The 19th century ornithologist had a surprisingly progressive view of Australian animals, championing the fast-disappearing thylacine and broad-faced potoroo, even if he also knew how to cook a wombat

That old cliche “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” has a truly hollow ring when applied to Australian’s awareness of its lost mammals.

Most Australians are barely aware of the creatures that still inhabit their island and couldn’t tell the difference between a bettong (a shin-high kangaroo) and a wambenger (a small marsupial carnivore) if they got kicked in the eyes by one. A bettong that is. A wambenger would more likely target the jugular with its sharp little teeth.

It wasn’t always so. Early European settlers were keenly attuned to the foibles of bettongs. Native mammals were part of their daily lives, raiding gardens, stealing poultry, eating pasture, a source of fur, and more often than not of free meat, too. And it was into this world of abundant native mammals that John Gould arrived.

One of the 19th century’s most talented ornithologists, Gould was lured to Australia’s shores by its birdlife with a view to producing a series of lavishly illustrated works.

But he also amassed a large collection of mammals from visits between 1838 and 1840 to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), South Australia and New South Wales. His collector, John Gilbert, visited the colonies of Swan River in Western Australia, Queensland’s Moreton Bay and Port Essington in the Northern Territory.

Both men commented on the variety and abundance of Australian mammals and Gould developed a clear fondness for many of the animals he encountered, particularly the ’roos. He named almost half the known species of kangaroo but it was the nobility and beauty of the red kangaroo that impressed him most. He considered it the emblem of Australia, as it still is today.

Modern accounts still refer to Gould for descriptions of many mammal species and their natural history. But Gould was a man of his time who thought nothing of shooting species on sight and even recounted the difficulties of skinning a particular specimen.

He was also partial to the culinary experiences native animals offered, finding, for example, that wombat flesh was “tough, with a musky flavour, and not altogether agreeable”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An 1880 recipe for bandicoot curry. Photograph: National Library of Australia

Aside from these particular Victorian attitudes, Gould valued Australian mammals in ways the general population of the time did not. He was scathing about the lack of hunting regulations and other laws protecting them. He correctly drew direct parallels between the demonisation and persecution of wolves in other parts of the world and the inevitable demise of the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine). Even though the last known thylacine died in Hobart zoo in 1936, the images from Gould’s book, The Mammals of Australia, completed in 1863, still provide one of the most reproduced records of the species.

This is the sad legacy of Gould’s work. He documented a significant proportion of the mammals of southern Australia, and it is in southern Australia that extinction and decline hit the hardest. For the thylacine, a wealth of information was recorded before it disappeared; they were kept in zoos and encounters in the wild were often written up in newspapers. The Tasmanian government even debated its right to exist.

In contrast, no one documented the disappearance of the broad-faced potoroo, and only a handful of them were recorded prior to its extinction. Gould’s accounts provide the best available firsthand natural history information for such species.

J Gould and HC Richter’s White-footed Rabbit Rat. Illustration: National Library of Australia

Gould’s work provides an illustrated inventory of mammal fauna with additional information wherever it was known. When I was asked to produce a book on the endangered and extinct species from The Mammals of Australia, Gould’s work provided the baseline for a series of far richer stories than he was in a position to describe.

A few species like the white-footed rabbit rat were probably close to extinction by 1863. Others, like the koala, persisted despite Gould’s pessimism over their chances of survival in the face of the fur trade and other hunting. Then there are the hopeful stories of species rediscovered from extinction, like the bridled nailtail wallaby and the New Holland mouse. The latter was not seen after the 1840s until it was found on the outskirts of Sydney in 1967.

“Wretched marauder”, “vermin”, “pests”, “one of the most stupid animals”, “unsatiable desire of shedding blood”. These were some of the common attitudes of the early settlers. However, calls for protection and conservation of Australian wildlife were voiced from the early 1900s, a result of the country itself changing dramatically – from Gould’s “vast grassy plains”, “luxuriant brushes” and “rich lands which surround nearly the whole of the sterile interior” to worn-out sheep paddocks overrun with rabbits, hares and foxes, and forests prowled by foxes, cats, pigs and deer.

It happened fast. The period from the 1870s to the early 1920s saw this wholesale conversion of Australian land, and plant and animal communities. Along with this, attitudes to native fauna also changed. The prime catalyst was the rabbit.

Meeting of stock directions reported in the Queanbeyan Age, 1886. Photograph: National Library of Australia

Settlers who had previously considered species like the eastern quoll as vermin rapidly came to view them as allies in a losing battle against rabbits. The combination of rabbits, foxes, land-clearing and other processes drove catastrophic decline of small and medium mammals across southern Australia, particularly bandicoots, bettongs and rodents. It is the astonishing loss of these small species that would probably surprise Gould the most.

Ultimately though, it’s not the stories I could find about thylacines and koalas that tell the tales of Gould’s mammals. It’s the pages where there is nothing to show but a painting from his publication and a few lines explaining that the species was never seen again. Now these animals have gone, even the best informed among us have no idea what we had.

• John Gould’s Extinct and Endangered Mammals of Australia by Dr Fred Ford is published by National Library of Australia