Once Upon Australia – A Retrospective Review

[Infinity Blade]

Once Upon Australia – A Retrospective Review



I know I still have the second half of Walking with Cavemen to review. If the fact that I just randomly decided to write a review for another documentary makes me seem out of focus…well it’s because I kind of am. But in my defense, Once Upon Australia is literally less than half an hour long, so it’s not like I’m going to be digressing from WWC for long.

What is Once Upon Australia? Well, it’s a 1995 stop motion documentary created by Australian stop motion animator Nick Hilligoss, meant to showcase the natural history of Australia. Because there is only one “episode” that is <30 minutes long, it’ll be like reviewing one episode of WWD or WWB at worst. This is also the first stop motion documentary I have reviewed. So without further ado, let’s get started!

• Now, the first thing we’re treated to is the formation of the Earth and a brief mention of its early history before we quickly get into Australia itself. Due to a lot of Australia’s rock formations being eroded across the ages or even inundated by water, the continent’s fossil record is relatively sparse, with gaps in time. Hence, the program skips to an (unnamed) Eusthenopteron-like fish crawling onto land while gulping air*, evolving into a generic amphibious basal tetrapod (just called an “amphibian”), evolving into a generic reptiliomorph (identified simply as a “reptile”).
  
  *Nowadays we don’t really think the likes of Eusthenopteron were crawling onto dry land (Dickson et al., 2020), although one study found that its humerus was able to bear its weight without reaching dangerous levels of stress (Cornille & Clarac, 2020).
• ”…one of natural history’s great parting of the ways”, which turns out to be dinosaurs and mammals (represented here metaphorically with a literal two-way sign saying “dinosaurs” and “mammals”).
  
  More properly, this would be “sauropsids” (or as most people just like to say, “reptiles”) and “synapsids”.
• The reptiliomorph we see gradually evolves into a bipedal dinosaur to catch an insect. I don’t know if any of the forms we see evolving into are meant to represent any particular species, but if they are, they’re certainly never identified. The same goes for another reptiliomorph that goes the synapsid route and gradually evolves into a tiny mammal.
• The two lineages meet up on the other side (a forest) and have a little spat. Don’t ask me why that big theropod is so bothered by such a teensy mammal.
• Anyway, Gondwana continues to break apart, and we get to the Early Cretaceous 110 Ma. We see…Allosaurus?
  
  That might seem like a really weird decision, but I’m pretty sure I know the reason why. In 1981, a supposed allosaurid astragalus was found in Victoria, Australia, and for a while it was believed that allosaurids survived into the Early Cretaceous (Molnar et al. 1981). Four years after Once Upon Australia, Walking with Dinosaurs would feature the same animal and call it a “polar allosaur”.
  
  Nowadays, this astragalus is no longer regarded as an allosaurid, but rather a megaraptoran (Rolando et al., 2022).
• It’s just weird seeing this Allosaurus kill another dinosaur. Of course, that’s because it’s a 1995 stop motion documentary. It quickly snatches a generic small ornithopod in its jaws and instantly kills it, then shakes it a few times without much effort.
• We’re also introduced to an ornithomimid called Timimus. Of course, since it’s the 90s it’s unfeathered, and also depicted feasting on other dinosaur eggs. Although Timimus is only known from two femora (one juvenile and one adult), it is no longer thought to have been an ornithomimid, but possibly a tyrannosauroid (Benson et al., 2012).
• After the ornithomimid fails to get its lunch it goes for a drink, but is again driven off by a labyrinthodont that resembles Koolasuchus. Either their Koolasuchus is small, or their ornithomimid is huge.
• There’s a background event where the mother Allosaurus is feeding its hatchling, but when it drops the piece of meat it seems to fall on the hatchling and pins it underneath. This doc isn’t without its attempted comedic moments.
  
