Rowena Lennox - Dingo Bold: The Life and Death of K’gari Dingoes

drums rolled off in my forehead
And the guns went off in my chest

The Triffids, Wide Open Road, 1986

He has a multicoloured tag in his ear.

Blood throbs at the back of my head as he comes closer. My heart is beating so hard and loud I am sure he can hear it.

He looks up at me. He seems to be asking for something. The way his torso narrows to his rump looks skinny from where I stand. He flinches, almost imperceptibly, and I think, Hes as nervous as I am. I can scare him off if I need to.

But I stay still.

He goes around behind me. I look straight ahead. He walks away.

Later I find the photos I took on my phone. Initially I dont know why I took a picture with a foreground full of sand, tracked with light brown roots and wispy pale green strokes of dune grass; a middle ground of silhouetted casuarinas on the dune; and a cerulean sky washed by wave-like clouds. Only when I zoom in on the centre of the image do I notice, in the shade cast by the dune, a dingo heading straight for me. Another dingo, also hardly distinguishable in the shadow, is in the picture too, further away on the dune with his back toward me.

I took one more photograph as he approached.

I wish I had an image of his face when we conversed but photographing him would not have been conversing with him. I have no memory of taking two photos of him leaving, his shadow in the afternoon sun so much bigger than he is.

when a dingo is hungry it will kill to eat and then it takes it

Barbara Tjikadu in Lindy Chamberlain, Through My Eyes: An Autobiography, 1990

There was never a time when dingoes didnt exert an illicit pull in my mind. In the 1970s when I was growing up in an outer suburb of Sydney , people were not allowed to keep them as pets. They had a reputation for being impervious to human control, a law unto themselves qualities that appealed to me. Our family had blue cattle dogs, who counted dingoes among their ancestors. Our dog Beau could beat every other dog in the street in a fight and jump unbelievable heights. No enclosure could contain him. When my parents separated, he not we decided which household he would live in. His intelligence, prowess and independence might have come partly from his dingo gene s.

Three of our dogs died like dingoes when five-year-old Possum and her two grown pups took a strychnine bait in the woodpile on the verge outside my fathers house. A neighbour told us how Possum had watched her pups die before her.

I knew that, historically, dingoes were considered pests I read Dusty , a novel written in the 1940s about an outlaw dingokelpie cross when I was a child but until a few years ago when I started researching dingoes as part of an essay I was writing about my kelpiecattle dog Zefa, I was unprepared for how vehement emotions around dingoes are. On the radio I listen to farmers from around Blackall in Queensland rail against the wild dogs that are driving them out of sheep production. I hear the rage and powerlessness people feel when they find their wounded animals after attacks. I see pictures of dingoes hanging from trees and strung up on fences by their back legs, their muzzles stretched toward the earth. On the internet are reports produced by state governments and organisations such as WoolProducers Australia and the Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Council that describe wild dogs and dingoes in well-researched detail and indicate more effective ways to manage them. Manage is a euphemism for eradicate. This violence is part of the shadow story of my country.

Heres trouble, I think. Im in.

In moments of lesser bravado I wonder why we go around killing other living beings on this scale.

I start searching for dingoes. My husband, children and I take a few days to drive from Sydney to the Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo. On the way we go for bushwalks and I look for dingo scats and tracks in the Blue Mountains and at Mount Canobolas in the central west of New South Wales. I picture dingo habitat on the scrubby undulating edges of the Great Dividing Range.

At the zoo in Dubbo I stand at the dingo enclosure for two days and watch Bunjil and Mojin go about their business and doze in the sun.

My family and I visit a wildlife park at Helensburgh on the southern outskirts of Sydney . I go to the dingo enclosure to watch the dingoes and talk to the keeper who comes to feed them. My children are impatient. I visit a dingo breeder in Victoria. The pups undo my shoelaces and climb up my legs. Their fur is soft and they smell of ammonia. At a conference I touch noses with a rescue dingo. She licks my mouth.

I start to interpret our dog Zefas behaviour in the light of what I am learning about dingoes ecological relationships. At night when Zefa chases a possum down the driveway and urinates at the base of the tree it has climbed I deduce that she is communicating with the possum: Im here. Come down and face the consequences. When she eats all of the food in our friends cats bowl, perhaps shes not just being a glutton, perhaps she is performing an instinctive duty, showing the cat, a mesopredator, that she is the apex predator, top of the food chain: