The Behaviour of the Koala 1. Background

     If you had visited Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary during the years, 1971 to 1973 you may have seen a strange young man sitting on a foldable cloth stool outside the main enclosure scribbling notes onto an exercise book. If the Sanctuary was quiet, he might be reading a book, his eyes flicking up to the koalas every few seconds. At other times, he might have been sitting inside one of the enclosures, or he could have been handling the koalas, or waving a camera or the microphone of a tape recorder at them.
     That strange young man was me, and I was undertaking the thesis for my Master's degree at the University of Queensland. The managers of the sanctuary, Patrick and Paul Robertson were involved in martial arts, and had a special attraction to all things Japanese. They were thus friends of my supervisor, Dr (later Prof) Jiro Kikkawa, and it was he who gained permission for me to use the Sanctuary as a centre for making the first detailed study of the behaviour of this unusual marsupial.

The Behaviour of the Koala. 2. Basics

Sleeping

     The first thing a visitor to the Sanctuary will notice is that most of the koalas are curled up asleep in a fork of a tree. Sleeping is their major "activity", followed by eating. Typically, the head is down and the arms folded, or clasping the tree, but the whole of their weight rests on a small section of the rump where the skin lies right next to the bone. The photo at left demonstrates it perfectly. (Yes, I know it's not 100% in focus, but please understand that this was the first time I had ever used a single lens reflex camera.) On hot days they will sprawl out in all sorts of odd positions, always taking the weight on the same spot. Cubs curl up in much the same way in their mother's laps, and adults may even sit like that on the ground, or sit like a dog, or sometimes squat like a man. When it is really hot, some of them spread out on their bellies.

The Behaviour of the Koala. 3. Bringing Up Baby

     One of the most peculiar myths, which may or may not still be current, is that these gormless marsupials spank their children. I don't know where it started, or how, but it was certainly reported as a fact by Ambose Pratt in his 1937 book, The Call of the Koala. Once a visitor to Lone Pine told me, in all seriousness, how she and her husband had once heard heard a loud crying or wailing in the bush, looked up, and saw two adult koalas - Mummy Bear and Daddy Bear, no doubt - chastising Little Baby Bear. The little offender would be turned over one parent's knee and, after that parent had finished paddling its posterior, it threw the child to the other parent for a repeat performance. She recounted it with such visible sincerity, that I would have been tempted to believe it, if it weren't obvious nonsense, and it became a lesson to me for the next time I heard some other improbable tale related convincingly. It is not just that I never observed such a thing myself. It is that, first of all, nothing a baby koala could do could possibly merit punishment and, secondly, the animals do not possess the fixed motor patterns which would enable them to do so. So, with that in mind, let's look at what really happens with bringing up baby.

The Behaviour of the Koala. 4. Communication

     Even a solitary, antisocial animal needs to be able to communicate, if only to say: "Get off my turf!" and the three methods of doing so are vocalisations (sounds), facial expressions, and scent. So let us start with the first one.

The Behaviour of the Koala. 5. Sex

     In my younger days, when I was giving speeches on the subject, I used to say that the koala's sex life was rather similar to that of humans: the females get jumpy and chase the males, while the males assail every available female and bellow like a bull if they don't get any. Of course, that was spoken in jest, but there was a certain amount of truth in it. The sexual behaviour of koalas contains many interesting features.

The Behaviour of the Koala. 6. Fighting

     In captivity, koalas are mostly very placid, easy-going creatures, but when they fight, they really fight. In all cases the basic pattern is the same: an arm is thrown over the victim, which is then bitten on whatever part of the anatomy is closest.

The Behaviour of the Koala. 7. Comments and References

     It is possible to become much attached to koalas. On my last day at the Sanctuary I took photos of all my favourite characters from a sense of nostalgia. I left with a feeling that I had opened a door on a social system and behaviour repertoire which was both deceptively complex and deceptively simple.

Some People's Damascus Road Experiences

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with Me. (Rev. 3:20)

     No doubt that is how it is for most of us. But sometimes the Lord does not simply wait patiently outside the door. There are times when He comes with a battering ram, smashes the door down, and drags the occupant, sometimes kicking and screaming, to the feast. St Paul knew all about it; it happened to him on the road to Damascus. Here are a few other examples of other people's Damascus Road conversions. No doubt there are many more out there. God only knows how many.

The Christian Explosion in China

                   No doubt many of you, as children, would have been given the following exercise. For a month's wages, would you prefer to be paid (a) $1,000 a day, or (b) one cent the first day, two cents the second, and so on, doubling the pay every day? If you chose the second option, you would receive only a paltry $5.12 on day 10, but for day 30 your wages would be more than half a million dollars. Such is the magic of exponential growth.

     Now, consider the one cent on the first day as the mustard seed of Matt. 13: 31-32. If a religion grows by just 50% per generation, relative to the population, then, from a baseline of a few hundred or few thousand followers, it will remain insignificant for a long time. But once it reaches one percent of the population, it is on track to reach five percent in 100 years, and 25% in 200. And in 300 years ...? And there is also evidence that, at specific times and places, Christianity have expanded much faster. In The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark has demonstrated that the history of the religion in the Roman Empire is consistent with a growth rate of 40% per decade. Thus it was that, by the third century, the Roman authorities discovered that a movement, originally no more than an irritant, was now too large to stop. Closer to our own times, in the 1980s, commentators began to notice that sub-Saharan Africa was rapidly turning Christian.

   Why do I mention this? Because it appears that exactly the same thing is being played out right now in the largest country on earth.

Rates of Cure for Homosexuality

     Shortly after the powers that be declared that homosexuality was not a mental disorder, they proclaimed that dogma that it was also impossible to change. Prior to that, it was taken for granted among psychiatrists in the field that a cure for homosexuality was possible - difficult, time-consuming, and uncertain, to be sure, but definitely possible - and they had the case studies to prove it. Sexual orientation change therapy is neither new, nor restricted to religious zealots, not ineffective.
     There is a certain irony which is never mentioned. The naysayers have never come out with a study whereby the therapy has been applied to a large number of conscientious patients, and found to be 100% ineffective. On the contrary, there is ample evidence of cure rates of the order of a third to a half of patients. Indeed, in a high proportion of cases, change is spontaneous. Whitehead and Whitehead devoted a whole chapter of their book, My Genes Made Me Do It (downloadable here) to both spontaneous and assisted change. Dr Spitzer, who was largely instrumental in getting homosexuality taken off the list of mental disorders, nevertheless, to his surprise, discovered that a lot of people had made successful changes. More detailed is that of Dr Phelan, who quoted 100-odd studies, some very old, some very new. I am glad I copied it when I first encountered it, because now it can generally be found on the net only minus the long list of references which gives it its value. For your information, therefore, I enclose the full review. I am sure he would not mind.