When Did It Become Okay? A Reckoning for Our Kangaroos

When did it become acceptable to treat our kangaroos — ancient symbols of this land — as disposable? Not long ago, they were revered. Aboriginal communities saw them not just as food, but as kin. Kangaroos were totems, spiritual guides, woven into Dreamtime stories that taught respect for nature and the interconnectedness of all life. They were hunted with reverence, never wastefully, and every part of the animal was used — not just for sustenance, but for ceremony, shelter, and story.

From the time of creation — or the great flood,  kangaroos have roamed this land, uniquely adapted to its rhythms. Some believe they arrived here on rafts of driftwood after the flood, carried by ocean currents and divine intention. However they came, they belonged.

Then came the colonists. With them arrived hard-hoofed animals — cattle, sheep — that tore through fragile soils never meant for such weight. The land was cleared, burned, and fenced. The kangaroo, once a symbol of harmony, was recast as a pest. No consideration was given to sharing the land. No reverence for the creatures who had lived here for millennia. Just conquest.

Today, Australia is home to the largest commercial slaughter of land-based wildlife on the planet. Nearly 90 million kangaroos and wallabies have been killed in the last 30 years — not for survival, but for profit. Their meat is exported. Their skins turned into shoes. Their joeys bludgeoned or left to starve when their mothers are shot.

This is not conservation. It is eradication.

And it echoes the same anti-predator narrative that Judge Donald Molloy condemned in his ruling on wolves in the U.S. He wrote that their near extinction was “at hands of men… acting on an anti-predator narrative, not science”. Wolves were not managed — they were hated. And hatred is incompatible with stewardship.

So too with kangaroos. The myth of overpopulation, the propaganda of pest control — these are tools of an industry that refuses to see kangaroos as sentient beings, as mothers, as symbols of a land that once knew balance.

If we continue down this path, will our children only see kangaroos in exotic zoos overseas? Will the world remember them not as icons of Australia, but as victims of its silence?

When will it stop?

It must stop before the last joey is orphaned, before the last mob is scattered, before the last kangaroo fades from the horizon.

Stewardship means protection. It means humility. It means listening to the wisdom of those who lived with the land — not against it.

Let this be our moment to say: Enough.