Echnida	Eastern Quoll
Platypus	Tasmanian wallaby

Australia's fauna and flora are fragile. Just as you would expect from a continent isolated from others for 40 millions years and evolving ever so slowly. Like Madagascar and the Galapagos -- islands suspended in time with the unique biodiversity to prove it. Over 83% of Australia's mammals and plants occur nowhere else. Unfortunately this fragile state of affairs doesn't mix with colonial zealots bent on making their new land as similar as possible to the one they left behind.

Most visitors to Australia would not see this. There are plenty of gum trees, large kangaroos hopping about and endless fields carpeted with sheep or cattle. As for the deserts, well they're just red sand, right. Not so. For most Australian animals come out only at night. And if you were lucky enough to see one you would dismiss as just another rat, mouse or possum. We are not talking glitzy, cuddly or endearing but strange and fast disappearing. Few Australians have even heard of the dunnart or the quoll. The first looks like a mouse with a fat tail and the other like a small spotted cat. These are still hanging on but so many others are already extinct.

In fact, Australia has the worst record in the world for species extinction. More mammals have become extinct in the last 200 years here, more than anywhere else in the world, 41 of them. Now another 117 are classified as endangered, many are surviving precariously on tiny offshore islands. When you have been isolated for 40 million years you are just not ready to face competition from introduced predators. Feral predators and competitors of all kinds that now live (and multiply) in the wild - cats, goats, mice, rats, rabbits, camels, pigs, foxes, cane toads, sparrows, starlings, exotic grasses and vines, etc. The list of the executioners and rivals is long and thriving.

How can we stop this? Is there any hope of saving this unique biodiversity? Probably not for long if the introduced animals are not eradicated - and that is clearly an impossible task. The rabbit is a case in point. It was introduced, along with the fox, in Victoria in 1844 by an Englishman for his personal hunting pleasure! Well his rifle could not keep pace with the reproductive ability of his targets that soon spread across the continent. The rabbits reached plague proportions and ate many of the native grasses into extinction to the detriment of the smaller kangaroo species and the farmers. What the rabbits didn't starve out the fox and the cat ate. These two species are responsible for more extinctions in Australia than the usual No. 1 killer of endangered species elsewhere in the world: loss of suitable habitat. For that read turning forests into fields or houses.

Undaunted by the hopeless odds, conservationists in Australia are waging battle here and there. One stands out among them - John Wamsley. He is the messiah of small and forgotten marsupials like the bettong, bandicoot and bilby. He is the champion of the platypus, numbat and stick-nest rat. Animals that you and I have never heard of but once seen never forgotten. And you can still see them at in John's Earth Sanctuaries near Adelaide. He bought abandoned, "worthless" farm land and recreated ideal habitats behind tall electrified fences to keep out the cats and foxes - he calls them exclosures. Now you can peer down at a platypus from a boardwalk meandering through a swamp and fern forest, climb a hill into a eucalypt forest where tiny bright blue fairy wrens chirr as you walk past. Animals living free, without bars, only protected from what might come in to eat them.

For these earth sanctuaries are not only successful in breeding the nearly extinct but also in re-creating habitats that protect native plants and attract birds and reptiles in the neighborhood. Miniatures gardens of Eden: Yookamura is 3000 acres and Warrawong 40 acres. Other sanctuaries are on the way as soon as the exclosures are completed. The proof of the success of this approach is in the numbers. Ten years ago the numbat, a charming striped marsupial that feeds on termites, was down to its last 200 individuals in the wild. A few were sent to Yookamura in desperation and in 5 years 120 were reared successfully and re-introduced into the wild sanctuary. We watched a female peering out of a log in the mallee forest growling softly -- nothing captive or tame about her. It shows what can be done when the feral predators are kept at bay. The same success story is true for the bettongs and the potoroo, pocket-sized kangaroos no larger than rats. They have also thrived in such protected areas.

A more conventional approach is used by the Healesville Sanctuary near Melbourne. Here you have a zoo that specializes in breeding Australian species. Last year their platypus gave birth to twins, a very rare event in captivity. And they are breeding two particularly endangered birds, the Orange-bellied parrot and the Helmeted honeyeater - both with only a handful of individuals left in the wild.

We observed an echidna, Australia's primitive version of a hedgehog, investigating its large enclosure with great determination. It waddled with a roly-poly gait, long snout prodding every nook and cranny looking for ants, climbing over logs and through bushes miniature tank style. Like the platypus it lays eggs and its milk oozes through the pores of its skin - two not-quite mammal species called monotremes, halfway between reptiles and mammals but still around to show us this 'missing link.'

These sanctuaries are managed by dedicated crews battling impossible odds to save Australia's threatened wildlife heritage. Odds that were set unwittingly by a single selfish hunter who wanted to shoot the tried and true in a new land. Odds that were set by the early explorers who left goats and pigs behind -- to create a larder on the hoof ready for their return. Individual gestures that seemed benign at the time but that created havoc with 40 million years of isolated evolution, leaving death, desolation and extinction. These sanctuaries are successful in saving at least some of the species for a while longer and for that we are grateful.