Kangaroo Dog

‘Kangaroo Dog’ is an audio documentary made by Jane Curtis. It was commissioned by ABC Radio National and was first broadcast on ABC Radio National’s The History Listen on 24 August 2024.

It follows the journey of a mongrel dog born in the early colony at Sydney Cove to the present day.

This dog was born on Country, and born of colonisation.

• How was the kangaroo dog part of the colonisation process in Australia?
• How did this dog play a role in the resistance to colonisation?
• What relationship did the kangaroo dog have, and has now, with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians?
• What happens when we see the past through a dog’s eyes?

Listen to the 36 minute documentary below and read the annotated transcript, and meet this unique Australian dog through images and video.

Content Warning

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that the audio below and this webpage contains the images and voices of people who have died, and descriptions of colonial violence.

Annotated Transcript

Kirsty Melville: Hello. Kirsty Melville here with The History Listen. And today, the story of an Australian dog that changed history. But this dog is one you’ve probably never heard of — the kangaroo dog or ‘roo dog’ as it’s called in this song.

Kevin ‘Bloody’ Wilson [song]: Roo dog, the wet nose cross breed. Ugliest dog I’ve seen.

KM: From its mongrel birth at Sydney Cove, the kangaroo dog is uncannily linked to Australia’s colonial history. And today, producer Jane Curtis goes digging in search of both the story and the dog.

Kevin ‘Bloody’ Wilson [song] Covered in fleas and mange. Roo dog the wet nose crossbreed…

KM: And just a brief warning. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people listening, this program has the voices of people who have died and descriptions of colonial violence.

Jane Curtis: Hi. I’m Jane Curtis. And I bet you’re thinking, what is a kangaroo dog?

Julie Dowling: They sleep all the time, sixteen hours a day.

Carol Dowling: They just sleep.

CD: Very lean on politeness.

JD: Not the kind of dog that you’d sit there and go, “Oh, wouldja wouldja wouldja wouldja wouldja.” You don’t do that with a kangaroo dog.

JD: And they’re sooks as well.

CD: They are sooks. But sixteen hours a day, they are sleepers.

JD: And then the bit where they are active is just, like, amazing. When they were coming past me, it was like, “Schoooom, Schoom!” They’re really full on.

JD: My name is Julie Dowling. I’m a fine artist portrait painter, and I do history paintings as well.

CD: Yep. And I’m Dr Carol Dowling, an academic in Aboriginal Studies. And this is Carol speaking because we are twins. We’re identical twins.

JC: Carol and Julie Dowling are First Nations women of Badimia Country in Midwest Western Australia. Badimia Country is semi desert, and in spring, it’s a carpet of West Australian wildflowers.

Before I’d met Carol and Julie, I’d never heard of this sooky, sleepy, super-fast dog, and maybe you haven’t either?

We’ll get to why that is, and how the kangaroo dog got its name. But to picture the dog in your head — imagine a beefed-up greyhound. A big, athletic dog.

These days the kangaroo dog is pretty rare, but there was one place I found kangaroo dogs — 37,000 of them. References, that is. In Trove, the online archive of Australian history and culture.

JC: As a dog lover, I was hooked. And as a history lover, it mattered! Because history can be really people centric. ‘It’s all about us’.

The more I dug, the more I found the kangaroo dog at key moments in our colonial history.

In fact, the kangaroo dog was part of the colonisation process.

But it also played a role in the resistance to colonisation as well.

And sometimes, it was just on the sofa, asleep.

Let’s meet our first kangaroo dog and hear more from twin sisters, Julie and Carol Dowling.

We’re in Perth, tucked inside Julie’s art studio; an old mining shed that sits in her backyard.

CD: We were brought up with the story about particular dogs in our family that had sort of like a legendary status.

JD: Yeah.

CD: Julie’s painted one particular one called Tigermoth, and he was sort of like a dappled color, wasn’t he?

JD: Yeah.

CD: A brindle color. And Tigermoth was one hell of a roo dog. Our Auntie Liz, when she was growing up there with Granny, that dog helped her learn to walk.

