01/09/2026
*** Distressing roadkill images below ***
Very sad to report the wombat with mange that a group of us were trying to assist on the road outside Eventide Sanctuary has been killed today.
There was a plan to get him to the care and treatment he needed at wildlife vets. This was a different wombat to the one assisted a while ago so there must be a lot of mange spreading in this area now sadly.
I highly doubt anyone can say he ran out on them as he was virtually blind and moved very slowly.
Left in the road to bleed out the person that did this could not even check if he was deceased or clear it from the road. I saw many cars just drive over the top of him before I could safely move him to a place of dignity. As a large adult male I doubt the impact killed him outright.
The first journey many tourists do when they pick up their hire car at Hobart airport is drive to Port Arthur along this road, this is one of their first images of Tasmania and what they take back to their home country with them. I have personally been told this by many of them how confronting it is. You cannot truly measure how much financial, traumatic and long-term impact a single wombat laying in the road like this can cause to Tasmania as a whole, perhaps it stops members of that tourists family visiting next year and they go elsewhere and so it spreads? Why is nothing done about it?
What is happening to society? We need to care more about each other and our surroundings. People are living in a cocoon of work cubicles,social media and keyboards and spend time complaining about others but can’t pull over and get out the car to help an animal. Most accidents now, people’s first instinct is to grab a phone video instead of bloody helping!
Local councils need to stop wasting money digging up perfectly good footpaths for 6 months and look at some basic wildlife fencing along known wildlife routes. That wombat could flip a small car quite easily in the dark had I not taken it off the road. Why is it left to a handful of people that care to clean up the mess, much like dumped roosters. There is a handful of people caring enough to capture and rehome them around here. Others chuck them out the car and drive off looking at them in the rear view mirror.
It’s not weak to care, some young lads need to lose this macho image of speeding around in jacked up 4x4s and with ‘aim here skippy’ stickers on the bull bars. This starts with education. Some of the toughest blokes I served with in the Army were quiet, kind men.
The standards you walk past is the standard you accept.
Let’s do bloody better than this.
