Aussie couple, son fight off kangaroo with broom

SYDNEY: Three members of an family used a broom and a shovel to fight off a rare attack by a large kangaroo that left all of them injured, one seriously.

Linda Smith, 64, suffered a collapsed lung, broken ribs, cuts and other internal injuries, and underwent surgery in hospital yesterday after the Saturday evening attack at her property in the Darling Downs region of Queensland state.

The wildlife carer and her husband, Jim, had been feeding 30 kangaroos and wallabies at their property every night amid a drought that depleted their food.

One of the large males — at least 1.8m tall — turned on her husband as he fed it.

“Jim was on the ground and the kangaroo just kept at him.

“I went outside to try and help him, and took a broom and a piece of bread, but he knocked the broom out of my hand, then attacked me,” Smith said.

She managed to get the roo off her husband and grabbed a piece of wood to defend herself, while her 40-year-old son “came out to try and help me and hit him over the head with a shovel”.

The kangaroo then hopped off back into the bush, Queensland Ambulance Service’s senior operations supervisor Stephen Jones said, adding that the attack was “rare”.

He said if Smith had not helped her husband, who suffered cuts and abrasions to his arms, chest and legs, “the outcome may have even been death”.

Smith, who has been a wildlife carer for 15 years, said she did not want the marsupial to be hunted down and killed.