AustLit

'This chapter traces the development of the colonial kangaroo hunt as a transnational narrative genre. John Hunter’s First Fleet journal (1793) presented the generic conventions that came to define the colonial kangaroo hunt narrative: casting the kangaroo as fitting quarry and giving an exciting account of the chase and the kill. The chapter goes on to map the subsequent transnationalisation of the kangaroo as scientific details and live specimens were shipped back to Europe. Zoological gardens and acclimatisation societies in Europe contributed to the development of the kangaroo hunt as a recognised recreational activity outside Australia. The kangaroo hunt was absorbed into a global narrative to do with travel and adventure, which also informed readers about species biodiversity in the Global South. These themes were explored in novels by Sarah Bowdich Lee and Emilia Marryat Norris, which are analysed alongside narratives and artworks by Europeans who visited Australia to take part in kangaroo hunts. The chapter concludes that –whether encountered when exploring, wandering, bivouacking, settling, or hunting professionally – the kangaroo hunt is represented as an essential experience both in colonial Australia and abroad, one that unfolds in the contexts of imperialism and empire, military occupation, exploration and settlement, developments in the natural sciences, and transnational narratives of adventure.'

Source: Abstract.

' In Australia – and no doubt in other outposts of empire – hunting provided a rite of passage for ambitious young men to learn about local conditions and establish their colonial credentials. This article argues that the kangaroo hunt narrative therefore operated as a kind of colonial bildungsroman or novel of education. It examines three kangaroo hunt novels written by women who had in fact never travelled to Australia. The first is Sarah Porter’s Alfred Dudley; or, The Australian Settlers (1830). Porter’s novel shows that the kangaroo hunt is incompatible with the bourgeois sensibilities of an aspirant settler who revolts from ‘scenes of blood’. But other colonial bildungsromans invested in the adventure of hunting as a reward in itself. The second published kangaroo hunt novel is Sarah Bowdich Lee’s Adventures in Australia; or, the Wanderings of Captain Spencer in the Bush and the Wilds (1851); the third is Anne Bowman’s The Kangaroo Hunters; or, Adventures in the Bush (1858). Lee’s novel gives free play to the kangaroo hunt, exploring its possibilities for both Aboriginal and settler identities, while Bowman’s novel puts the kangaroo hunt into an ethical discussion of killing on the frontier. These British novelists imagine frontier experiences in colonial Australia by drawing on a range of Australian source material. Their novels present Australia as a testing ground for young male adventurers. The kangaroo hunt is their defining experience, something to survive and in some cases, finally, to disavow as they transition from emigrants to settlers.'

Source: Abstract.