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A Hop Through Australia

Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Creature
Tim Flannery. 2007. Grove Press, New York. 258 pp., hardbound. $24.

I've always found kangaroos vaguely menacing, repellent enough to put Australia toward the bottom of my list of places to go. Check out the dude on the cover of Chasing Kangaroos. Is it just me, or does he look like a Mafia don, what with his jowls, frown lines, and heavy-lidded stare, his languid posture belying a 200-pound boxer's toughness? I still picked up the book—admiration for its author, Australian Tim Flannery, overcame my distaste for its subject.

Cover of Chasing KangaroosThe cover animal is a red kangaroo, largest of the living marsupials, symbol of Australia, and the species most Americans picture as "the kangaroo." In fact, there are 70 or so different living species of kangaroos (and many more extinct forms), including three other large ones—all slimmer and daintier-looking than the reds, more boulevardiers than bruisers. At the other end of the size spectrum are diminutive musky rat kangaroos, rabbit-like one-pounders with big eyes. And in between is a diverse assortment of kangaroos called wallabies, pademelons, bettongs, potoroos, and quokkas.
 
Chasing Kangaroos is full of fascinating stories about the species, living and extinct, told with wit as well as the wonder with which Flannery views these creatures. A chapter on extinct Ice Age species describes long-necked giant wallabies that resembled giraffes, huge short-faced kangaroos eerily like hominids, and even a carnivorous "killer kangaroo." Flannery discovered the killer kangaroo—and many more species living and extinct—and writes about the thrill of it: "Then there were a delicious couple of days when, as I worked on my theory without telling anyone else, I was the only person on Earth who knew that great, carnivorous kangaroos once stalked Australia."

Of the news about living kangaroos I was most astounded by their digestive system (really!). Like cows, kangaroos eat grass but can't digest it. Instead, cow guts harbor symbiotic, microscopic bacteria that break down the tough grass. Kangaroos have a similar system with one huge difference: Their digestion assistants are worms, "as thick as a hairpin and twice as long." In essence, the kangaroos eat grass in order to feed their worms, whose by-products feed the kangaroos. How cool is that?

But this book is not only about kangaroos. In often hilarious stories of his adventures in the field, replete with a host of colorful characters, Flannery, now a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, describes his career as a paleontologist obsessed with finding the fossils that would help him understand how kangaroos came to be. Like many of the Australians (and paleontologists of any nation) in these tales, Flannery is a bit of a character himself. The first sentence of the book is, "When I was a young man I met a man whose arse bore the bite-mark of a Tasmanian tiger."

Young people will be inspired by the fact that Flannery's high-school record was too poor for admission to a college science program—he got his start as a volunteer in the Museum Victoria in Melbourne—and today he is among the most renowned scientists in the world. In addition to his specialized scientific writing, Flannery contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books, and is the author of acclaimed books for the general public, including environmental histories of Australia (The Future Eaters) and North America (The Eternal Frontier), and, most recently, The Weather Makers, about the causes and effects of climate change.

In Chasing Kangaroos, Flannery also offers an ecological history of Australia to show how the evolution of kangaroos is inseparable from the environments in which they lived, and ends with a plea for the conservation of this damaged land and its diminished fauna. Many of the kangaroo species he discusses are highly endangered, and other Australian marsupials are extinct. The last Tasmanian tiger died just before Flannery was born. In referring to the animal's bite-marks on the arse of a man he once knew, Flannery writes, "In my youthful imagination that scar was the supreme stamp of Australian identity, a badge of honour that lay forever beyond my reach."

Flannery concludes "with a sinking feeling…that things are likely to end badly for both ourselves and this great island continent," unless every Australian helps to save it. If anyone can, Flannery will help to inspire this, and not only among Australians.

—Susan Lumpkin

 

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ZooGoer 36(5) 2007. Copyright 2007 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.

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