Dad's Australia Trip, and the Joey

Reviewing a stack of slides from 1966.

Dad took a Rotary trip to Australia in 1966, when I was a baby. I’ve got a stack of slides from it.

There’s the joey. Dad shot a kangaroo, and when the guides picked it up the joey was there, still alive. He wanted to keep it. But to the guides, kangaroos were vermin — they thought of them about the way we think of rats. The joey didn’t come home with him.

Dad ended up with the mother’s pelt as a rug.

I’ve been sitting with this story since I found the slides. Many mixed-up feelings there, as a friend says about complicated things.

Dad was a man of his time, which is both obvious and unhelpful as a statement. He was also a man who wanted to keep the joey, which tells you something else. The impulse was there. The context didn’t support it.

Phil Heald. 1939–2025.