The Great Koala Rescue of '93

Wednesday, 13 September 2017

In 1993 I was living in Melbourne and in the first year of my IT degree at Swinburne.  One weekend my brother Paul, friends Andy and Rob, and I, decided to drive out of town to do some orienteering training in the beautiful gold mining terrain that Ballarat had in abundance.   I was carrying some sort of injury, so my plan was to just walk around the area while the others did their own training course.

Being from Tasmania, I wasn’t very familiar with gold mining terrain and I certainly wasn't used to being in areas with mine shafts all over the place. I found them really interesting and after walking past a whole lot I couldn’t resist getting close and peering down into one of them to see how deep it was. It was surprisingly deep - almost 3 metres I reckon - but that wasn’t the most surprising thing about it - there was also the bumper bar of an old car down in there too. That would have been surprising enough, but it still wasn't even the most surprising thing about it.   The fact that there was a koala down there looking up at me was the most surprising thing of all.

How crazy was that.  I had walked past heaps of mine-shafts that day, and I only stopped to look in one, and that one happened to contain a bumper bar AND a koala.  Crazy.

I couldn’t see any way that the koala could get out of the mineshaft - the walls were vertical dirt.  but there wasn’t anything I could do about it so I continued on with my course and met everyone back at the car as planned.  Once I explained what I’d seen we decided to drive out to the area in Rob’s 4wd to investigate further.   We gathered at the spot and agreed the koala was in a predicament - it had maybe climbed or fallen down there and was stuck. The question was how we were going to get it out again.

This was all pre mobile phones but Andy happened to have a camera with him, so we actually have photographic evidence of what happened next.  I must have been the one taking the pictures as I’m not in any of them.  

Or first plan was to find something to put down into the hole so the koala had something to climb out on.  Luckily there was a long branch lying on the ground not too far away so we carried it over and gently lowered it down.  

 

The koala just looked at it, and up at us, as if we were stupid.   It was a narrow branch, so we were afraid that it was too thin for the koala to use.  We needed another plan.  

Without thinking it through too much we decided to lower Rob down into the hole. Incredibly we managed to do that without injury but we now had Rob and the Koala looking up at us as if we were idiots.  We suggested to Rob that he just pass up the koala to us but he wasn’t game to just lift it up without protection so we tossed down a towel that he could use to wrap it with first.  I must mention that everytime anyone came close to the edge of the shaft, a shower of dirt and small rocks were rained down onto the occupants below, making them increasingly agitated. 

After enduring several rock showers, Rob tossed the towel over the koala.  It was quite a small towel, and quite a large koala, so the end result was a bewildered koala with a towel on its head.  It was a this point that the koala obviously decided that the thought of spending the rest of its days stuck in a mineshaft with Rob and a bunch of morons kicking stones onto its head was too much, so it threw off the towel and proceeded to climb up the branch we’d put in there first.  Rob isn't visible in these photos but that is who the koala is looking at..

The branch was so flimsy that Paul had to hold onto it to keep from swinging around like a pole vault.


For a moment I was afraid it was going to keep climbing to the top of the branch and then gouge out Paul's eyes - luckily it decided to leap onto the ground as soon as it possibly could then head for the nearest tree.

 

 Once safely ensconced high in the branches it embarked on an arial assault of sticks and scary sounding growls.

 

Meanwhile our heros hauled Rob out of the ground and we all drove back to Melbourne hardly able to believe the surreal events of the day.  I'm not sure how long the life-span of a koala is, but I'd hazard a guess that it still hates us now, almost 25 years later - it certainly hasn't sent us a thank you card. 

It's good to finally have this story written down - thank you to Andy for scanning and emailing the photos to me today, prompted by my bird rescue story.
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