At 22, Eric discovered an ‘extinct’ possum. It lived in his pocket

The first time I met Eric Wilkinson, I offered to check him for leeches.

We were in the heart of Victoria’s highland forests – Mountain Ash country – where the trees stand nearly as tall as skyscrapers, and the trail was wet. It seemed the polite thing to do.

The retired geologist had stopped by a particularly large and ancient tree called “Giant” to tell me of the time he discovered something tiny. Not a leech, as it turned out, something far rarer. Something no one had expected to see ever again.

Eric Wilkinson was an assistant in the fossils department of Melbourne Museum when he rediscovered the Leadbeater’s Possum in 1961.Credit: Paul Jeffers

It was on that very spot in the forest some 60 years earlier that Wilkinson, then a young assistant in the fossils department of Museum Victoria, had shone a spotlight through the ferns and into the eyes of a Leadbeater’s possum.

“There or close enough,” he says in his rasping chuckle. “The hairs stood up on the back of my neck.”

Back then, the possum had been thought extinct for decades and Wilkinson’s “rediscovery” was heralded as a survival so remarkable the animal became Victoria’s state emblem. One naturalist enthused it was like finding a sasquatch. They would soon discover a flourishing colony still in the forest, though Wilkinson didn’t get any official credit for the find until 50 years later.

The first photo of a Leadbeater’s possum in decades, taken in 1961 by the man who rediscovered the tiny mammal, Eric Wilkinson.Credit: Eric Wilkinson

When the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires swept through Marysville, burning right to the edges of that track, the possum lost half its population in a day but pulled off yet another survival trick.

If you look out across Cambarville now, the white dead trees of the fires stand shoulder to shoulder with the old Mountain Ash, leaving the site of Wilkinson’s rediscovery untouched. Still, the “fairy possum” is facing its greatest challenge yet – outlasting a dying logging industry.

Wilkinson, 84, says: “I don’t like the thought of it going extinct before I do.”

Today we’ve reunited for lunch at Melbourne Museum’s Mercury restaurant, both a little relieved to be out of the reach of leeches. Far from a few modest sandwiches at a picnic table, a decadent high tea is on the cards this time.

The high tea spread at Mercury in Melbourne Museum.Credit: Paul Jeffers.

Wilkinson has been catching up with some curator colleagues still at the museum, though the building is new since his days at the old Russell Street site. He spent much of his time in the basement then, poring over fossils of giant prehistoric wombats. “Everything down there would get covered in this foul black dust,” he says. “They analysed it later and found it was metal filings from the trams” rattling by overhead.

According to his superiors, the Leadbeater’s Possum belonged in one of those basement drawers with the other extinct, stuffed mammals.

But Wilkinson grins as he recalls how, at just 22, he marched up to the director of the museum and told him he was wrong. The possum was alive. And he had a photo to prove it.

Eric Wilkinson on New Year’s Eve 1958, aged 20.Credit: Courtesy of Eric Wilkinson

Charles Brazenor was an expert on the possum but had given up his own search for it years before. He held Wilkinson’s photo up to the light, inspecting it through a magnifying glass. Wilkinson’s heart was roaring thunder in his chest as he waited. “Charles shot me down. He said ‘it must be a sugar glider’.”

Wilkinson had taken the photo because he knew his say-so wouldn’t be enough. “I recognised it by its club tail, I’d seen specimens at the museum.”

All those nights trekking into the forest with his fellow amateur naturalists, piling into his overheating car and lugging around a spotlight that ran on leaky acid batteries the size of beer cans, Wilkinson hadn’t really expected to find anything. “No one at the museum even knew I was [into] wildlife,” he laughs. “I worked in fossils.”

When he did see the possum, he was so shocked he stumbled and hit his head on an overhanging branch, losing sight of it. But driving home with friends, he spied a second “Leadie”, right near the road. “A nightjar [bird] flew down at the car and suddenly there it was in a tree. Of course, by the next day, even I’d started to doubt my notes.”

So Wilkinson returned with a flash camera.

Today, he’s brought a whole folder of Leadie photos for me to thumb through over our scones. The possum really is tiny; it weighs half as much as a can of Coke and can fit in the palm of your hand. But on camera himself, it seems Wilkinson is even more elusive. “It never occurred to me to take photos of ... me.” (He would later unearth one photo, “spotted in the wild” in 1958.)

