The Kangaroo Coup: How the CIA Overthrew the Australian Government

CANBERRA’S KANGAROO COUP:HOW THE CIA OVERTHREW THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT AND HOWKANGAROOS ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO THE SAMEDriving the road inland to Canberra is similar to the videogame Asteroids, but instead of puttering around in a smallspaceship dodging flying rocks, you’re swerving to misskangaroos who for unknown reasons share an uncanny affectiontowards car bumpers. The roadsides are littered with ‘roo andwallaby carcasses to such an extent that the Australiangovernment has declared the motor car as a wildlife “weapon ofmass destruction”, killing 7000 animals per day in New SouthWales alone, mostly kangaroos.These figures do not elicit any amount of sympathy fromAustralian drivers who have spent any deal of time scraping furoff of their hood because they know there is no fear of thekangaroos being run over to death. They outnumber Australianstwo to one (some estimates put it at three to one, or sixtymillion) and it’s possible that they are beginning to stage arevolt against Canberra residents, whether out of thefrustration of being hit by automobiles so often or becausethey’re staging a coup. Either way, kangaroos around the

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capital are growing increasingly vicious, or so reports the BBC,who seems to have immeasurable interest in the story. Onekangaroo forced into the city by a lingering drought hopped intoa lake and drowned one onlooker’s dog. This attack was thoughtto be an isolated incident when a different kangaroo recentlycornered a Canberra woman and took a swipe at her. The BBC wenton to note the Australian response to this: a kangaroo cull.The Australian government has increased the allowed numberof commercial kangaroo deaths from five and half to a whoppingseven million a year, with a targeted interest in thinning thespecies around Canberra on account of their nasty behavior andthe unsettling presence of kangaroo carcasses in the city’sdrinking water (caused by drought-stricken kangaroos gettingcaught in the mud around local reservoirs and drowning).Needless to say, groups around the country and world are madlyupset about this (Ice-T fans especially)--though I doubt most ofthem have ever shared the unpleasant experience of drinking downa glass of Canberra tap water while watching a BBC report onkangaroo drownings--and its fairly certain that none of themhave made the white-knuckled, kangaroo ridden journey fromUlladulla to Canberra.

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An attempt was made to control the population of kangaroosaround Canberra in the early 1990s when 14 males were captured,given vasectomies, and released. Obviously, this did not work.

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It didn’t take long for us to spot our first kangaroo.There were mobs of them eating in the fields. In fact, wedidn’t pass much of anything else on the road out to Canberraexcept kangaroos; the drive was filled with the nervousfrustration that at any minute one might decide to get a closerlook at our headlights. I eventually succumbed to the fact thatif a kangaroo so chose the life of a hood ornament I wouldn’t beable to do much about it, and put my mind on other things,chiefly on solving the riddle of why Australians decided to puttheir capital in the middle of nowhere instead of Melbourne orSydney.It turns out cities were the problem in the first place.#Since their respective beginnings Melbourne and Sydney havecompeted for general superiority and international recognitionas the world’s quintessential Australian city. Things reallygot heated up, for example, when Melbourne hosted the 1956Olympics. Following the attention given Melbourne for such anevent, Sydney decided it needed to do something and built itsOpera House. When it came time to decide where to put thecapital back in 1908, both cities contested for it and createdsuch a stalemate that Australia’s unnamed capital was founded onthe border of New South Wales and Victoria, almost exactly halfway between both cities. And, if you look on a map, this puts

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