Kangaroo meat is low in fat, tender and delicious (when it’s cooked right) and environmentally sustainable. But are Australians ready to stomach eating the national emblem? Greg Bearup shoots a roo to serve to some slightly apprehensive guests. First published Good Weekend magazine 9/01/10.

As we set off into the scrub, up into the back paddocks after dusk, I wonder what two decades in the city have done to me. How will I feel? Will I get the shakes and miss? What if I maim the poor creature and we have to chase it, mutilated, through the eucalypts? Can I actually do this? It’s been a long time since I’ve killed something.
I am familiar with this New England mountain terrain – and the winter chill that seeps into your bones – because the land belongs to my oldest friend. I spent my school holidays in these paddocks, spotlighting for foxes, rabbits and kangaroos. Parents these days should be thankful for PlayStations – killing things was just what you did then, growing up in a place without a picture theatre or a skate park.

Picture by Stuart Cohen

But much has happened in the 20 years since. I’ve come to realise that the Nationals may not have all the answers, I’ve acquired some pinko-leftie friends – some of whom, it’s rumoured, may be gay – and I consider myself an environmentalist. I cycle to work. I was a vehement supporter of tougher gun laws, even before I was sent to Port Arthur, the day of the carnage.
And yet here I am, cradling a high-powered .222 hunting rifle with five live rounds in the magazine, while my old friend, Mark, takes the wheel of his farm buggy. We’ve not been out of the house 15 minutes when he spots an animal in the powerful light. “A hundred metres straight ahead, mate. He’s not too big, either. You don’t want to be tuckin’ into an old boomer.”
I load a round into the chamber, release the safety catch and aim for the kangaroo’s head – it’s a clear shot. I breathe slowly, until the crosshairs are nice and steady, and then I squeeze the trigger. Bang! Through the scope I see the roo somersault, and then hear the deep thud confirming what I’d seen. It’s dead before it hits the ground.
As we drive up to the steaming carcass, I ask myself how I feel. The truth is, I feel just as I did as a 15-year-old – excited. I’ve just killed something and what I’m thinking is: “This is fun.”

One of the remedies in professor Ross Garnaut’s plan to save the world was to wean Australians off sheep and cattle and get them onto kangaroo. Our national emblem, you see, produces only a fraction of the methane that sheep and cattle do. But that’s only the half of it.
Eating kangaroo is akin to environmental patriotism, explains science and environment writer James Woodford. He’s as passionate an advocate for Aussie fare as Dick Smith, but he spruiks for macrofauna. “We have to face the fact that we have a really big herbivore on this continent, and for all sorts of environmental reasons it is perfect for making up a large component of our agricultural output,” he tells me, on the line from his self-sustaining farm on the NSW South Coast.
Ethically, eating kangaroo is more sound than tucking into lamb, beef, pigs or even free-range chickens. “The quick death of a kangaroo shot in the paddock – an animal that has led an organic natural life roaming freely – is far more humane, I would argue, than the life that is led by, say, a steer in a feedlot,” says Woodford. The feedlot steer, having had its testicles removed, spends its life standing in mud and faeces and is pumped full of chemicals and artificial foods and, when sufficiently obese, is prodded onto a truck and driven for hours to an abattoir to wait in line while its friends are being shot through the head with a metal bolt. Such is life for the average wagyu.
Environmentally, running kangaroos for meat is a far more sensible option than running greenhouse-gaseous, hard-hoofed cattle and sheep, and, as a consequence, roo is the major red meat component in the Woodford household. They buy it from Woolworths, even though dozens of perfectly fresh ones hop past their front balcony every day. Woodford is yet to take matters into his own hands and get a shooter’s licence and a gun. “I suppose it is the gun thing,” he tells me. “I still have a little bit of the city left in me. It will happen eventually; it is just a step I haven’t taken yet.”
For me, it was a step I took a long time ago, but we never actually ate it. Nobody did. There’s a stigma surrounding the eating of kangaroo meat where I come from. Farmers will tell you there are worms in it, or that it’s only fit for dogs and that it makes them fart something terrible. Tough as old saddle leather, claim the few who’ve given it a go. But there’s more to it than that. Eating kangaroo signifies poverty – it’s Depression tucker. “I ate it when I was kid,” an old Aboriginal friend tells me, “back when we had nothin’. Why would ya eat it now when you can buy a perfectly good T-bone in the supermarket?” Growing up in this environment had clouded my view.

