Her name was Mothball and she changed my life: the true story behind 'Diary of a Wombat.'

Her name was Mothball and she changed my life.

We met almost 30 years ago. She was a young wombat that had been badly bitten by dogs, then rescued by Wires and reared by humans. And me, a woman who had lived with wild animals for two decades by then, who had been accepted as a neighbour by many, and by some as their friend.

I had met my first wombat 20 years before that, when I moved into a shed in his territory. Smudge decided I was harmless but ignorant. He chose to educate me. Each night I’d follow him to springs in the hills, or up a vast lightning-struck tree with a wombat-dug tunnel to a sort of viewing platform on the top. Wombats don’t look at views. They smell them. (They mostly communicate by smell too.) When a wombat smells a view, they see not just now but (possibly) what was there many years ago, with at least a glimpse of what may happen next.

In those years I became part of the animal world around me, living with little human contact, eating, cooking, working and bathing outside much like my ancestors, and all very useful for the historical fiction I’d write years later. Gladys the black snake hibernated under the bed. Fred the wallaby enjoyed new gourmet delights of onions, parsley and roses. Smudge shared my nights.

They were not pets. I never fed them or patted them. It’s a joy and a privilege to have wild animals decide you are their friend.

I studied them too. In the early 1970s almost no work had been done on the species I lived with, from antechinus to wombats. Decades passed. The shed became a house. I had a son, and married again. Professionals now studied Australian wildlife. Groups of carers evolved to raise injured or orphaned baby wombats. And our farm became a conservation area, and an occasional release site for hand-reared wildlife.

An orphaned wombat dies if released straight into the bush. Wombats need to learn how to dig properly, how to find local foods and, most importantly, not be bashed up or bitten by the local dominant wombat. They need safe places where they can gradually wander off into the bush for a few days, finally vanishing into the hills as they find their own territory. Most never return.

Mothball was round and brown and cuddly. She sat on my lap, munching a carrot as I had a cup of tea.

“She’s very fond of carrots,” said her carer. “And rolled oats.”

Neither are good food for wombats, though a small amount does no harm. Her carers put a couple of carrots into the animal cage on the back seat. I headed out into peak-hour traffic as Mothball crunched.

Then the crunching stopped. Mothball gave the shriek that I soon learned meant “carrots!”

An ominous new sound came from the back seat. Five minutes later, an angry wombat leapt on my lap; she’d bitten through the cage and she wanted carrots. Now.

It’s not easy to negotiate traffic with an angry wombat chewing the steering wheel, but there was nowhere to pull off. I made it to Bungendore, bought an armload of carrots, and threw them in the back.

The rest of the trip was accompanied by munching.

At last, I opened the back door. Mothball leapt out, and discovered grass. Lush green grass. She discovered dirt when I pushed her blanket up the wombat burrow behind the bathroom, and she followed its familiar scent. She emerged with a grubby nose.

“Dirt!”

Three months later, Mothball went bush. I missed her. Smudge had been a friend, sitting on the doorstep when I played the violin, leading me on walks on moonlit nights, even spending the last weeks of his life lying close to me. But I’d never cuddled or played with him as I had with Mothball.

Eighteen months passed. The drought grew worse. Suddenly there was a wombat shriek at the back door.

“Carrots!”

Before I could unlatch the screen door, Mothball had charged through the wire, leaped up at me and ripped my dress, invaded the bathroom, tore the bathmat in half and draped toilet paper around the corridor. She was hot and hungry, and it was all my fault.

Mothball made her displeasure clear each night. Anything that smelled of humans was destroyed. She devastated the mop. We hung the new one higher; she pulled a box over to reach it.

She chewed up the doormat and the garden chairs. She ripped the washing from the line and mangled every boot left outside. Our house looked like we were defending it from angry elves, with reinforcing mesh over the lower windows and metal nailed to the doors.

Finally it rained. Grass grew. Mothball grazed peacefully – apart from trying to bite any wombat, wallaby or lyrebird that encroached on her territory. But she still demanded carrots, and would seek and destroy until she received them NOW – even at 2am.

One evening, carrotless, she dragged a box over to the garden seat, climbed into the box, then the seat, then the windowsill, then leaped on to my lap.

“Carrots. Now.”

I explained the noise to a friend on the phone: “That’s just Mothball bashing up the garbage bin, gnawing

through the door …”

I realised I was describing the diary of a wombat. So I wrote one.

It took three years to find a tone that sounded wombat-like. If I wrote a book in “wombat” it would mostly be smells, with a few growls, a shriek and “huff”. But I’m dyslexic. Working with kids with dyslexia, I’ve learned that if you know the key words in a sentence you can usually decipher it all. Wombats are single-minded. Key words worked.

Back then few people overseas knew wombats. Only my publisher, Lisa Berryman, thought Diary of a Wombat would sell. There was no PR campaign. But booksellers fell in love with it, and so did readers across the world. It’s now sold more than 1m copies in Australia and unknown numbers overseas; it has won about 40 awards and has been translated into about 30 languages.

It’s an impossible book: how do you illustrate a brown wombat in a black night? The genius illustrator Bruce Whatley turned black into white. He accepted the need to make the sleeping postures accurate.

When it was published, I read the book to Mothball. She liked the pictures. She seemed to recognise them as wombats – she showed no interest in other animals but she could recognise her own reflection (often used as a guide to animal intelligence).

I loved her. How can you not love a furry dominatrix? I had assumed she saw me as a useful servant, until one day, stroppy about something else entirely, I spoke to her angrily as I put down her carrots. She stopped, sniffed my anger with a lifted nose, ignored the carrots and slowly trudged away. I had hurt my friend. I hadn’t known she was a friend until then.

Mothball returned three weeks later, cautious. I apologised. She understood my tone.

We lived together until she died, by then an old wombat, accidentally killed by trespassers.

I still see her when I read Diary of a Wombat. Every time I lecture on wombats, she’s there too. I hear her snort each time someone declares that wombat droppings are square. (They can be – but only when their food is dry. When it’s lush grass, they’re long and green.)

After 50 years I know a great deal about wombats. But how can you truly understand a species that communicates by smell, and probably in concepts you can’t share? I’ve been privileged to share my life with an animal that never co-evolved with humans, like dogs, cats or sheep.

I’ve known a wombat who slept so deeply that even a vet friend couldn’t find a heartbeat or respiration; she woke up as we lowered her into a grave. (She was not amused.) I’ve known a wombat use a tomato stake as a lever, and another to count to six. Some wombats swim. Others sink. Some enjoy music. Others ignore it, or move away.

Wombats can visualise possibilities. One heartbreaking morning I watched a log truck hit a wombat. Her young son spent over an hour rolling her body to the safety of their burrow. Was he hoping that, when night came, she’d wake up?

I still write books, fiction and nonfiction, for young people and for adults. Now and then they win awards, or creep on to bestseller lists. But no matter what I write now, I’m “the wombat’s mum” or “St Jackie of the wombats”. I’m neither. I’m a human who has been privileged to have wild animals accept her as a neighbour, and sometimes as a friend.

I still miss Mothball, every day.

• If you’d like to support desperately needed research into a mange vaccine to help this endearing, indomitable species survive, please donate to WomSAT via Western Sydney University: https://give.westernsydney.edu.au/wombat