Liz Dowling: I’m Liz Dowling or Auntie Liz. I was only a baby at the time, and there was this big dog. Its fur was like a tiger’s fur, and I knew that by holding onto its neck, I could get around.

That dog was a real solid dog. A friendly dog. A big dog.

JC: Tigermoth died before Carol and Julie were born, but they were brought up with the stories of kangaroo dogs.

CD: You know, it’s almost like that dog was a part of our life. Those oral histories are very powerful about that. We have a long line of storytellers, and our mom brought us up talking about her grandmother and the life that they lived up in a small town called Coorow.

JC: Coorow is on Yued Country — a tiny town on the train line, about three hours north of Perth.

CD: She was known as ‘Granny’, so that’s our great grandmother.

But she used to do quite regular hunting with the kangaroo dogs.

Granny was forever making kangaroo skin pelts and making blankets out of the kangaroo and them having kangaroo meat all the time.

JC: Yep, kangaroo dogs got their name because they chase and kill kangaroos.

CD: Forever when you’re yarning to Noongars or Yamajis or whatever, the first thing they say to each other is, “You got any meat?” To actually have a good source of protein is the most important thing. It’s always about meat.

JC: Kangaroo is one of the healthiest meats there is, and kangaroos have been hopping all over Australia for at least two million years. They’ve been sustainably managed and hunted by First Nations peoples with weapons, nets, dingoes and fire.

JC: Here’s Carol Dowling.

CD: In my Country, in Badimia Country, the use of fire was very important to seasonally burn off the bush and force kangaroos down to a certain exit point. It took a long time to build up a good population of kangaroos. They often wouldn’t touch the older males or the breeding females.

A lot of the techniques for hunting were quite inspired by a real close understanding of Country.

JC: So what happens when the kangaroo is hunted by people and dogs with no knowledge of, or connection to, Country?

JC: To find out, let’s leave Badimia Country in the west and go to the east coast, to Gadigal Country, and the birth of the first kangaroo dog.

It’s 1788. The lives of First Nations people are about to change forever. Over a thousand British soldiers and convicts are setting up camp at Warrane, Sydney Cove. They unload animals off the ships of the First Fleet: cows, horses, sheep, and dogs, including greyhounds, a traditional British hunting dog brought to Australia on the orders of Governor Phillip.

Guy Hull: Governor Phillip was told that he would need greyhounds if he wanted to catch the kangaroos. That’s why they were brought.

JC: That’s dog historian Guy Hull. He grew up hearing the stories of his dad’s kangaroo dogs.

In the first few years of the colony at Sydney Cove, the crops failed, and so the British hunt kangaroos.

They hunt them with muskets that rarely hit their targets and with the governor’s greyhounds¹.

GH: They tried to ambush kangaroos and hunt kangaroos, but, you know, kangaroos are very wary. And they’ve been hunted for sixty thousand years by people.

So they know that people are trouble, and they know that dogs are trouble.

JC: Turns out that these greyhounds, bred to kill rabbits and foxes, just weren’t cut out for the job of tackling and killing a kangaroo.

[Production Music]: What can a kangaroo do? Oh, what can a kangaroo do?

GH: Kangaroos are really dangerous. They can grab a dog. They can fight them savagely. They can use their enormous nails to disembowel them.

They can get into water. They can grab dogs. They can stand on them and drown them. And they’ve had thousands of years practice doing this with dingoes.

The colonists soon realised that they needed a harder dog.

So they got hold of Scottish Deerhounds and crossed them with greyhounds, which is the animal that we knew then as the kangaroo dog.

JC: So sometime in the first fifteen years of the Sydney colony², the first kangaroo dog was born. We’ll call her Speedy, after a real kangaroo dog of the time.

Speedy — the furry, muscly, deerhound-greyhound cross³ — looked quite distinctive.

Kevin ‘Bloody’ Wilson [song]: Roo dog, the wet nose cross breed.

GH: People who are close to me have seen pictures of them and thought, “That’s the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen in my life.”

They weren’t bred to be pretty. They were bred to do a job, and they’re about as pretty as a rifle.

