found the elephant quote

[ozestrange]

"The answer to the question of why the pines experienced an enormous crash in their population is fairly clear. The converse-why they survived-is not. The only explanation that makes sense is sheer chance. Australian prehistory appears to be littered with the occurrence of million to one events that took place only because millions of years have passed. New research is showing that, given enough time for freak events to occur and for chance to run its course, life can find
itself in completely odd places. Elephants, for instance, may once have lived in Australia. The director of the Australian Museum, Mike Archer, is aware of the existence of three elephant fossils, found as far apart as Western Australia and New South Wales. For three fossils to be found suggests elephants once lived on the continent in significant numbers. Australia, however, is surrounded by a very deep trench of water that has never been less than sixty kilometres away from the closest Indonesian island with a healthy elephant population. 'Living elephants are very capable swimmers,' Archer observed in a recent scientific article, 'some having been known to snorkel and dog paddle their way across forty-five kilo metres of ocean. Is it then so inconceivable that a sea going pachyderm every once in a very rare while scared the poo out of a bug-eyed kangaroo as it hauled its superwrinkled, barnacle-encrusted bulk onto an Australian shore?"
The Wollemi Pine-James Woodford-Page 119.

[Beastman]

I don't find the notion that elephants have swum here fanciful in the slightest.
They ARE excellent swimmers. They colonised Flores and Timor, which are believed to have always been isolated from Java by sea.
Take into account the fact that the Oz coast was once closer to Indonesia, factor in things like tsunamis, huge storms etc and you can imagine how some elephants may have made it here. Especially over periods of hundreds of thousands of years. It would obviously be a very rare occurance.
Whether or not they made it here in any significant numbers and bred is a different story. That would surely be more unlikely... but still possible.