Now, thanks to The Secret Life of Wombats, by James Woodford, we’ve wombat facts to add to wombat fictions. The book begins with a story worthy of Lewis Carroll: a Boys’ Own Adventure tale of a youngster exploring the burrow of a wombat, which might replace the one about Alice following the rabbit down its burrow. This is one of the great yarns of Australian natural history. The year is 1960. Peter Nicholson, a Geelong Grammar boy, spending a year at Timbertop, plays truant at night and heads off into the bush to investigate the world of the wombat. Defying the dangers and claustrophobia, he climbs down a burrow and, little by little, maps it. ‘Getting to know its forks and offshoots, testing it for its stability …

He turned the last corner awkwardly and there, less than a metre in front of him, was a wombat lying in its nest.’ It made a strange grunt and Nicholson grunted back. Thus began his friendship with the creature. In April 2001, Woodford entices Nicholson back to the burrow to relive his adventure. Each chapter begins with a few lines from Nicholson’s original school project. It’s a pity the whole text isn’t included as an appendix.

The book also incorporates correspondence between such eminences as Joseph Banks and George Bass, revealing the fascination the colonial white man had with these furry barrels. While enjoying something like cult status in England and Europe in the nineteenth century, the wombat was already becoming extinct in some areas back home. Wombat populations are subtly different and we really have no way of knowing which wombats we’ve lost, given that many were driven to extinction before they could be studied.

We’re taken to Riversleigh, the palaeontologists’ nirvana, and to the Gregory River in Queensland. Although wombats haven’t lived there for thousands of years, their fossilised ancestors burrowed away for twenty-five million years. One of them, the biggest wombat that ever lived, was a beast weighing up to 250 kilograms, in contrast to the Warendja, the smallest species, perhaps half the size of a brush-tailed possum. Wombats are part of the Vomatiforums (the wombat shaped sub-group) of the Diprotodontian order. Twelve species of wombats are known by their fossil record; only three survive.

We’re most familiar with the common wombat, whose corpses litter our roads, and the southern and northern hairy-nosed. The latter, in the Epping Forest National Park in central Queensland, is on the verge of extinction; it’s estimated that only one hundred survive. There are none in captivity and, thus far, scientists have been unable to encourage their breeding. The national park is surrounded by degraded, cleared land that can’t support them. From inhabiting three eastern states a hundred years ago, they now linger on a mere three hundred hectares overrun by buffel grass.

The chapter on the desperate state of the northern hairy-nosed is deeply moving, a clarion call for people to care about these threatened and probably doomed creatures. Woodford meets up with scientist Alan Horsup and they check out the burrows in the park. The news is grim. ‘There is no sign of life at Burrow 28.’ Their fate is now so perilous that they ‘cannot be secure in the long term if they live in one small section of a tiny national park. But the risks are just too great to move the twelve or eighteen animals required to establish another population – either in captivity or in one of the areas where they were once found.’ Meanwhile, the southern hairy-nosed are still being legally culled and accidentally killed in considerable numbers.

All wombats are likely to have ritualistic mating procedures, but no one has seen the southerns or northerns having sex in the wild. Nor has anyone actually seen a wombat being born. We know, however, that gestation is probably less than a month and that the young are born the size of a jelly bean. They leave the pouch aged between eight and ten months but remain close to their mothers. After two years, and weighing around twenty-two kilograms, they take on an independent life. Captive examples have lived for twenty-six years, but no one knows how long they can live in the wild. As we learn from Woodford, what we don’t know about wombats is as intriguing as what we do. How do they clean their young in the pouch? How do they get rid of waste products?

‘What makes a wombat different from all other marsupials and from many other mammals is its jaw. In order to be able to fuel its underground existence a modern wombat has to eat vegetation, such as native grasses and roots, that other animals turn their noses up at.’ Their ability to convert grass to meat is three times better than kangaroos. Urea, a urine waste that most animals excrete, is fermented in wombats allowing them to recycle the nitrogen in their feed. ‘Wombats really do appear to belong to an environment – underground – that we don’t understand.’ Then, ‘Wombats seem to suffer life above ground as a necessary evil’.

Woodford devotes a few pages to the Wildlife Information and Rescue Service (WIRES) and to the work of Gaylene and Rob Parker at their wombat retreat an hour and a half south-west of Sydney. Here they’ve saved more than two hundred orphaned wombats. Along the way, they have experienced difficulties sufficient to convince anyone that caring for these creatures is too complex to be left to the amateur. Little wonder that no one has ever attempted to farm them.

Given the mysteries surrounding the wombat, it’s not surprising that Lewis Carroll replaced his with a dormouse.