And then, on a trip around Australia with my family last year, I found a lot of Australians out there who’d eat the tail off a low-flying Qantas jet. On Tasmania’s Bruny Island, we met sea-changers who were cheerily swapping organic vegetables for legs of wallaby and who saw no need to ever enter a butcher’s shop. In Adelaide, there were rows of stalls at its wonderful Central Market, all dedicated to selling various kangaroo cuts. Foodie Maggie Beer has turned entire South Australian villages that once made car components towards producing condiments to consume with roo.
I tried it for the first time in the Kimberley. We became friends with an Aboriginal couple, Chris and Brenda Garstone, in Kununurra. Chris and I and his two kids set off for the red flats one night and he shot a wallaby – much to Brenda’s annoyance, as she’d specifically ordered kangaroo. Chris wanted the tail. I was determined to get in on the act and so took a leg.
That night I searched the internet for recipes and consulted my “Gideon”, Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion. I settled on a heavily bastardised version of Stephanie’s twice-cooked wallaby shank with young ginger. Rice wine and Tasmanian mountain pepper berries were a bit hard to come by in Kununurra. I was a little cross with the usually reliable Stephanie for not providing a recipe suitable for wallaby on a hotplate by a riverbank. Tersely, I cut my meat into slivers and marinated it with what I had.
The next day, we met on the banks of the Ord River for a picnic. It was safe to swim in the river, Brenda assured us, even though there were crocodiles. “They don’t like the rapids at the crossing,” she insisted. “No one has ever been taken here.” I let the kids go in first and then jumped in and out very quickly – I like a couple of hundred kilometres between me and any crocodile, rather than 20 metres of fast-flowing water.
Up on the bank, Chris lit a fire and dug a hole next to it. He singed all the hairs off the tail, put it in the hole with hot coals and covered it with sand. Two hours later he removed it. The meat was superb – tender and delicious, like a good lamb shank. Mine was edible and people made polite comments.
After coming home to Sydney, I resolved to do better – to fulfil my patriotic duty, palatably. But first, I needed a licence to kill.

I can imagine that your request to shoot a couple of kangaroos for personal consumption would cause a little confusion!” exclaims a woman at the NSW Department of Environment in an email. She is spot-on. After a week or so of email badminton and calls around the state, it is established I can in fact shoot a kangaroo, on private land, if I have a gun licence and the landholder has the necessary permits for “vermin control”.
“We don’t allow people to kill kangaroos based on their desire to eat them, so any suggestion of this kind in the story would be misleading,” says another email from another arm of the department. “I should also point out that while there is nothing to stop you personally eating the roo, it is illegal for you to sell the carcass for any purpose.” I assure the woman that anything we don’t consume will be fed to the dogs, free. But the dogs are working dogs, I realise later – a legitimate tax deduction for farmers. Does this constitute a payment? Ignoring this conundrum, and deciding against further departmental instruction, I forge on.
Next, I apply for a shooter’s licence. The shooters’ parties would have you believe this is a Draconian imposition that tramples our (non-existent) constitutional right to bear arms. They’d have you believe it is as onerous as a PhD. They are fibbing, of course. It’s a simple process that takes a bit of time. To get a licence, you have to demonstrate “genuine reason”, which means most city people will have to join a gun club or get written permission from a farmer granting them the authority to conduct vermin control.
You don’t have to prove that you are a good shot – there’s no test for competency – and after submitting a form with the necessary paperwork to the Firearms Registry, I’m off to a gun shop in Sydney’s south to attend my accredited firearm safety course. Its website says it’s a place for “Guns and Toys for Big Boys”. Heavy metal grilles surround the shop. As I approach, three tradesmen, still in their work clobber, are sucking in a final fag before the class begins. I learn that they are Macedonians – two of them had been soldiers in the Yugoslav army and are familiar with weaponry. Only one of them, a thickset man in his 50s, is doing the course tonight – the others have come along for support and to check out the new guns in stock. My fellow pupil, a house painter, tells me his mates go out west, hunting pigs, and that he loves spending time in the bush. I am surprised to learn they will not let him shoot because he doesn’t have a licence. “I sick of doing all the f…ing cooking,” he says. “So now I get licence – some other prick can cook.”
Inside, the gun dealer is serving a customer. Behind him on the wall are racks of guns and the stuffed heads of pigs, goats, deer and a whole duck. They all chat a bit about guns and pig shooting while I stand quietly off to one side. The painter and I are then taken to a screened-off section of the shop to watch a video about gun safety. It is actually just words on the screen. The painter has forgotten his glasses and I have to read the fine print to him. In the background there is a discussion about how, since the election of Barack Obama in the US, there’s been a rush to buy guns because of concern there’ll be a tightening of guns laws, like there was here after Port Arthur.
“But at least they got the NRA over there to keep the greenies and do-gooders in their place,” someone says. “Over there, you’ve still got the right to defend yourself – not like here, where someone could walk inta ya house and shoot ya and there’s nothing you could do.” There seems to be general agreement that greenies and do-gooders are the scum of the earth and that things would be better if we only had something as powerful as America’s National Rifle Association to “keep these greenie c…s in their place”.
After an hour or so of reading the screen, and listening to the rant, we sit the test. The Macedonian house painter’s mates give him a hand with some of the trickier questions and both of us pass with flying colours. Next, we are taken through gun safety, how to safely load and store and transport a weapon. The course is reasonably thorough and the emphasis is all on safety, but the message doesn’t get through to everyone. “You wouldn’t believe the number of times blokes have walked in here and I’ve checked their weapon and the dickheads have left it loaded,” the dealer informs us.
After we are done with the formal part, the dealer, who is a member of a pistol club, shows us some of his weapons. “Have a look at this beauty,” he says, bringing out of the safe a handgun that looks as though it could bring down an elephant. We all get a go at holding “Dirty Harry”.
My safety certificate arrives in the mail shortly afterwards. I send it off and apparently the police are satisfied I’m a “fit and proper person”, because in six weeks a letter arrives. I take it to the Roads and Traffic Authority, which issues me with a photographed category A, B recreational hunting/vermin control firearms licence/permit. A week later, I’m on a farm in northern NSW.
With the kangaroo dead in the paddock – after I’ve strictly followed the National Code of Practice for the Humane Shooting of Kangaroos and Wallabies for Non-Commercial Purposes with a direct shot to the brain “to achieve instantaneous loss of consciousness and rapid death without regaining consciousness” – I go about the task of removing its legs in the light of the buggy. The method is the same as for removing a chicken leg: cut through the flesh to expose the ball joint and then crack it back. The animal is dead but its muscles are still twitching, which is a little unsettling. “Go around a bit deeper,” says Mark. “You’re missing some of the meat.”
I do as instructed. I then hold the paw as Mark peels off the fur. After I’ve removed the other leg, he takes over the more technical task of removing the backstraps for Patrick, the photographer. He thinks we are mad. He says he’s got some good lamb in the freezer that we are welcome to.
I spot a fox a short time later and shoot it – Mark reckoned it had been living under the shearing shed and had taken some of his lambs. I then shoot another kangaroo, for the dogs. Mark removes only the legs; he says there’s not much meat in the body and leaves it in the paddock.
Back at the house, my roo legs are hung in a meat house overnight to be frozen the next day, while the other legs are hung in a tree to be carved up for the dogs. Just a few hours after setting out for the hunt, we are back in the house with the fire roaring, sipping red wine and tucking into roast beef – which is a tad dry and stringy, to be honest.

