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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...

Gowrie Shire Gowrie Shire (1879-1913) was immediately north-west of Toowoomba. It was named after the Gowrie pastoral station (1847). The name is thought to have derived from an Aboriginal expression referring to Gowrie Creek or indicating freshwater mussels. The creek's headwaters are in Toowoomba's northern suburbs and it flows westwards through Gowrie Junction to the Oakey Creek. When the Gowrie local government division was formed in 1879 it had an area of 67 sq miles. The 1881 census recorded 2038 residents. Although reduced to 24 sq miles in 1887, the division's population surpassed its original figure by 1901 as Toowoomba expanded beyond its borough-size 6 sq miles. The Gowrie Council's offices were in Toowoomba. Gowrie Junction was in the division's rural part, and was the intersection of the Western and Wallangarra railway lines until 1915 when the more direct Drayton deviation line was opened. In 1913 Gowrie Shire (it had been a shire since 1902) was abolished. Its rural part was added to Jondaryan Shire and the urban part placed in the newly created Town of Newtown (1913-17). Newtown is now an older suburb of Toowoomba. Source: queenslandplaces.com.au/gowrie-shire

Bug is a spider, looking at those eyes an active hunter - not a web spinner.