The term quoll is used of any of a number of small spotted marsupials of the genus Dasyurus of Australia and New Guinea. The rare western quoll is found only in south-western Western Australia. The northern quoll is found in a few areas of northern Australia. The spotted-tailed quoll is found in Tasmania and parts of Victoria, New South Wales, and southern Queensland. The eastern quoll is found in Tasmania and is rare or extinct on the mainland.

Where does the word quoll come from?  On his voyage of discovery in 1768–71, Captain James Cook had detailed contact with the indigenous people of Australia only when the Endeavour had to be beached for repairs at the mouth of what was to be named the Endeavour River, the site of present-day Cooktown, after the ship had been damaged on coral reefs. During their seven-week stay Cook and his crew had contact with the local Aboriginal people, the Guugu Yimidhirr, and their language.

It was here that both Cook, and his botanist Joseph Banks, collected a number of terms from the language of the Guugu Yimidhirr, including kangaroo. Another word they collected was quoll, and our earliest record of this word is in Joseph Banks’s Endeavour Journal in 1770, where he writes: ‘Another [quadruped] was calld [sic] by the natives Je-Quoll: it is about the size and something like a polecat, of a light brown spotted with white on the back and white under the belly.’

Although Joseph Banks had collected the Guugu Yimidhirr word for the creature, the word quoll disappeared from the record for another 150 years. The animal was called a native cat, because the early settlers saw some kind of resemblance between this animal and the European domestic cat!

Quoll reappeared in strange circumstances in 1924. The Direct Hosiery Company conducted a series of ‘Australian Picture Puzzles’ in a Sydney newspaper, and to help people with the puzzles a Dictionary of Australian Words and Terms was prepared by Gilbert H. Lawson. There are six Australian words under the letter Q and one of them is: ‘QUOLL —Aboriginal name for native cat.’ Where Gilbert found this word remains a mystery.

There is silence for another thirty-seven years, when the word appears briefly in a reference to ‘baby Quolls’ in the October 1961 issue of the Victorian Naturalist, and then in 1963 in the June issue of Wildlife Australia: ‘Just as all wombats are wombats, implying their distinctive status as pure Australians so each species of the spotted hunters is nothing else but a quoll.’ The third reference in the 1960s is in Nightwatchmen of Bush and Plain (1968) by David Fleay: ‘In those early days … we domesticated quolls (“native cats”)’.

David Fleay (1907–98), the author of Nightwatchmen, was an extraordinary Australian naturalist who was a pioneer in the captive breeding of endangered Australian animals. For example, he was the first to breed a platypus in captivity, at Healesville Sanctuary in 1943. When we checked the authors of the articles that mentioned the quoll in the journals from 1961 and 1963, we discovered that both articles were written by David Fleay. This means that all of the references to the quoll in the 1960s are from David Fleay.

All of this suggests that it was in fact David Fleay who popularised the term quoll, and was responsible for it replacing the absurd term native cat.