Heart of the Nation: Boort 3537

This tiny swamp wallaby joey, rescued from its dead mother’s pouch, was brought to a wildlife vet who listened for a heartbeat with his stethoscope.

Clinging to life: Eddie listents for a heartbeat. Picture: Doug Gimesy

Dr Alisdair Eddie, a wildlife veterinarian for Wildlife Victoria, was all set for a day of tending to injured birds in the opening week of Victoria’s duck hunting season. Every year, the not-for-profit charity – which opposes the hunting of ducks with shotguns due to the unnecessary suffering it causes – sends mobile vet teams into the field to tend to injured birds. But on the way to the lakes around Boort, northwest of Bendigo, one of the vet nurses noticed a dead swamp wallaby by the roadside, stopped to check its pouch and found this ­infant joey – known as a “pinky” – in there. She brought it into the field hospital for Eddie’s appraisal. Here, he’s using a stethoscope to check the pinky’s heartbeat.

Eddie, 50, hails from South Africa and used to work in information technology, before a change-of-heart at the age of 40 – “I wasn’t that excited by an IT career any more” – and starting a veterinarian degree. These days he travels Victoria in a converted Toyota HiLux kitted out with an X-ray machine and anaesthesiology ­equipment, providing emergency care for injured native animals including koalas, echidnas, wallabies, kangaroos, lizards and all sorts of birds.

The opening of Victoria’s duck hunting season around April is always a dispiriting time, Eddie says. They’ll be in the field for a week, during which time they’ll treat dozens of birds with wings and bones smashed by shotgun pellets; very few can be saved, he says. And alas, it was the same for this swamp wallaby joey: after a gestation of little over a month, they’re born the size of a jellybean and suckle for over a year. At the pinky stage, he says, they’re simply too young to survive outside the pouch. “Sadly, this one had to be humanely euthanased,” he says. “But it just goes to show how important it is to do a pouch check on marsupials found by the roadside.”