Kevin ‘Bloody’ Wilson [song]: Covered in fleas and mange. And all of the town dogs picked on Roo dog because he couldn’t fight.

JC: Luckily for kangaroo dog Speedy, looks didn’t count.

GH: For a while, they became the most valuable commodity in in the colony because that’s what kept everyone in their protein. So they were pretty important dog.

JC: Thanks to the skills of Speedy and other kangaroo dogs, kangaroo meat was a regular colonial dish cooked in soup, stews, or the famous kangaroo steamer⁴.

Sienna Brown [voice actor]: Cut the meat off the hindquarters, being careful to remove all the sinews. Chop it very fine. Take the same quantity of smoked bacon fat.

JC: With kangaroo meat on the menu, British colonists bought and sold hundreds of dogs. ⁵

Duncan [AI stock voice]: Sydney Gazette, November 1805. Wanted to purchase for a gentleman at a distant settlement. A good kangaroo dog that must be warranted to kill and show. A liberal price will be given.

JC: As the colonists expanded from Sydney Cove onto Dharug Country, they violently pushed through Aboriginal resistance.

Yet kangaroo hunting was one thing the newcomers and First Nations peoples sometimes did together. Darug warriors carrying woomeras, spears and axes hunted alongside white bushmen with their ‘savage, muscular dogs’. ⁶

Soon Darug people had kangaroo dogs of their own⁷, and the practice of First Nations people taking in these dogs isn’t a one off. Over time, it happens again and again across Australia, including in our next stop, Tasmania.

In 1803, the British anchored their boats in the Derwent River in modern day Hobart.

Julie Gough: Well, it would have been like paradise. Can you imagine? All the waterways, that amazing Kunanyi Mountain, and the sounds, they say, the sounds of the whales. You’re hearing the whales all the time in the Derwent making whale song. Imagine that.

It was magical and would have been just all stories, so many stories of everything having meaning. And then these tall ships arrive.

My name is Julie Gough. I’m an artist and also writer, researcher, and curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. I’m also a Trawlwoolway woman.

JC: British convicts and soldiers unload supplies off those tall ships with the stuff you needed back then to invade and start a colony. And one thing those fifteen years at Sydney Cove had taught them? You’d better bring kangaroo dogs to help feed the colony.

Remember Speedy, the first kangaroo dog born in Australia? Well, Speedy’s grandson named Bosun, a little puppy, is on board.

The kangaroo dog has arrived in Tasmania.

James Boyce: These Palawa managed lands were, to the English, you know, consistently described like a a gentleman’s park. There’s 200 miles of grassland stretching to their north and teeming with wallaby and what still call forester kangaroo here in Tasmania, the eastern grey, and the emu.

JC: That’s historian James Boyce. So thanks to sustainable management by Tasmanian Aboriginal people, the Country around Hobart was a kangaroo and emu paradise.

But here’s the thing: the dingo, the kangaroo’s only predator on the mainland besides humans, had never made it to the island of Tasmania.

JB: These animals are not adapted to the dog. The animals had never seen anything like it.

JC: The colonists had over a thousand mouths to feed⁸. And on this isolated island, seemingly at the bottom of the world, this kangaroo paradise is about to end.

JB: There’s no more supply ships coming in. Everyone sort of forgets about this settlement, and it’s basically left to fend for itself. And so they just switched to kangaroo ration⁹.

Suddenly, they’re eating fresh meat every day, supplemented by the shellfish, which were everywhere to be found. And they’re eating a diet quite similar to the Indigenous people of the island, and people’s health becomes dramatically improved.

JC: The Hobart government store buys huge amounts of kangaroo meat to feed the colony. Around one ton of kangaroo a week is what the town surveyor George Harris told his mother in a letter in 1805…

George Harris, Surveyor (Voice Actor): My pack of kangaroo dogs are as good as any in the whole country. There’s Lager, Weasel, Lion, Bosun and Brindle. And with those dogs, I scarcely ever have to send out for meat. My two huntsmen can bring me three, four, five, even eight kangaroo a day.

JC: Just like the town surveyor Harris, the other officers of the colony had their dogs hunting kangaroos and emus intensively too.

