I have come to a profound insight into human understanding. Seriously.

In Tasmania, you can tell whether a person is fundamentally “urban” or “rural” by their attitude to possums. Urban Tasmanians see possums as wonderful, lovely examples of our native fauna, and cute and furry to boot.

It may come as a shocking revelation to the gentle readers of Forty South, but those of us in country Tasmania do not like possums. In fact, we abhor possums. We find them absolute anathema. They may be cute and furry, and the sight of a mother possum carrying her young on her back is entirely enchanting – until you think of what those young ones are going to grow up into: destroyers of all you are trying to grow. Your food plants, your flowers and even your fruit trees; your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations.

No one wants to kill cute creatures, but the temptation is there because of their destructiveness. That is what possums can do to you. Turn your soul sour.

Down here on the Tasman Peninsula, even the greenest of green old hippies – off the grid out at Roaring Beach – would cheerfully get rid of them, if they were allowed. But we’re not. So, what we, and they, do is put up all sorts of defences. A friend of mine swears by hanging moth balls on plants he particularly values, but this is not practicable on a large scale. So we buy old nets from the fish farms, and have our fruit trees completely enclosed by mesh. We erect electric fences, as a public garden project on one property has. Or we trap and relocate them.

The lengths serious gardeners will go to are quite extraordinary. My friend Stuart MacDonald has erected a veritable fortress to defend his amazing vegetable garden. It has three strands of electric wire and 10-foot high chicken wire fences with floppy tops. He calls it Fort Knox.

If you go down the path of removal, you have to take them at least 15km away or they’ll be back tomorrow, ravenous to eat your geraniums and roses, your spuds, your peas, your beans – anything with leaves!

They love grape shoots.  I haven’t had a decent cover of leaves on my pergola for years, let alone a grape. They don’t seem to go for our tomatoes, thank the stars, but others may have a different experience. In fact different possums in different localities – or even different possums in the same location – seem to have different tastes, and go for different plants.

Just when you think a rose cutting is going well, an arriviste possum turns up and off it goes. But something else, such as a herb, survives. They are voracious but eclectic gourmands.

The point is, they are the mortal enemy of the country gardener. A friend recently lost the whole of his promising market garden produce from a plot 50m x 100m when his defences were breached. And, apparently, forced relocation is not necessarily a humane alternative, as the dislocated possum will have difficulty establishing a new territory, and probably may not survive.

But you can’t shoot them, because all native species are protected. They get killed on the roads in their thousands every year, which keeps the forest ravens going, and probably the Tasmanian devils as well.

Please don’t think I’m advocating for open season on possums, in fact I’m terribly worried that I haven’t seen a ring-tailed possum down here for years, whereas, in my youth they seemed to be in about equal numbers.

What I am describing, of course, is the tension inherent in a settler society trying to establish European horticulture in an alien land. This is liable to be fraught, in both directions. The introduced species may not thrive (eg, most citrus in Tasmania), the introduced species may out-compete local species (eg, cape weed or any number of introduced weeds you can think of), or, as in the possum case, the introduced flora, whilst finding a benign growing environment, may find a voracious local predator.

And then there are cats.

This raises a whole, almost philosophical, debate about whether we should have introduced anything – including us – to this continent and this island.

The trouble is, it is a completely barren debate. It’s over. We’re here and, let’s face it, we’re not going away, however much we would like the treatment of the Aboriginal population to be improved, and the destruction of the environment to be reduced. We’re just not leaving, and we need our introduced species – both plant and animal – if we are to maintain our European lifestyle and diet.

Whether we should or not, is a whole other debate.

What we have to do, in my opinion, is to work out how to maintain this lifestyle in a way that reduces our impact on the natural environment.

Now, what I have just written is almost a “motherhood” statement – one that even some conservative politicians would be happy to spout glibly. But are we serious about it? I love dogs and I’m fond of my cat (which, where I live, is almost a necessity if one is not to be overrun by rodents). But I freely admit that cats in the Tasmanian countryside are not a good thing, and it was the hunting of eastern grey kangaroos with dogs that almost wiped them out on this island – and did wipe out the Tasmanian emu. Are we really willing to live without cats and dogs?

Are we really willing not to eat beef and lamb and chicken? Most of us would say no, so we have a problem.

There are some exotic symbioses that work out well. Examples from just my place: the New Holland honey-eaters love our fuchsias, as do the wattle-birds. And Rocky and Roxanne, our resident green rosellas, feast on various exotic fruit trees in season while seemingly subsisting on things in the grass in lean times. And they bring up their “Rockettes” every year, while we still get fruit, so I suppose that something is working out. But not the problem of gardens and possums for us colonial invaders. That problem is completely unresolved. I suppose we’ll have to persist with the fish-farm netting, the electric fences and the moth-balls.

Live and let live.

Through gritted teeth.

So, that’s the colonialist now of the “possum problem”. What was the indigenous then?

The Tasmanian Aboriginal possum problem did not centre around the possum destruction of gardens, because there were no “gardens” in our terms. The whole landscape was their garden, open to them to harvest. The pallawah possum problem centred around how to catch them, because what what the Tasmanian Aboriginal people did with possums was to eat them.

This strikes me as a splendid solution, but it wasn’t easy. Aboriginal women had to climb the trees to catch the possums and then throw them down to death and degustation on the ground. And, to do this, the women had to fashion ropes to girdle the tree-trunks, cut notches in the trees as they went up and so edge up the big eucalypts till they got to their prey. It was exciting, if rather dangerous, stuff for them, and I’m sure a great spectacle for their families waiting expectantly for possum supper below.

