A pair of Eastern Grey Kangaroos, a female and a joey; photo taken near Brunkerville, New South Wales, Australia
16 March 2021
English use of the name for this antipodean quadruped dates to the arrival of the first Europeans to Australia. That was in 1770 by the expedition led by Captain James Cook on board HM Bark Endeavour. The name kangaroo comes from the Guugu Yimidhirr gaŋurru. Guugu Yimidhirr is an indigenous language of northeast Australia. But the word has one of the more persistent and amusing false etymologies attached to it.
Cook describes kangaroos in his 14 July 1770 journal entry without naming them:
Mr. Gore, being in the Country, shott one of the Animals before spoke of; it was a small one of the sort, weighing only 28 pound clear of the entrails; its body was [ ] long; the head, neck, and Shoulders very small in proportion to the other parts. It was hair lipt, and the Head and Ears were most like a Hare's of any Animal I know; the Tail was nearly as long as the body, thick next the Rump, and Tapering towards the End; the fore Legs were 8 Inches long, and the Hind 22. Its progression is by Hopping or Jumping 7 or 8 feet at each hop upon its hind Legs only, for in this it makes no use of the Fore, which seem to be only design'd for Scratching in the ground, etc. The Skin is cover'd with a Short, hairy furr of a dark Mouse or Grey Colour. It bears no sort of resemblance to any European animal I ever saw; it is said to bear much resemblance to the Jerboa, excepting in size, the Jerboa being no larger than a common rat.
(Cook’s manuscript is blank where the length should be. Evidently, he was uncertain about the number and left room to fill it in later, but never did.)
And in his entry for 4 August 1770 he gives the name:
Besides the Animals which I have before mentioned, called by the natives Kangooroo, or Kanguru, here are Wolves, Possums, an Animal like a ratt, and snakes, both of the Venemous [sic] and other sorts.
(The reference to wolves is probably to dingoes.)
And he mentions the name again a few weeks later on 23 August 1770:
Land Animals are scarce, so far as we know confin’d to a very few species; all that we saw I have before mentioned. The sort which is in the greatest Plenty is the Kangooroo or Kanguru, so called by the Natives; we saw a good many of them about Endeavour River, but kill’d only 3, which we found very good Eating.
Concurrently, the name is recorded by the expedition’s naturalist, Joseph Banks, who writes in his journal for 16 August 1770:
Quadrupeds we saw but few and were able to catch few of them that we did see. The largest was calld by the natives Kangooroo. It is different from any European and indeed any animal I have heard or read of except the Gerbua of Egypt, which is not larger than a rat when this is as large as a midling Lamb; the largest we shot weighd 84 lb. It may however be easily known from all other animals by the singular property of running or rather hopping upon only its hinder legs carrying its fore bent close to its breast; in this manner however it hops so fast that in the rocky bad ground where it is commonly found it easily beat my grey hound, who tho he was fairly started at several killd only one and that quite a young one.
In 1793, Watkin Tench, a British marine officer who was among those who first established the penal colony at Botany Bay (modern-day Sydney) published an account of his time in Australia in which he gives a different Aboriginal name for the animal and seemingly claims that the name kangaroo was introduced by Europeans:
Hitherto I have spoken only of the large, or grey kanguroo, to which the natives give the name Pat-ag-a-ràn.* But there are (besides the kanguroo-rat) two other sorts. One of them we called the red kanguroo, from the colour of its fur, which is like that of a hare, and sometimes is mingled with a large portion of black: the natives call it Bàg-a-ray. It rarely attains to more than forty pounds weight.
*Kanguroo, was a name unknown to them for any animal, until we introduced it. When I shewed Colbee the cows brought out in the Gorgon, he asked me if they were kanguroos?
The confusion over the names is a result of there being hundreds of Aboriginal languages and different names for the creature in each. To be fair to Tench, he may have meant that the indigenous people in the vicinity of Botany Bay were not familiar with the name kangaroo, not that the British invented it—Guugu Yimidhirr is not spoken in what is now New South Wales, but rather far to the north in what is now Queensland. And later writers made the same mistake, with many understanding it to mean that it was not a native word at all.
From this confusion over the origin, the tale arose that in an Aboriginal language the word kangaroo meant “I don’t understand.” So, when Cook and company asked, presumably slowly and loudly in English, what the animal was called, the natives answered “kangaroo.” It’s a funny story, but utterly untrue. (Cf. Toronto for a similar tale from a different continent.)
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. kangaroo.
Banks, Joseph. The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, vol. 2 of 2. J. C. Beaglehole, ed. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1962, 116–17. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Cook, James. Captain Cook’s Journal. W. J. L. Wharton, ed. London: Elliot Stock, 1893, 287–88, 294, 318. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. kangaroo, n.
Tench, Watkin. A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson. London: G. Nicol and J. Sewell, 1793, 171–72. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Photo credit: John J. Harrison, 2019, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.