JB: The whole economy is centered on the kangaroo.

Reverend Robert Knopwood was one of the officers, and he was one of the ones supplying the government store — making more money out of selling kangaroo to the government than his own wage.

JC: But it wasn’t Reverend Knopwood or the town surveyor, Harris, doing the dirty work of hunting kangaroos with dogs. That was done by the convicts assigned to them — a perfect ‘side hustle’ for the gentry.

While these dogs were essentially the trained killers of the colony, they still bonded with their humans.

In his diary, the Reverend Robert Knopwood wrote all about his kangaroo dogs. There was Toby, Tatar, Sultan, and Spot, to name a few, and how they were pretty much better than anybody else’s.

And get this! When Spot dies, Robert Knopwood commissions an autopsy to cut open Spot and find out what killed him. (Spoiler alert, it was a kangaroo.)

And of course, this intensive hunting is having a massive impact on the owners of this land.¹⁰

JG: And since 1803 when the British raised their flag at Risdon Cove, there’d been clear attempts to annihilate Aboriginal peoples.

JC: In May 1804, less than a year into the new colony, there’s a massacre.

30 Big River Oyster Bay people are killed at Risdon Cove on the Derwent River.

JB: And there was soon also resistance pushback by local Palawa people, obviously.

JC: The colonial violence and Aboriginal resistance would later turn into full scale war, Tasmania’s Black War.

And where will the kangaroo dog be in wartime? We’ll get to that.

But before then, the officers of the Hobart Colony are sending their convicts deeper into Aboriginal land to hunt¹¹.

JB: We soon see these convicts going bush, often without a gun, just with a dog.

JC: Bosun, who’d arrived in Tasmania as a puppy, had grown up. And he was one of those dogs, taken out bush to hunt kangaroos for his convict and his convict master back in Hobart.

JB: Within eighteen months of first settlement, we have British convicts living year round in the Tasmanian bush. So it goes against all these stories that we have of the British sort of struggling with this environment.

I mean, they were they were living year round, something that, you know, many of us would still struggle to do today. Now this is one of the fastest adaptations to a colonised land.

So they were dressing themselves in kangaroo skins, learning to make huts that they saw all around them. They’re living semi nomadic lives. Of course, what was in it for them was freedom.

And the key was the dog.

JC: These convicts were Australia’s first bushrangers, but not the Ned Kelly kind, not yet.

And it was kangaroo dogs like Bosun that made it possible for Tasmanian convicts to ‘range the bush’.

JB: They were called bushrangers, but they weren’t bushrangers in the sense we understand it like armed outlaws. They were accepted by the state.

JC: As time went on, bushrangers were no longer accepted by the state. Less ‘convicts gone wild’, and more like Michael Howe.

Michael Howe was an escaped convict and one of Australia’s most famous bushrangers. In 1818, he was captured by police in the bushland of Central Tasmania. When Michael Howe stood and faced his death, it was said there were two things he’d miss:

JB: One is the loss of his Aboriginal partner. The other is the loss of his kangaroo dog, Bosun.

JC: Bosun missed his bushranger master too, but a good kangaroo dog was too valuable to let mope around. Colonists traded Bosun the dog for kangaroo skins with Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

And this trading of dogs had been happening since the early days of the colony.

JG: Pretty early on, they were incorporated. And not just kangaroo dogs because a lot of colonists had small terriers.

JC: A quick note here. Early on, as Trawlwoolway artist and curator Julie Gough says, Tasmanian Aboriginal people took in kangaroo dogs and other kinds of dogs, and these dogs bred.

So the original strict deerhound-greyhound mix from Sydney Cove changed over time in Tasmania and on the mainland. But they were still called ‘kangaroo dogs’.

JB: There wasn’t a lot that Aboriginal people initially wanted for British society, but the dog was a different matter. So the dog was traded, supplied. Puppies was was supplied.

The dog spreads right across the island.

JG: The advantages of the dog were quickly understood. It provided companionship. It was a early warning system of colonists encroaching upon us. It provided warmth.

It became a family member.

