Canberra teenager Henry Baczynski wrote the following excellent, and sad, report on the annual kangaroo slaughter in the nation’s capital — now pushing to 50,000 lives cruelly extinguished – on nature reserves! – since 2009 with bogus rationale and at great expense to the taxpayer. This was a school-based assignment to profile a matter he cared deeply about and needed to protest. Henry urges Australian citizens to urgently help the few remaining kangaroos in the Australian Capital Territory — where the authorities also persecutes other wildlife. Here’s his story.
Allow me to paint you a grim picture. Imagine that you are a joey, nestled in the comfort of your mother’s pouch, you watch curiously as sun rays illuminate the vast grass fields. You have never ventured outside the comfort of your mother’s pouch, but the world just seems so welcoming. You start to move, edging closer towards a world full of life until suddenly, you find that you are outside the pouch. Your mother looks at you with pride and gently starts to guide you, showing you how to move like your brothers and sisters. It takes a while, but eventually, you are able to jump, and you feel free. As day turns to night your ears perk up as you hear what you can only describe as a rumbling in the distance, a rumbling that is growing in strength. Suddenly, blinding rays of light shoot from a fast-moving object, with mysterious figures populating it. The lights scan the landscape and are followed by loud bangs.
You watch helplessly as your brothers and sisters fall to the ground motionless. Your mother urges you to run, but you can’t move; fear overtakes you, and you find yourself wishing that you had never left the comfort of your mother’s pouch. Another bang, and this time it is your mother who falls to the ground. Grief overtakes you as you realize all that you have lost. You climb into your dead mother’s pouch, noticing that the familiar warmth radiating from her body is no longer present and is instead replaced with an unbearable cold. Some time passes until you hear movement in the distance, the sound approaches until it stops right next to you. A hand reaches into the pouch and aggressively yanks you out, stripping you of any remaining comfort that you possessed. You look up and see the same mysterious figure that was on that object, the same mysterious figure that took everything from you. You struggle helplessly, desperately trying to get away, but it’s no use. The figure raises an object above their head, and they proceed to bludgeon you mercilessly. Your last moments are pure agony until darkness takes you, and you are no more.
What I have just described to you is the sad reality of the Annual Canberra kangaroo cull from a joey’s perspective. Every year, the ACT government contracts shooters to kill thousands of Eastern Grey Kangaroos across many supposedly protected nature reserves, including here on Red Hill where today I’ll talk about how the research that backs the Kangaroo culls is flawed and how you can get involved to help bring an end to this cruel slaughter.
The ACT government justifies this slaughter by claiming a large mob of Kangaroos poses a significant threat to endangered species like the Grassland Earless Dragon. They argue that the optimum range of grass height required for a healthy ecosystem is 5-15cm, and Kangaroos threaten this balance by overgrazing. However, inspections of Canberra nature reserves reveal that this 15cm grass height limit is often exceeded, which is likely due to the lack of Kangaroos present. Furthermore, during the time that the ACT government has killed Canberra’s kangaroos, the Earless Dragon has been uplisted to ‘critically endangered’. This shows that this claim is not true, and yet the ACT government continues to spend over a quarter of a million dollars a year to continue this atrocity.
Additionally, the method that the government uses to calculate the size of Canberra’s kangaroo populations is also flawed, and typically overstates its size. This has led to even more Kangaroos being needlessly killed, with a total of around 50,000 Eastern Grey Kangaroos killed since the cull was established in 2009. This issue directly impacts me and many others, including my school community, as we are privileged to live near reserves like Red Hill. I remember when I used to go on walks with my family through Red Hill, and feeling immense amounts of joy when I saw the large families of Kangaroos. Joy that I can no longer experience, after the government included the Red Hill Nature Reserve in the cull in 2022. As a result, a total of 1730 kangaroos from Red Hill have been slaughtered, essentially wiping out the majority of this population. This has caused a deep sadness within me, as whenever I am near or think about Red Hill, I cannot help but think about all of the Kangaroos that suffered unnecessarily as a result of the ACT government’s lack of respect for our wildlife.
If we do nothing, the cull will continue with no end in sight; that is why we must work together to end it, and here are some ways you can get involved. First, you can follow the Save Canberra’s Kangaroos socials and attend any of their protest events. Additionally, you can represent Save Canberra’s Kangaroos at other events, like I did when I joined the Australian Koala Foundation’s march to Parliament House in 2024. Second, you could create protest media such as this artwork my brother and I made in 2023, or create protest texts such as these that you could publish through media outlets, such as letters to the editor. Third, you could repeatedly write letters to your local government members to express your opposition to the issue. Finally, you could either start or sign a petition that aims to end the Canberra kangaroo cull.
In summary, I have showcased to you how hideously cruel and unnecessary the ACT government’s annual kangaroo cull is, and the ways you can protest against it. I have shown you how the cull would be from a joey’s perspective, and how both the reasoning behind and the counting for the Kangaroo cull is deeply flawed. This concludes my speech, and I hope together we can help save Canberra’s kangaroos before it is too late.
Henry Baczynski (Year 9 English Assessment)
