Blueish-grey or Silver Kanguroo.

Scarce early c.19th hand coloured engraving of an Eastern grey kangaroo.

Modern binomial name: Macropus giganteus
First described: Shaw, 1790
Distribution: Eastern Australia S.A, VIC, TAS, NSW, QLD

The first illustration of a the Kangaroo drawn from an Australian species, is acknowledged as that drawn by George Stubb’s from a specimen collected at Endeavour River in 1770 by James Cook’s crew while the Endeavour was being careened. The subsequent engraving was published in 1773, in the official accounts of the voyage of the Endeavour. That iconic image captured the public’s imagination for over sixty years and was the first depiction of any Australian animal in western art. The first sighting of a kangaroo in fact was an earlier one, by Francis Pelsaert of ‘the teeming rats’ on 15th November, 1629 on the Abrolhos Islands where the Batavia had been wrecked. The first illustration of a Macropod was made prior to the Stubb’s illustration, titled ‘Kangaron’ and made on 15th November 1629 by Matthys Pool and described by Cornelis de Bruyn in ‘Reizen over Moskovie door Persie en Indie’, 1714 but the animal depicted was not an Australian species but Thylogale brunii (Dusky Pademelon), a Filander native to New Guinea.

From George Shaw’s, ‘General zoology or systematic natural history.