And to have such a completely alien being be quickly incorporated into your life and family life… These glimpses of how much we did equip ourselves our sisters to survive and change, such as incorporating the dog into everyday life shows that we were flexible, adaptable, resilient people.

JB: The kangaroo dog is central to this whole adaptation on both sides of the frontier, this whole encounter.

JC: Tasmanian Aboriginal people adapted to the new dog, but the Tasmanian environment did not.

JB: Sadly, the Tasmanian emu is extinct and the forester kangaroo, the eastern gray — it’s recovering now, but it also was threatened with extinction, again, by the effectiveness of these dogs.

JC: The Tasmanian emu, smaller and darker than the Australian mainland emu, became extinct in sixty years with the most likely cause being overhunting.

JB: In the early decades of the British invasion, the introduction of the dog is impossible to separate from the introduction of of white people. By the eighteen twenties and thirties, British colonists are taking over Aboriginal land on the coastlines and inland in Tasmania and the Mainland to farm food, cattle, and sheep. Dog historian, Guy Hull.

GH: Kangaroo dogs went with people. They lived with people in every little cabin or slab hut or the settlers made as they were spreading out throughout the countryside. They took kangaroo dogs with them because that was their ticket to survival because what small stock they took had to be shepherded and protected.

JB: Free settlers who were given large land grants, they’re, wanting to keep out everybody else. This is my land.

GH: One of the issues people had with kangaroos and why the reason they kept kangaroo dogs is because kangaroos eat the same thing that sheep eat, and that’s grass. So they were seen as being competitors. Australian pastoralism just took war to everything, to everything.

JC: Australian pastoralism did take war to everything and everyone that stood in its way.

Here’s First Nations academic Carol Dowling, who you heard from earlier.

CD: All I can speak is from the Swan Colony in Perth and also up in our Country, Badamia Country in the Central West around the Murchison Colony.

When they first came in contact with our people, we often would allow them to actually have a chance to have kangaroo or to hunt kangaroo. The idea of someone going hungry was unheard of.

But unfortunately, as time wore on, those engagements, they quickly went sour mainly because of our values within the community, within First Nations community was one of reciprocity. You know, what are you going to, give back to us in kind?

Emus and kangaroos were considered open, game for the colonists that came into our country, but there was no consideration that first nations peoples could actually spear a sheep, a steer, to actually recompense for the the loss of game in country claimed as reciprocal, food source.

And this was often met with a quite a lot of retaliation by the colonists. The idea of reciprocity was, an issue in that early engagement. A lack of understanding on both parts, but particularly from from the colonists who viewed their conquering of country, tantamount to taking whatever resources that was located on that country.

JC: When Aboriginal people killed cattle or sheep, just as the colonists killed kangaroo, the British often retaliated violently.

CD: It wasn’t unheard of for whole groups of people being massacred or shot because of them taking sheep and livestock.

JC: It’s one part of the hundred and forty years of conflict and resistance between Indigenous and non Indigenous people in Australia called the Frontier Wars or the Australian wars.

And in these wars, particularly Tasmania’s Black War, the kangaroo dog’s role changed to battle dog.

JB: I mean, it’s… it’s… it’s really hard to talk about this stuff. So the British techniques, they learn that the most effective way, and as we find in Tasmania and in New South Wales and then taken into other parts of the continent

JG: Ancestors were attacked while sleeping at 3AM.

It was this sort of set time when colonists thought everyone’s asleep.

JB: Position yourselves. And then as dawn breaks, you just open volleys of musket fire and then it’s just slaughter.

JG: Raid an Aboriginal camp and kill everyone.

JB: But the early warning system, so are the dogs.

The dogs start to bark. You know, we hear often accounts of that and then, you know, someone’s out there, something’s out there¹².

So they become really key to to managing this threat.

But also their capacity to catch food on the go when you’re conducting a sort of guerrilla warfare and you’re needing to move all the time.

JG: So twenty nine years of that, these are people that had hardly had a chance to rest for for that length of time.

Thirty years, really. So it’s more than a generation on the run-in their own country. The kangaroo dog was a partner in the hunt for bringing down the the kangaroo and the wallaby, so it made life more economically possible.

