Mentality

Don’t shoot the messenger, says filmmaker Mick McIntyre, whose documentary on Australia’s commercial kangaroo harvest has earned him death threats

Where to start? With night-vision footage of a commercial shooter holding a joey by the tail and smashing it to death against his bull bar? By slamming the official population estimate of 50 million kangaroos as wildly inflated? By driving home Australia’s appalling extinction rate? Or by trying to explain our schizoid approach to the kangaroo — sentimental national icon on one hand, reviled pest on the other?

These were some of the creative decisions facing filmmaking couple Mick and Kate McIntyre as they made their controversial documentary, Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story.

It is not the film they planned to make, Mick McIntyre told a State Cinema audience at the film’s Tasmanian debut last month. “When we set out to make it, we didn’t know there was a

commercial industry of this scale or that the commercial industry had replaced culling,” said the Bondi filmmaker, who grew up in Hobart.

McIntyre expands on that dawning awareness with TasWeekend. “We had no idea the Australian and state governments were so complicit in it and that it hadn’t been publicly scrutinised,” he says.

The film comes in firmly on the side of roos and it has earned the rage of hunters, the slander of shock jocks, the opprobrium of National Farmers’ Federation president Fiona Simson and the endorsement of scientists putting their reputations on the line and animal welfare organisations such as Voiceless and a local organisation it funds, Tasmania’s Wildlife Matters.

“There are not 50 million kangaroos in Australia,” says McIntyre, disputing the official population number cited against an allowable annual kill rate of up to 15 per cent of that estimate.

“This figure [which shows a dramatic rise in the past decade] comes from the Government’s so-called populations estimate, which are hyper-inflated extrapolations from the actual data count.”

He says the government’s data relies too heavily on counts in national parks and other reserved areas, where roo populations are generally higher than on and near farmland.

Make no mistake, he says, the kangaroo kill is the biggest wildlife slaughter in the world. Couple that with the animal’s slow rate of reproduction and the numbers look wobbly.