How About Hanging Out With a Wallaby

Left to right:  Wallaby, Tinkerbell, Lotho (maybe about 1960 in Sydney)

They seem indifferent to the wallaby but they would be since there's nothing unusual in seeing one in Australia and this was their home.  These sibs really are native Australians since they were born there and I'm the only one who was not.  As far as I know, Lotho is the only one fortunate enough to have been back and that time he went with his American family to show them the homeland.  Who can even imagine what a trip that was for all of them and for 'trip,' I mean full out Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.


It's Australia so you know there are wallabies and kangaroos all over the place in the cities just like here are jackrabbits and coyotes in all the cities here, right?

I think think this is probably in a park in Sydney where there were all kinds of animals and that's where the 'killer emu' stole my potato crisps to scare the living hell out of me.  A gigantic emu head came out of the stratosphere as they're huge birds and it snatched the crisps.  So began my lifetime trauma for gigantic hell birds.


Maybe if you think of a kangaroo at all then you just see a kangaroo which looks like every other kangaroo but I remember riding about in some pickup trucks outback with Doc, my ol' Dad, and a bunch of ranch hands and that gave a whole different view.  Kangaroos and wallabies were pacing the trucks for some reason and they were all over the place, big ones, little ones, and all different colors.

Maybe you wonder where is the outback and that's far enough out of the city that you don't see traces of it anymore but then there's far outback which is out by Alice Springs, one of the hottest places in the world.  Alice Springs isn't quite the center of Australia but it's not so far from it and that's as far from civilization you can get without 'going walkabout.'  (WIKI:  Alice Springs)

It may surprise you that Alice Springs is not in a desert but I'm not sure how much of Australia even qualifies as desert anyway.  It sure carries the temperature of one since the January record goes to 113F.

Note:  yes, January.  The rest of the world has the seasons upside-down.


The Aboriginal people in Australia used the term 'going walkabout' for when a man just needs to take a walk and maybe he comes back in an hour or maybe he comes back in a year.  Maybe city people think that's awful but good luck trying to confine the Aboriginal people in a hellish concrete jungle.

Note:  'Aboriginal people' with a capital "A" is the appropriate reference to the original Australians and there doesn't seem to be one word which refers to all of the many tribes but 'Aboriginal people' is acceptable to them.  An extremely derogatory reference is calling them 'Abbos' and that one comes straight out of colonial racism.


Most likely, the Aboriginal people are the oldest civilization on Earth and they can tell you we came out of the 'Dreamtime' in which all of us were created.  They got here first so who's to say they're wrong.

Probably the reason the Aboriginal people were not forced onto reservations was the colonial settlers didn't want their land because it was too hard living out back.  Most of the colonials lived on strips of green space along all the coasts.

They're an ancient people and likely we could learn a lot from them.  If you interested in finding more, here's the WIKI:  Indigenous Australians