TheBanyanTree: The appropriate encountering of kangaroos

[Peter Macinnis]

I blame the drive-in movies, myself.  OK, out in the bush, it gets hot,
it doesn't rain much, so people can sit out under the stars when the sun 
goes down and watch B-grade movies and dated newsreels and "features", 
anything that will fill up the time cheaply

I reckon that's what must have happened, you know.  Some idiot took that
Disney feature with lemmings hurtling over the cliff (what a pity the
BBC didn't do it, with David Attenborough in safari suit, plummeting
with the lemmings, and telling us that it was all a fake, brought about
by Disney staff throwing them off the cliff), and then you can imagine
what happened next -- the kangaroos saw it, and got motivated.

Now out in the plains of Hell, Hay and Booligal, all the way from
Deniliquin through Urana and Lockhart ("the verandah town") and 0over to
Wagga Wagga, the ground is flat.  Dead flat, and if not devoid of trees,
it is at least under severe arboreal deficit.

The truth of the matter is that the low-grade plains are bring dug up
and sold as paving blocks, the intermediate grades are traded as instant
airports, and the super-fine-grade plains (about 85% in area) are being
exported as billiard tables.  In short, the kangaroos are stuffed when
it comes to finding a cliff -- and even the plains quarries are no good,
as the holes are back-filled with bull-dust, a common commodity out there.

Anyhow, the suicidal kangaroos found that with no cliffs to leap off,
the next best thing was hiding behind a tree and leaping out at passing
vehicles.  But as I said, there's this tree shortage, and as I was
driving over the One Tree Plain this morning, I noted suspicious grass
tussocks in the half-light, and then some anorexic roos hiding behind
the "kangaroos next 25 km" signs, so I slowed.

See, hitting a kangaroo is pretty depressing.  It leaves a serious
depression in the vehicle, and generally it is depressing on the
kangaroo.  Sometimes the ribs get so depressed they have an out-of-body
experience, but while you can always breed more roos, cars have to be
repaired.

I went over a dead roo some years back -- I had been out into central
Australia, to a place called Woomera where we sort of luck up people the
government calls undesirable, and we launch rockets (I had been there
for rockets, but an old editor of mine was there with a Jesuit -- they
were there for the refugees, and they reckoned that was pretty
depressing as well).  Anyhow, the roo was on the road, hidden in the
glare of the lights of a road train going the other way until it was too
late.  Bits of roo adhered to the car and slowly cooked and smelled, all
the way to Adelaide.  The car rental people were depressed, and all.

So that's why I slowed, and discovered that the skinny roos were sticks,
and the tussocks were just grass, and I didn't collect any extra meat.
That suited me.

Heading east or north in the early morning in Australia is bad news --
the sun gets you in the eyes.  I started out from Echuca on the Murray
River -- Australia's greatest river, a sort of glorified long puddle,
though it had paddle steamers working 1300 miles of it, last century.

I started going north before sun-up, mobs of birds everywhere, and as
the land brightened, I started to notice odd flashes, where the sun came 
out -- over in the east, there was a water-course, lined with trees, and 
the sun was coming through.

Before long, it was above the horizon, above the trees, and I continued 
on at 100 km/hr, just slotting in between the other vehicles, drinking 
regularly from a supply of iced water bottles in the Esky (ice box) in 
the boot (trunk), and in the thin population on the roads, able to water 
the plain from time to time, seeing the distant cars a kilometre or 
three away.

The roads are full of suicidal animals -- several days ago, a sheep 
burst out from behind a large truck, doing a runner with two dogs in 
pursuit, just as I drove by.  This sheep wanted to be off into the 
paddock, not up on the truck, and after crashing to the road in front of 
me as I hit the brakes, it took off down the road, oblivious to the two 
dogs.

I actually saw more roadkill sheep than roos on this trip, but no signs 
warning that there were sheep on the road.  There were signs warning us 
to give way to stock, but these always have pictures of cattle.  There 
are suicidal crows, as well, standing their ground on a choice bit of 
roadkill, glaring at the driver to say "I saw this first".  On my 
observations, crows eat crow quite happily.

Staying awake is a challenge -- I was on the road for almost ten hours, 
including breaks -- we are told to do this every two hours, but in 
between drags a bit, so I started making up crow dialogue, lines like 
"Dad gave me a piece of his mind", but that's enough of that.

At 100 km/hr, the wind buffets your ears, especially when a road train 
or truck goes by, and the temperature was forecast to be 37 C -- call it 
98 F, and dry, with most of the fire warning signs set on "extreme". 
They said on the news that the Commonwealth Games baton (sort of like 
the Olympic torch, but no flame, and only ex-colonies and colonisers are 
allowed) was well-chosen, since people could not have run with a flame.

So in the end, I drove with the windows up, the fan on, and the air con 
running intermittently, and sweat running all the time.  Just as well I 
had the Esky.

Of yes, I encountered a roo.  Stopped at a creek that had actual water 
in it -- well, traces of your H2O, along with mud, dead things, live 
wriggly bits, mud and other stuff, and disturbed a kangaroo.  I looked 
at her, she looked at me, but when I reached for my camera, she took 
off.  I think she must have been in a witness protection program, or she 
had a thing about paparazzi.

Anyhow, neither of us was depressed -- until I looked at the water.  It 
was so noxiously mephitic that it could be sold as a weapon to 
unscrupulous dictators.  It was probably water like this that motivated 
fish to get out and walk on the land.  I am sure that a team of 
scientists could find five novel industrial uses (probably involving 
annihilation of something indestructible) for this water, and gangsters 
could probably dispose of bodies in it, knowing no evidence would remain 
after twenty minutes.  I spared a few moments' thought for the poor sods 
who in times gone by, used to walk this plain, and who would, perforce, 
have drunk that water.

We have lost that power.

-- 

   _--|\    Peter Macinnis, Manly, the birthplace of Australian surfing
  /     \   Purveyor of pressed frogs and other amphibian novelties,
  \.--._*<--President, Papuan Bandicoot Hound Breeders of Australasia,
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm