Dingo: The Dog Who Conquered a Continent (12 page)

Probably the first explanation I need to give here is that dingoes don't bark — and nor would their ancestors have barked either. This is why none of the dogs bark in this book.

This is not a true story, but it is what might have happened.

This is a story from five to ten thousand years ago, but probably closer to five, as testing of wild dingoes' DNA and RNA tells us that was likely when the first dingo arrived in Australia, probably from Timor or one of the islands nearby. (If dingoes had arrived much before ten thousand years ago they would have reached Tasmania, as Tasmania was still connected to the mainland then.)

The earliest dingo skeleton found so far is about three and a half thousand years old, but it's likely there were dingoes in Australia long before that.

Dingoes are so similar genetically that it is likely that all the modern packs are descended from one pregnant female. How did she come to be here, one dog, so long ago?

Some stories teach us our history. Others tell us what it might have been like. They're a window on the past and say, ‘This is what could have happened.'

This story is one of those.

There are many other versions of how the dingo first arrived in Australia. Many of them belong to the Indigenous people of the north and all of them differ.

We know little about that time. What we do know is derived from ancient tools, the remnants of plants, middens with shells and pieces of bone and stone-lined ovens, as well as from old histories passed down through many generations. Ancient adzes tell us that Loa's people would have had the tools to make canoes; and the lack of shards of pottery means that they probably didn't know how to make pots.

We also know that at that time, at the end of the last Ice Age, the sea level was about one hundred metres lower than it is now — much of the world's water was still locked up as ice. The camp that Loa came from, and the coast where he arrived, would be underwater now, and probably very different from the land as it is now, although the seasons and many of the plants would be similar.

Even if the sea level had been higher when the first dingoes arrived, earlier than we now think, the first dog must have come here across at least fifty-five kilometres of sea, too far for a dog to swim. Possibly, as in this book, the first dog arrived in a canoe lost in a storm. Later, thousands of years later, when sails and better canoes and then other craft had been invented, traders would regularly cross those waters, as well as fishermen. But not back then.

Blood and guts

Apologies, but this is a book about a dog, and set five thousand years ago. Meat and hunting was what kept life going then. They still do for a wild dog. We can pretend that what comes in a can or as dried dog food wasn't once alive, but what you buy in a can probably came from an animal that suffered more before its death than the swift kills made by Loa and the dogs in this book.

I wanted to write a book about the discovery of humanity's closest friendship — the one we enjoy with domesticated dogs. But to do it I needed to write about things most of us would rather not think of.

The dog as food

Even in the last few hundred years, Macassan and Torres Strait fishermen would take a dog out in their boats as a way of storing food, or to throw to a shark or crocodile if a diver was threatened. I know it will be confronting to many who love dogs to know that dogs were — and still in many places are — valued more as dinner than as friends. But that too is the way things are and have been.

The seasons

Loa's people would have measured time by at least four seasons, possibly five or six or more. I have limited them to four in this book.

The Dry Season — May to late September/early October

It does rain at this time, but the air is dry, not humid.
The early Dry Season can be a season all to itself, with fat tubers and lots of fruit. Later the grass turns gold, then vanishes from the soil. In July and August there are less fruit and fewer tubers to dig and animals to hunt. What was once swamp dries out and cracks.

The Thunder Season — October and November

In this season there is thunder in the air and occasional storms. The grass grows green and tall, and massive tides bring new water to the mangrove swamps.

The Rain/Wet Season — December to early March

This is the season when monsoons, cyclones and big storms may blow in from the sea, when swamps turn to rivers and grasslands turn to swamps.

The Season of Fruit and Flowers — March and April

The season of grass seeds and fruit, bringing flocks of birds.

Dingoes

Dingoes are close to the original wolves that first formed a partnership with humans. Most other dog breeds have been deliberately bred to be small, or lovable, or fetch sticks or game. Dingoes are about as close as we have now to the original wild dog ancestor.

Dogs were first domesticated in the Middle East and the Americas, and travelled from there to South-East Asia. Australian dingoes have Chinese or South-
East Asian ancestors, although they are quite different from modern South-East Asian dogs.

