kangaroo

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KANGAROO HUNTING IN COLONIAL AUSTRALIA A new book explores how the kangaroo became a quarry, a resource and a point of violent conflict between settlers and Australia’s Aboriginal people By Professor Ken Gelder and Dr Rachael Weaver, University of Melbourne In 1848, the Scottish explorer Thomas Mitchell wrote “fire, grass, kangaroos, and human inhabitants, seem all dependent on each other for existence in Australia; for any one of these being wanting, the others could no longer continue”. This is a strikingly modern, ecological observation, establishing the link between humans, agency, species and the shaping of the environment that some Australians are only beginning to understand today. All kinds of native Australian species were co-opted into the machinery of colonisation, but kangaroos have a pre-eminent place here. The struggle over kangaroos as a resource led to both small and large-scale conflicts between Aboriginal people and settlers – who brought their dogs, horses and guns to the hunt. Watkin Tench was a young lieutenant in the Marine Corps; in his 1793 book A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, he noted the two ‘standard’ methods of killing kangaroos: “either we shot them, or hunted them with greyhounds”. Hunting clubs were established in New South Wales in the 1820s and, in Victoria, in the late 1830s. Hunting for recreation was a way of consolidating settler ownership of large pastoral properties; it was a triumphant announcement of the absolute dispossession of Aboriginal people and the end of the frontier. Networks of settlers hunted together, often turning the hunt into a festive social occasion. In fact, the kangaroo hunt became a much sought-after colonial activity, attracting many notable visitors from overseas. Charles Darwin joined a hunt in 1836 and was famously unsuccessful, while the English novelist Anthony Trollope fell off his horse while hunting in the early 1870s. Source: pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/kangaroo-hunting-in-colon...

The killing of kangaroos by Europeans began at exactly the same time that the species was first identified. Shooting, naming, describing, scientifically classifying, sketching, dissecting, eating: these things all played out simultaneously as soon as Cook’s Endeavour got stranded on a reef in far north Queensland in June and July 1770. Many notable visitors participated in organized kangaroo hunts: Charles Darwin in 1836 (“my usual ill-fortune in sporting followed us”), Britain’s Admiral of the Fleet Henry Keppel in 1850, and the novelist Anthony Trollope in 1871. The Duke of Edinburgh came to the colonies in 1867 – the first royal visit – hunting kangaroo in South Australia and then traveling out to Victoria’s western district for more sport. Organized hunts could kill any number of kangaroos; alongside hunting meets that pursued individual roos as game, squatters also organized large-scale drives or battues, which could see thousands of kangaroos rounded up, slaughtered, and left to rot. Source: theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-art-of-the-colonial-...