Death of a Wallaby

Steve and I had only got as far as the spot where Julia's Little Creek flows under McGuinness Road on Friday morning on the start of our trek to work, when we saw to our horror, that one of the larger male red necked wallabies that hang around our place had been hit by a car sometime earlier that morning. His back legs were next to useless and he had a very bloodied and messy throat. The poor thing must have been hit on Martin's Road and managed to crawl and haul his mangled body up near our paddock. What the hell to do? Our friend, Piglet, had the unfortunate experience of hitting a wallaby on his way home from Lismore when he was up here doing his prac last year and had courageously returned to run the poor animal over in order to kill it. How many other people would have continued to drive on? Our wallaby was now off the road and it was so large that I was afraid that running it over, as awful as this sounds, wouldn't have killed it swiftly.

We drove back up and conferred with our friend Shane, who stayed at our place Thursday and Friday nights, with his partner, Cub, (aka Jason) so that he could work his magic around the creek. In the end we asked Shane if he could ring WIRES as a first port of call, given that it would be a fair assumption that they get calls like this fairly regularly. Unfortunately, there were no close WIRES people, so the woman Shane talked to suggested he ring Nimbin police who could come down and shoot it. Shane was reluctant to take the police away from more pressing policing matters, so he drove up to our neighbour, Bill's place. Bill lives at the very end of McGuinness Road, a few hundred metres past our gate. Bill came down with his rifle and put the wretched wallaby out of pain with one clean shot.