The notches were about two metres apart vertically, which made Tasman’s men in 1642 think that they had encountered a land of giants.

There may, however, have been another exotic symbiosis which saved the women their dangerous work. The Tasmanian Aboriginal people, having had no companion animals before European occupation, were fearful of dogs when they arrived on the island with the first European settlers. At first they killed them whenever they could, as they could see how they were being used to hunt kangaroos. But they so swiftly adopted them as hunting and companion animals that within 10 years of the European occupation of Tasmania, Aboriginal people had dogs tamed and were working with them.

They became so good at dog-handling, that Jorgen Jorgensen, a contemporary observer, believed that hunting with dogs allowed the Tasmanian people to remain on their Country much longer than they otherwise would have been able to in the face of European aggression. The dogs were such efficient kangaroo and wallaby hunters that the people could remain inland, subsisting on game caught by the dogs, and did not have to visit the coast to harvest seafood. The coast had become dangerously populated by Europeans with guns.

The adoption of dogs was so rapid that the prominent archaeologist of Tasmanian matters, Rhys Jones, wrote, “These changes happened in Tasmania so quickly that, even in the most sensitive archaeological record, the process would seem to have been instantaneous.”

What this did to the relations between the sexes in a society where the women had been the main food providers – through shellfish and lobster gathering - is an interesting speculation.

The swift and useful adoption of a companion and hunting animal is a complete rebuttal of the contention that the indigenous people had become “mal-adapted” to their environment because they were suffering a “slow strangulation of the mind” ( a quote from the same Rhys Jones) by their 10,000 year isolation from the wider world after the flooding of Bass Strait.

Rhys Jones contended that this isolation had reduced Aboriginal capacity to adapt to changing circumstances, and that they were on the way to extinction even without European intervention. The use of dogs, their adoption and their complete integration into the social group is a complete rebuttal of this theory. A society, the members of which had never before had companion animals, had within 10 years become brilliant animal handlers and had changed their way of life to suit. Hardly mal-adapted.

But this adoption and adaptation, however marvellous, was of dogs, and dogs are relatively easy to train. What about cats?

There is a one report from GA Robinson that the Tasmanian Aboriginal people – post occupation, of course - used cats to catch possums. This is so singular that I will quote it: “The natives train up the English cats to catch possums.” This statement requires some examination

Robinson’s diaries were transcribed, edited and annotated by NJB (Brian) Plomley and published as Friendly Mission in 1966. Robinson travelled with the Aboriginal people and is generally seen, today, as a malign figure in their dispossession. Plomley feels that he seems to have started on his mission with good motives – to save the last of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people from destruction at the hand of the settlers. Many of the settlers were “extirpationists” – people who wanted the Aborigines wiped from the face of the earth.

The fact that Robinson’s evangelical Christianity might not fit with modern liberal sensibilities does not mean that he wasn’t sincere at the start of his “mission” to save the Aboriginal people’s bodies from the settlers and their souls from the devil. However, I agree with Plomley that it appears that, later, a feeling for celebrity and a realisation that there was money to be made, sullied Robinson’s mission.

The fact is, however, that Robinson knew more about the Tasmanian Aboriginal people “on Country” than any other recorded European, and his diaries, as published by Plomley, remain the best source of information for the lifestyle and society of the people – and the destruction of that society.

I quote the larger paragraph in which the statement about cats occurs:

“Saw where a native cat (which the Brune natives call LUE.DY) had chased a kangaroo … When in quest of prey they travel in pairs, male and female; and will run like a dog [so we must be talking about thylacines, and yet, in the next diary entry, he calls thylacines “hyenas” – difficult]. The natives say they follow the kangaroo in water and swim after it. The natives frequently kill the native cats when in the act of killing their prey. [This is reinforced in other references in the diaries.] The natives train up the English cats to catch possums.”

Given that this diary entry was written in 1830 at Port Davey, which had only had some seasonal whaling stations there by then, Plomley feels it unlikely that such a domestication could have taken place there. He thinks it may have been possible on Bruny Island, where there had been European settlement for some time, and also time for Robinson to observe the behaviour, as he had spent a year there before embarking on his “Friendly Mission”.

Even at Port Davey, there had been seasonal whaling stations for more than 10 years when Robinson visited, quite enough time for escaped or left-behind ships’ cats to go feral and get huge, as feral cats do from the pressure of their environment – natural selection.

How you tame and train them, who knows? But how did the Tasmanian people tame and train their first dogs?

It is one tiny reference, but oh so tantalising. Given their extraordinary skill in animal training, developed in such a short time, could the Tasmanian Aboriginal people  have trained cats to catch possums? I doubt we’ll ever know – but what a thought!

To finish on a light note, allow me a fantasy. In Victoria, they have a marvellous creature called the powerful owl. These terrific birds eat possums. A pair of powerful owls consumes about 300 brush-tailed possums a year. Three hundred! So, if we introduced them to Tasmania, we could save a lot of gardens and redress my perceived imbalance between brush-tailed and ring-tailed possums.

Call me a dreamer, but this is surely a win-win. I think even my hippy friends at Roaring Beach would approve, although perhaps not serious ecologists.

James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

Dinkus image credits: ring-tailed possum, Wikimedia Creative Commons, benjamint444 and Tony Wills; rose garden Wikimedia Creative Commons, Maria Kozmina.