JOURNALISM of the past half century has too often been about death. The word 'war' registers 825 million references in Google; 'peace', only 259 million. For once, let's celebrate life.
On a 29 sq km patch of land in a remote, semi-arid corner of Australia, a strange little, furry, long-eared marsupial that might have been designed by Stephen Spielberg or a Disney cartoonist is edging back from the brink of annihilation.
The endangered creature is the bilby - also known as the rabbit-eared bandicoot. Bilby fans say it reminds them of Yoda, the floppy-eared Star Wars character.Before white settlers arrived in Australia in 1788, many millions of bilbies lived alongside Australia's other idiosyncratic native marsupials, kangaroos, wallabies, wombats and koalas. But by the late 1990s, the bilby population that was once spread across some 70 per cent of the continent had dwindled to almost nothing.
The first of those settlers were British convicts and their guards. Gold discoveries later attracted many thousands from North America and Asia.
The immigrants brought with them animals that quickly became the bilby's enemies. Deadliest by far have been imported cats. Foxes, imported by English military officers and landed gentry, also found the bilby tasty.
The carnage first wiped out the bilby's relative, the lesser bilby, believed to have gone extinct in about 1950. But over the past decade, dedicated naturalists working on slender budgets believe they may have halted yet another extinction.
The headquarters of the bilby's comeback is a fenced-off acreage in the Currawinya National Park, 670km north-west of Brisbane. Though the bilby cannot yet be considered really safe, there is growing optimism about its future.
One of the main reasons, perhaps, is the bilby's mating habits. Given half a chance with its love life, this weird little grey and white creature has to be one of the randiest in the animal kingdom.
Bilbies are sexually mature at six months and breed all year round. The female is pregnant for just 12 to 14 days before a baby (called a joey) appears.
There are usually up to three in a litter. One bilby-fancier describes the newborn as 'a baked bean with legs'. The mother keeps them in her pouch.
They are well catered for inside: The pouch has eight nipples. After about 80 days, the fully formed bilby appears, ready to forage for insects and wild onions - and, after about another 100 days, to begin mating.
In a year of good weather and abundant food, a female bilby can produce up to eight young. A sexually active two-year-old female can be a great-great-great-grandmother.
A couple of dedicated conservationists are given much of the credit for improving the bilby's prospects: Mr Peter McRae and Mr Frank Manthey.
Mr McRae, a zoologist with Australia's National Parks and Wildlife Service, first got involved in 1988 when he was asked to make an initial survey of the Queensland bilby population. 'But after 12 months of setting traps and using spotlights at night to locate the nocturnal animals, we found nothing,' Mr McRae told The Straits Times.
Fearing the worst, he turned for help to a friend and fellow ranger Mr Manthey, who had formerly made a living shooting the bilby's bigger cousin, the kangaroo.
Mr Manthey, whose wife had recently died, was looking for something to put meaning in his life. At first, he had little interest in the bilby. But one night in 1998, after joining Mr McRae with a spotlight trying to locate bilbies - and, he said, 'after a few glasses of snake juice' - the bilby's round eyes, large twitching ears and irresistibly cute manner turned him into a passionate bilby fan.
Mr Manthey spoke recently to Australian Story, a government TV programme, about his bilby fixation. 'Bilbies were mythical to me,' he said, 'like Santa Claus or tooth fairies. You hear about them, but, really, do they exist?
'But when you see one at the end of the spotlight, you see the colour and how graceful and beautiful it is, you start to realise that they were once all over Australia, and now we're down to this little, tiny pocket.
'That really gets to me. Why are we letting something like this disappear from our planet?'
With help from the Environmental Protection Agency and Wildlife Preservation Society, Mr Manthey and Mr McRae, who became known as 'the Bilby Brothers', launched a nationwide Save the Bilby fund.
The men took sample bilbies to schools to enlist schoolchildren in the conservation effort. Costume jewellers designed bilby necklaces and other trinkets to be sold through the fund's website. Candy manufacturers produced chocolate bilbies, offering them in place of chocolate bunnies for Easter.
The media took up the story. The fund announced that each A$20 (S$24) would buy a section of Currawinya's planned predator-proof fence. By 1999 they had more than A$300,000, enough to start building.
The drive continues: There is now a National Bilby Day (second Sunday in September). To date the fund has collected A$800 million (S$953.4 million).
Why save the bilby? Mr Manthey has a response that's hard to argue with:
'If you wake up one morning and there's not a bilby left, Qantas will fly, the banks and post office will open, you'll still pay tax. All I'm saying is that it's going to be a sadder world without them.'