Australia’s extinction crisis doesn’t begin when the last animal dies. It begins much earlier – when people stop noticing what’s missing.
This occurred to me at a barbecue recently when I mentioned quolls in conversation and was met with blank stares around the table. Not one person knew what they were. Think about that for a moment.
Quolls are among Australia’s most remarkable native predators. These spotted marsupials, found nowhere else on Earth, have become so absent from our national consciousness that many Australians no longer even know they exist.
A few days after the barbecue, a friend shared a photo in our group chat of a fox wandering through her backyard. Another responded simply: “So cute!”
I haven’t stopped thinking about that contrast. In many ways, those two moments captured Australia’s extinction crisis perfectly.
We are living through a bizarre cultural amnesia where invasive predators are normalised, even adored as in this case, while the native species they help drive towards extinction disappear so completely we forget their names altogether. In fact, a 2020 survey found that almost one in five Australians believed foxes were native to Australia. And honestly, who could blame them?
Most Australians are never taught about invasive species in any meaningful way. We grow up celebrating gum trees, kangaroos and the bush, but rarely understand the things reshaping the places beneath our feet.
Foxes and cats kill billions of native animals every year. Deer trample bushland and pollute waterways. Rabbits strip landscapes bare. Weeds choke native trees and cause more ferocious bushfires. The crisis is everywhere, yet invisible to so many.
That invisibility is politically convenient. When people don’t understand the scale of the problem, governments can continue treating nature protection like a niche issue, instead of the national emergency it is. Funding gets cut, programs limp along in short-term cycles and environmental biosecurity is perpetually underfunded.
Australia already has one of the worst animal extinction records on Earth, and invasive species are the leading driver of those losses.
Some species are no longer seen. Certain sounds are no longer heard. And eventually, particular names are no longer recognised.
People in Sydney will probably remember the extinction of the monorail than they will the extinction of the eastern quoll from the Australian mainland, but it was not that long ago that they were commonly found across Sydney. The last ever wild eastern quoll officially recorded on the mainland was found as roadkill in Vaucluse in 1963. That is a moment in Sydney’s history we should remember.
Instead, “quoll”, for many, has been reduced to a word you’d need to check the answers for when doing a crossword puzzle. This is the legacy we risk leaving the next generation: erasure.
Because once people stop recognising a species, protecting it becomes infinitely harder.
This crisis fundamentally clashes with how we as Australians see ourselves. We tell ourselves we are outdoor people. We celebrate uniquely Australian wildlife as part of our national identity. We pride ourselves on our connection to the bush, the beach, the weekend camping trip and the local walking track.
But increasingly, many of us see green and assume nature is healthy – not realising our local bushland may be choking under a blanket of invasive weeds, suffocating the native plants and displacing the animals that belong there.
It is this disconnection from our ecological reality that is the gradual unmaking of Australia.
Perhaps that is the most dangerous thing about invasive species in this country. They reshape what feels normal – and they lower the bar of what we expect nature to look like.
Australians once knew what it meant to lose the Tasmanian tiger. Today, many could walk past a quoll without knowing what it is. That should alarm us far more than it does.
Nicola Barton is media and communications Invasive Species Council
Nicola Barton is media and communications manager for the Invasive Species Council.