Rockin' with the Roos in the Aussie Outback

TULLAMORE, New South Wales – Here’s another tale (or should I say tail) about the most-recognized creature in the Land of Oz.

It’s the humble kangaroo – or Roo, in Aussie-speak.

The animals are both loved and loathed, embraced and just-only-endured, nurtured and slaughtered – and that’s just right here in the tiny sheep and farming community of Tullamore in rural New South Wales, some 500 miles east west of Sydney.

Recent estimates are that some 50 million Roos hop along the rural Aussie landscape, drawing tourists from around the world.

But the locals see them as pests that emerge each day at dusk to make mad kamikaze dashes into the paths of cars. The roadsides are littered with the carcasses of animals that are involved in 8 out of ten animal-vehicle mishaps here.

As I traveled the Outback, I spotted thousands of dead kangaroos along the roadside.

It was a tragic site.

Roo-vehicle mishaps have taken the lives of countless motorists as well.

Kangaroo collisions make up 90% of all animal-related traffic mishaps across Australia -- more than all other animals combined.

But there's another reason the animals have become Public Enemy No. 1 Down Under.

Just like the wild mustangs of the American West, these maligned and misunderstood animals Down Under are demonized by rural residents who say the runaway numbers and damage to ranching and agriculture interests threatens their way of life.

Then there are the activists who want the ranchers to leave their mitts (and lassos) off the wild herds, insisting that the animals are bona fide national icons and are blamed for damage they do not commit.

The other day, I saw both sides of this nation’s Roo issue in a single afternoon.

Just before dusk, I rode in the front cab of a ranch ute driven sheep owner and farmer Billy Edwards, a Tullamore native with large icy-blue eyes and an easy demeanor. Billy has run sheep on his and also farms wheat on 6,000 acres. Sometimes, when planting his crop, he feels like he’s just setting the table for mobs of ravenous Roos.

Year round, he says, they converge on his crops like hop-along locusts. 

We took a short drive from central Tullamore to one tract of his spread where Billy knew we’d see the little crop dusters in action. We turned off the paved road and passed a flock of sheep that ran along in front of our truck, as Billy explained the annual process of ear-marking sheep, the castration and tail-docking of the lambs of domestic sheep.

We paused as Billy opened a locked gate and entered into the Realm of the Roo – in other words, Billy’s wheat field. 

“There they are now,” he said as he charged into the field to give chase.

A half-dozen or so Roos bounded in front of his truck with the telltale “boing! boing! boing!” rhythm that makes them distinctive. 

A few broke for the brush, another hopped a fence in a single leap and a few smaller ones fled panic-stricken, running alongside a fence, with Billy and me in hot pursuit, the cab lurching this way and that as I tried to get video of the hunt.

“How is a farmer supposed to grow crops with animals like these around?” he asked. “They’re a huge problem. You can’t poison them, you can’t shoot them. The government protects them as an indigenous Australian animal.”

Meanwhile, Billy says, they eat him out of house and ranch home, costing farmers like him untold thousands each year.

Billy likes the idea of having kangaroos on the Australian landscape, don’t get him wrong. He bears the animals no real ill-will and has been even known to take an abandoned young joey home as a family pet.

It’s the government he criticizes – the bureaucrats in urban Canberra who are always exerting their way of life on country people. Billy wonders whether, if the roles were reversed, and the countryside had an oversized say in an urban issue (say, whether to kill pigeons), whether the city folks would like a taste of their own bitter medicine.

The government should have learned its lesson with the foxes.

Decades ago, rural residents like Billy used to kill the agricultural pests and skin them. Many displayed foxtails on their auto antennas. Then the government said “No, you can’t do that” and precluded farmers from killing the animals. 

Within years, fox populations were out of control and now the government comes in with expensive poisoning programs.

Billy shakes his head at the so-called wisdom of that brilliant bit of government policy.

Back in the day, farmers across rural Australia used to take Roo numbers into their own hands. When the numbers got up, they culled them back.

Not anymore.

We rumble along a fence and both Billy and I are amazed at the speed and agility of the creatures, which race along at 30 miles an hour or more – their bounding bodies streamline, like greyhounds run amok on the farm.

The chase seems like a game to these animals, which move through the landscape with the ease of dolphins in the sea.

“There’s a red one! Look at him!” Billy says. “They grow up to be monsters, those ones!”

After our hour-long rumble across the fields, Billy dropped me back in town and I stopped by to see another side of the Roo To-do.

Merrill is a woman who’s lived all around Australia – in Sydney, on a farm and now in a small town of 400 residents.

She has a pet cat, lapdog and another ward she calls Little One, or Little Mondo Maria.

A Roo.

She got the creature two years ago when it was still a tiny joey, its mother struck and killed by a car.

Now it bounds around the backyard and has its own comfy chair inside the house, along with the cat and the dog.

“They all get along,” she said.

She gave Maria a treat and allowed me to take a few snaps. She’s used to people knocking on her door to see her star attraction – Irish and English tourists and the like.

She’s lived on a farm and knows the damage that roos that run in mobs can wreak.

But not her little Maria.

“She’s not going to get much bigger than this,” she said of the animal the size of a midsized setter.

She’s spellbound by the marsupial. She’s like many Australians who run nonprofits to shine a light on what they call misunderstood creatures. 

“Did you know kangaroos can produce two types of milk – one for joeys in the pouch and another for a young one on the ground?” she asked. “They can also tell beforehand the sex of their next baby depending on the season. No other animal can do that.”

Maria was adorable, cartoon creature cuddly, no doubt about that.

But I also felt Billy’s pain as he drove the land he worked so hard to make productive, only to feel that the government was condoning these swarms of two-legged locusts to ravage his livelihood.

Billy and Merrill may be on opposite sides of an issue that make many Aussies hopping mad, but there’s no finger-pointing or recriminations here, not in Tullamore.

And like the debate over America’s wild mustang, there seems to be no solution in sight – anyway, not one that both Billy and Merrill can live with.