The transnational kangaroo hunt

Abstract

This chapter looks at the earliest stages in the transnationalisation of the kangaroo and the kangaroo hunt, turning to an English narrative from 1830 in which a exported kangaroo speaks ‘in as good English as if it had been brought up in this country’ – to talk about his life at Windsor Park, Regent’s Park Zoo, and George Wombwell’s travelling menagerie. The kangaroo hunt itself was part of a global narrative to do with travel, adventure and hunting as a rite of passage for young men in particular. The paper looks at Sarah Bowdith Lee’s 1850s hunting novels, as well as Emilia Marrayat Norris’s Jack Stanley (1874; 1882); it discusses some travellers (Count Ludovic de Beauvoir, Augustus Earle..