Gro Flatebo

Fraser Island Dingoes: Hard Tracks in Soft Sand

          A dingo ate my baby.
          I get that line whenever I tell someone I’m writing about dingoes. It’s Seinfeld-funny, a gag line. But only Americans laugh; Australians wince. For them it’s a painful and polarizing statement. They know the complexity and injustice of that anguished cry. How feeding wild predators and treating them as pets can create a Stephen King-like monster capable of grabbing a baby out of its bed, running into the bush, and devouring it.
          I didn’t know the background for this line until our family moved to Australia for my husband’s job. David, the rogue yard man hired by our landlord, educated me quickly. Always wearing short shorts, heavy boots, and an Aussie bush hat, David was very opinionated. If I was bored when he came to mow, I would lead him on with questions until he got cracking on a story. An innocent question about dingoes started him off.
          “The legal system in this country is from the bloody middle ages,” he started. “The police made up their mind about what happened to that baby early on and didn’t listen to anybody. They couldn’t fathom that her mother was telling the truth.” I could tell by the way he stood, feet apart facing me full-on that I was in for a long treatise full of foul language and blame. I have since pieced together the story and tried to make sense of it for myself.

***

The first time a dingo attacked a human, no one believed it. In 1980, Lindy Chamberlain put her baby to bed in a campground near Uluru, a National Park in the center of the Australian Outback. Five minutes later, her daughter’s screams summoned her back to the tent. She glimpsed a dingo leaving the tent with his head down. The baby was not inside. The police investigating her daughter’s disappearance never believed Lindy; no human had ever been attacked by a dingo before. Feeding dingoes scraps was routine in the campground, supporting a roaming pack. There had been other problems ― nips and bites, one dingo even jumped into the back seat of a car where a baby was strapped in. But the prospect of a dingo grabbing and gulping down a baby was too foreign for the police and prosecutors to fathom. Slipshod forensics identified splotches of fetal blood in the Chamberlain’s car, although it was later confirmed to be carpet glue. The prosecutor speculated that Lindy and her husband, a Seventh Day Adventist minister, murdered their ten-month-old daughter in a blood sacrifice for their church. Convicted of murder, Lindy was sentenced to life in prison.
“A dingo ate my baby” became a scapegoat line, Lindy Chamberlain’s alibi to cover up her terrible deed. It was easier to support this version of deviate human behavior than to understand how far nature had come out of balance.
Six years later, the baby’s knit jacket was found partially buried in a dingo lair near the campground. Lindy was released from prison within days and later exonerated. “It was a travesty, a bleeding travesty,” sputtered David. But by this time “A dingo ate my baby,” was embedded in our culture.

***
          Dingoes are not at fault in this story. Related to the wolf, they are the largest carnivore in Australia and the top predator in many areas. Dingoes have no natural enemies except each other. Australian dingoes are ginger-colored and naturally lean; they look like rescue dogs from the local pound. Not truly native to Australia, they arrived with Asian sea-farers 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, probably as pets. Their genetic diversity is so narrow it’s thought only a few dogs, or even one pregnant female, made the voyage.
          After thousands of years living in the Australian Outback, dingoes have influenced the landscape through natural predation and are considered native. Wolf-like, they howl and can’t bark. Dingoes scavenge widely and prefer eating small mammals, reptiles, and insects, but almost anything will do. Ranchers despise and blame them for killing sheep and cattle. Outside of Australian National Parks, dingoes are classified as pests and can be shot, trapped, and poisoned.
          Before coming to Australia, I only knew dingoes from children’s picture books in which they walk upright and wear bush hats to keep the flies away. Portrayed as sly, cunning dogs, dingoes always are outsmarted in children’s books―outsmarted but always hungry.
          Nowhere are dingoes more in the spotlight than Fraser Island in Queensland. A national park midway up the Pacific coast of Australia, Fraser Island offers a landscape you can’t see anywhere else in the world–majestic rainforests rooted in sand dunes, crystal clear lakes surrounded by snowy-white sand, and seventy five miles of uninterrupted beach flanked by dunes and brilliant orange sand cliffs. A piney-eucalyptus fragrance blankets the subtropical island. It is the largest sand island on earth and its unique array of habitats and geology-in-motion has earned it World Heritage listing.
          Fraser Island supports an enclave of the most genetically pure dingoes in Australia. The World Conservation Union considers dingoes vulnerable to extinction on mainland Australia because they hybridize with domestic dogs, diluting their genes and changing their behavior; they become less wary of people. Over 80 percent of mainland dingoes are hybrids. Fraser Island dingoes are carefully managed for their genetic purity and dogs are not allowed on the island. Killing or destroying dingoes reduces the variability of their gene pool, limiting their resiliency to adapt to disease and changing conditions.
          But on Fraser Island dingoes are like the bears in Yellowstone National Park. Because a dingo looks like an underfed family dog, that familiarity and leanness make for a bad combination. People want to pet and feed dingoes, entice them with food to capture a photo, or look the other way when they ransack their trash for scraps.
          Tourists are newcomers to Fraser Island and the boundary between people and dingoes is still raw. In 1970, about 5000 people visited Fraser Island, but by 2004 that number had ballooned to over 395,000 annually. In the early nineteen nineties, wildlife biologists studying dingo scat estimated that Fraser Island dingoes were getting 47 percent of their food from humans.
          Like wolves, dingoes breed only once a year and live in a pack structure controlled by an alpha male and female. Researchers speculate that the permanent population on Fraser Island is around 120 dingoes, organized into 25 to 30 packs. Fraser Island dingoes interact as a super pack, with less aggression between packs than on the mainland because food is more readily available. This means that dingoes can move through another pack’s territory, shifting around the island depending on the seasonal availability of natural foods like fish or turtles. But a high mortality rate prevails, most of it from fighting within or between packs over territories and dominance. Even within a pack, the lead dog runs the subordinate members away from food, keeping them hungry. When nondominant dingoes find easy pickings at a campground, the hierarchy and social cohesion of the pack breaks down. Serious dingo attacks seem to occur when dingoes roam outside the normal pack structure.

