Kangaroos, wallabies and wallaroos abound, literally, on our farm, as do platypuses, echidnas and wedge-tails. We’ve even been told by visiting bushwalkers that we’ve got a few koalas up the mountain. But we don’t have wombats.

To compensate, we’ve a ceramic wombat doorstop and a big wooden wombat garden seat. We buy books for our daughter – The Muddle Headed Wombat, Wombat Divine – and tell her how the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, the one that drowses through the Madhatter’s Tea Party, was a wombat in Lewis Carroll’s first draft. Our mythology is augmented with jokes about eating wombat sandwiches and wombat soup and how a rare breed of wombat flies from tree to tree each spring.