29 December

An ancient pattern. Kangaroos LOVE golf courses. It seems obvious, there’s grass to be eaten there. But it’s much more than that, the pattern of long grassy strips (each hole of the course) bordered by trees and shrubs is one Aboriginal Australians invented to hunt kangaroos. The roos love that young, shooting grass (mowing produces that), and use the bordering trees for shelter. The Aboriginals would also plan the entire landscape so that these grassy strips would lead to dead-ends, so that when the roos were spooked they’d hop straight into hunters waiting in the trees. Aboriginals turned huge parts of Australia into that pattern, now mostly lost to either complete clearing of land for housing and farming, or re-claiming of the land by scrub and forest.