Cirrus@Austlit

'Kangaroo hunting was an important activity in colonial Australian life; it provided much-needed sustenance to early settlers; it provided employment, especially when land was being cleared for pasture; and it developed as a popular sport, enabling wealthier settlers to develop and consolidate influential social networks. It also soon became an available genre of writing, found in poetry, fiction, chronicles of exploration and travel, journalism, and memoirs. This chapter looks at one aspect of this genre, beginning with the first poem on an Australian topic published in Australia in 1805; it goes on to explore the figure of the ‘weeping kangaroo’ as an affective narrative trope in colonial Australian writing.'

Source: Abstract.

'Since the beginnings of settler occupation in Australia, the kangaroo has been claimed at once as a national symbol and as a type of vermin to be destroyed en masse. In Kate Clere McIntyre and Michael McIntyre’s recent award-winning film, Kangaroo: A Love Hate Story, Sydney academic Peter Chen sums up this stark contradiction: “Kangaroos are wonderful, fuzzy, they’re maternal, and they’re also a pest that should be eliminated wholesale”.' (Introduction)