More than 1.7 million kangaroos could be legally shot in Queensland this year. Meet the two women doing their best to save the orphans left behind.
Karen Emmott is well-acquainted with interrupted sleep.
After she silences her early-dawn alarm, the former nurse dresses and makes her way downstairs to the kitchen.
Lights on. Kettle on.
She scoops out the milk powder for the first batch of bottles for the day.
Then she heads to the cot in the next room.
But the breakfast offering isn't for Karen's children — their days of middle-of-the-night feeds ended nearly three decades ago.
She's about to feed a handful of tiny, orphaned kangaroos.
"It's pretty full-on. It's really like raising a baby," Karen says.
She and her husband, Angus, run a thriving cattle operation and tourism business on their property on the border of Iningai and Maiawali country, south-west of Longreach, in central west Queensland.
On top of that, they are both registered wildlife carers.
Bruised and battered
Dead roos are a common sight on outback roads.
Queensland's Department of Environment and Science estimates the state's kangaroo population exceeded 12 million in 2021.
Locals know to avoid driving at dawn or dusk, when roos are most likely to jump out in front of them.
The common mantra is: if one jumps out in front of you, don't swerve, don't stop, keep driving.
Better to hit the roo than oncoming traffic.
Most people drive on.
Those who stop and check the pouches of female roadkill sometimes find a joey, perhaps bruised, sometimes bleeding, and very often still alive.
Drivers deliver these small, sometimes furless creatures to Karen or fellow wildlife carer Kim Palmer.
There's always room for one more
Kim was 15 when she looked after her first injured native animal — a squirrel glider.
It's a passion that runs in the family.
"Our second child brought [a roo] home when he was 15," Kim says.
"That was about eight years ago.
"Things have snowballed since then."
The Palmer household, on Iningai country in Muttaburra, 120 kilometres north of Longreach, is always bouncing with activity.
Currently, the family are sharing their home with 32 roos.
The boarders are a mix of red kangaroos, eastern greys and smaller wallaroos.
There's even a swamp wallaby that was found by travellers four-and-a-half hours away in the Gemfields region.
His name is Shrek.
He and the other smaller roos live inside the house.
Their fabric pouches hang from various objects inside the living room — a child's playpen, doorknobs, the metal bars of disused gym equipment.
The "big kids" live in a 2,400-square-metre enclosure in the backyard.
Kim says she can't say no to a roo in need.
Back in the kitchen, there's a thud, thud, thud.
An inquisitive roo is investigating if feeding time is near.
"That's the number-one rule. You never step backwards. There's always one under your feet," Kim says.
Among the chaos, there is order.
In one corner of the kitchen sits an array of glass bottles; in another, a rainbow collection of plastic teats.
Drawers full of medical supplies to tend to the babies of the house stand tall next to the sink.
A 10-kilogram bag of powdered kangaroo milk sits on the floor.
"Cleaning, bottles, washing, bottles, cleaning, bottles," she laughs.
"It's just constant. Never-ending. Sunrise, sundown, to all hours of the night."
Kim and Karen's goal is to play their part in undoing the damage done to Queensland's kangaroo population.
"We get them in whether they've been sick, injured or orphaned," Kim says.
"Care for them, rehabilitate them and get them back out into the wild."
But not everyone shares their passion.
In the drought-stricken outback, where feed for livestock is precious, cattle and sheep graziers consider kangaroos a pest ...
... and roo shooters an essential service.
The 'conscious harvester'
As night approaches, Dave Coulton prepares to begin his work day.
He loads his work gear — his gun, ammunition and his dog Happy — into his blue ute.
The huge spotlight that sits atop the ute will help him find the 38 roos he wants to shoot tonight.
"Every landholder [around here] would have a roo shooter," Dave says.
"As far as I know, there's not one vacant block that doesn't have a harvester on it."
Macropod harvesting is a thriving, legal industry in Queensland.
Each year, the state government sets a quota on the number of each roo species allowed to be shot, based on population estimates gathered via aerial surveys.
In 2020, 514,144 roos were harvested by shooters in Queensland — 18.2 per cent of the overall combined quota.
Dave is one of 13 roo shooters in the town of Aramac, 68 kilometres north of Barcaldine on Iningai country.
He says without the industry, the town would crumble.
"In that 13 of us, we send 800 tonnes of roo meat [away for processing] every 12 months.
"There's 72 kids in the school and I think there's 23 of them who rely on their mums and dads on that roo wage."
Every Tuesday, the grocery truck arrives in Aramac.
It offloads its supplies and is then refilled with the roos harvested over the past seven days.
Dave's roos are sent to a processor seven hours away in Roma where they're turned into meat for human and pet consumption.
Dave worships kangaroos. His eyes light up when he talks about them.
"I know people can't get their head around it, but I go out there every night and harvest a portion of the roos, but the rest of the night I just drive around in awe of them.
"I fully respect them.
"What they've given me, the freedom of my life, my family, what I've got out here.
"That's too good to be true."
It's a bizarre dichotomy: Dave deeply reveres the native animal but is happy to make a living killing it.
Even more unexpected is his relationship with wildlife carers like Kim Palmer.
A self-described "conscious harvester", Dave has strict rules about what he will and won't shoot.
He won't pull the trigger on a female because it is more than likely to have a joey in its pouch.
And if he does find a baby injured, he sends it straight to Kim.
"She grows them out to about 12 kilos and sends them on, and it's a never-ending rotation of awesomeness," Dave says.
