Ten Years After
I still think that its name was made up during an early advertising scheme. People are mad enough to do that kind of thing. Working to a brief that called for a name so Australian it could be nowhere else on Earth – but a name without the dozens of syllables favoured by the people who named the country in the first place. It needed to be iconic, definitely not ironic, and preferably short. Easy to spell would be a bonus as well. So they settled on ‘Kangaroo Island’, which seems to tick all the boxes, although I remember struggling to spell kangaroo on the rare occasions I used it as a child. Marsupials generally, and kangaroos specifically, were not thick on the ground in northern Somerset. It was ten years ago, almost to the week, that I first went to Kangaroo Island. Overnight on the sleeper train from Melbourne, with the car on a flatbed somewhere behind us. We had real beds, with crisp white linen. There was a dining car with metal cutlery, real glass glasses and a wine list. Ther