Eating Skippy

Eating Skippy…
by Spencer Shaw
The memory of when I stepped off the boat in Fremantle in 1977 as a naïve eight year old Pommy immigrant, and placed my feet for the first time on Australian soil (well concrete anyway) is a strong one for me. The brightness of the sunshine, the dryness of the air are all ingrained in my memory as my first impressions of Australia. Fremantle was a quick stop, before the final leg of our trip on the ship (we were some of the last pom’s to be lucky enough to arrive by boat) to Melbourne.
Melbourne was a brief stop of an hour or two (very cold even in November – who’s not surprised?) before we hopped on a train for Adelaide, which was to be our new home. Guess what? We’d been lied to (or were at least seriously gullible) because we seriously expected to see Kangaroos hopping down the streets of all these capital cities we visited, and didn’t see one! I remember pigeons, sparrows and rabbits – lots of rabbits on the trip from Melbourne to Adelaide, but it wasn’t till we went to the Adelaide Zoo that I saw my first Kangaroo.
It wasn’t until we moved to Bribie Island in the early eighties that I was able to see wildlife up close and personal. I remember being accosted by curious Emus while delivering news papers in the coastal town of Woorim, seeing Kangaroos hopping about the place, dolphins jumping in the waves – it was great! For a kid who’d been a fanatical fan of David Belamy, Jacques Cousteau, Harry Butler – any wildlife show, I was finally there!
Then in my teens came the dawning awareness of change and loss. Bribie was fast developing and large wild areas of forest, wallum and mangrove disappeared for canal developments. One day while looking over the carnage of recently cleared bush I also became aware of the greater loss of what had happened in this place, when I held for the first time a stone axe, made by a people now gone from my island home that was once their island home. Most of the people who I shared this island home with would have struggled with the idea that this place had once been home to Aboriginal people for tens of thousands of years. The Aboriginal people of this place had fallen victim to disease, battle and removal – in an undeclared war that was soon to be forgotten by successive waves of immigrants.
Like many wars of settlement, dispossession of the original inhabitants and replacement with the culture (including agriculture) of the invaders is the norm. What I was slow to realize was that the war was/is still in progress. Our lack of understanding of the land we now live in still sees a war of attrition drag on that the wildlife and flora of our region are still losing.
Well that was, a heavy paragraph or two, with references to war and genocide and after such a cheery start to my little tale! Where am I going with this lot I hear you ask? Well this particular rant was inspired by a local tale I have heard of a craft person being asked to leave a well know art and craft establishment because of their use of kangaroo leather in their product, its because of the pressure placed on local butchers to not stock kangaroo or emu meat, its because of the fundamentalists who say we shouldn’t eat or use the animals that stand on Australia’s coat of arms.
Sure, its ok to destroy our native habitat and displace our native flora with the introduced livestock from the old country (and eat animals that are native to somewhere else!). Unless of course you are a vegetarian and in that case we still see the destruction of native habitat and displacement of native fauna with vegetable and cereal crops from the elsewhere.
Back to Bribie in the 80’s, I was fortunate to see a view of one of SE Queensland’s wonderful ecosystems, while it was still diverse, but even then fading. The last 25 years have seen the picture fade even more. Why is their so much loss in our local ecosystems still? Unfortunately we, as a wider culture, have no understanding and place no value, on these ecosystems. We displace them with gardens full of exotic plants, farms full of exotic plants and animals, plantations full of exotic timber trees.
Those who would advocate sustainable use and harvest of our natural and native resources such as kangaroo leather and meat, those who wish to tread a different path, a way to be more Australian, by living within Australian ecosystems, are too often persecuted by the small minds who – in placing some lucky Australian animals on a pedestal , will as a result of their blind prejudice cause the destruction of the very habitat that sustains many, many, many more unique Australian animals, that they don’t even know the names of.