There’s an old story that when Captain Cook landed at Botany Bay, his secretary on board the Endeavour tried to start an Aborigine-English dictionary with the help of some friendly local tribespeople.
When he pointed to an outlandish creature hopping away in the distance and asked the tribal chief what it was, the chief told him, ‘kanguru’. It wasn’t until years later that white settlers began to understand enough of the local language to discover that kanguru meant ‘no idea what you’re talking about, mate.’
Sadly, it's now common knowledge that kanguru doesn’t mean any such thing in any known Aborigine language, but if you try and imagine seeing a kangaroo for the very first time in the days before the National Geographic channel and Skippy, you can understand why those early European visitors would have been astonished.
Because it is effectively a huge island, Australia has been
left in peace for millions of years to evolve it’s own range of
unique species, and it’s managed to produce quite a few of the most
bizarre animals on the planet. Some of their unique characteristics are pretty odd in their own right. Can you imagine coming across an animal for the first time that keeps it's young in a special pouch on the outside of its stomach, for example? But for Europeans I think the real weirdness lies in recognising so many features from back home, rehashed into surreal new combinations.
Take the duck
billed platypus. Viewed separately, the bill, body and tail of a platypus are old hat to anybody who has ever seen a duck, an otter and a beaver. It starts to get a bit more eccentric when you realise it has webbed feet and lays eggs, but when you stick it all together the fur covered, egg laying, web footed, duck billed platypus becomes what many would regard as the most mixed up mammal on
earth.
Not surprisingly for a creature that has such an extreme
identity crisis, it is very shy and very rare, and you have to be
incredibly lucky or knowledgeable to see a platypus in the wild. If you’re lucky enough to catch one by surprise, it is advisable to
find out first whether it’s a male or a female before you try and catch
hold of it, because a male platypus has a spur on his hind leg that can
deliver enough venom to put an adult human being into a coma, possibly permanently. Presumably this is to
prevent you from telling anyone you have seen him, or describing what
he looks like to your disbelieving mates.
The members of the Royal Society in London include some of the cleverest people in the world, but the first time they saw a stuffed platypus brought back by Captain Cook, they were absolutely convinced it had been stitched up by a taxidermist as a practical joke.
However, if you take a good look at a big grey kangaroo from the top down, it seems to me that this is an even bigger mish-mash of different species than the platypus. 
It starts off with a pair of ears that could easily belong to a donkey or a very large hare. The head is part sheep, part dog and part rabbit. But from there on down it goes way off the page: little spindly arms, a whopping great rat’s tail propping it up at the back, and a pair of gigantic gerbil hind legs. This is an animal made out of spare parts by a short-sighted two year old. Everything looks completely out of proportion, and what weird kink in the path of evolution led to that fur pouch to keep the kids in?
Having said that, good design is the marriage of form and function, and the kangaroo turns out to be a perfect model of sustainable design.
For a start, they are the only herbivores in the world that do not
expel the waste gasses created by the fermentation of herbivorous
material in their digestive systems by means of exhalation or
eructation.
In other words they don’t belch or fart.
This is nothing to do with manners. It's because they have evolved to convert the stuff that comes out of a cow’s backside in the form of methane, into something else that they can use as a source of more energy. This makes them far more environmentally friendly than cattle, which are responsible for more global greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars and aeroplanes in the world put together.
When you also take into consideration the fact that their meat has much lower fat levels than beef or lamb or pork, the logical conclusion is that we should be farming kangaroos on Cockatoo Creek instead of cattle. The ranches of America and the livestock pastures of Britain should be full of roos as well. Raising roos would be significantly better for the planet, and for human cholesterol levels.
Here are a few other insights into the habits of the kangaroo. Some of this information came from Buckle and may not be scientifically reliable.
Among their many other adaptations to the Australian environment, female kangaroos remain pregnant at all times, with a line-up of embryos waiting their turn. This would seem to put the the male roos out of business, but obviously they still play a part in this process because there are always plenty of large bucks lounging around eyeing up the does out in the paddocks.
As soon as the incumbent joey stops suckling, the next tenant at the
front of the queue crawls out of the womb, hauls itself up its mum’s
fur, and clamps itself onto the nearest teat in her pouch. This happens
at a stage in the embryo’s development when it is about the same length
as half your little finger, blind, hairless and almost skinless - a
shapeless, veined pink blob with forelegs large enough and strong enough for
the long climb north. Frankly, at this age they are a pretty disgusting sight, but how they manage this marathon and what triggers it is an absolute miracle of natural selection.
Buckle tells me that the does or jills can stop this production line in times of drought or disease and hold their embryos in storage indefinitely. When you see the brand new infants, you wonder why they don’t do it more often. On the other hand, once it has developed eyes and fur, a very young joey’s head sticking out of the pouch does look cute, and the ride must be fantastic.
Standing still, a kangaroo looks odd and ungainly, and they can’t walk in the normal sense by putting one foot in front of the other. Instead, a slow moving roo leans back on its tail and then shuffles both hind legs forward awkwardly together.
But then when a kangaroo needs to move in a hurry, like the moment
when a penguin waddles off a rock into the sea and starts swimming, it
all makes sense.
At full tilt a big boomer can reach speeds of nearly seventy kilometres an hour, and at that speed the distance he can cover in a single bound is colossal. No wonder the Australian national airline uses it as their symbol. A speeding kangaroo must be the nearest any big mammal gets to flying. They can travel as fast as the fastest racehorse, moving with little or no apparent effort because their brilliant design turns effort into energy much more efficiently than any more conventionally built quadruped. In the heat of Australia, energy efficiency is a matter of survival.
