Native Animal Rescue Group
The Native Animal Rescue Group is the first port of call for anyone in Braidwood and surrounds who comes across injured wildlife. With the help of dedicated volunteers, NARG takes in kangaroos, wallabies, possums, birds, and any other native animal in need, and runs a 24hr hotline to walk people through the basic steps of rescue.
Since the group’s inception, ‘Wombat Bill’ Waterhouse has served as NARG’s president, balancing the work fundraising and lobbying with taking in wildlife, and driving several hundred kilometres a week on NARG business. The group covers roughly the area between Doughboy, the top of the Clyde, Nerriga, and Wynebene, a serious stretch of land.
`
Some of this time is spent collecting rescued animals, or occasionally, delivering euthanasia where injuries are too severe. But his time on the road is often more mundane.
‘There’s no grass at the moment,’ says Bill, ‘so I have to find the grass. That’s about a 30km round trip every day.’
Much of the group’s fundraising goes to specialist animal feed. ‘Hard feed is $1500 a pallet, and the milk powder we use is $50 a kilo. Leslie [Bill’s partner] is bottle-feeding four little critters now, and we’re using $30 a day just in milk powder.’ He laughs. ‘The feed bills are astronomical.’
The group’s main source of fundraising is the famous Wombat Calendar, which appears annually at the Braidwood IGA and Post Office, and local businesses often donate prizes for raffles. During the fires, NARG also raised donations in the form of pallets full of sweet potatoes and other fruit and veg, which it solicited from the Animal Rescue Collective when Bill learned that Felicity Sturgiss had been setting up feeding stations for injured wildlife. Through extra funding, NARG was also able to provide hard feed for nearly 200 feeding stations across the area.
Getting together volunteers, and skilling people up, is something Bill is keen to do more of, especially now there is the opportunity to deliver training online.
‘The last time we did a beginner’s course,’ he says, ‘we had 78 people, from South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales, and I think one from Queensland. We also had one in Japan, and two in the United States. There’s a woman in Arizona who got so interested she’s going to come visit us at Christmas.’
At the end of the day, living in the midst of many of the animals he’s released, Bill finds the work exhausting, but rewarding.
‘There are stressful parts to the job,’ he says, ‘but the great part is little fluffy critters in your life.’
When did you first become interested in wombats?
I'm a musician in my other life, and for 25 years, I played in a band called the Flying Wombat Bush Band. So, there’s one word that’s been stuck in my head for decades!
We moved to Nerriga in 2002, and the third week I found a baby kangaroo and said to Leslie, ‘We should do some training.’ And three weeks after that, I found my first wombat, and then the next wombat, which I called Cuddles. I was teaching at Braidwood Central School, and I would put them in a box and bring them in with me.
In the meantime the need for native wildlife rescue kept growing, and other local people decided they wanted a local group, and I thought, ‘Well this is crazy, we can't not be in it.’ Leslie and I both joined that group, and probably about a year later she was the animal coordinator and I was the president, and I’ve been the president ever since.’
Even though you named your wombat Cuddles, they’re not exactly cuddly.
With [rescued] wombats, you don’t want them friendly; you want them to run away. So you don't go out to call them and say, ‘Come on, come on, come on, have a feed,’ you go out and kick the fence to scare them so that they run down the hole. Because you want them to have that defence mechanism.
When it comes release time, they’re 20 or 30 kilos of cranky, unpleasant, furry rocks that you’ve got to trap. They’re very different to kangas. Kangas you release at the same time, and you’ve got a mob. These guys, you keep ’em apart.
What’s your advice for people with wombats or other wildlife on their properties?
If you’ve got a wombat digging under your house, it’s up to you to convince it to not dig under your house. It’s always better to keep animals in situ, because it’ll keep other ones away. And you’ve just got to learn to live with it. You stop it from digging under the house, you put mesh down, you do everything you can to stop it. If you win, it will continue to live there, but it won’t dig under your house. It will learn to live somewhere else.
If you’re going to live in Braidwood, you've got to learn to live with possums. And if you’re going to live on the edge of town beside a paddock, you need to learn to live with snakes, unless they’re in the house. You know? That just comes with the territory. If you don’t like it, move to Ireland. No snakes in Ireland. [laughs]