“Jimmy”, the first captive Leadbeater’s Possum after its rediscovery in 1961. He lived with Wilkinson for a time at home.Credit: Eric Wilkinson

Still, it wasn’t until Brazenor had sent the museum’s best marksmen into the trees with Wilkinson to bag a Leadbeater’s specimen that the director believed his young assistant. The first Leadie discovered was shot dead – not by Wilkinson and not to his liking – for the museum’s collection. The second was captured live.

Named Jimmy for its scientific name Gymnobelideus leadbeateri, it lived between Wilkinson’s house in Box Hill and the museum, but most of the time in his pocket. “They said I treated it more like a pet than a specimen,” he smiles. “But it was hard not to. He’d hop up on my shoulder and I’d feed him milk and honey. ”

After a few months, there were two others in captivity, and Jimmy joined them at a reserve, but “no one would mate with poor Jimmy”. Indeed, Leadbeater breeding programs down the years have never had much success and the animal remains critically endangered as its forest shrinks. A draft recovery plan for the species has been sitting, unfinalised, on the desk of a score of environment ministers since 2016 – since Wilkinson and I first met on that forest trek, in fact.

Wilkinson in 2011 inspecting a Leadbeater’s Possum specimen in the Melbourne Museum archives.Credit: Paul Rovere

Now at the museum, as we contemplate fighting each other for the last pink lamington, he tells me of his latest visit to those trees; returning just that weekend on the anniversary of the rediscovery (April 3, 1961). He’s made the trip every year on the day “or close enough” for nearly two decades – guest of honour of the community environmental group Friends of the Leadbeater’s Possum. (Steve Meacher, who runs the group, calls Wilkinson a treasure.)

Wilkinson recalls camping there in his 20s, watching greater gliders soar across the water. Today, gliders are endangered themselves, and smoke sometimes looms overhead, mushroom clouds that can look like an atomic blast, as the logging coupes burn.

This is the forest where Melbourne’s drinking water comes from. The old trees store the most carbon of any in the world. But scientists say the highlands have been decimated by logging, putting Victoria at greater bushfire risk and robbing animals like the Leadie and the glider of the old tree hollows they need for nesting.

Loggers, meanwhile, say ending clearing will put hundreds out of work. Mountain Ash timber makes sought-after tabletops and kitchen benches (though, most of the time it just becomes paper).

Victoria’s government-owned logging company VicForests is running at a loss and has repeatedly been found logging illegally, including clearing protected possum and glider habitat after recent devastating bushfires. The Andrews government plans to end all logging in native forests by 2030, and has pledged $200 million to help workers and communities transition out. Federal Environment minister Tanya Plibersek, meanwhile, has vowed to reverse Australia’s course as world leader in mammal extinctions, but it’s unclear if the Commonwealth will rein in state-managed logging.

2030 is too long for the possum to wait, says Wilkinson. “I’d love to go there one April and see the whole place as a national park.”

The high tea spread at Mercury in Melbourne Museum.Credit: Paul Jeffers

The museum heavyweights may not have been impressed by “upstart” Wilkinson’s find in 1961, but his future wife was. When he took Mary back to the spot in Toolangi soon after the possum sighting, it ended up being their first date.

It was Mary who first encouraged Wilkinson to write a book on the fairy possum. More than 20 years on, it’s almost finished – delayed, Meacher says, by Wilkinson’s unstoppably curious mind. “Every time he’s gotten close before, he’s stumbled across another obscure document, another clue, and he’d be off investigating that.”

As both museum worker and then geologist, Wilkinson admits he’s always loved solving a mystery. And he credits his grandfather, who ran a Baptist church, with fuelling his fascination with nature.

Still, for all the wonder in the world – trees as tall as giants and possums that fit in your pocket – Wilkinson knew early on there was sadness too. “I met death young,” he says.

The bill at Mercury.Credit:

His two sisters both died as children, leaving Wilkinson’s mother somewhat “exasperated with three boys” while his father was away as a soldier in World War II.

Though blessed himself with daughters and grandchildren, Wilkinson lost his wife Mary in 2019.

Losing an entire species brings its own grief. Wilkinson finds it hard to explain what it would mean for the possum to vanish for good.

He touches his pocket. But maybe the little fairy can pull off some more magic yet.