Stop feeding the ’roos, selfie-taking tourists told

LAKE Macquarie’s biggest attraction is not the azure saltwater lagoon that gives the Australian city its name.

Instead, the most popular tourist draw in this post-Instagram era seems to be Morisset Hospital, a former insane asylum whose grounds – declared a wildlife refuge in 1972 – are home to a mob of wild kangaroos.

Despite the fact that Morisset remains an active psychiatric hospital, thousands of visitors flock to the fields around the clinic each year, hoping for an encounter with one of Australia’s most iconic animals. And a kangaroo encounter is almost guaranteed to happen, given how conditioned the animals have become to visiting humans, said Australian MP Greg Piper, who represents Lake Macquarie.

Because of the site’s popularity, boosted by pictures on social media, it was unlikely local officials could stop tourists from continuing to go there, he noted.

However, a rash of reported kangaroo attacks on tourists has prompted several officials, including Piper, to call for more visible warnings to be put up at the unofficial attraction. They’re also urging visitors to remember that, even though a kangaroo might seem docile enough to pose for a selfie, it’s still a wild animal that can suddenly turn on you and slice a three-inch hole in your abdomen.

In a four-minute video, Piper said: “Upfront, please realise these kangaroos are being visited on what is a mental health facility and a residential facility for people with developmental disability.”

Here, the video morphed from travelogue to governmental service announcement. The camera panned across several signs in the area that specifically instruct people not to feed the kangaroos – though Piper acknowledged people were feeding them anyway.

But the biggest problem, he said, was that the human-provided food could sometimes trigger unpredictable aggression in the animals, especially the males.

“Be aware that due to the feeding that has occurred, these kangaroos are not just desensitised, they will literally come to you looking for food,” Piper said.

“What many tourists seem to overlook is that these are wild animals and they are equipped with long, sharp claws and they do actually injure people from time to time. We’re not wanting to overstate the risk here but people have been attacked.”

The video began alternating images of past kangaroo encounters gone awry: most people sported bloody scratches and slash marks on their faces, backs or chests. One man held a blood-soaked shirt beneath a gaping hole in his abdomen. In another picture, a shorts-clad tourist found himself on the receiving end of a marsupial’s powerful kick, as two other kangaroos looked on.

Shane Lewis, who runs a local shuttle service that regularly drops people off at the site, said in the video that he had seen many visitors get injured through feeding the kangaroos.

“They’ve been kicked, scratched. One person even got 17 stitches in their face,” Lewis said.

“There have been scratches on shoulders, body, limbs. One guy even left here in an ambulance where his whole stomach got cut from side-to-side.”

That has not stopped people from recommending on various travel sites, such as TripAdvisor, that tourists bring along carrots or other items to feed the kangaroos if they visit Morisset Hospital. Instagram abounds with people taking selfies with the kangaroos, petting them, feeding them, mimicking them and even lying down on the ground with them – despite plentiful warnings about the kangaroo poop.

At least one local seemed fed up with it all.

“It’s not an attraction, it’s a hospital,” the TripAdvisor user wrote.

‘WHAT MANY TOURISTS OVERLOOK IS THAT THESE ARE WILD ANIMALS’