Qualla: Poochera, South Australia

Poochera, South Australia: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For half a century, finding this ant was the great white whale of insect science. Nothomyrmecia macrops - the dinosaur ant, a creature so primitive it looks like an insect that wandered out of the age of the dinosaurs - had been described from two specimens in 1934 and then promptly lost. Decade after decade, expeditions failed. Giants of the field, including E. O. Wilson, the most famous ant scientist who ever lived, went looking and came back empty-handed. The animal seemed almost mythical. Then, on the night of 22 October 1977, a research party broke down beside a tiny grain town on the Eyre Peninsula, and one of them took a walk in the dark. Twenty paces from the stranded trucks, he started yelling. The lost ant — missing for forty-six years — had just been found at Poochera.

Poochera, South Australia: The Ant That Time Forgot

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To understand the fuss, you have to understand what Nothomyrmecia is. It is a 'living fossil', the sole survivor of an ancient lineage, retaining features that vanished from almost every other ant tens of millions of years ago: large staring eyes, long slender jaws, a simple body...

Poochera, South Australia: "The Bloody Bastard's Here!"

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 1977 expedition had not even meant to come this way. Led by the entomologist Robert Taylor, the team had set out from Canberra to drive more than 3,000 kilometres west, all the way to the remote site near the Western Australian coast where the original specimens had turned up...

Poochera, South Australia: The Only Ant Town on Earth

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Poochera has embraced its strange fame completely. This is, quite possibly, the only town in the world that runs on ant-based tourism. Images of Nothomyrmecia are stencilled onto the streets, the creature has been adopted as the community's emblem, and myrmecologists - ant specia...

Poochera, South Australia: Wheat, Rails and a Borrowed Name

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Strip away the ants and Poochera is a classic Eyre Peninsula grain town, and its ordinary history has its own quiet weight. The townsite was not surveyed until 1920, and its name is believed to come from King Poojeri, a local Aboriginal man who died in 1917; a nearby hill carries...