  Anyway, the real focus of this scene is Steropodon, a Cretaceous monotreme. It just lays an egg like a modern monotreme. It’s hard to say what Steropodon really looked like, but most reconstructions depict it looking something like a narrow-snouted platypus. Whatever the case, this documentary was far closer to the mark than Walking with Dinosaurs would be four years later (they just used a coati to live-act Steropodon!). Points to it for choosing to portray it too (obscure as it is).
• Right after introducing us to Steropodon, we cut to the K-Pg extinction. We even see a Parasaurolophus for a brief moment (clearly not meant to be in Australia, although Parasaurolophus was gone by the time of the K-Pg). A generic dromaeosaur collapses and dies, and a generic mammal scurries around (at one point falling into a dinosaur’s footprint; again, comedic moment). I’ll never get over how in a stop motion like this, an animal can seem fine walking around, but it just abruptly falls and dies.
• The metatherians on South America, Antarctica, and Australia are separated with the break-up of Gondwana. Though not seen, South American metatherians (all marsupials are metatherians, but not all metatherians are marsupials, and not all of South America’s native metatherians were true marsupials) are left to their eventual fate of having to live with North American fauna tens of millions of years later (although, the effect North American invaders had on them is exaggerated; much of the native South American fauna had already gone extinct before their supposed vicars could come down and compete with them).
  
  What is shown is the extinction of Antarctica’s marsupials. A generic small marsupial walks around its now frozen habitat, whimpering until it freezes to death, standing where it dies. Snow piles on top of it and icicles form on its frozen corpse, until its tail literally freezes off. Jesus Christ that’s dark…
• We get a bit where the small diprotodontid Ngapakaldia is feeding in its dense forest habitat (putting this scene in the Late Oligocene to Early Miocene). This documentary was literally the first time I had ever heard of Ngapakaldia, and I had no idea idea it was spelled like this at first.
  
  To my knowledge, this is the only depiction of the Riversleigh fauna in any paleomedia. I don’t think it’s shown much outside of some paleo art, books, and the Riversleigh Fossil Museum, which is a real shame. This brief bit in Once Upon Australia is all we’ve got, and even it only makes a dent in the mammalian fauna, let alone all the other creatures we’ve found there. Walking with Beasts was originally intended to make an episode centered on the Riversleigh fauna, but it was cut in production (link->). Pain…maybe if Forgotten Bloodlines does well enough, they can cover Riversleigh.
• Potentially fun fact about Ngapakaldia, though: in all of Riversleigh’s Faunal Zone A sites (latest Oligocene in age), N. bonythoni coexisted with the slightly smaller zygomaturine Neohelos tirarensis. In Faunal Zone B sites, Ne. tirarensis goes through a general increase in body size. It’s been hypothesized that this increase in body size may have led Neohelos to compete with Ngapakaldia more for resources, leading to the latter’s local extinction and replacement. Neohelos spp. are, in fact, the most geographically widespread diprotodontids, and they exhibited a lot of morphological variation. Ne. tirarensis exhibits far more individual variation in tooth morphology than N. bonythoni, which may have led to the latter being outcompeted (Ne. tirarensis itself was replaced by the cow-sized Ne. stilton in Faunal Zone C). Of course, as with virtually all competitive displacement hypotheses in the fossil record, this needs more testing (Black, 2010).
• A Ngapakaldia watches a small pool of water completely dry up before its very eyes, meant to represent the climate and habitat changes Australia goes through over time. In its bafflement, the Ngapakaldia evolves into Palorchestes off-screen as the rainforest turns into a drier, more open forest.
• So, let’s cover the Palorchestes. There are two things we have learned since then that make this Palorchestes dated. First, it probably did not have a muscular trunk like it was previously depicted with so often (Trusler, 2020). Second, the elbow of Palorchestes was fixed at an angle, such that it was immobile (Richards et al., 2019).
  
  “The shape of the humeroulnar articulation in P. azael would have effectively fixed the elbow in a flexed posture approaching a 100° angle, a condition seen in no other marsupial or placental mammal known to the authors.”
  
  Sandy Gore is certainly right when calling this beast big, though. P parvus weighed about ~300-400 kg. The largest species, P. azael, weighed a tonne or possibly more (Richards et al., 2019).
• No small wonder then that the two thylacines sneaking up on the Palorchestes are unable to challenge it. I’m not sure if these thylacines are meant to represent one of the earlier species (from the Miocene or Pliocene) or if it’s really meant to be the recent species. Given how this scene depicts an earlier, more forested environment from that of the Pleistocene, it may be one of the earlier fossil species.
• The Palorchestes vocalizations are obviously tweaked elephant trumpets. They…actually sound kinda nice?
• At last, we get to the Pleistocene! Though Thylacoleo’s size is rather underestimated (they were more comparable to jaguars in size) (Wroe et al., 1999), I wholeheartedly agree with Gore that it was too small to tackle an adult Diprotodon (certainly an adult male). I explain my reasoning here->.
  
