Australia's national animal is the red kangaroo (Osphranter rufus), held by custom rather than by law. It has supported the shield on the Commonwealth coat of arms, alongside the emu, since King Edward VII granted the first arms on 7 May 1908, and it kept that place in the current arms granted by George V on 19 September 1912. The government has never formally declared either animal an official emblem; their status comes from being endemic, large enough to hold up a shield, and unable to walk easily backwards, which made them a symbol of a nation moving forward. The kangaroo has since spread from the arms to the one-dollar coin, the Qantas tail fin, the Royal Australian Air Force roundel and the green-and-gold Australian Made logo. Biologically it is the largest living marsupial, with big males standing more than 1.8 metres tall.
Gangurru on the Endeavour River, 1770
The kangaroo's story as a symbol begins with its name. In 1770 HMS Endeavour, under Lieutenant James Cook, was beached for almost seven weeks on the Endeavour River, at the site of modern Cooktown in far north Queensland, to repair damage from the Great Barrier Reef. On 12 July 1770 the naturalist Joseph Banks wrote the word "kanguru" in his journal, and Cook mentioned the animals in his own diary on 4 August. The word came from gangurru in Guugu Yimithirr, the language of the local people, where it referred to the eastern grey kangaroo.
A persistent story claims that "kangaroo" meant "I don't know" and that Cook mistook a puzzled answer for a name. The anthropologist Walter Roth tried to correct this as early as 1898, and in 1972 the linguist John Haviland, working with Guugu Yimithirr speakers, confirmed that gangurru was a real word for a large, dark kangaroo. Europe's first look at the animal came the same year: John Gore, an officer on the Endeavour, shot one, and its skin and skull were taken back to England, stuffed by taxidermists who had never seen a live kangaroo, and shown as a curiosity. For many Britons the first image of the animal was a painting by George Stubbs.
Advance Australia: From the 1805 Bowman Flag to the Arms of 1912
Long before federation, colonists had made the kangaroo stand for the place. The Bowman Flag of 1805 showed a rose, shamrock and thistle held up by a kangaroo and an emu. By the 1820s an unofficial coat of arms, with a golden fleece, a ship, an anchor and wheat on the shield, supported by the same two animals and the motto "Advance Australia", was in wide use across the eastern colonies. It appeared on buildings and on goods as a kind of national brand, and it later shaped the arms of New South Wales, Melbourne and Adelaide. The Australian cricket team wore it on the baggy green cap from at least 1899 and still does.
When the six colonies federated in 1901, the new Commonwealth needed arms of its own. The first official design, by Wilson Dobbs, was granted by Edward VII on 7 May 1908. It put the kangaroo on one side of the shield and the emu on the other, the emu with a foot raised to help hold it up, standing on green grass above a scroll reading "Advance Australia". The choice of the two animals and the motto belonged together: creatures that do not easily move in reverse, under a call to go forward.
The design was redrawn in 1911 and granted by George V on 19 September 1912 after a lively debate in Parliament. Willie Kelly, the member for Wentworth, argued that the kangaroo and emu did not suit heraldry and that Australia would look ridiculous trying to fit its "wild" fauna into Old World traditions. The animals stayed, now drawn more realistically, with the emu's foot back on the ground. The shield gained the badges of the six states and an ermine border, the grassy mound was removed, and the scroll was shortened to "Australia". Sprays of golden wattle were added behind the shield, although they have never been part of the formal grant; golden wattle was proclaimed the national floral emblem only on 19 August 1988.
The arms say "a kangaroo", but the animal shown is generally identified as the red kangaroo, and the Parliament House art collection has held that it must be seen to be a male. Both supporters owe their place to being endemic and to being the best-known native animals large enough to stand at the same scale beside the shield. Neither has ever been named an official national animal by statute or proclamation, which is why "national animal of Australia" is answered by tradition. More on the country's other emblem, the Southern Cross flag, is in our guide to the flag of Australia.
