This is not a quoll. It is a short-beaked echidna, Western Australia’s only monotreme species from back in the days when Australia was one end of the supercontinent Gondwana. Antarctica then apparently made some awkward comment and copped a heap of shunnage from South America and Australia which both split away and headed north; Antarctica ended up at the south pole surrounded by an ocean that eventually cooled it to freezing. South America then had the ecological misfortune to run into North America, and all the vicious bastard Laurasian fauna like jaguars and ocelots and monkeys and stuff headed south and that was that. South America managed to get its own back a bit by sending some spare marsupials north, which is why there’s opossums in North America now.

Australia’s ecology managed to thrive and evade the worst of the Laurasian invasion until human beings arrived at least fifty thousand years ago, then dingoes were introduced a few thousand years ago and wiped the thylacine off the mainland. And then some European human beings showed up with their favourite pets, food, pest control, beasts of burden and target practice and, ecologically and otherwise, all hell broke loose..

The moral of this story is that human beings are a more indigenous species to Australia than dingos, given that dingos only arrived pretty recently.

The Noongar word for the short-beaked echidna is nyingarn, which is a much more fun word to say than echidna. There is a cute picture book in Noongar and English about how poor Nyingarn gets shunned by all the other animals while looking for a friend.