But today's dingoes are probably not quite like the ones who arrived here, who were even closer to being wild dogs, living on the edge of human camps scavenging for food, and often becoming food themselves. (It's worth remembering that dogs thought of humans as food too, as did many other animals nearby.)

Dingoes don't bark as domesticated dogs do. They breed only once a year — dogs breed twice. Only the dominant female dingo in a pack breeds, with the dominant male. The dominant female feeds first too, and then the others. All the others are uncles or aunts who help bring up the puppies. The pack also hunts together, although dingoes will hunt by themselves often too. Nearly all domestic dogs can breed with them — and will unless they are kept apart or desexed, which is one reason why dingoes are becoming an endangered species. Many of the animals we think of as ‘dingoes' are actually part dog.

Dingoes are far more independent than most dogs. They'll go along with what a human wants … most of the time. But they may think about it first.

A dingo hunts quietly and swiftly, often waiting lying on its tummy for prey to arrive rather than chasing it wildly, then leaping at the throat. Dingoes are very efficient hunters and soon became a problem when white settlers brought sheep to the continent. Dingoes were used to hunting wary prey. Sheep, especially before they have been shorn and are
carrying heavy woollen fleeces, are slow and nervous and most breeds aren't very bright, making them remarkably easy for dingoes to hunt and kill.

But even though they are efficient hunters, dingoes aren't aggressive. They can and do fight and bite, but usually only when they — or more usually their puppies — are threatened.

Dingoes changed Australia, possibly helping to wipe out many species like the thylacine and Tasmanian devil on the mainland and helping humans to hunt, as well as providing companionship and joy. Australia also changed the first dogs here, as they became dingoes.

Domesticated dogs arrived with the First Fleet. They were largely accepted by many Indigenous people as, unlike dingoes, the ‘new' dogs would bark to warn of intruders. Dogs — and dingoes — were soon adopted by the people of Tasmania, who until then had never worked with canines.

Governor Arthur Phillip and Captain Hunter also adopted dingoes as pets, but more often the new settlers shot, trapped or poisoned them. The last wild dingoes in my area of New South Wales were killed in the early 1970s, courtesy of a government scheme that dropped poisoned baits to wipe them out. Most dingo traps were cruel — a dingo might even gnaw its own leg off to try to get free — leaving animals in pain to die slowly of thirst or blood loss.

Now, after so long, dingoes may become a tamed species, not just because so many are killed in places where they can become a nuisance for people, but because they are breeding with feral dogs.

Nowadays there are breeding programmes that try to bolster numbers of ‘pure' dingoes, both the gold and the black ones, using DNA tests to make sure they are dingoes, not a dog – dingo hybrid that just looks right.

Most ‘wild dingoes' probably do have some dog in their ancestry — and the proportion is growing. The last large area of ‘pure' wild dingoes was Kakadu National Park, but now even many of the dingoes tested there are hybrids. Fraser Island once had a large colony of pure dingoes, but the most recent study there showed that about a third were hybrids — and those hybrids will probably breed with the others.

It is legal in some states to have a dingo as a pet, but this is carefully regulated. I won't give details here, as the regulations often change. Dingoes are loyal companions — once a dingo has bonded with you it may not ever regard anyone else as its partner. But never think a dingo is an easy pet. A companion dingo is beautiful, strong, wise, funny and determined. But every dingo is still, despite so many generations of association with humans, very much its own creature. Never approach a wild dingo, or try to tame one as Loa did. Dingoes may attack if stirred or threatened — but they can also see you as a threat, even if you don't mean to be.

Dingo life cycle

Australian dingo puppies are generally born after a sixty-three-day gestation between March and June. There are usually about four to six in a litter. At first the puppies' eyes are closed and they drink only milk.
Later they eat meat that the mother has chewed and partly digested and vomited up for them; and after that they begin to eat the food she — or the rest of the pack — bring back for them. Slowly they learn to hunt and track, following the others as they learn their skills.

