Kangaroo (Animal)
John Simons
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 186189922X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From Kanga and her son Roo in Winnie the Pooh to the boxing champ Hippety Hopper who punches Sylvester in Looney Tunes, kangaroos appear frequently in children’s books, cartoons, and songs. They are a favorite animal at zoos, charming yet peculiar-looking with their powerful hind legs, long tails, and pouches. Though kangaroos are beloved in the imagination, but reality of their relationship with humans is darker and more troubled. In this book, John Simon tackles the story of these marsupials—and their use and abuse—in global history.
the kangaroo is killed and eaten. This pattern of description, killing and eating is one we encounter time and time again as Europeans meet exotic animals and the kangaroo is not exempt. These events in the early history of European Australia caught the imagination of the first visual commentators and so we can see how central it is to our understanding of what Australia meant in colonial times and how the kangaroo featured. The incident of Banks and his greyhounds featured in a painting of 1796
convicts we find that the approach was slightly different. By no means all the convict artists left pictures of kangaroos – the artists known as the Port Jackson Painter and the Sydney Cove Painter did not – but two, Thomas Watling and Richard Browne, did. Watling was a forger and therefore an accomplished draughtsman. While his painting is not technically of a kangaroo but of swamp wallaby, it is a lively affair showing the animal poised in the midst of hopping on the balls of its strong feet.
history) but it also omitted the head of Queen Victoria. Australian troops en route to the Boer War with their kangaroo mascot, c. 1899. An Australian kangaroo stamp from 1913. In 1913, when it was agreed that the post-federation Australian states should no longer issue their own stamps, the first approved design for a national stamp consisted of a map of Australia with a kangaroo superimposed. This again caused controversy because it omitted the head of King George V and was subsequently
development (milk for the early stage has a high sugar and low fat content, and as the joey develops the proportions gradually change in favour of fat and protein) and she can control the sex of her babies. She has three vaginas: two lateral, which are used to convey sperm, and one medial, which acts as the birth canal. Kangaroo just after birth. Newborn kangaroo feeding. In a red kangaroo, pregnancy lasts about 40 days and the young kangaroo is only 10 millimetres long at birth. It then
Australia and their image is almost universally familiar. But although they are common and familiar, the strangeness they carry has meant that they are relatively unknown animals and, even in Australia, they are not well understood. Much of this book will concern itself with looking at the ways in which images of kangaroos are symbolically charged. But it will start with a review of the remarkable zoological features of the kangaroo, of its biological uniqueness and its amazingly adaptable life