  Also, Thylacoleo's isotope values show a clear preference towards forest-dwelling prey (see SVP 2018 abstracts here->). Diprotodon, by contrast, was living predominantly in grasslands (though sometimes did feed in forests) (Gröcke, 1997).
• The Thylacoleo takes down a juvenile Diprotodon, only to lose it to a Megalania (Varanus priscus). 7 meters, as stated here, is rather optimistic, but it was definitely still plenty big (size comp->). Big enough to take down an adult Diprotodon, and certainly big enough to scare off a Thylacoleo.
• We see some Genyornis, as well as a thylacine utterly fail to take down a Meiolania (which, frankly, seems utterly unbothered by the marsupial’s predation attempt) before we get to humans arriving in Australia. The megafauna go extinct, represented by Diprotodon just dropping dead (perhaps justified, considering it’s during a drought), though the doc cleverly makes it ambiguous as to whether climate change or human hunting is to blame. Recent work supports climate change being the general cause of extinction for Australian megafauna (Stewart et al., 2021), though Genyornis in particular may have been driven to extinction at least in part by egg harvesting by humans (Miller et al., 2016; Bradshaw et al., 2021). It’s here that the doc takes a depressing turn.
• By *50,000 years ago they’d gone.
• The thylacine walking through the bones of Diprotodon is also rather depressing (at some point it becomes motionless and fades away). While it survives the Pleistocene, it disappeared from mainland Australia a few thousand years ago (though, closer to 3,200 than 4,500 years ago as the doc says). Climate change, together with human impact (this might include competition with dingoes), is likely to have been the cause of extinction for mainland thylacines and devils (White et al., 2018a; White et al., 2018b).
  
  My man just taking L's in this doc.
• It only gets worse from there with European colonization of Australia. The montage over time, here, is very cleverly done. We see Australian cave paintings depicting the arrival of European ships, and as the camera zooms out the view is behind prison bars (referencing the fact that the first European immigrants to Australia were British prisoners). Tally marks on a stone prison wall turn into taller, stylized fences keeping in sheep grazing on Australian fields (with the sound of sheep in the background), and even taller trees that then shift back into the normal stop motion models. A modern sugar glider notices off-screen people cutting its tree down, first with an axe (like in earlier centuries), and later a chainsaw (which forces it to glide off of its tree branch).
  
  This turns out to be the side of a truck, and we get a scene of a modern Australian urban area. A plain brick wall is decorated by various graffiti paintings over time until they fade out and some vines inexplicably grow on the wall. The camera slowly pans up and…it’s a post-apocalyptic scene where buildings have crumbled. And humans have gone extinct. A rat comes across a partially-buried human skull. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.
  
  All while the narrator explains how Australia has another 50 million years before it collides with continents up north, and how humanity will (surely?) be extinct by then. And that’s the end of the doc.
• Well, sort of. As the credits roll, the rat next to the human skull picks up a bone, smacks it a bit into its other hand like you would with a baton, then throws it up, only to get hit in the head by it as it falls back down. The disgruntled rat leaves.
• I promise you this ending isn’t as weird as it sounds, I’m just kind of bad at describing it. It does, however, have a bittersweet energy to it. For the last several minutes of this doc, anthropogenic impact is portrayed in a rather negative light, from possibly the Late Pleistocene to the present day, and it’s kind of sad to see Australia’s fauna succumbing to humanity. But then, of course, humans are depicted going extinct. The rat staring at the human skull while playing with an old bone is, while kind of humorous, also leaves open the possibility for new life to emerge after the extinction of humans, especially with Australia’s remaining 50 million years of isolation.

Final verdict:

There’s not really much I can think of saying other than “old stop motion, dated but still very much charming, with an interesting premise”. Fun fact: during the production of this doc, Jurassic Park came out, and the then-advanced CGI in that film actually discouraged Nick Hilligoss about creating this now-seemingly outdated stop motion. The fact that he obviously made and released it anyway commands respect to him. I still recommend giving this a watch, because it is one of a kind. Appreciate it for what it set out to be at the time.