Tim Flannery - Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the Worlds Most Extraordinary Creature

MORE PRAISE FORChasing Kangaroos:

Chasing Kangaroos is almost unclassifiable. It is partly about Flannerys formative years as a palaeontologist, partly a natural history of the Australian landscape, and partly a study of the evolution of kangaroos, which, I know, sounds like three reasons not to read it. In fact, from beginning to end it is absorbing, funny, and wondrously learned.

Bill Bryson, author of A Walk in the Woods

A warmhearted book by an expert and an enthusiast for his subject Mr.Flannerys fervor for the animals of the fifth continent has kept him curious for three decades.

Ruth Graham, New York Sun

Flannery writes with enthusiasm about the natural history of his subject and explorations in his native land and his stories of field research unfold with wit and flair.

Lisa Palmer, Providence Journal

Written with both earthy humor and scientific precision, this book is almost as unique as its subjectThis delightful journey of discovery will appeal to fans of Bill Bryson and Mark Kurlansky.

Booklist

Satisfying Tagging along [with Flannery] is always informative, often fun, and frequently thought-provoking.

Brian Alexander, San Diego Union-Tribune

Flannery is a playful Antipodean Stephen Jay Gould and Chasing Kangaroos an intellectually infectious recruiting pamphlet for the next generation of ecologists and palaeontologists.

Sydney Morning Herald

Flannery has been fascinated by kangaroos ever since he abandoned prospects for a humanities degree in favor of work for a noted paleontologist and a cross-country summer trip on a sturdy motorbike some thirty years ago. Not only did these untamed youthful adventures excite his interest in further fieldwork, they also provide the frame here for lively chapters filled with colorful Australian characters and occasionally perilous encounters with the continents scattered Aborigine population [Chasing Kangaroos is] fired by a boundless exuberance that leaps off the page.

Kirkus Reviews

CHASING KANGAROOS

OTHER BOOKS BY TIM FLANNERY

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate
and What It Means for Life on Earth

Mammals of New Guinea

Tree Kangaroos: A Curious Natural History
with Roger Martin, Peter Schouten & Alex Szalay

Possums of the World: A Monograph of the Phalangeroidea
with Peter Schouten

Mammals of the South West Pacific and Moluccan Islands

Watkin Tench, 1788 (ed.)

The Life and Adventures John Nicol, Mariner (ed.)

Throwim Way Leg

The Birth of Sydney

Terra Australis: Matthew Flinders Great Adventures in the
Circumnavigation of Australia (ed.)

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples

A Gap in Nature with Peter Schouten

The Explorers: Stories of Discovery and Adventure from the Australian Frontier

Astonishing Animals with Peter Schouten

A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the Worlds Most Extraordinary Creature

TIM FLANNERY

Copyright 2004 by Tim Flannery

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without per-mission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

First published in 2004 by The Text Publishing Company, Australia

ILLUSTRATIONS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reproduce the illustrative material:

COLOR PLATES

Plates 1,4 and 12 are from the authors collection; plates 2,3,6,7,8,9,10 and 11 are courtesy of Dave Watts, Dave Watts Photography; plate 5 courtesy of Lochman Transparencies.

BLACK AND WHITE

Special thanks to Peter Schouten for his drawings on pages 158, 161 and 164, and for permission to reproduce the picture on p. 58. Stubbs kangaroo on p. 20 is reproduced with permission from the British Library; p.98 and p. 110 courtesy of Cindy Hann; p. 156 courtesy of Museum of Victoria; p.222 from the authors collection; p.247 photographer Barry Wilson, reproduced courtesy of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flannery, Tim F. (Tim Fridtjof), 1956
(Country)

Chasing kangaroos : a continent, a scientist & a search for the worlds most extraordinary creature / Tim Flannery.-1 st Grove Press ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: Country: a continent, a scientist and a kangaroo. Melbourne: Text Pub., 2004.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4821-7

1. Kangaroos-Evolution. 2. Macropodidae-Australia. 3. Extinct animals-Australia. 4. Extinction (Biology)-Australia. 5. Natural history-Australia. 6. Human ecology-Australia. 7. Australia-Description and travel. 8. Flannery, Tim F. (Tim Fridtjof), 1956- I. title.

QL737.M35F56 2007

599.222-dc22 2006052628

Maps by Tony Fankhauser

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 841 Broadway
NewYork, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

To my mother
Valda Joyce Flannery
a woman of boundless compassion and understanding

If you want to study the history of this country,
youll have to have the will to fail.

Tom Rich

When I was young I met a man whose arse bore the bite-mark of a Tasmanian tiger. David Fleay was one of Australias most respected naturalists, and hed received his punctures while bending over to film the creature as it paced in its cage in a Hobart zoo. In my youthful imaginings that scar was the supreme stamp of Australian identity, a badge of honour that lay forever beyond my reach. That was because my eyes opened on the world in Melbourne nineteen years, three months and three weeks after the last tiger closed hers forever. My birthplace was a grand, European-style city of rumbling trams, and men in coats trudging plane-tree-lined streets past Victorian bluestone edifices. I dreamed of finding a thylacine, but by the time I was old enough to travel, even kangaroos and bandicoots had vanished from around Melbourne. So I was a rebellious young mantoo angry to take a good look around mewho did not know my country.

Then again, how do you ever know your country? Had I not rejected what Id been taught at school I might have remembered the sage words: by their fruits you shall know them, and perhaps even recollected the First Fruits of Australian Poetry, a work that in 1819 eulogised the kangaroo, hailing it as

thou spirit of Australia,

that redeems from utter failure

this fifth part of the Earth.

The author of that first-published volume of Australian poetry was Justice Barron Field of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Perhaps only one whose days were spent judging colonial miscreants could have rhymed Australia with failure. Then again, Ive always suspected that Australians are a self-deprecating people who, despite their penchant for scattering Great reefs, ranges and bights across the map, were ashamed of their country. Even our national symbol, the kangaroo, has been something of an embarrassment. Many people convert their national animal into