***
          It was only a matter of time before tragedy struck Fraser Island. For years, dingoes had been coaxed into close interactions with people. Tourists had been nipped and harassed. Inattentive campers returned to find their coolers and campsites ransacked. My 2000 Lonely Planet Travel Guide to Australia included a shaded side bar warning travelers to be wary around dingoes on Fraser Island and not let their children wander on their own.
          In 2001, a pack of Fraser Island dingoes stepped over the line between campground nuisance and vicious predator. As David, the yard man told me, “The rangers really should have seen it coming. All the signs were there.” Nine-year-old Clinton Gage and his seven-year-old brother were camping with their family at Waddy Point, a remote campground heavily used by fisherman, seventy miles up the beach. Dingoes frequented the campground, scavenging trash and scarfing down hand-outs. The two boys ambled down a walking path as they left the beach one morning. Trees over-arched the trail and waist-high ferns and shrubs brushed their legs. Two dingoes tracked the boys up the path, pestering and lunging at them. All alone facing two wild predators, the boys panicked and ran. Clinton tripped, fell, and was immediately pounced on by the two dingoes; his brother escaped with bites on his arms and legs. Clinton died on the path. A nine-year old boy weighs about sixty pounds, the average dingo around twenty five pounds.
          The Queensland Government acted swiftly and decisively. National Park rangers immediately killed any dingoes loitering near campgrounds or harassing people. Twenty eight dingoes, twenty percent of the island’s population, were culled. The local Aboriginal tribe filed suit to stop the indiscriminate rangers, but it was too late.

***
          I first came to Fraser Island with my family three years later in 2004. David told me we would be fine as long as we paid attention and were dingo-aware. We camped on dunes off the beach, midway up the seventy-five mile beach. It was the hands-down favorite campsite of my life, set on a sandy rise behind the dunes under Dr. Suess-looking Pandanus trees. We had a shady view of the endless beach and a warm tropical breeze I can still conjure in my mind. Even though it was school vacation week, we had no neighbors camped within a half mile. My middle school sons wanted to camp separately on another hillside. We were far from any houses, campgrounds, or trash bins, but we carried several days of food locked in our car. Low trees and shrubs blocked any view of their search, but in the distance I could hear the boys choosing a spot. I reined them in and made them pitch their tent closer to us. “This is stupid, dingoes would never attack us,” the oldest whined.
          At dusk, we combed through brilliant white sand blows and roamed the beach searching for dingoes. We wanted another tick mark on our list of Australian wildlife, along with bandicoots and the Azure Kingfisher. We found dingo tracks leading into the undergrowth but never saw the animals.
          After a few days camping and exploring the island, sleeping on, eating on, and walking on sand, we had grains settling into every crease and fold of our bodies. We treated ourselves to two nights at an upscale island resort. While I lay on a lounge chair watching my two sons in the pool, a dingo cut across the pool deck and scurried into the weeds. He stole a furtive glance at me before disappearing. Instead of a stately predator at the top of the food chain, this dingo was mangy and skittish, looking for someone’s abandoned sandwich. It didn’t feel like we deserved our tick mark for native wildlife.
          Later that day, I saw another dingo on the resort beach, pacing behind a five-year-old girl. She turned, stood tall, crossed her arms over her chest and shouted “Dingo, no!” Her parents darted over to collect her and the dingo cowered, then scooted off. Several weeks later, a dingo slunk through an open hotel room door at the resort where a small baby slept. Two dingoes were subsequently shot.

