'Can you be haunted by a ghost who hasn't become a ghost yet' my niece asks, her eyes earnest and reflecting the last of the leaves outside the glass of her room. She usually skips to the next question before I have had chance to answer, but this time she leaves a pause.
I don't know what to fill it with because my waking hours are full of ghosts. Yesterday it was the barking owl. I had to change the list to 'believed extinct' from 'endangered'. No one had heard it's bark for years. Some said it was like a human howl and I would agree - as if it was lamenting the demise of all the winged things we'd lost in the last decade.
I don't want to talk to her about the bureaucratic admin of reducing life to status changes. I used to rescue animals, not document their disappearance, but the silence in the field became too loud. It's less quiet in the temperate perfection of the government building in which we are housed. One of the perks of the job - plucked from a town near the coast decimated by fire, we were one of the lucky ones, privledged, cared for in the thick walls of a museum, our apartment with one single highlight window that let in the sun.
She likes to listen to the birds on her screen. She knows the yellow tailed black cockatoo, the scrub wrens, the grass parrots. Once I brought her a feather from a pink cockatoo which she pinned on a corkboard above her desk. She knows too dodos and t-rex and other animals that have gone extinct. I am well versed in those - the striped thylacine, still believed to roam in Tasmania, yet there has been no sightings for years, perhaps because of the fires that killed three quarters of the human population there last year. Less glamourous, the brooding tree frog, a monitored right up until the last known call, then silence.
I know ghosts. I know you don't lie to children. I was raised in a world of lies, and look at the truth we are living now.
'Yes,' I say softly. 'That's my job, my darling koala' I say. I show her my personal screen and bring up the recordings, the emails, the news reports, the social media posts.
Koala, Cape Otway, Victoria, Australia.
'Take the 2029 fires' I said. 'You remember. We were lucky. Do you remember the week before?'
'The wombat?' she said. Her face was serious. She was a rescue pup too, just like the joey we'd found still sucking at it's burnt mother's teat. Her mother had died in the tsunami on a trip to Japan with her husband.
'For weeks, I had been getting calls about wombats. It was either no-one had seen them, or some old lady swearing she'd seen one in the moonlight down by the old shearing sheds, or blurry photos. One guy sent in a recording of something that sounded like a wombat grunting outside his window, but it was hard to verify. So when we saw the baby wombat and it's dead mother, it was like seeing a ghost'.
'Yes, I know that' she said, impatient as she would often be when trying to puzzle out a problem with me not quite understanding. 'But there are still some wombats alive, in the Australia Zoo, right?'
'Yes, three breeding pairs, a few babies' I said, knowing that they were unlikely to mate, and having them on my 'ready to archive' list. I felt ashamed, as if my own hastiness to complete a day's work was hastening their extinction.
'I mean' she said, 'knowing that something will die, and being haunted by a ghost that hasn't yet become one?'
I did know. I felt sick with the knowing, and that she knew. We were meant to protect children, not surround them with carcases, taxidermied bandicoots and monitor lizards and koalas. For a moment I see her as the last koala, sitting stunned in a blackened landscape, burnt, keening. I want to pull her close, wrap her in my shawl, kiss her head. But that's not the world she will survive in, one of hiding and being coddled.
Pademelon, Tasmania
I thought of knowing that my sister would die before she left on the plane, or that the ice sheets would give up their frozen ships, or that the krill would not survive the temperature rising in the southern pole, and then the great blue whale, the greatest that had ever lived.
We named that stupid wombat Hope, a stupid human name which had doomed her to die before she'd even stopped drinking from the teat. She couldn't even walk properly but she drank with this impolite ferocity as if she could just keep drinking she'd keep on living, but it wasn't as simple as that. I remember her last shudder, as if she'd given up trying to do well, the last of her kind.
My niece looks at the screen and doesn't flinch. She is good at understanding systems and have not yet learnt the survival mechanism of denial like the adults around her. .
“So ghosts can come early,” she says finally.
“Yes,” I say. “Sometimes they arrive while there’s still a body.”
She nods, satisfied in the way she is when something difficult has been correctly named. We were never good at naming it. There always seemed something else to pay attention to, until we were locked indoors, looking outside, the dead leaves scraping along the glass.
Echidna, Hordern Vale, Victoria, Australia
Somewhere, a sound that once could have been a call is swallowed by the evening. I know the sounds out there are just the collapsing of the world. Tomorrow I will go back to work and change more words into past tense.
Tomorrow she will ask me another question that breaks my heart to answer.
Later, when she’s asleep, I sit alone and listen to the last known recordings of a rainbow lorikeet. I catalogue and archive - it is steady, methodical work, and keeps me calm. But tonight, I feel sadder than usual. I can hear the ghosts tapping at the glass, waiting for our last shudders. It strikes me they're impatient.
All photographs by me.