Dingo pups are weaned at about two months of age and within a year most are independent, some staying with the pack but more moving on to make a new pack, or joining another. Male dingoes can breed once they are about a year old. So can female dingoes, but often they don't until they are two years old.

Young dingoes can have their first puppies slightly out of the normal season, as the one in this book did.

The name ‘dingo'

The Eora people who lived around Sydney Harbour called wild dogs ‘warrigal'. Tame dogs were known as ‘tingo', and that is where we got the name ‘dingo'. Loa's language would have been very different from any language spoken today, just as the English we speak today is utterly changed from the English spoken a thousand years ago. I haven't tried to recreate that language, and so have used the modern word ‘dingo'. Loa uses the word ‘dog' — the word he'd have used in his own language for the animals he knew.

Why are there no coconuts, sails or wild millet in this story?

This story is set at least five thousand years ago. Coconuts probably hadn't been brought to the islands
north of Australia at that stage — and certainly not to the mainland. Millet doesn't seem to have been gathered yet and sails still weren't used in this part of the world.

The coastline was very different too. It's likely that the land Loa set out from, and the place he landed, are underwater today. The swamps and to some extent even the river systems would have been different too. None of the places in this book are based on any specific area that exists now.

Loa's knee

Loa didn't break his leg when the canoe crashed. Instead he tore his medial collateral ligament — the same injury I had while I wrote the book. The medial ligament holds the kneecap in place. It can be agonisingly painful, as when the kneecap moves it tears more flesh and ligaments, but if you keep the knee immobilised — and you're lucky — it does heal. (I tore my knee climbing down a cliff without a rope to look at what I thought might be a rare plant. It wasn't — and I was silly and careless. And many thanks indeed to Nicol for helping my knee heal much faster and less painfully than Loa's.)

With all the benefits of modern health care, I knew my knee would eventually heal. Loa would have feared that he'd be a cripple forever.

The dog's name

Most of us give human names to the animals we are close to, but this wasn't always so. It would probably
never have occurred to Loa to name the dog. It may have taken many generations of dogs and humans living together for humans to realise that a dog could learn a particular name, and come or obey when that word was used.

Many humans who are close to an animal still don't give their animal friends a human name. I've known farmers and bushies who just call their companion ‘Dog' or ‘Hey You'. I call one of the wombats who shares my life ‘Wombat', although to others she is known as ‘Mothball'.

Names are human devices, not animal. Animals just learn — sometimes — what we mean when we use them. But sharing your life with an animal — whether it is a dog, cat, horse or wombat — is one of the greatest joys and privileges a human can have.

It is difficult to know where to start with thanks for a book like this. Its existence is owed to the many researchers in ethnobotany, anthropology, zoology and many other disciplines that enabled me to recreate the world of so long ago, as well as the dedication and empathy of the many people who have worked with and studied dingoes. Thanks are due not just for the research this book is based on, but for opening the ever-fascinating complexities of the world to others.

As always, enormous thanks to Lisa Berryman, for giving me the freedom to follow my inspiration, even when it isn't for the book that was on the schedule, and for her ever-wonderful assessments, encouragement and insistence that each manuscript reach its highest possible potential.

Kate Burnitt has worked and reworked this book, picking up errors and inconsistencies. If Loa no longer gets into a canoe twice without getting out of it — and many similar mistakes — it is entirely due to Kate, with her endless perfectionism and patience.

Angela Marshall as always performed the miracle of turning what many might find gibberish into a properly spelled manuscript, as well as giving her own extraordinary depth of knowledge both to Loa's world
and the intimacies of canine behaviour. Again — and again — much love and so many, many thanks. I hope that your students will find that this book speaks to them too.

To my husband Bryan, who probably will read neither these acknowledgements nor the book (he prefers books with diagrams, and preferably submarines), my love and gratitude always, for letting me expound my theories of the ancient world while you pretend to listen, your eyes almost imperceptibly flicking over your
New Scientist
or computer screen.

And finally — this book, and at least two others, wouldn't have been written without the loving inspiration of Hank Huffington, to whom this book is dedicated.