Journal of Australian Studies | 2021
Into the Loneliness: The Unholy Alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates
Abstract
dogs and horses—could also prevail over Indigenous people. Once that was achieved, the freedom to hunt kangaroo showed the settlers’ uncontested mastery over the land, which became a “post frontier playground” (61). In such accounts, it was important that kangaroos were seen to provide good sport, and early poetic renderings of weeping kangaroos conscious of their own approaching death were replaced by descriptions of them as large and terrifying beasts with claws “like a boar’s tusk” (84) who fought back against hunters. This narrative is identified in both non-fiction writing and bildungsroman novels in which youths come to adulthood and the full inheritance of colonial dominance through the proving ground of a kangaroo hunt. Of course, Australia was not the emptied land that some writers might have wished, and the authors note the coexistence of frontier violence and kangaroo hunts, and the involvement in and witnessing of hunts by Indigenous people. As literary scholars, the authors are most interested in what was being written, by whom and what it meant. Therefore, they provide long passages from their sources, and naturally the focus is on the best-documented, choreographed form of kangaroo hunt, rather than the more commonplace individual hunts that went largely unrecorded. As part of this analysis, greater reference to scientific knowledge about kangaroos would have been welcome, as in the final chapter with regard to the female kangaroo’s practice of abandoning larger pouch young when being hunted. This action led to a belief in the early colonial period that kangaroos were proverbially poor mothers—but in reality, it increased the chance of survival not only of the adult animal but also of smaller pouch young on the teat. Gelder and Weaver are to be congratulated on this engaging account of the colonial kangaroo hunt. They identify a social practice previously accorded limited significance and use it to comment on something much greater—that “chain of reactions to [novel] species” (5) from naming to eating, managing to trading, scientifically classifying to visually and verbally representing, which all worked in concert to colonise other peoples’ countries.