File:Great Kanguroo (3424317784).jpg

Picture: The Naturalist’s Miscellany, written by George Shaw and illustrated by Frederick Polydore Nodder, published in twenty-two volumes between 1789 and 1813.

GREAT KANGUROO

With spears slung to woomeras, The Iora killed the Patagarang When they were sick of shellfish, Stalked it through the sclerophyll, Flushed it onto the plains With the scourge of firesticks.

Further north, Cook had seen it, Compared its head to a hare’s. Shaw thought it jumped Like a jerboa. Its name was learned From Aboriginals: Kanguroo.

When the convict ships came, They addressed the Iora with signs And single words, spoken slowly. “Kanguroo?” they said, pointing As one turned on its tail to watch them. “Kanguroo?”

The Iora shrugged. “Kanguroo.” The intruder’s word For Patagarang.

Source material: NM, Volume 1. When Cook’s expedition encountered Kangaroos, the tribesmen in the region where they had landed used the name by which the marsupial has since been known. However, the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia were divided into innumerable nations, each with its own language, defined by territorial and topographic borders. The local tribe in Sydney, where the First Fleet landed, were known as the Iora, and they called the kangaroo “patagarang”. They assumed that “kangaroo” was the white man’s word. Cook had noted in his Journal that, “Excepting the head and ears which I thought something like a Hare’s, it bears no sort of resemblance to any European animal I ever saw.” See Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, London, 1987, pp. 5-11. Shaw compared it with the jerboa, but recognised that it was a pouched animal. The animal illustrated by Shaw is probably an Eastern Grey Kangaroo, Macropus giganteus. A woomera is a sling-like attachment used for throwing spears. Sclerophyll is forest dominated by tall eucalyptus trees and other plants with tough leaves designed to limit water-loss.