Koala Inn

When adventuring by car we generally prefer to camp in national parks and reserves. But this requires a little pre-planning, and time. So every few nights we find ourselves, due to deteriorating weather or unexpected circumstance, in a modest regional motel or bnb. This brings with it a range of serendipitous pros (memorable exchanges at reception, tele, soap, a tiny swimming pool) and cons (hefty tariffs, UHT milk). Lately I’ve also become quite dispirited by the sub-op-shop quality of much of the ‘art’ [paintings, prints, photography] in motel rooms. The lack of love afforded the walls - second only to the ceiling in one’s visual field when sprawled, semi-conscious after a long drive - perplexes, and it’s led me to consider some retrospective, digitally-rendered improvements. In supplanting garish, jarring oils and undistinguished framed b/w photographs of amorphous city skylines with a recent work of my own - koalanimbus - I’m hopeful that children & adults alike will take away a subliminally enhanced love for their iconic yet critically endangered fellow-travellers, so many of whom currently end up mown down and unmourned beside our roads. I imagine that Koala Inn will be rolled out across key territories in northern NSW and southern Queensland throughout 2025. If only Tanya Plibersek would stop approving new coal mines, I’d have suggested it for her Nature Positive Summit.

Koala habitat is being destroyed at an alarming rate. The large quantity of leaves that koalas eat means they need around 100 trees each to transfer between. Deforestation, bushfires and urban development are all an enormous threat to their environment, and once displaced, koalas are far more likely to get hit by cars or attacked by other animals. Koala numbers have plummeted 30% since 2018, and across eastern Australia there are estimated to be as few as 50,000 koalas left. The situation is particularly dire in Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT, where koalas are headed towards extinction.

David Watson spoke with a koala about his work early one morning in September 2024…

KOALA

Look, mate, we’re in serious trouble. We’re being decimated … not only by cars, chlamydia, land-clearing & an angry, fossil-fuelled climate but by over-consumption and politically-driven GREED & INACTION. Money keeps talking, and talking … and for us it’s a frankly incomprehensible tongue. Absolute gobbledegook. Not sure that your little clever-clogs motel intiative is going to help, either, but I’m all ears … let me just grab a couple of those leaves …

DAVID

Appreciate you don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll be brief. We were in the nation’s capital just last week with a friend who took us up to see the extraordinary Nolan Collection at CMAG (Canberra Museum & Art Gallery). 75 years’ ago Nolan had an epiphany whilst sketching, photographing and travelling across central Australia, where he was welcomed with great generosity by local Elders. He left in awe of the gently-woven culture of First Nations people and their kinship with the land, writing ‘One feels a barbarian at the gates’. The first flashes and rumbles of a broader-breaking antipodean epiphany about country and custodianship are today upon us as ‘planet’ wrestles with ‘profit’ and we enter what Waanyi author Alexis Wright has dubbed ‘the Age of the Precipice’.

But you remarkable arboreal herbivores have survived and flourished here in the South for more than 25 million years. So you’re doubtless - in your own slow, seemingly oblivious way - up to speed on all that, and plenty more. However, just in case it helps …

Koala Inn is my environmental apology in the form of an imagined social intervention. It seeks to comfort the disturbed, and to disturb the comfortable…

KOALA

Huh? [falls asleep in eucalypt fork for 19 hours].

$99 each

incl post/packaging/hand-delivery (in Sydney): bombora@bigpond.net.au

Koala Inn

$99 each

All proceeds to the Australian Koala Foundation + Friends of the Koala