Hopping Mad

Kangaroos are crazy creatures. Either that or they’re just stupid. It’s probably a little of both. We saw dozens of them in our first few weeks in Karratha but unfortunately not one of them was living - we observed them in various stages of decomposition on the side of the road. Some recent hits look like life-size stuffed toys, lying on their backs or sides, paws up in the air, rigid from rigor mortis, a surprised expression permanently plastered on their faces. They are the ones that have been cleanly hit and propelled across the road, to lie in their final resting place as road kill. Others clearly haven’t been so lucky and are so badly mangled it is difficult to tell what animal they had once been. But you can bet your life that the squished mess of congealed blood, ratty fur and broken bones on the side of the road here will always be a kangaroo. No other animal is stupid enough not to have learnt by now that cars equal death to four legged creatures.

That may seem like a harsh assessment of an innocent animal repeatedly mown down by man-made monsters but we don’t want to run them over. In fact we try everything in our power to avoid them, not least because of the damage a kangaroo hit can do to your vehicle, if not yourself. Generally, they avoid the hot temperatures of the day and only emerge as the sun goes down which, of course, makes it even more difficult not to collide with the bounding animals. Many cars around here have been fitted with high-powered spots to give the driver a better chance of spotting the roos. The problem is that lights will stun them, stopping them in their tracks, which is often in the middle of the road. Hopefully you see them in time to slow down and allow them to hop off into safety but, if the amount of road kill is anything to go by, that doesn’t always happen. It is therefore a foolish vehicle that attempts a night-time drive without a bull bar. This doesn’t help to avoid hitting a kangaroo but it does go a long way to ensuring they don’t fly through the windscreen and take you out. Apparently, if the kangaroo is still holding onto life they will instinctively kick out repeatedly, and even if the hit killed them outright, they can often reflexively perform a little kung fu action. These aren’t the sweet little animals you see in cartoons, these can often be big animals and a kick to the head could be the end of you as well as the roo.

With all this in mind, it was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that we saw our first live kangaroos a couple of weeks ago. We were driving home from the beach on an unmettled road in the middle of the bush about an hour before dusk when one jumped out into the road ahead of us, instantly spotted the car and, like a rabbit caught in headlights, came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the road. Luckily, we weren’t driving that fast and immediately slowed to a crawl before stopping completely. This prompted the roo, after a few seconds of sizing us up, to carry on across the road and it was soon followed by two other, slightly smaller kangaroos. I like to think that the first roo was dad and the other two junior and mum. Little Joey was probably fast asleep in mum’s pouch. Eyes wide and grins on our faces, we watched them bounding off across the scrub until they were mere dots on the red horizon and I suddenly thought of all of the road kill I had seen over the previous weeks – it’s easy to look at them and see a pile of bones, something to quickly avert your eyes from, but these were once living, breathing animals. Grief they may cause the driver, but they are one of Australia’s symbols – an animal native only to this remote country, and perhaps we should all look on them with a little more humanity.