Paddling free

These egg-laying aquatic mammals are among the world's most intriguing animals, a mystery to even the scientists who study them. The Weekly meets one man whose accidental discovery of an urban platypus led to a battle to save its home

- TIFFANY DUNK

For years, Pete Walsh had heard rumours that a mythical urban platypus was inhabiting Hobart’s waterway. To be honest, he said, he’d not really given it a thought.

Then COVID hit. Like many Aussies in those pandemic years, walking was about the only thing Pete could do. And with the Hobart Rivulet Walk on his doorstep, and photography both a sometimes-career and a passionate hobby, he took his camera along while he pondered both the nature surrounding him and the state of the world. And then it happened.

“It was just one of those things where you get a feeling and you peek your head over the water bank,” he tells The Weekly. “And then you see a platypus. During COVID, there were so few people around and the animals really seemed to come out across the city. They’d been enjoying our absence.”

Pete had started his walk at the foothills of Mount Wellington, from which the water flows down to the River Derwent before going underground beneath Hobart’s city. Polluted and filled with rubbish and debris thanks to long having been used as a stormwater drain, it seemed remarkable that any life form – let alone a platypus – could inhabit these waters. Pete was not only about to find out that they could, but that more than just one platypus had made a home here.

He spent hours photographing the remarkable creatures. “They are incredible from start to finish really,” he says. “They are perfectly evolved for their world. It’s such a small creature but packed with so many superpowers. They are graceful and peaceful and just deal with whatever comes along really pragmatically. It’s almost like a meditation how they exist.