Aboriginals and Kangaroos!
The first recorded drawing of a kangaroo was sketched in pencil by one of Captain Cook’s men at Endeavour River, Queensland, in 1770. However, the oldest known paintings of the kangaroo are in the world heritage listed Kakadu National Park, three hours east of Darwin in the Northern Territory. More than ten thousand years ago early Aboriginals depicted four species of kangaroo on cave walls, where the images may still be seen. Historical records show that Aboriginal hunting of kangaroos, when successful, gave status and was not a common practice when more readily gathered protein was available. The smaller wallabies and bettongs were much more easily captured in grass snares and with boomerangs. The kangaroo hunting grounds were known as ‘Kangaloola.’ Every part of a kangaroo or wallaby was utilised by the Aboriginals. The kangaroo skin became a floor in the hut; sinews from the tail were used to sew possum skins together for warm clothing and the bones became needles, tools and weapons.
Indigenous Australians formed nearly seven hundred tribes, with two hundred and fifty distinct languages. They had over forty different names for kangaroos and wallabies. Each person and tribe had a unique totem and was bound to a specific region by the totem ancestors. It was believed that the health of the person and the region, vegetation and animals depended on these ancestral spirits. Aboriginal people lived in harmony with the environment. Their lifestyle enabled them to coexist and maintain a balance with nature and the animals. It was forbidden for tribes with the kangaroo totem to eat kangaroos. Aboriginal people developed a rich and complex culture that encompassed a whole of life concept, including social structure, language and ceremony. Storytelling was a key component of community life and youth education with each story containing sometimes up to 20 lessons. The complexity of the culture meant that language, stories, dance, music and art all depended on the area of land where the tribe lived. A dance would include the spirit-form animals from around that region. If Aboriginal people lived in the mountains there would be mountain stories; if in the desert, there were desert stories; if on the coast, there were coastal or ocean stories; and always, always, there were stories about the kangaroo.
As one Aboriginal storyteller has said, “I think the only way the Aboriginal saw the kangaroo was as a special animal, through the stories we heard as we grew up. It would be nice if, through the Dreamtime stories we tell, other Australians could learn to love them in the same way.”
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