When our numbers were so reduced, it had to almost replace our missing… our missing people.

JC: In the Black War, the most extensive conflict in Australia’s history, Tasmanian newspapers report kangaroo dogs being used in ambushes.

There’s another another story in the Hobart Town Gazette:

29th October, 1831. Another attack by the natives. Upwards of 150 natives armed with spears and waddies and attended with nearly 50 fine kangaroo dogs again surrounded the house of Mr Hobbs.

And you wonder too about what level of protection or warning they provided colonists?

JC: In Queensland, kangaroo dogs are kept by some police¹³¹⁴, including the notorious native police¹⁵.

The Australian Wars end in the nineteen thirties. A legacy of the land grab left kangaroo dogs scattered right across Australia, but mainly out bush. You’d find them in country towns, remote communities, and outback stations.

And people still use them to hunt like in these oral history interviews.

Sir John Kramer (Oral History): We all had our own kangaroo dog. I had mine, and Charlie had his, and Earl had his. And we used to go out hunting, hunting hares.

Chris Woodland (Oral historian): What what else did you do out there?

Kangaroo, emu, or just go out of town and ..?

Bill Gray (Oral History): Yeah. And you don’t have to go, you know, five mile out of town, get a feed of wild meat.

Bill Gray (Oral History): Yeah. Mostly kangaroo.

Chris Woodland (Oral historian): Just run them down with dogs or shoot them?

Bill Gray (Oral History): Yeah, dogs. We used to have the dogs, and the kangaroo dogs would be trotting along in the shade of the buggy or the ‘sulky’. And me and Joanie, we’d run along with the dogs.

JC: That was Bill Gray, a First Nations man. And before him was sir John Kramer, a former New South Wales MP. Both had had kangaroo dogs as young men in regional New South Wales.

But these hunting dogs were on the way out.

GH: But, you know, every decade that went by, they became less and less popular.

So, you know, weapons became more accurate, and then rifles could shoot quite long distances and, you know, had the power to knock a kangaroo over. Well, they made the kangaroo dog redundant overnight.

JC: So better guns meant kangaroo dogs almost died out across Australia. Almost.

JG: I wonder about, you know, where are all the descendants of those dogs that helped us survive?

Are they with colonists now again? Are they back with where or any families, Aboriginal people with the descendants of those dogs?

JC: The answers to Julie Gough’s questions are ‘yes’ and ‘yes’.

You have to look hard, but you can still find them. On the bush blocks of Tasmania, in outback Western Australia, where they’ve probably got some dingo in them.

And in regional Victoria, in the small Gippsland town of Bairnsdale, which is our last stop.

Lex Rayment: I’ve had this one line of dogs for fifty years, which makes me sound a little bit oldish, but I’m not. I’m just a young

JC: This is Lex Rayment, a pastor of his local church and the only kangaroo dog breeder in Australia, it seems.

LR: Come and come and meet some dogs. So have you actually seen a kangaroo dog before?

JC: Never.

LR: Never? Wow.

JC: I’ve only seen them in photos and historical paintings Yeah. But I’ve never seen one in real life.

LR: Well, they are a super friendly dog.

Everyone says to you their dogs are wonderful. It’s not true. And it’s probably the temperament of these dogs that is the most endearing quality of them.

This is Willow. Hey…

And she’s just a real little sook and a softie. Hey. Hey. Come here, Elsa.

Come here. She’s an absolute sweetie. Very obedient. Here, Elsa.

You can see in that dog, she’s almost like a smile and the kind eyes. She’s a good girl.

JC: I asked Lex if he could remember the names of the dogs that he’s bred over the past fifty years.

What you’re asking for, I could get my nine year old granddaughter to tell you because she is an expert on all my dogs.

Brooklyn: So the first dog he ever had was Scout.

LR: Scout.

B: And he loved him lots lots lots lots lots lots lots. She would tell you about Shiloh and Chick and all these dogs.

LR: Shiloh, Chick, and Rain.

In fact, I have got dogs today that carry the names of those ritual dogs because of that emotional connection. I’ve got a puppy called Ryan because I had a Ryan forty five years ago. I have a Bonnie today because I had a Bonnie fifty years ago.

