Featherdale Wildlife Park, Sydney: Where to find Australia's cutest animal, Archer the koala

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Featherdale Wildlife Park, Sydney: Where to find Australia's cutest animal, Archer the koala

By Belinda Jackson
Updated
Zookeeper Chad with a bilby.

Zookeeper Chad with a bilby.

The koala's bottom is snuggled into my hand as we wait for the camera to click, and I'm acutely aware of the distance between his long black talons and my seven-year-old's eyes.

Monty (for that is the koala's name) turns his own tiny, pink-rimmed eyes away from my daughter and glares at me before slowly turning back to stare down the barrel of the adoring camera. He knows the money shot.

"Kids love them, people bawl their eyes out, they propose to each other," says Chad Staples, Featherdale Wildlife Park's director of life sciences, who started here 22 years ago, fresh out of high school.

Set in Doonside, just outside Blacktown in Sydney's outer west, Featherdale opened in 1972, surrounded by paddocks and farms. Today, the three-hectare park is hemmed by houses and, unlike many Australian wildlife parks, focuses solely on our native animals, without resorting to the big-buck lure of imported pandas or tigers.

This modest park knows the power of the platypus, potaroo and pademelon. Sure, the car park is full of buses bringing adoring foreign tourists, but the other half of the visitors are like us – families with primary-school-aged kids and the pram-bound, every one of them besotted with bilbies, gawping at ghost bats, cowering from crocs. Little groups work through home-made picnics beneath the gum trees, and the café is doing a mean trade in cold ice-creams and hot chips: staying on the Australiana theme, we order the barramundi burger.

Featherdale is the busiest of parks: our footsteps awaken a parade of echidnas who putter out for juicy clumps of mince, egg and mashed termite, and we watch a hapless keeper being chased by a cross mother magpie goose. A colony of little penguins skim in and out of their pool, while Ned and Lola, two hand-raised wombats, grumble by.

"I've been bitten by everything," says Chad, who has a fabulous repertoire of trivia that surely makes school projects a cinch in his house. As seven-year-old Yasmine stuffs the animals with leaves, her head is being stuffed with facts: cassowaries – with their talons and bony heads – are distant cousins of the pack hunters of the Jurassic period, velociraptors, and hate everybody, including each other. Girl wombats are bigger than boy wombats, and they communicate by biting. And the very existence of bettongs.

There are more than 2000 animals here, but the king is Archer the koala, Featherdale's pin-up boy, voted Australia's cutest animal. Today he's making an appearance at the park's hugely popular Breakfast With a Koala. We witness first-hand his star power: as the doors to the breakfast room are flung open, we are flung aside by a group of foreign visitors, who ignore the lamingtons set invitingly on the table as they rush to bask in Archer's gaze.

The koalas' other key job is to help the sanctuary reach its aim of producing six healthy joeys each year to bolster Australia's wild koala population. With a complex web of arranged marriages to keep the bloodlines clear, the pack is led by stud Arlo and aided by Monty, he of the snuggled bottom, abetted by the girls, including Laura, Scout and Willow.

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Note that this is a park, not a zoo, and there's plenty of free-range action, with swamp wallabies, pademelons and kangaroos from Kangaroo Island (where else?) springing joyfully past us: even an albino wallaby in pouch. The more notorious animals – think crocodiles, snakes and spiders – are, of course, behind bars.

The macropod preschool is stacked full of sweet-faced wallabies and kangaroos being weaned, and every kid is on their knees, shovelling grain into gluttonous, fat-bellied hoppers. The farmyard treads more familiar territory, but here, a rogue lamb is causing chaos, cannoning happily through a group of nine-year-old girls, who scream only as nine-year-old girls can.

On our VVIP tour, we go backstage into the vet block to commiserate with an injured spectacled flying fox and coo over pretty birds' eggs in incubators. But the showstopper is baby Olivia, a seven-month-old orphan wombat joey rescued from the South Coast after her mum was killed by a car. Snuggling deep into Chad's arms, her little pink snout wiggling with pleasure, she's in no rush to leave.

Not everything on this tour is soft. "He's super friendly," says keeper Emma, as she plonks Mario, a shingle-backed lizard, into Yasmine's hands. With his thick, black tiled body and head that's shaped exactly like his tail, he's a living tank. "He's the sausage of the reptile world," says Emma, as Miss Seven chats to the wrong end.

And they're not all touchy-feely, which should allay any fears that one of Featherdale's four inland taipans, the world's most venomous snake, is going to get a cuddle. In the cool, quiet reptile pavilion, beautiful leaf-green tree frogs drip from the glass like emeralds, and Winston the children's python hangs like a discarded rope.

Then there's big, bad Ngukurr, a 600-kilogram saltwater crocodile trucked in from the Roper River, up in the Northern Territory, where he was guilty of eradicating the town's dog population. "Ngukurr was going to be turned into a pair of shoes," says his keeper. He's not reformed: in his 27 years here, the septuagenarian croc has also eaten two wives.

It's Ngukurr's feeding time and a crowd has gathered around his pool: our VVIP pass means we're standing up beside the keeper, who's dandling a raw chicken carcass over the croc's unblinking eyes. Suddenly, incredibly, he hauls his great bulk towards the sky to snap it savagely in one go, crashing back down into the shallows, with the smile of a known killer.

Afterwards, on a personal croc encounter, Yasmine is handed his compatriot.

"Aww," we all coo, "it's a baby!"

The junior crocodile's jaws are taped shut, and its little body vibrates with indignity and rage. It's a test of my motherhood, it's a test of our Australian-ness. Croc and child pass with flying colours: the next thing Featherdale breeds may be Generation Z's Attenborough.

Featherdale Wildlife Park is open every day except Christmas Day. Entrance costs $32 adults and $19 children (3-15 years). Families (2 adults, 2 children) costs $88. Breakfast with a koala costs $55 adults, $45 child, personal animal encounters – including dingo, koala and reptile – cost $25 each, 217-229 Kildare Rd, Doonside, see featherdale.com.au

STAY

The four-star Blacktown Atura has a cool pool, busy bar and design vibe, 10 minutes' drive from Featherdale. Stays cost from $179, see aturahotels.com

FIVE OTHER FAMILY ACTIVITIES IN THE WEST

SKYLINE DRIVE-IN

With new Hollywood movies and the obligatory '50s diner, the drive-in also hosts a bursting Sunday morning market. Yes, they still check in the boot for stowaways, see eventcinemas.com.au

WET 'N' WILD SYDNEY

More than 40 slides and water play areas, from super-slides to wave pools, languid lagoons and lazy rivers cover this vast, open-air waterworld, see wetnwildsydney.com.au

IFLY

Try indoor skydiving in a high-tech wind tunnel, or get whisked up into its High Fly tunnel – for anyone over 3 years old, see downunder.iflyworld.com

SKYPEAK ADVENTURES

If the weekend isn't complete without zip lining, there are more than 80 high experiences including bungee-like jumps and the tree-tops Skypeak Walk, with views to the Blue Mountains, see skypeak.com.au

JET PACK

James Bond inspired the jetpack experience, which lets you fly over water, strapped to a jetpack or jetboard, or go whitewater rafting, see jetpackadventures.com.au

Belinda Jackson travelled as a guest of Featherdale Wildlife Park.

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