‘Are we a masterpiece of design? Bloody oath we are!’: my week as a red kangaroo

There’s a bit of a bludger in all of us. When I’m snoozing away the heat of the early arvo in the shade of a jarrah tree, I’m not about to tell myself I should be getting stuck into a lot of hard yakka. What I can’t stand is a bludger of the mind: someone who’s completely wrong but too bloody idle to think about it.

Monday

Mental bludgers thrive on contradictions without ever being aware of them. They praise my athletic ability – who could blame them? – and at the same time they write me off as a primitive mammal. But get this: we didn’t evolve the most sophisticated leaping equipment in all creation by failing to keep pace with those self-applauding bastard placental mammals.

Tuesday

Humos are the worst. You know, those bloody bipeds who think they’re all crash-hot rationalists. Primitive marsupials, they say, cut off from the mainstream in primitive Australia, left behind in the evolutionary arms race. I tell you, there isn’t an antelope alive who wouldn’t sell his soul to leap like me.

Wednesday

Are we a masterpiece of design? Bloody oath we are! And that design means I can travel at more than 35mph, I can cover nine metres in a single leap and clear three metres in height. No animal on earth can match that and it all comes down to stored energy. You stretch a rubber band: now it’s full of stored energy. Release the band, release the energy. My achilles tendons do the same thing: simple idea, complex solution, like all the great inventions. This one’s a real ripper. It’s also a kangaroo USP and it’s kept us ahead of the competition for more millennia than you can count.

Thursday

What’s so unsophisticated about being a marsupial? Those placentos should envy our blue flyers. They’re the Sheilas: they might be pregnant with something that’ll grow as big as me – 6ft tall, 14 stone – but do you know how long that pregnancy lasts? Just 33 days, and out it comes – you little beauty! – like a pip from an orange: an inch long, more slug than big boomer. We do our developing outside in the good outback air: in the pouch and then out of the pouch. It’s a wonder all mammals don’t do it, a way of birth and upbringing they all should envy.

Friday

You’ll find plenty of roos who can’t stand those humos driving about in their utes with their guns. But there’s a fair bit of the mental bludger in that as well: if you’re living out in woop woop you need water, and the humos have dug thousands of waterholes for their cattle and their sheep. These days we live in places we never could before.

Saturday

I could go on about our sophisticated nature – tell you about urine retention, for example, and you can’t beat that in a hot, dry country – but maybe you’ve had enough. Just so long as you’re now convinced we’re fair dinkum top-notch mammals, up there with the very best, she’ll be apples.

Red kangaroo CV

Lifespan 20 years with luck

Eating habits vegetation, no matter how salty

Hobbies leaping

Sexual preferences you can’t beat a blue flyer

Photograph by Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images