***
          We spent one night in a National Park campground on our trip in 2004. As I ventured into the fragrant rainforest near our campsite at dusk, I nearly walked into a dingo fence. It was six feet tall with four inch wide square mesh, so unobtrusive I didn’t see it until I was almost on top of it. Ensconced in a fence out in the wild I felt odd, but I knew why it was there. We wouldn’t see any dingoes skulking around the dumpsters looking for hand-outs. Management programs on Fraser Island now separate dingoes from people. A dingo-aware program warns tourists to stay clear of the animals. Throughout the island signs warn people not to feed them. Dingo fences surround campgrounds and after 2008, island villages.
          Conventional wisdom holds that tourists feed the dingoes, but pick up any management document and it also fingers resort staff and island residents. One resident reportedly trained dingoes to sit before feeding them. By 2009, close to 500 people had been fined for feeding or leaving out food for dingoes.
          Island trash is tightly managed now and armored dumpsters are set out at campgrounds and along the beach. Large city garbage trucks rumble up and down the seventy five mile strip of sand. If dingoes collect near a point frequented by people, rangers haze them with sling shots, or fire at them with rat shot from a .22 caliber rifle. Detractors argue these measures fragment dingo societies and groups. Numbered yellow ear tags help rangers track a dingo’s movements and ensure justice if a dingo stalks or attacks a human ― they tell rangers which dingo to shoot. These measures are done under the supervision of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It seems to work. Current surveys found that dingoes now only get about 10 percent of their food from humans.

          I came back to Fraser Island in 2007, without my family. I had four days at the end of a trip to Australia, so I joined a group of friends who had rented a small SUV and took the ferry over. Fraser Island hosts several resorts, some of them are high-end, others not more than fishing shacks. We stayed on the Pacific beach side, in an enclave of comfortable and airy two story bungalows and drove the sinuous inland roads visiting rainforests, heaths, and pristine lakes. The driving is slow on sandy Fraser Island and cars must be durable and have 4WD. Historical logging roads have been carved through the woods. They twist and turn, the sandy ruts growing deeper and deeper, softer and softer. The beach offers a straight run up the island and even has speed limits, but an hour before and after high tide, it is covered by water and impassable. All beach travel stops.
          After a day driving through the interior, one of our circuits dumped us out on the beach and we steered the car down toward our bungalow. In the gathering dusk, far from any regular dwellings or people, we surprised a dingo walking out to the beach. The dingo emerged from the dune grass and sniffed the air, his nose rising once, twice, three times. Quick steps carried him to the beach, where he caught sight of us and froze. He had come out to the beach to scavenge the wrack line, the clumps of seaweed left behind at high tide, looking for dead fish. A yellow tag tacked in his ear displayed a blue number. Thin but with a luxuriant coat of ginger fur, he didn’t look like a relative of the gray wolf so much as a neighbor’s dog. The soft fur of his concave underbelly matched the color of the sand beach before him. He stared. We stared. He kept his distance from us but was not skittish; he held our gaze and waited us out. We stopped our car to look and snap a photograph. After a minute, he sniffed again and loped off to the dunes. This dingo was worthy of a tick mark.
          That night, the headline story on the Australian national news reported a dingo attack on a young girl near our bungalow. She had been playing close to her father’s SUV on the beach while he surf-casted. A dingo bit her on the thigh, buttocks, and lower back but she escaped with just a few stitches. Rangers speculated this dingo was a pseudo-pet of one of the residents and that clandestine feeding was still going on.
          People come to wild places like Fraser Island with a confused mix of values and expectations that dingoes and other wildlife can’t possibly learn to navigate. People try to connect with nature without truly understanding the depth of wildness or a predator’s innate drive. They long to see dingoes in the wild but then treat them like pets. “Blooming idiots,” David would say, adjusting his bush hat. “People just don’t understand they need to leave wild animals alone.”
          As for me, I would rather miss a glimpse of a wild dingo than see one skulking about trying to steal my sandwich. Then when I see a wild dingo on the beach scavenging for food, the experience is more profound, a view into the natural world that I can’t and shouldn’t be a part of.

***

Scheduled to leave Fraser Island early the next day, an 8 a.m. high tide blocked our way. We could have traveled inland, but the roads were slow and indirect. After breakfast, I took a walk on the beach to relish the remoteness of the subtropical island. I expected to be alone, but a news helicopter dispatched after the dingo attack hovered over the resort, a camera lens out the window. A shirtless man shouldering a heavy television camera walked along the tide line and passed me by with a quick “G’Day.” They were looking for a shot of dingoes no doubt, expecting them to scamper out to the beach for a photo opportunity.
We left the bungalow two hours after high tide, when we had a wide enough sand margin to drive down the beach. An hour later, next to an eroding cliff a half mile from the ferry, the minimal beach was blocked by fallen trees, impassable until the tide dropped further. Beyond the trees gathered the morning’s new arrivals—families with camping gear, backpackers in vans, and 4WD tour buses. A carnival atmosphere prevailed over there with flying Frisbees and sandcastles under construction. The dingo attack the day before had not deterred the number of arriving tourists.

--------"Fraser Island Dingoes: Hard Tracks in Soft Sand " by Gro Flatebo has also been published in the South Dakota Review .