On a spring day in 1997, I found myself sitting on the banks of Tietken's Birthday Creek, a beautiful coolibah-fringed waterway that drains the Musgrave Ranges in northern South Australia. Around me Aboriginal children are alternately playing and listening as a Tjilpi-an Anangu elder by the name of Ginger Wikilyiri-tells of the creatures he knew as a youth. I have brought a box-full of museum specimens along, and as Ginger gently picks up the stuffed animals, his eyes fill with sadness. He seems to be searching their soft fur for answers as he says that
once they were everywhere-then, how
quickly, they were all gone.

The plains and ranges hereabout once swarmed with rabbit-sized marsupials, and their disappearance is one of the most mystifying extinction events the continent has ever seen. Twenty-three species were lost, the remainder being confined to offshore islands or remnant patches. By and large, all that is left today are the larger kangaroos and the mouse-sized creatures. But the remarkable thing is that even now there are people like Ginger who can remember eating those extinct animals. Talking to such elders is like consulting an encyclopedia of now vanished desert life-to a biologist this could hardly be more exciting.

Ginger says that he does not know why they disappeared, but a big drought in the 1930s may have had an effect-foxes too. A woman elder by the name of Mungita chimes in, saying that the drought was important. As they pass the museum skins around, they speak at length and with eloquence in their Yankunytjatjara dialect about the mystery. They clearly feel a great fondness for the vanished animals and the way of life they supported, which is undulled by a half-century absence.

I inquire, one by one, about the various species. Once its Aboriginal name is ascertained the information comes out in a precise, almost formal way. This one lived on the sand dunes, that one in the rocks. This one bred in spring, and had two to three young. That one had a single young at a time. This ate leaves and that one insects.

So devastated is the mammal fauna of central Australia that even the brushtail possum is gone from Anangu lands. It was once common, Ginger says, and it held on a little longer than the rest. Then Ginger's son Gilbert, who is perhaps in his fifties and has until now been silent, pipes up. 'I know where they went,' he says in a whisper (a tone Desert people adopt when a major point is to be made). 'They all gone down to Adelaide. I seen them there.'

Later that day we return to our camp among the granite domes of the Musgraves. A light rain has fallen, and the lichens on Sentinel Hill now look alive, punctuating the rocks with pale green. Somewhere among those domes are the last of the middle-sized mammals left in the region-three small colonies of black-flanked rock-wallabies (Petrogale lateralis). A team from the South Australian Department of Environment and Heritage is there conducting a survey, and has caught a female. I have the honour of holding her while she is weighed and her pouch checked for young. She is a lovely, soft creature with a well-grown joey. Despite her fertility the colonies are vanishing, laid siege to by changed patterns of fire, introduced predators and competition from goats and rabbits. Fox-baiting might give them a chance, the rangers say, but dingoes take the baits too, and dingoes kill foxes, making them important allies. To my dismay I discover that rabbits are-with the aid of a post-calici bounceback-relatively abundant, as are cats.

As I sit among the granite tors discussing the diminishing wallaby colonies, my attention is drawn to an older man who has thus far remained silent. His name is Robin and he speaks very little English. I learn through an interpreter that Robin was born on the other side of the frontier, and has always led an independent life, avoiding the mission stations. His principal early contact with Europeans was through dingo trappers, with whom he travelled on camel and horseback, learning how to take dog scalps for the bounty. Robin is one of only two old men in the area who can still knap stone (strike flakes off larger pieces to make tools), and as someone who lived through a first-contact situation he has interesting things to say about the arrival of the Europeans.

Robin saw his first white man while he was still a youth. Both he and Ginger explain that Aborigines encountering Europeans for the first time stalked the intruders, doing without fire for days so as not to draw attention to themselves. This fascinates me because it bears on an important argument surrounding land management in Australia-how frequent was fire before 1788, when the First Fleet brought its convicts to Sydney Cove? There are those who argue that burning the bush was rather infrequent back then. They explain away the many instances of smoke recorded by explorers as the result of signal fires lit by Aborigines to alert others to the presence of the strangers. But Robin and Ginger's testimony points in the opposite direction: fire may have been suppressed by Aborigines who saw the intruders, so the columns of smoke recorded by Europeans may have been fewer than normal.

A few days later, near Uluru, I meet Nugget Dawson (Tjilpi Nagada)-the other capable stone-knapper and a great source of traditional knowledge. As we speak Nugget draws in the sand with his finger, tracing the journeys of his youth in the days before roads, cars, camels and white men. 'Walking everywhere,' our translator says, 'walking all over my country, burning, hunting, visiting the sacred sites, making sure that the red kangaroos increase, the hare wallabies increase.' His finger describes a great oval in the red sand, a trace linking small circles and crinkled lines, representing the all-important waters and sacred sites. Then he stops and looks directly at me, saying, 'But now the white men have come and they have made their own sacred sites, putting up fences around them so that we cannot go in. They use those sacred sites to increase their money.'

He is absolutely right. The whites took the land from the Aborigines and gave it to their sacred cows, in whose name they irrevocably changed the Centre, so that Nugget's remembered landscape is no more, and can never be again.

Country by Tim Flannery. Out Now from Text Publishing. Illustrated paperback, $32.00. ISBN: 1 920885 447