Before I moved to Melbourne, on one of my first visits to the city, friends took me to Studley Park. Not knowing the city at the time, I had no conception of where it was, but it felt like miles from anywhere: surrounded by bush, next to the wide Yarra River. In fact it’s in the inner city, just over the river from Collingwood, where one of Melbourne’s oldest football teams was founded, and only a few kilometres from the CBD.

Studley Park is also where one of the last known wild mainland eastern quolls in Victoria survived. An article in Melbourne’s Argus newspaper from 1956 states that: ‘there is an isolated colony in one of the wilder parts of Studley Park; and every now and again the body of one is brought to the [National] Museum after being dazzled and knocked over by a car at night on Studley Park Road, or the Yarra Boulevard’. How long that colony persisted for is difficult to determine, but it’s believed that by the late 1950s the species was extinct in Victoria. Shortly after that eastern quolls—one of four Australian quoll species, and once found throughout south-eastern Australia from Queensland all the way along the coast to South Australia—were declared extinct on the mainland, and continued to survive in the wild only in Tasmania.