Rare colour footage of extinct Australian animal seen again after 90 years

Yahoo

5 hours ago

An extinct Australian animal can once again be seen bounding across a paddock after rare 16mm film was digitised by the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) this week. Taken almost 90 years ago, the clip contains the only known colour footage of a living Toolache wallaby, a species relentlessly hunted to extinction.
While the marsupials were once common, the film itself shows just one female fenced in a paddock. She was likely the last living representative of her species when the footage was shot in 1936.
Bernard Cotton, from the Field Naturalists Society of South Australia, would have understood the animal's significance as he travelled to film her at Robe, a coastal town located more than 340km south of Adelaide. The trip was in October, just one month after the last-known Tasmanian tiger died at a zoo in Hobart.
The film begins in black and white and ends in colour, showing a Toolache wallaby completing common behaviours like hopping, eating, and cleaning itself and ends with a snippet showing four rock wallabies for comparison. Three years later, this individual was dead, and her species was extinct.
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Australia has the highest rate of mammalian extinction in the world, and watching back the newly digitised footage in 2025, the Field Naturalist's current vice president, Peter Matejcic, said he felt 'saddened'.
Not only did the Toolache wallaby lose habitat to the agriculture industry, it was both culled and shot for fun. A diary from the 1800s that was unearthed by the Field Naturalists indicates recreational hunting of native species was a common weekend pastime across Australia.
'Co-existing with native fauna is difficult given human priorities,' Matejcic lamented as he spoke with Yahoo News Australia.
The film, Toolache Wallaby in 1936 by BC Cotton, is owned by the Field Naturalists and it has granted Yahoo News permission to obtain and use it for this article.
A digital copy of the film has been held at the South Australian Museum for 20 years, but that version is entirely black and white. What's incredible about the newly digitised NFSA copy is that it contains 34 seconds of colour footage at the end. Few people alive today had likely seen the colour version until it was removed from a canister and digitised in June.
In black and white, it can be hard for modern viewers to imagine what it was like to see a living animal that has since gone extinct. In 2021, the NFSA engaged experts in Paris to painstakingly colourise footage showing a Tasmanian tiger, but luckily, this wasn't required for the Toolache wallaby.
As NFSA technicians stared at the canister, they were initially unsure of the film's condition. Its film services team lead Dave McGrouther explained older 16mm film is made from diacetate, a material that shrinks and warps over time.
'The reality of working with film is that it's all deteriorating. The controlled storage conditions we have slow that down to a great extent, but there are occasions where we come across a film and it simply can't be saved,' he told Yahoo News.
The first five minutes of the Toolache wallaby film, which are in black and white, were in reasonably good condition. And while the colour section had deteriorated and turned a deep magenta in colour, it still helps viewers imagine what this fascinating creature was like to see in real life.
Anyone visiting the South Australian Museum can see a taxidermy specimen on display, but watching one alive on film, moving through its environment, adds another dimension of excitement.
Although Yahoo has colour-corrected two stills from the footage, NFSA opted to release the video without alteration because doing so could result in the loss of some detail.
McGrouther is one of the world's most experienced film preservation experts. He's working on an NFSA initiative called Deadline 2025, which aims to digitally preserve sound and film from the Twentieth Century before it ages and degrades.
This includes thousands of old newsreels from cities and regional towns that tell Australia's history. At current rates, it's estimated the team has at least 70 years worth of work ahead of them.
'Film is our cultural record, it's how we view ourselves, it's a visual record of what Australia looked like in this previous century,' McGrouther said.
While film is an important way for Australians to visualise their history, written first-hand accounts are also powerful. In March 1945, months before the end of World War II, an article in the Field Naturalists journal reflected on the demise of the Toolache wallaby.
It includes a historic description detailing when the species were in such great numbers they 'swarmed in the neighbourhood of Kingston', at the southern end of the state's famous Coorong wilderness.
A separate account indicates visitors to Australia have always marvelled at its wildlife. A man who saw Toolache wallabies in the mid-1800s says, 'I never saw anything so swift of foot as this species: It does not appear to hurry itself until the dogs have got pretty close'.
When it became apparent that the Toolache wallaby was vanishing, less than a century after it was first described in 1846, efforts were made to preserve the species. But a plan to capture and breed the last survivors in the late 1920s was disastrous, because most were left exhausted, stressed, and quickly died.
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At 72 years of age, Peter Matejcic from the Field Naturalists Society of South Australia has seen 'significant declines' in biodiversity across the country. In 2025, there are more than 2,000 species federally listed as threatened with extinction.
Some are already likely extinct, but not enough time has passed without a sighting for this to be officially declared. Others are in such small numbers their genetics could be compromised, making recovery a challenge.
History has shown that captivity is not the magic bullet for preventing extinction, as seen with the Tasmanian tiger and Tooloache wallaby. Matejcic wants to see increased focus in Australia on protecting natural spaces so that native animals can thrive in the wild.
'Once a species is confined to only zoo enclosures, survival of that species may be too late,' he warned.
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