Osphranter rufus: Biology of the Largest Living Marsupial
The French zoologist Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest described the red kangaroo in 1822 from a specimen taken somewhere west of the Blue Mountains. Today it is placed in the genus Osphranter, a move supported by genetic analysis in 2019. It is the largest of all kangaroos, the largest land mammal native to Australia and the largest marsupial alive. Males, known to Australians as "big reds", weigh 55 to 90 kg and have a head-and-body length of 1.3 to 1.6 m, plus a tail of about 1.2 m. Females are much smaller at 18 to 40 kg. The average red stands about 1.5 m tall when upright; big males exceed 1.8 m, and the largest confirmed animal was about 2.1 m tall and weighed 91 kg.
Its hopping works like a spring. The Achilles tendon stretches as the animal lands and releases that energy on the next bound, so a red can reach about 60 km/h, and a male can clear 8 to 9 m in a single leap at heights of 1.8 to 3 m. The long tail balances it at speed. The species lives across the arid and semi-arid west and centre of the continent, in scrubland, grassland and desert, and avoids the fertile south-west, the east coast and the northern rainforests. Its densest populations are in the rangelands of western New South Wales. It copes with heat by resting in shade under saltbush or mulga, panting, sweating and licking its forearms, and it keeps its body at about 36 °C. It can also go long periods without drinking, taking water from green plants and concentrating its urine. In good seasons reds can gather in groups of up to 1,500.
Breeding is just as specialised. A joey is born after only 33 days, blind, hairless and a few centimetres long, and climbs through its mother's fur into the pouch in three to five minutes. It first leaves the pouch at about 190 days, leaves it for good at around 235 days and suckles until about 12 months. Meanwhile the mother can carry a second embryo held in arrested development, a process called embryonic diapause, so that she may support a young at foot, a joey in the pouch and a dormant embryo at the same time. Adults have few predators other than people; dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles take joeys and, occasionally, a grown kangaroo.
Kangaroos on Pennies, the Qantas Tail and the RAAF Roundel
From the arms the kangaroo spread through daily life. The 1908 arms, with both animals, appeared on the sixpence from 1910 to 1963, and every penny struck under George VI and Elizabeth II carried a kangaroo on its reverse. After decimal currency arrived in 1966, the 1912 arms moved to the 50-cent coin, and on 14 May 1984 the one-dollar coin replaced the dollar note with a reverse of five kangaroos by Stuart Devlin, the designer of Australia's first decimal coins. The story of those coins is told in our guide to the currency of Australia.
The airline Qantas first used a kangaroo logo on the "Kangaroo Route" from Sydney to Karachi in 1944 and is still nicknamed "the Flying Kangaroo". After the Second World War the Royal Australian Air Force weighed a Southern Cross, a boomerang, a sprig of wattle and a red kangaroo for its new roundel, and on 2 July 1956 it adopted the kangaroo, red on white inside a blue ring. On aircraft the kangaroo always faces forward. The Australian Made logo of 1986, a gold kangaroo in a green triangle, certifies goods made or grown in the country, and the national rugby league side has long been known as the Kangaroos.
42.8 Million Kangaroos: Harvests, Road Signs and Conservation
Unlike many national animals, the red kangaroo is not rare. It has benefited from farm dams and cleared grazing land, and, contrary to a common assumption, it is not even the most numerous kangaroo: the eastern grey is. The Australian government estimated that 42.8 million kangaroos of the large species lived within the commercial harvest areas in 2019, down from 53.2 million in 2013.
Like all Australian wildlife the red kangaroo is protected by law, but because it is so numerous it is also harvested for meat and leather under nationally approved management plans. In 2000, 1,173,242 red kangaroos were killed; in 2009 the government set a limit of 1,611,216 reds for commercial use; and in 2023 more than half a million were harvested across Australia. The industry is worth about A$270 million a year. The harvest is controversial, particularly because of the animal's popularity. Australians are sometimes said, wrongly, to be the only people who eat the animals on their coat of arms; a pie or pizza with both kangaroo and emu meat is jokingly called a "Coat of Arms".
The other everyday encounter is on the road. Kangaroos dazzled by headlights often leap in front of cars, with collisions peaking between 5 pm and 10 pm, in winter and after long dry spells, which is why kangaroo-crossing signs are commonplace on Australian roads. To see reds in the wild, head inland to places such as Sturt National Park in the north-west corner of New South Wales, and for the wider cast of marsupials, monotremes and birds that share their country, see our guide to Australian wildlife and where it lives.