B: Elsa. Good girl. So this is Elsa. She’s you can’t see her, but she’s very calm.

LR: My granddaughter names my dogs based on her history she carries that I’ve imparted to her.

JC: On Lex’s farm, I got to meet real kangaroo dogs — Willow, Fagan, and Elsa, the ‘great great great great great great’ granddaughter of Bosun, the bushranger’s dog.

While the history of kangaroo dogs can make it sound like they’re ferocious, bloodthirsty beasts, They’re just not.

And they’re not ugly either. They’re really beautiful dogs.

Well, for ages, I was very scared of them because they’re so big. But once you get used to them, they’re very nice and calm. I think anybody that invests a partnership with a dog, whether that’s just living with a dog in your home, dogs play a remarkable role in human life.

LR: All dogs that we have are bred for a purpose and the kangaroo dog’s purpose has evolved as our world has changed.

CD: The kangaroo dog is actually quite an honored animal within our families particularly in smaller country towns especially in the Southwest and up in the Wheat Belt. We do know that a lot of people will go out hunting with their dogs still¹⁶.

But generally, most of them are couch potatoes, these dogs. They’re very pampered and very much loved by their families.

JG: We’ve got a lot, I think, to thank for those creatures joining us. The kangaroo dog is, for me, emblematic of our people’s survival against the odds and being able to use something as an ally that had come from so far away.

And that when it was with us and our ancestors, I mean, survival was the task at hand and it and it did work and we are still here. And we partly have that dog to thank for that.

JC: So the kangaroo dog was born of colonisation and the Australian environment, born on country, from hunting dog to bushranger’s best mate to battle dog and family member of Black and white Australians. The kangaroo dog’s seen a lot.

And by seeing the past through a dog’s eyes, maybe we can face our history together.

KM: Kangaroo dog was produced by Jane Curtis. The sound engineer was John Jacobs. And for more information about the scruffy roo dog, just head to our web page, the History Listen, on the ABC website. I’m Kirsty Melville.

Thanks for your company today. I’ll catch you next time.

