The world’s largest living marsupial (pouched mammal). The kangaroo is found on the inland plains, grasslands, open forests, and brush country of Queensland, of southwestern Australia, and of Tasmania. The animal was given its name by Captain James Cook, the famous English explorer of the 18th century. He questioned the aborigines of the Endeavor River as to the name of the strange animal, and they answered “kangaroo,” which in their native tongue meant “I do not know.” The name has remained ever since. However, the kangaroo was known to Western civilization long before Cook visited Australia. In 1629 the Dutch Captain Francois Pelsaert was the first European to make a report on the animal after his boat had been wrecked on the coast of Australia.
The kangaroo may be 5 to 7 feet (152-213 cm) tall when standing upright, and the male (boomer) can weigh as much as 200 pounds (90 kg). The female (flyer) is smaller. The kangaroo’s head is somewhat rabbitlike, with large ears; its shoulders, forelegs, and feet are relatively small. The ani¬mal’s most outstanding characteristics are its enormous pow¬erful hind legs and feet and its long muscular tail.
The animal travels by a series of leaps and bounds. It is propelled by its hind limbs and boosted by its large tail, which acts as a balancing pendulum and a rudder. The kan¬garoo usually covers from 5 to 10 feet (1.5-3 meters) with each jump. In an emergency it can jump 15 to 20 feet (4.5-6 meters) in a single bound and has a recorded leap of 27 feet (8.2 meters). The female is usually faster than the male.
The kangaroo is a grazing animal and feeds on grasses and other vegetation. It is constantly moving from pasture to pasture, lying down to sleep on the ground during the night. The animal travels in herds known as “mobs.” In the pioneer days it was not unusual to see a mob of a thou¬sandkangaroos, but today it would be difficult to find a mob as large as a hundred. Hunters who sold the hides for leather were the main factor in reducing the kangaroo population to its present low ebb.
The kangaroo is timid and inoffensive and likes to bathe and bask peacefully in the warm sunshine. However, in spite of its quiet nature the animal can defend itself against most enemies. With its back to a tree, it can drive off a whole pack of savage dogs, none of which would risk being cut to pieces by the strong ripping claws on a kangaroo’s hind limbs.
Breeding may occur during any season and young are seen at all times of the year, but most often during the win¬ter. Females breed once each year and usually have one young at a time. Occasionally there are twins and in rare in¬stances triplets. The young is born in an embryonic stage 38 or 40 days after mating. At birth it is naked, blind, about 1 or 1 /4 inches (2.5-4 cm) l°ng> and weighs about 19 grains or 1/23 of an ounce. Starting immediately after birth the tiny embryonic kangaroo slowly makes its way to its mother’s pouch. The mother offers no assistance other than licking a route through her fur to guide the newborn. Should it slip and fall to the ground the embryo dies. However, once in the pouch it quickly attaches itself to a teat and remains fixed for the rest of its embryonic life. When nursing, milk is pumped down its throat. The “joey,” the name by which the young kangaroo is known, remains in the pouch for the first six months of its life. At that time it begins to take some solid food and is old enough to make short explorations into the outside world. At the approach of danger the joey returns to the pouch and the mother bounds away. A big kangaroo has a life expectancy of about 15 years. It con¬tinues to grow until it becomes an “old man”—the name given to aged kangaroos—but never reaches the size of some of the fossil forms, which were twice the size of the modern species.
The Blues. At the center of the jazz tradition is the blues, at once a separate style of black folk music and a form of jazz. The basic form of the blues is simple: a 12-bar chorus in three 4-bar sections. The harmonic pattern re¬sembles that of much European folk music, the first section being based on the chord of the tonic, the next section on the chord of the sub-dominant (fourth note of the common scale), and the last section on the chord of the dominant. The melodies built on these chords employ flatted third and seventh notes (E-flat and B-flat in the key of C), which are known as blue notes. They are an approximate instrumen¬tal likeness of the rueful, off-pitch sounds (or “bent” notes) made by blues singers. Blue notes give to jazz its most dis¬tinctive melodic characteristic.
In most vocal blues, the singer’s phrase occupies only slightly more than half of each four-bar section. The re¬mainder of the section is completed by the accompanist, who is thus given an opportunity for spontaneous instrumental improvisation. This instrumental “break” was one of the seeds that grew into the improvised but more sophisticated art of jazz. The qualities of melancholy, defiance, and irony inherent in the blues were also assimilated profoundly by jazz. In return, jazz instrumentalists have accompanied blues musicians with great success. The incorporation of blues thought and practice did not mean, however, the vir¬tual disappearance of the blues itself, as was the case with ragtime. The blues continued to be sung and played along¬side jazz and to exert a deep influence on it.
Of many fascinating blues instrumentalists, the pianists were closest to the world of jazz and often took their place in it. One blues piano style, boogie-woogie, set a repeated rhythmical bass pattern against melodic blues variations in the treble. Boogie-woogie is probably as old as jazz itself, but its first definite identity seems to have been established in the Middle West rather than in New Orleans.
