Jack Ashby

So we became very well known to the general store and they convinced us to go to the Adventure Bay New Year's Eve party.

They said, bring your own food, bring your own music, bring your own grog.

And we expected that everyone in South Bruny, or at least 150 people or so in reach of the village, would be there.

But we opened the door.

It was a stormy night.

It felt like American Werewolf in London.

The tourists opened the door to the pub.

Everyone just stops immediately and stares at them.

And there were 12 people in this party.

They were extraordinarily welcoming, but they were all waltzing.

They'd been learning a waltz for their New Year's Eve party since February.

But one of the guests, there's 12 people, and there was a wallaby, which was an extraordinary experience that someone had rescued them.

a pouch young of a roadkill, Bennett's wallaby.

So I spent much of the evening with this baby wallaby that couldn't leave the warmth of a warm body.

So it was definitely the best New Year's Eve I've ever had.

So I think, absolutely, I think those two things you just described, the kind of everything is trying to kill you and the primitive idea, are both very much intertwined.

So these are both ways of kind of writing off Australian mammals.

And I'm sure entirely subconscious, but it's a hangover from a colonial mindset.

If you read any 19th century description or 18th century description of Australian mammals, they are all...

without exception, describing them as lesser mammals, of lower, inferior, primitive indeed, that they are not meeting this... So in being seen as being different to the kind of zoological standard of the animals they were familiar with in Europe and the Americas...