Notes

1. Our methods of killing them were but two; either we shot them, or hunted them with greyhounds. We were never able to ensnare them. Those sportsmen who relied on the gun seldom met with success. Tench, Watkin. A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson. Chapter 16. Project Gutenberg Australia. https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/e00084.html. ↩︎
2. The first mention of a ‘kangaroo dog’ in the archives that I can find is 1803. ↩︎
3. The dogs used here to hunt the kangaroo have the shape and general character of the greyhound, but are very much larger in size, and coarser altogether, uniting great strength with speed. Louisa Meredith, quoted in James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008), 24. ↩︎
4. Kangaroo Steamer (Author’s Recipe) in Edward Abbott, The English and Australian Cookery Book (first published 1864; this edition 2023), 84. ↩︎
5. The breeding of dedicated hunting dogs was instrumental to the professionalisation of the kangaroo hunt in Australia, and it began relatively early on. In her book Land Settlement in Early Tasmania (1992), Sharon Morgan notes that when the minerologist Adolarius Humphrey arrived at Port Dalrymple in 1804, he brought four kangaroo dogs with him ‘which he believed would “kill about 1000lb weight of Kangaroo a Week.” Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2020), 56. ↩︎
6. Hunting provided some common ground with Aboriginal warriors. After 1788, Aboriginal and white men set out on hunting trips together, on foot. The warriors carried spears, woomeras, and axes, while the foresters were sometimes armed with muskets, but more often they only used their savage, muscular dogs to run down the kangaroos. Grace Karskens, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2020), 201. ↩︎
7. They appeared to be good hunters, and had five hounds with them. Explorer Francis Barrallier on meeting Darug people in the Blue Mountains; Francis Barrallier, “Barrallier’s Journal November 17, 1802,” in The Journal of the Expedition into the Interior of New South Wales, Project Gutenberg Australia https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203731h.html.https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203731h.html ↩︎
8. The Hobart settlement initially consisted of two separate colonies. Judith Hollingsworth, The Companion to Tasmania History (Hobart: 2005) https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/N/North-south.htm
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9. On 10 September 1804, Collins took what was to prove a momentous policy decision. He ordered the first government purchase of kangaroo meat… A large cash market for kangaroo was immediately created, and, in direct consequence, the foundation for a new society was laid. James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008), 44. ↩︎
10. Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981), 79. ↩︎
11. By 1806, as Henry Reynolds notes, the ‘foundations’ had been laid for the island’s two major cities, Hobart and Launceston. He adds: In both settlements recourse was had to the massive hunting of kangaroo, which required men and their dogs to venture farther and farther into the interior. Henry Reynolds, The History of Tasmania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), cited in Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt, 38. ↩︎
12. In the Appin Massacre in New South Wales in 1816, dogs sound the warning that people are approaching:
    … a few of my men who wandered now heard a child cry. I formed link ranks, entered and pushed on through a thick brush towards the precipitous banks of a deep rocky creek, the dogs gave the alarm and the natives fled over the cliffs, a smart firing now ensured. Captain James Wallis’ Diary Entry, 17 April 1816 in https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/unsettled/fighting-wars/appin-massacre/ ↩︎
13. There is evidence Queensland police kept kangaroo dogs in regional Queensland, such as in the Burnett region:
    In defiance of Halloran’s orders, Larry left on the night of 16. April to return to Traylan. Larry not only took his two police horses but also a kangaroo dog belonging to Halloran.” L. E. Skinner, Police of the Pastoral Frontier: Native Police 1849–59 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1975). ↩︎
14. Evidence from an inquiry into the conduct of the Queensland Police includes a story of an Aboriginal man being approached by police and attacked by a kangaroo dog, at York’s Hollow which is modern day Herston in Brisbane:
    I proceeded to the camp about eleven o’clock at night, in company with Peter Murphy, a constable, Henry Gratton, a prisoner of the Crown, attached to the Survey Department… ”I then fired my piece at Jackey Jackey. “I do not know whether I hit him or not; another shot was fired by Jackey, who had a small pocket pistol ; he fired at a kangaroo dog that rushed at him ; I do not know whether he hit the dog, but it yelled very much ; there were 300 or 400 natives at the camp ; they all ran off as soon as the shots were fired.
    “Moreton Bay,” The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW: 1842–1954), February 23, 1847, 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12892043.http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12892043 ↩︎
15. An archeological record reports finding evidence of kangaroo dogs at the native police camp in north Queensland:
    The archaeological record of Lower Laura (aka Boralga) Native Mounted Police camp, a longstanding base for Queensland’s frontier war in Cape York Peninsula.
    As part of a wider project to investigate the archaeology of the Queensland Native Mounted Police, the site of the Lower Laura (aka Boralga) Native Mounted Police camp in Rinyirru National Park, southern Cape York Peninsula, was surveyed, mapped, and subjected to open area excavations.
    Evidently the police followed the common colonial practice of using ‘kangaroo dogs’ for hunting (see Jack 1921), since Sub-Inspector Townsend kept dogs at‘ the Laura’ police camp (Hill 1907:75–76), and government geologist Robert Logan Jack (1921:524) while staying at nearby Laura Telegraph Station in 1879 ,‘got two kangaroo dogs, one from the Native Police and one from Mr. H.R. Jones’ Townsend buried his dogs at the police camp (Hill 1907); Noelene Cole, Lynley A. Wallis, Heather Burke, and Bryce Barker, “‘On the Brink of a Fever Stricken Swamp’: Culturally Modified Trees and Land-People Relationships at the Lower Laura (Boralga) Native Mounted Police Camp, Cape York Peninsula,” Australian Archaeology 86, no. 1 (2020): 21–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2020.1749371. ↩︎
16. It seems the use of kangaroo dogs for hunting has continued through the 20th century to today. In the 1970s, Isobel M. White writes about the use of kangaroo dogs by Pitjantjara people at Yatala Mission, South Australia. Isobel M. White, “Hunting Dogs at Yatala,” Mankind 8 (1972): 201–5. ↩︎