In the old days it was common for travelling fairs to include a ‘boxing kangaroo’ that would sit back on its tail and use its forelegs to spar with a human opponent. The roo would wear proper boxing gloves, and it was a pretty effective boxer, because this is how big males fight each other for dominance and mating rights in the wild.
However, Buckle has explained that when you see two bucks sparring out
in the paddocks, they’re not exactly practising the Noble Art under the
code laid down by the Olympic Boxing Committee. What they are actually
trying to do is to get a grip on their opponents with their
considerable upper or front claws, so they can kick them in the guts with their
massive hind feet.
When you see the size of the claws on those vast feet, you can see that this could be lethal. A kick from a
fighting kangaroo, raking downwards, can disembowel another male, and
dingoes will rarely tackle an adult for this reason. Dogs that chase
kangaroos may fare worse, and the Canberra man who unexpectedly found
himself wrestling an adult kangaroo in his bedroom not long ago was
lucky to come away with a few scratches and a story that in a few years
everybody will think came straight out of the bottom of a bottle of
Bundaberg rum. Sydney Morning Herald
As for living with these extraordinary animals in the outback, there are two major drawbacks in the relationship between kangaroos and people.
Leaving aside the surreal possibility that a large male roo might jump through your bedroom window and bounce all over your wife, the only direct threat they pose is to drivers. Kangaroos will cross a road when they feel like it. They don’t recognise the potential danger of engine noise, and nobody has yet managed to teach them the highway code.
In most parts of the outback this doesn’t usually matter. In most parts of the bush any more than one vehicle passing every few hours is called a traffic jam. So in the event of a collision, both the roo and the driver have to be very unlucky to arrive at exactly the same spot on a road at exactly the same time.
Because there are so many roos this does unfortunately happen from time to time, and when it does it can be disastrous for both parties. A fully grown male Eastern Grey kangaroo - the species here on Cockatoo Creek - can be over two metres tall standing upright and weigh more than ninety kilos. Hit at anything more than about thirty miles an hour, the roo is almost certainly going to die, either instantly or later of its injuries. If the driver is in a car or pickup travelling at speed, at best he or she will probably need to buy a new one. At worst if they hit a big roo when the roo is in mid hop, possibly two or three feet off the ground, the roo will smash into the cab and could kill the driver, front passenger or both.
Most vehicles in the outback carry big metal roo bars on the front. The roos have absolutely no defence except numbers, which is no consolation to the individual that ends up as a radiator cover on a Mack truck, but is nature’s way of safeguarding the species.
On Cockatoo Creek, it's the numbers of roos out in the paddocks that present the big problem.
We have hundreds, if not thousands, of large, grey kangaroos on the property, all eating grass and drinking water that we desperately need for the cattle.
The average adult roo will eat at least the same amount of grass as a sheep. Three or four adult roos will eat as much grass as a cow or bullock.
Because they can hop over a fence as though it wasn’t there, there’s no way of keeping them out, and naturally they gravitate to the best areas of grass. If you drive out into any of the open areas on the station where we still have any grass left, you’ll see more roos than you can shake a stick at. If you shout across the clearing they pop upright out of the grass to see what you want - an uncountable number of dark eyes in pale grey faces, all at different levels according to age and height, staring inquisitively back at you. You can almost hear a collective, ‘Yes...?’
This is irritating, because the cattle badly need the grass these roos are eating. Our cattle are starting to die for lack of feed and water, and here are hundreds of these freeloaders scoffing their heads off. So Jonathon and I go out on Sundays with Ben’s old .22 rifle and shoot roos. We know we can make no more impression on the numbers than if we were trying to clear a beach of sand by throwing handfuls back into the sea. But this is one small part of the growing crisis that we feel we can do something about, and if we do it regularly we feel as though we might keep at least some roos away from the better grazing.
Ben says we’re wasting our time and his ammunition, and Deborah would much prefer us not to do it at all. If I am honest, the more we shoot the worse I feel about it too. When you whistle at them they stand up straight and look right at you. With a telescopic sight it makes it easy to kill them cleanly, but it brings you uncomfortably close to the animal you are about to kill.
The professional roo shooters don’t have any such compunction.
They come through this area every six months, camping out and sleeping during the day and driving through the paddocks at night in Landcruisers, shooting adult roos held mesmerised in the beam of a spotlight, in exactly the same way that people shoot rabbits and foxes back home. The only difference here is the size of the target and the fact that the roo shooters take the skins away with them, blowing them off the warm carcasses with compressed air pumps mounted on the fronts of their vehicles.
Most of the skins are used to make soccer boots, so maybe a tiny part of the credit for a Wayne Rooney goal might go to a kangaroo scalped on Cockatoo Creek. Not that the roo in question would necessarily feel that this makes the sacrifice worthwhile.
A good team of professional shooters can kill and skin four or five hundred adult kangaroos in a night. They’ll usually stay two nights on Cockatoo Creek, moving steadily from one paddock to the next, leaving the stripped carcasses where they lie and the paddocks looking like a trail of medieval battlefields. The wild pigs and the dingoes gorge themselves on this bonanza, and for a week after that any breeze carries the unmistakable smell of putrefying bodies from every direction - a reminder of the outcome we can expect the cattle to face if the drought continues for much longer.
In a short time in this heat all that remains of the dead roos are their bones scattered by the scavenging pigs.
Ben says that at least this blood and bone is doing the soil some good, but it doesn’t appear to diminish the kangaroo numbers in the slightest. In the days after the roo shooters have moved on, when we ride out into the paddocks the kangaroos lift their heads and stare in their hundreds as usual, and there doesn’t seem to be any difference at all in the endless waves of grey bodies bounding easily and gracefully away from us across the station.