die the following day, one of the estimated 15,000 koalas left in NSW.
As she lay there suffering by our home at the foot of the Nightcap Ranges in the hinterland of Byron, Forestry Corp was busy further down the coast, logging the proposed Great Koala National Park. Forestry Corp is owned by the NSW government, therefore by you and me.
The park, supposed to connect rich coastal koala habitat to large sections of state forests, was promised by Premier Chris Minns to help him win the 2023 election. Yet, based on Forestry Corporation's own maps as of last June, operations from the Hunter to the Queensland border show more than half of the active logging operations were in the footprint of the proposed Great Koala National Park.
The connectivity across the forests for all native creatures is being broken by the logging. Koalas, particularly, need corridors to find their food trees. They have few primary food species of eucalypt and must rely on secondary species. They also need medicine trees and shelter trees.
Koala habitat was rare and precious even before the devastation of Black Summer when more than 60,000 koalas died or were harmed and, since the floods and cyclones, koala rescue centres have been inundated with injured, mud-caked, diseased and malnourished koalas.
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