Meeting Kangaroo Dundee Meeting Kangaroo Dundee

Chris “Brolga” Barns will be familiar to many as the star of the BBC documentary series Kangaroo Dundee, which ran for two seasons and followed life at his Kangaroo Sanctuary in Alice Springs, deep in Australia’s Northern Territory. The former tour guide and zookeeper rescues and takes in orphaned joey kangaroos, raises them, before eventually releasing them back into the wild. The sight of 6ft 7in Chris carrying a joey in a sling became synonymous with the series. But his story doesn’t end there.

A new feature film, Kangaroo, which has been inspired by Chris’ life, has just been released in cinemas. We caught up with him to learn about why you should always have a pillowcase to hand when travelling in the Outback and what role visitors can play in saving the lives of the Northern Territory’s baby kangaroos.

It’s been 17 years since you set up the Kangaroo Sanctuary. How did you become a full-time kangaroo carer?

It wasn’t planned. In 2005, when I was working as a tour guide, I rescued a joey from out on the highway here in Alice Springs. I brought it back to town, but I couldn’t find anyone to look after it. But I had been a zookeeper before, so I knew how to look after kangaroos. I then set up my own rescue service in Alice Springs called the Baby Kangaroo Rescue Centre.

But the distances out here are vast; it’s not like there’s little towns every 20km. As a rescuer, you often can’t get out to the more remote places. So, rather than just being a rescue service, I decided to set up a visitor centre to educate people, because we need everyday people knowing how to check dead kangaroos on the highway for joeys. Us rescuers can’t be everywhere.

Why are there so many orphan kangaroos?

There are two reasons…

Our local Indigenous people hunt the kangaroo for dinner as part of their traditional practices, and a female kangaroo has often got a baby in the pouch. If they do hunt a mother and they find a joey, they’ll bring it to us.

But the main reason – and this happens all over Australia, not just the Outback – is traffic accidents. The reason kangaroos come to the edge of the highway is to eat green grass, which is hard to find in the dry and hard bush. It grows there because of pollution – car exhaust fumes contain just enough water to feed the grass a little bit. For the hungry kangaroos, that’s irresistible. They come to the edge of the highway to eat during the night because they’re nocturnal. Then they get blinded by the car headlights and they get hit.

It’s very common in Australia to see a dead kangaroo lying on the highway, so every town all over Australia now has a group of volunteers that takes in orphaned kangaroos. They use a pillowcase that imitates the mother’s pouch and carry them around.

But you have to feed them every four hours. It’s quite an intensive job. How did it change your life?

Oh, I love animals more than I do people. I love my family, of course. But I was very happy to spend my life with the animals. I built, or started building, what is now the Kangaroo Sanctuary in 2009, when I decided to live out in the bush. That was my dream more than anything else. I wasn’t going out nightclubbing or anything like that; I’d done all that in my early twenties. It’s basically like being a parent, you know. We don’t have any human kids, so these are our children.

You’ve already had a documentary follow your life for the series Kangaroo Dundee. The film Kangaroo has now been ‘inspired’ by your life. Which aspects did you hope would make it onto the big screen?

To be honest, a lot of people drive past dead kangaroos on the highway. So, what I really wanted in there was the reality of what we do: actually rescuing a little orphan kangaroo from a dead mother that has been hit by a car. You know, it’s never pleasant.

In the film, the main character actually hits a kangaroo with his car, whereas I’ve never hit one. But many people do… I wanted that in there because that’s our message: trying to get through to people that if they see a dead kangaroo, they can be driving past a mother with a baby in her pouch that could have been rescued. But no one ever told them.

For visitors going to the sanctuary today, what can they expect?

We have our own bus that picks people up from their accommodation in Alice Springs. And then it’s about a 15-minute drive out to our sanctuary, where we do a sunset tour. Kangaroos sleep all day, so we don’t allow anyone to come here during the day. And then we go walking around out in the bush… A big part of it is teaching people how we rescue orphan kangaroos from the highway, and how they can do it while they’re on their travels.

So… how do you rescue a joey?

All females have a pocket on their lower stomach. If it’s flat, like an empty pocket on your pants, there’s no joey in there. But if there’s a bulge, and the bulge is moving, that’s a joey, so just stick your hands in the pouch, take the baby out, transfer it into a pillowcase, take it with you on your travels and drop it off with someone in the next town.

How can travellers avoid orphaning kangaroos?

If you stop driving at 5pm, there’s a good chance you’ll avoid any kangaroos waking up and coming out to the highway. Kangaroos generally get killed by traffic during the night.

The sanctuary has a number of kangaroos that don’t get released. Why do some of them not make it back into the wild?

Every year, we rescue and raise about 100 orphan joeys, and we return probably 98 to 99% back to the bush. We’ll keep one or two back per year because they have an injury or there’s some reason that they wouldn’t survive in the wild. They need to be an athlete to outrun packs of dingoes; if we put back a kangaroo with a lingering injury, it’ll just get eaten… So, knowing that a lot of zoos don’t want kangaroos because they’re very common animals here, I was met with a situation where I’ve raised a few that are injured, and no one wanted them.

[In the Kangaroo Sanctuary] today, we’ve got about 200 acres in all. In the middle of that is a 50-acre enclosure for the kangaroos that can’t be released. They’ve got lots of space, and it’s like the wild, but there’s a big fence around it to keep out the dingoes.

You were a tour guide before you started the Kangaroo Sanctuary. What should visitors see and do around Alice Springs?

When people see the movie, I’m sure they’ll see the beauty that we’ve got around here… we’ve got incredible mountain ranges and swimming holes. And the Aboriginal people here have a vibrant culture – a lot of Aboriginal art is from Alice Springs. Uluṟu, formerly known as Ayers Rock, is also about a five-hour drive away, and it should be one of the wonders of the world because it’s on a scale similar to the Grand Canyon in America.

Kangaroo is out in cinemas in the UK on 30 January 2026.