Dry and stringy is not how I want my kangaroo for my sydney shindig, so I call Matthew Evans, a Good Weekend food writer. Kangaroo meat contains only small amounts of fat and is unforgiving if cooked incorrectly – I need instructions. Evans lives in Tasmania and is a big fan of macropods for the pot. After a bit of discussion we decide that I will roast it slowly, covered, for three hours on my barbecue in a broth of white wine, whole garlic cloves, carrots, parsnip, olives and coriander (he’d suggested parsley). Half an hour or so before serving, I’ll remove the covering to brown the meat. It is to be accompanied by vegetables roasted in duck fat – potatoes, brussels sprouts, carrots, parsnips and small onions.
I am cooking for 10 people and forewarn them all that kangaroo is on the menu, and how it has come to be in my kitchen. One friend, Annie, is wary and asks if the pizza shop around the corner is open late – she’s a little pedestrian in her tastes and likes nothing more than tucking into a devon sandwich with sauce. Another friend, Matt, is sceptical about my shooting ability and thinks I may have picked it up in a supermarket. The rest are enthusiastic. My two-year-old son, at the mention of the word kangaroo, races out into the backyard. “Kangaroo, Daddy! Where’s the kangaroo, Daddy?”
I prepare the broth. There is still a bit of fur on one of the legs and I remove it before the guests arrive. The joints are large but not as big as a decent-sized leg of lamb and I am unsure if one will be enough – so I decide to cook them both in separate baking trays and cover them with foil. It is then that I realise the temperature gauge on the barbecue doesn’t work. This could be a disaster. I decide a low heat is best and cut back to one burner, checking it regularly.
The guests arrive an hour or so later and I’m in a tizz, running between the barbecue and the vegetables in the kitchen. People try to engage me in conversation; I stare at them blankly, thinking, “Shit! Vegetables. F…! Meat.”
With the vegetables almost done I take the foil off to brown the meat. It looks as if it just might work. (As a rule, I am genuinely surprised when things turn out well.) It carves beautifully – the meat is soft and moist. I serve it up. There’s a nervous wait as people take their first bites, and then some satisfied looks. “This is beautiful,” says someone. I take a bite, to make sure they are not just being polite. It’s a hit. People call for more meat and more of the sauce, the “roo jus”, as we call it. The meat has a stronger flavour than lamb and is more filling. I sit back, satisfied, and watch my pals enjoying a leg of roo.
A friend, Helen, had consulted the fine-wine man at Kemenys, a famous Sydney grog shop. It turned out he had been a roo shooter in his younger days and suggested we pair the meat with a pinot noir or a grenache shiraz mourvèdre. We do, and then move on to whatever else is in the house.
Another friend, Susi, tells me she’s been choosing kangaroo “for ethical reasons” for the past few years and eats it whenever it’s on a menu. She’s thought about becoming a vegetarian, but doesn’t want to go entirely without red meat – for her, kangaroo is a comfortable compromise.
While farmers may not be at ease with eating kangaroo or transforming their practices to harvest them, it seems city consumers are open to the idea. It may be these consumers who force farmers to change.
But farmers may not be entirely ignorant of all things pertaining to roo. The next day, Annie calls to thank me for the evening and to compliment me on the meal. “But darl,” she confides, “there are some side effects.”
“Wind?” I inquire.
“Yeah, like a shearer’s dog.”