My Earliest Email

The Internet hasn’t been with us for

My son, Mike, then aged 6, with a kangaroo.

very long and relatively few people had the opportunity to send emails before the mid-1990s. Think about it. When did you send your first?

Would you be surprised that I sent my first in 1952?  We didn’t have computers back in those days but we did have Morse code and that was the year I began working for the Australian Post Office.

Ten years later we had stopped using Morse in Australia so I went to operate a teleprinter for Qantas. I worked mostly night shift and when it was quiet there was always the opportunity to chat with the distant operator.

One guy, in Los Angeles, asked about Australian exports so naturally I told him about kangaroo feathers. Equally naturally, he thought I was lying until I explained that only the female has them and she only has two. They line the pouch and work as shock absorbers so that the joey (the baby) isn’t injured by all that jumping around.

I explained that they were exquisitely coloured and were popular in Europe as fashion accessories. After all, as Tennyson almost said, “The rainbow hath no richer hue, than the feathers of a kangaroo.”

If the man believed me he wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought him to be, but a question on ask.com last week brought him to mind. Somebody wanted to know if kangaroos can flip their pouches inside out if they fill up with water.

Well, you can’t look a gift horse -- or a gift kangaroo -- in the mouth, so I answered this way:

It doesn't work like that.
Kangaroos live in Australia.
Australia is Down Under.
Everything down under falls off the planet and out into space.
Humans have to wear magnetic shoes to stay on the ground.
Kangaroos don't have magnetic shoes so they keep jumping down.
That's why they jump instead of walking. It's an anti-grav response.
Their pouches face out from the bottom of the Earth.
So when they fill up with water it runs back out.
Chaos theory tells us that the water then becomes rain, and falls back on the forests in Brazil so that the butterflies flapping their wings along the Amazon can cause hurricanes in China.
So, no, there's no reason to turn kangaroo pouches inside out.