It is an alias for a wombat.

The wombat, also known as the koala, koala bear, koala bear, sloth bear, etc., is Australia's national treasure, but also Australia's strange and precious primitive arboreal animals. The English name Koala?bear comes from an ancient Aboriginal word meaning "no drink".

Because wombats get 90% of the water they need from the eucalyptus leaves they feed on, and only drink when they are sick or in drought, locals call them "kwalas", which also means "no drink".

The wombat is not a member of the bear family, and they are very different. While the bear family belongs to the order Carnivora, the wombat belongs to the order Marsupiales. It sleeps 18 hours a day and has a docile temperament and a simple body.

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200 years ago, Europeans had just moved to Australia. At the time, 10 million koalas lived freely in a 2,500-kilometer eucalyptus range along Australia's east coast. But their fur was so flashy that in 1919 alone, a million koalas were hunted; after Queensland's last open season for hunting in 1927, only 100,000 of the once ten million remained.

The koala population slowly rebounded over the next half-century, but urbanization encroached on habitat, and highways and domestic dogs posed a threat to the koalas -- there were 430,000 of them in Australia in 1990, but their numbers have since plummeted to 44,000 (courtesy of environmental advocacy groups).?

Baidu Encyclopedia-Koalas