The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt by Ken Gelder

Author:Ken Gelder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

Edward Snell, Kangaroo Hunting Yorkes Peninsula, 1850

Other contemporary artists similarly relished the slender, sculpted form of the kangaroo dog. Adam Gustavus Ball was another surveyor-engineer-artist; he emigrated from Dublin to Sydney in 1839, aged eighteen, and later moved to South Australia, where he produced most of his artworks and illustrations. Ball painted a number of kangaroo-hunting scenes featuring both settlers and Aboriginal people, but also focused on the kangaroo dog: for example, in his watercolour Dog Chasing a Kangaroo (1872), where a sleek, powerful hound is in full flight pursuing a kangaroo through thick grassland. The dog’s haunches seem to resemble those of a kangaroo; in contrast, the (red) kangaroo itself is stylised with softer, more rounded lines.

Painting a portrait of a kangaroo dog both individualises and typifies a representative of the species. In Balcombe’s painting, it also conveys the owner’s pride in the animal’s pedigree. We can see something similar in written narratives about the kangaroo dog. An anonymous article published in Samuel Bennett’s Empire magazine in 1871—‘Kangarooing’—describes two young settlers hunting along Mooki River, north-west of Sydney. Their rivalry over the prowess of their kangaroo dogs adds a competitive edge to the pleasure and enjoyment of the hunt. The narrator’s dog, Lightning, is a male; his friend’s dog is Gipsy, a ‘slut’—a term sometimes used to describe female dogs around this time:

Our dogs were of the right sort, and renowned alike for speed and pluck. My friend had a famous slut, of incomparable swiftness, according to his account, and I had a favourite dog, of whom I was in the habit of boasting that he had never as yet been outran by a competitor. These noble animals wanted little of being pure greyhounds; but the slight infusion of foreign blood, from whatever source derived, had imparted to them a degree of courage and strength which made them superior to dogs that were thoroughbred, and as they had never coursed against each other, we looked forward with the liveliest interest to the coming event that would determine once for all which of them excelled in fastness, pluck and sagacity … I expected with the utmost confidence that Lightning would be victorious, while my friend was no less sanguine in his anticipations on behalf of Gipsy. But we kept our thoughts on the subject to ourselves, as with admiring eyes each of us regarded the graceful shape and agile movements of his handsome dog, and rode forward cautiously not knowing at what moment we should start a kangaroo.25

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