While Andrew Burke is in Tasmania, I just happen on this, in The Fatal Impact, by
Alan Moorehead (Penguin, p.267 Penguin]
There were still in Tasmania at this time [1820? maybe he means later] great
unexplored rain-forests with tree-ferns said to be a hundred feet high, and, at
the other end of the scale, plants so minute and sensitive that the closed at
the sound of a passing butterfly. Like the aborigines, the fauna was already
vanishing. The Tasmanian devil, an untameable cat of nocturnal habits, was on
the way to becoming extinct, and the flocks of parrots that were once so thick
that Flinders found he could not take the altitude of the sun at midday, were no
longer to be seen.
Hmmm, copying this out makes it seem a melange of the dubious sensational...
Max in melbourne
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