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The controversy rages over our kangaroo-meat exports to Europe, with Greens luminary Lee Rhiannon among those presenting a horror-cruelty film Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story to the snowflakes of the European Parliament. I’m a Perth boy of Kendenup-Mt Barker heritage, and in the south-west in the good old days we always treated roos as nuisances. Roo-shoots at night from a ute combined good works with entertainment.
Let me now take you in my time capsule back half a century, when you, a pale-faced Eastern Stater, have arrived at Perth Airport by a state-of-the-art TAA Boeing 727. You exit via the gift shop and browse the shelves for a souvenir to take home to loved ones to commemorate your epic and safe flight.
“Hmm! These look nice!”
They’re chopped-off paws of kangaroos, a sort of visual pun on the kangaroo paw plants flourishing in the gardens outside the building. The actual paws are about 10 inches long and the fur ranges from white through fawn to brown. At one end the five claws and palm are lacquered black, and at the other the amputation is concealed by a steel circlet. Fixed into the circlet is a bottle-opener, paper knife, can-opener or shoe horn.
One model in this novelty line has a thermometer fixed midway down the paw. The thermometer fluid seems to be red ink, and from a distance it looks as though the paw is still bleeding.
“Greetings from Perth, WA,” is inscribed on the metal fittings. Prices are $5 to $7 [$60-80 in today’s money].
In my role as The West Australian’s reporter-at-large, I see fit to look into this souvenir trade.
“Where do you get the paws from?” I ask Miss Andrea Lee-Steere behind the counter, wondering if they are a local industry.
“Kangaroos,” she says.
“Do you like them?”
“We’ve got a bottle-opener paw at home. It looks tremendous on the cocktail cabinet.”
“Do they sell well?”
“Four or five a week. Some people think they are gruesome but most people off the planes are really impressed.”
My arrival at the importers in Perth causes some consternation and steely-eyed glances, particularly when I want to know who produces the paws.
“We don’t say where we get any of our stuff from,” says a representative. “Once we told someone and people started ordering stuff through him direct instead of through our agency.”
He considers the paws are horrible, but says they sell well. It emerges they are made by a struggling migrant in a garage in an outer Melbourne suburb. He had been looking for something original to make, and the paws combined the attractiveness of kangaroo fur with absolutely unshakable authenticity.
Where does the struggling migrant get his raw material from? No-one in Perth knows.
I suggest the paws could be a by-product from the pet food industry, but they don’t think so. I eventually decide that a truck must materialise once a month and tip a load of kangaroo paws on his driveway – an interesting subject for Salvador Dali to paint.
Is anyone in Perth thinking of setting up a rival factory? This is, after all, the Kangaroo Paw State.
No, they say, there’s nothing brewing in that direction.
Being a sentimental bloke, I conclude, “Maybe it’s time to pause on the poor paws.”
Tony Thomas’s book of essays, That’s Debatable – 60 Years in Print, is available here
Senator Rhiannon has chosen to cherry-pick the decline in kangaroo numbers during the drought in the eastern States during the decade from 2001. She has chosen to ignore the recovery in kangaroo numbers since – from 12 million to 22.5 million by 2014 in Queensland for instance. Given kangaroo adaptions to limit numbers in drought (diapause) there is no reason to believe that this variation in numbers isn’t natural. There are no species of kangaroos currently listed as endangered, despite the best efforts of the bottle opener industry.
I acquired such a novelty item on my way out of Brisbane International airport as a gift for my Taiwanese colleagues who I was visiting.
Rather than a bottle opener, it was a coin purse made from a suitable pouch-shaped part of the poor old roo’s anatomy.
In keeping with my joy at pulling peoples legs, I told the recipient that they were made by a group of rabid feminist greenies who chase the kangaroos with a dagging knife and perform the vasectomy as a way to keep them from overbreeding.
The comment raised not a single eyebrow.
Tony,
“In the south-west in the good old days we always treated roos as nuisances. Roo-shoots at night from a ute combined good works with entertainment.” Hmmm …
When I arrived in Perth decades ago my first job was 100km out of Port Hedland (before the mines, so we were it for 100km). I shot goats, pigs and ‘roos for fresh meat, but also took part in one ‘fun-run’ in which I shot 24 ‘roos skinned them and left the carcases to rot. Bad move as we worked through the area a few days later amid a constant horrendous smell and a blowfly plague that coul collapse you to your knees under their weight as they sucked the sweat from my shirt. I have not shot an animal for ‘fun’ since, but have killed a range of them for food. Among the more exotic are a python, a Pelican (the sole of Charlie Chaplin’s boot would be less tough), several tortoises (they taste worse than the grey blob they look when boiled).
My most interesting culinary experience was in Africa where I was served a lunch of bush meat. I had alreay tried chicken (that still had beak and feathers), goat (reread the comment on tortoises), river fish (that had the most bones I have ever enountered), bullet-proof meat and finally smoked ‘bush meat’ (to preserve it after it was killed in the bush). Afficionados told me they could tell what wood had been used to make it black and carcinogenic. I found it tough and strongly flavoured, but I lost my appetite when chewing on a bone I bit off a finger nail.
As for the Rhiannon: well, isn’t it great to see her university training in Moscow is being put into practical effect by distributing false propaganda and subverting of all things Oz? That’s one degree that has returned Russia’s investment in her.
Tony,
“In the south-west in the good old days we always treated roos as nuisances. Roo-shoots at night from a ute combined good works with entertainment.” Hmmm …
When I arrived in Perth decades ago my first job was 100km out of Port Hedland (before the mines, so we were it for 100km). I shot goats, pigs and ‘roos for fresh meat, but also took part in one ‘fun-run’ in which I shot 24 ‘roos skinned them and left the carcases to rot. Bad move as we worked through the area a few days later amid a constant horrendous smell and a blowfly plague that coul collapse you to your knees under their weight as they sucked the sweat from my shirt. I have not shot an animal for ‘fun’ since, but have killed a range of them for food. Among the more exotic are a python, a Pelican (the sole of Charlie Chaplin’s boot would be less tough), several tortoises (they taste worse than the grey blob they look when boiled).
My most interesting culinary experience was in Africa where I was served a lunch of bush meat. I had already tried chicken (that still had beak and feathers), goat (re-read the comment on tortoises), river fish (that had the most bones I have ever enountered), bullet-proof meat and finally smoked ‘bush meat’ (to preserve it after it was killed in the bush). Afficionados told me they could tell what wood had been used to make it black and carcinogenic. I found it tough and strongly flavoured, but I lost my appetite when chewing on a bone I bit off a finger nail.
As for Rhiannon: well, isn’t it great to see her university training in Moscow is being put into practical effect by distributing false propaganda and subverting of all things Oz? That’s one degree that has returned Russia’s investment in her.