"We need Kim. We need people like that, for sure, in the world.
"It keeps everything nice and tight and tidy so I support her 100 per cent."
But Dave is an anomaly.
Many of the things Kim and Karen have heard people say about their work isn't as kind.
"I've been told many times I shouldn't be doing what I'm doing [and] I should just knock them all on the head," Kim says.
"Cull them, eradicate them, whatever the choice of words is at the time."
Yet, the women press on.
"So many of the challenges that native wildlife face is because of people, so I feel like it's kind of a chance to balance the ledger a little bit," Karen says.
Kim estimates, on average, it costs $1,000 to rehabilitate one joey.
The wildlife caring gig is not paid: both Kim and Karen have to fund their vocations themselves.
Kim says her financial burden has eased since the deadly Black Summer bushfires two years ago.
"The plight of our wildlife has gone worldwide, phenomenal, and the support that has come from that has been huge," she says.
"Donated medical supplies, donated pouches, people willing to help put money towards buying bags of milk and hay and chaff makes a huge difference.
"Without that support there's no way I'd be able to take on 32 joeys."
The joey express
Just after sunrise on a Tuesday morning, Kim's house is a hive of activity.
She is busily loading things into the back of the car, reminiscent of a parent doing last-minute packing the morning of a family holiday.
Today is the day she'll give some of her "babies" away.
Hanging in pouches from a fixed metal railing down the middle of a converted ambulance vehicle are six older eastern grey joeys that Kim will pass on to Karen.
They'll stay in the backyard enclosure at the Emmotts' property, Noonbah, for another few months, slowly being weaned off bottles until they're ready to be released back into the wild.
Along for the ride are also 10 of the smaller roos that need four feeds a day and can't be left alone at home.
The six-hour round trip is something Kim has done many times over the past five years.
In that time, the women have jointly rehabilitated and released close to 100 roos.
"It's kind of like co-raising children, I suppose," Karen says.
"We're very quick to let each other know when we've got a new kid on the block."
The two families were put in touch by Kim's son Kieran's distance education teacher, who knew he was interested in reptiles, just like Karen's husband, Angus.
Then, at a wildlife workshop Kim organised in Longreach in 2016, the pair "hatched" a plan to work together.
Over lunch they catch up, talking animatedly and swapping anecdotes about which roos have been up to what since the last handover.
Kim has a picture of every roo she's ever left with Karen and remembers the details of each animal intimately.
"I'm not as bad as I used to be," Kim says.
"I used to be a bawling, crumbling mess leaving them behind.
"I'd be walking out of here and Karen would be like: 'Quick, get her out of here before she starts crying!'"
It's the personality quirks of each roo that stay with both women long after they've left their backyards.
"The wallaroos especially seem to be the ones who get up to all these shenanigans," Karen says.
"You'll often find them in places you won't expect.
"We've come down to breakfast and found them standing in the middle of the breakfast table with all the breakfast cereal and the plates laid out and they're sitting there very happily.
"We've found them in the toilet unrolling the paper roll, trying to eat it.
"They're very amusing."
Letting them go
From the moment the roos are taken in, the women are thinking about the day they'll let them go.
Often they will come in a predetermined mob.
Other times Karen will do what she wryly calls "creative interaction" to form a structure that will provide the best chance of survival in the wild.
It most recently happened with a couple of wallaroos named Lulu and Hiccups.
"They were from two different carers but they were the same size; one was a male, one was female.
"We did a little bit of creative interaction and got them hanging together eventually and they headed off into the great yonder together.
"It was a bit of an arranged marriage.
"Lulu and Hiccups are still together; we still see them hanging around, so it worked."
The roos' release into the wild itself has little fanfare.
Karen simply opens the gate to the enclosure and hopes the roos head out.
"Sometimes they all hop away very excitedly. Other times they look around and just sort of say, 'No, I'm quite happy here, thank you'.
"It can take a little while."
Karen suspects in the roos' minds it's just another day, but for her it's a much more significant affair.
"It is a bit heart-wrenching if it's you that's raised them, because you put a lot of emotional energy and time into that little creature.
"It's a privilege to be able to shepherd them through that period and to let them go.
"It is very exciting to know they're going to go out there and be real, wild kangaroos."
Doing what they can
The roos largely remain on Noonbah's 52,000 hectares.
"Sometimes they'll come back every couple of days just to check in on you, have a little drink at a spot they know is familiar," Karen says.
"Then eventually you'll catch a glimpse of them here or there out in the paddock and realise who they are."
While the property is free from roo shooters, the fact this is very much a rarity in the region is not lost on Karen and Kim.
Released into a wild western Queensland largely filled with hostility against kangaroos, the animals are not guaranteed to survive.
"Quite often you're like, why the hell am I doing this?" Kim says.
"You go, nup, not taking on any more, and then a little one gets dropped on your doorstep or you find one or whatever and off you go again."
"It's like that old starfish story — when you throw a starfish back, you make a difference to that one," Karen says.
"At least we know we're doing what we can in our region, and maybe people might hesitate to hit one with a car.
"They might take time to check a pouch if they know that people are thinking it's a worthwhile thing to do.
"We might just turn the tide a little bit."
Credits
- Reporting: Ellie Grounds
- Video & photography: Ellie Grounds
- Drone footage: Craig Fitzsimmons
- Digital production: Sarah Scopelianos and Ellie Grounds