WfHC - cover page (not to be used with pre-printed report ... - CSIRO

Marcus Barber: I was trying to find out if they have a home or not?
Ezra Michael: Oh they have a home alright, in the hollow log. After the wet, they are all free
to go out. They have their pups then, and they turn into big dogs. Always have them in the
winter. But me and Norman [Hudson – non-Indigenous caretaker at Oriners] never thought
about shooting them.
Marcus Barber: And you did not poison them or anything, you let them go?
Ezra Michael: Yes
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Marcus Barber: Does anything eat the wallabies?
Philip Yam: Wild dogs, dingoes. There‟s heaps of dingoes up in that country.
Marcus Barber: Why are they up there?
Philip Yam: I don‟t know. Maybe, there‟s dingoes everywhere, but I don‟t know how come
there‟s a big mob dingo up there now. There‟s heaps of dingoes there, all you‟ve got to do
is get up at 5 in the morning and you‟ll hear them howling everywhere. Dingo does come
right to the homestead.
Marcus Barber: Do dingoes hunt their own areas? Do you see the same animal again and
again?
Philip Yam: Dingoes hunt certain places, where they can easily get food. You probably
hear the same pack, come back through there howling at early hours of the morning or late
at night. Probably the same mob, but you don‟t know if they are the same because they all
look alike.
Marcus Barber: Do you still see the dingoes in the middle of the wet?
Philip Yam: Yeah, you‟ll see „em. Sometimes you get tame dogs going wild up that end.
From pig shooters you know? We had a few of them up there, some tame ones. [They] get
lost and mix up with the dingoes and bang. As long as, if she‟s a bitch, they‟ll put them in
the mob but if it‟s a male they‟ll kill him. It happened, last month or so ago at Koolatah. One
of the boys said „hey two dingo came in and killed those two dogs from the pig shooters.
Killed them.‟ You get some very healthy dingoes up there, some big fellers. They are
probably all mixed blood, from tame dogs. You get some black ones running around there.
They all mixed breed now.
Marcus Barber: Do they like goanna or what? What is their favourite?
Philip Yam: They‟ll probably kill calves, pigs. What[ever] is easy to get. That‟s what they
do. There won‟t be only one if they are going to go and kill a calf, there will be 5 or 6 of
them.
Marcus Barber: Working together?
Philip Yam: Yeah. That‟s how they do it, in a pack.
Marcus Barber: Did any of the people have trouble with them?
Philip Yam: No, no one had trouble with dingoes, but in the wet I used to be there on my
own, they used to come right up to the homestead and just sit there and stare at me every
day.
As the largest predator in the landscape, the dingoes play an important ecological role. Cecil
Hughes emphasised the variability of dingo numbers in the area, a comment that relates to
his time there from the 1950s through until the 1970s. Philip Yam notes the consistently high
numbers of dingoes in the 1990s and 2000s, but also that it is hard to identify particular
animals (a comment Cecil also made). Assuming both comments are accurate, the possibility
Working Knowledge at Oriners Station, Cape York
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