The First Dingo
The First Dingo - meaning Summary
Wild and Domestic Encounters
The poem traces Australia’s landscape and human-animal relationships, contrasting the kangaroo’s ancient, wild habits with Aboriginal practices of keeping kangaroos tame. It depicts frontier movement—men driving flocks to the coast, leaving women to guard them—and culminates in a shepherdess spotting unfamiliar, "stranded Dutchman’s dogs." The moment frames cultural contact and the intrusion of foreign animals into a long-established natural world, seen through rural observation.
Read Complete AnalysesThe kangaroo was formed to run, but not from man alone – it ran before the horse or gun or native dog was known. It ran when drought left waterholes three hundred miles between – from great floods and greater fires than we have ever seen. The blacks beside the coastal springs, where mountain sides are steep, they bred and kept their kangaroo much tamer than are sheep. And when the men fought inland tribes or when they roamed at large, they drove their flocks down to the sea and left the gins in charge. And so, alert, with startled eyes the shepherdess in fear perceives with wonder and surprise some foreign beats appear. She watches, creeping through the trees, and round the blackened logs the strangest sight by southern seas – the stranded Dutchmans’s dogs.
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