Ken Gelder

But the species that gets hunted the most and that colonial fiction invests the most in is the kangaroo.

There is a thing called the kangaroo hunt novel.

There is also a kangaroo hunt poem.

So the first poem ever published in Australia about an Australian topic is about a kangaroo hunt.

1805, yeah, exactly.

Oh, well, there is such a thing as the weak,

Weeping Kangaroo.

And so this 1805 poem, the first poem, and it's about a man who goes out into the forest with his dog and his rifle, his gun, and he shoots a wallaby, but the wallaby turns out to be female.

And when she dies, she weeps.

So the weeping stag, for example, in English fiction, and if you think of...

Shakespeare and so on, the weeping stag is a thing.

And it goes back a long way in hunting literature.

Hunting literature goes back a long way.

But in Australia, the weeping kangaroo is new.

That image comes and goes really through the 19th century.

And until you get to Ethel Pedler's beautiful sort of children's fantasy at the end of the 19th century, Dotting the Kangaroo, people might know.

And there you have a kangaroo that also weeps.

And that kangaroo weeps in sympathy with a lost little girl that the kangaroo takes into her pouch and looks after.

And the kangaroo also weeps because she's lost her own child.

So she's been hunted.