I've just pulled into the gutter of a wide street atop a hill in the rugged suburb of Riverside, ten minutes out of Launceston, in northern Tasmania.

I am greeted by Rowan Wigmore, a volunteer wildlife rescuer. He's tasked with the heartbreaking, and sometimes grizzly job of salvaging injured wildlife.

Rowan points to a pademelon lying in the gutter across the road.

She doesn't appear to be moving. My untrained eye thinks she's dead.

But as we walk closer, she starts to squirm. Her movements are weak. She hasn't got the strength to escape.

She looks at us. She's in a bad way, one of her eyes scratched and swollen.

Rowan tells me she's almost definitely been hit by a car and could have been lying there in the gutter for 24 hours.

He gently picks her up by the tail, lowers her in a hessian bag, and carries her to his car.

She'll be taken to the vet where she will be euthanised.

Rowan has lost count of how many times he's done this.

I've lived in Tasmania for about 18 months and I find the roadkill as confronting now as I did when I first crossed the Bass Strait.

So for this episode of Voice of Real Australia podcast, I'm looking into how Tasmania - commonly viewed as a haven for wildlife and the natural world - became the roadkill capital of the country.

If my South Australian number plates don't already scream 'mainlander', then the fact that I swerve to avoid running over already rotting bodies probably removes all doubt.

I could see roadkill was a problem. But I didn't know how severe it was, or that despite government and conservationist efforts, volunteer wildlife rescuers continue to receive more and more calls with every year that goes by.

The roadkill toll comes in at an average of 32 deaths every hour.

I wanted to understand the depth of the issue, why it's such a problem, and what is being done about it.

What unfolded was a story of complacency, shifting responsibility, and inconsistencies.

And I learned that nowhere is safe for native wildlife.

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