The Great Wombat Hunt of '38

"'Me and my cousins all rode up and we scoured the outback for those demon bats, those womble-spawn that came and cleft my Ma.' - Alt Schwift X"The Great Wombat Hunt of '38 was a mass cull of highly dangerous wildlife which occurred in Australia. It is notable because it was precipitated by the death of the mother of world-renowned outback demonologist, Alt Schwift X.

The inciting incident
The hunt was a triggered by dismemberment of a woman, reportedly by by a pack of wombats in a nocturnal raid on her family settlement. The woman was separated into four parts, or "cleft in twain" as was reported at the time. Her remains were allegedly taken by the wombats who were found to be scavenging on the them when they were discovered. The woman's remains were so widely scattered that they were only recovered over the course of several days, requiring a separate burial for each recovery. Bent on vengeance, the extended family of the slain woman scoured the surrounding hinterland, hunting for any wombats they could find to slaughter and eat them as part of their ritualistic vendetta.

Dating the event
Information on the event is pieced together from oral histories which only refer to "thirty-eight" as the year of the hunt. Researchers have tentatively placed the event as having occurred in 1838. The justification is that by the Gregorian Calendar, in the year 1738 Australia was only occupied by Aboriginal Australians, who lived in harmony with the wombat, and earlier candidates for dates of the event were unlikely because of this.

The first wave of British settlers, who were likely to be the first non-Aboriginal people to encounter the savage wombat, did not arrive until 1788, which would be look late to be the year referred to in the witness account. However, 1838 there was a wave of Prussian settlers to Australia, the largest group of non-British migrants in Australia at the time. Our source in these matters, Alt Schwift X, was known to have been caught up in the Great Purge in the Soviet Union in 1936, so it is possible that Schwift was among those early Prussian settlers in Australia, and that he retired to his family's ancestral lands in his old age.