Multispecies dwellings and deep time encounters

Early European encounters with kangaroos characterise these animals as biological anomalies, interpreted through Western classificatory systems and later exploited through hunting, trade, and scientific display. These colonial narratives continue to shape contemporary kangaroo governance, where macropods are simultaneously protected, commercialised, and treated as pests – often in ways that obscure Indigenous values of kinship and care. This chapter examines macropod depictions in Kimberley rock art to highlight how these images express deep-time relationships, identities, and cosmologies. Drawing on Deborah Bird Rose’s relational approach, I argue that these artworks reveal multispecies worlds grounded in responsibility rather than extraction. Through analysing rock art within its ecological and social contexts, this chapter challenges colonial and functionalist models and calls for renewed attention to multispecies modes of becoming anchored in Indigenous knowledge.