KANGAROOS FOR FOOD

Evening Star, Issue 22596, 13 March 1937, Page 25

KANGAROOS FOR FOOD

■ & LIFE IN THE “ OUT-BACK” Faced with starvation through the failure of food supplies from a settlement 60 miles away, and with oply three months’ practice at rifle shooting, Mrs Kenneth Harris, of Tanami goldfield, Central Australia, had to shoot kangaroos for food for a fortnight. Flour was the only other foodstuff at their home, which is 435 miles from Alice Springs, states the * Sydney Morning Herald ’). Mrs Harris lived at Tanami for more than a year, and only three months after she went there from Hobart — never having lived iv the bugh before

—she found herself faced with supplying the food as well as cooking it over an open fire, with the temperature at times as high as 122dcg in the shade. “ It was so hot the only way I could shoot The kangaroos was to go to a swimming pool about three miles from the house and have a swim before 1 started,” said Mrs Harris. “ After a swim I would set out on the hunt with two or three natives, and before 1 eventually shot the kangaroo I would often return five or six times to the pool for a swim.” With no other white woman nearer than Alice Springs, and no means of communication telephone, telegraph, or even a mailman—Mrs Harris on one occasion saved her husband’s life after ho became tangled in one of the mine machines. She pulled him from the machine and nursed him until he was i well again.

“ I had never done apy nursing before, and knew I needed one or two doctors; but I managed somehow,” was Mrs Harris’s description of her ordeal. While her husband and brothers work the mine, Mrs Harris spends much of her time gold prospecting. “ I set out with a native and a prospecting pick, and when I fincV anything that looks good be pounds it in a little iron pot, and together we wash the ore,” said Mrs Harris. “ So far I have found two mines, one which yielded loz (3dwt to the ton and the other from loz to 130 z.” There is no lack of work to bo done in the lonely home, for, although it only consists' of one room built of antbed” and spinifex, Mrs Harris has made most of the furniture out of apple cases and cretonne. She considers her masterpiece is a couch which she made frfj'n the boxes and then padded with

bags, completing her job by making a dainty cretonne cover. “ My husband and I go into Alice Springs every eight weeks and get our supplies and collect our mail,” stated Mrs Harris. “ Those are the only occasions when I wear dresses. My usual outfit is a shirt and shorts. On one occasion I came home from a hunt to find that every stitch except what 1 had on had been stolen by the lubras, who blamed their dingo, whom they killed as punishment.’