People are curious about the how/why of the roo shooting so here's how it works. There will be some gory details, so if you're a Skippy fan you may want to "skip" this blog (sorry, couldn't help myself). I had huge reservations about going but decided I did want to see it first hand as part of my experience of outback life.
The basic premise is that with a human population creating waterholes, dams and other water sources on stations throughout an arid land, kangaroo populations explode, particularly during wet seasons when land management techniques create much more arable and food-rich with grasses etc than you would get normally. So you get these massive kangaroo "herds" which then begin to starve when the feed dries up, and they congregate desperately around the water holes & dams. All of this is of course seen as competition for feed & water for livestock, so station owners hire shooters to cull the roos every season.
For the same reasons there is also a lot of culling of feral animals such as donkeys, pigs and camels. There is a market for roo and camel meat both locally and overseas, so the shooters take advantage of that.
What happens is, a professional shooter (you have to have a licence) will be engaged by a station owner, without pay, to be the shooter for that property. They usually call the shooter to let them know when they think there is a sufficient roo population to be culled, or the shooter will check in when they think it's time. They radio or phone the station to let them know what night/s they will be on the property and where; often they have an informal camp where they base themselves if they're shooting over a period of days or weeks. They get maps of the property and take care not to shoot around the residences etc, usually working many kilometres away in the bush (these are huge properties we're talking about). A shooter will have a 4WD ute with a hanging rack on the back, and have a generator-powered mobile cool room where they store the carcasses.
Each roo is prepped as soon as it's shot - gutted, head & legs cut off, and a yellow plastic tag tied to the rump to show it's been legally shot. Anything under about 12 kilos is not marketable and is kept as personal meat. The carcasses are kept in the cool room until there's enough (about a tonne) to take to the processing centre, also called a "box". Kangaroo tails are considered a delicacy and Aboriginal people will pay quite a bit for them; many shooters keep the tails themselves for stew (it's delicious) or sell them to Aboriginal communities.
The "box" is a processing factory type setup, usually in a local town, which an individual or company will set up in order to turn the carcasses into packaged meat like you get at the supermarket. The shooters take their cool room load to a box and get paid by the kilo; an average earning is about a thousand dollars or more per load, which could be done in a couple nights of shooting on a good run. So it's considered good money on a seasonal basis, and a serious shooter will usually try to have more than one property to cover. Duncan does Wooramel and Carbla, two massive stations between here and Carnarvon.
To get a licence, you have to prove that you can consistently achieve a head shot, which is defined as the area just above the eyes and above the base of the skull - it's actually quite a small area. There are rules for "humane killing" (!), and you have to have your gun and ammo each locked up separately when not in actual use (no, you can't go hooning down the highway with your rifle out the window hoping to get lucky, thank god).
Most shooting is done at night, which is when kangaroos tend to feed and be more active & visible. Generally you shoot from inside a vehicle. You have metal gun rests bracketed to the open windows on each side of the ute, and one or two portable spotlights running off the 12volt connection. You usually also have adjustable spotlights mounted on the bonnet or the cab. Shooting "on foot" is not ideal as it's easy to lose sight of where your roo went down, and you also don't have the steadiness of your gun bracket.
You drive slowly along (this is all off road, and can be very rough terrain), mainly looking for open plain type areas, or a water source, slowly panning your spotlight around until you see roo eyes gleaming ahead. Obviously you have to make sure you are not shooting at livestock or French backpackers. The spotlight really lights the area up so you would have to be seriously vision impaired not to be able to identify whatever you're pointing your light at. The rifle scopes are amazing and you can clearly see your target in the crosshairs; they're usually a hundred metres away, but a .222 is accurate up to 200 metres. Some shooters will use bigger rifles during the day which can hit a target several kilometres away, but this kind of distance is not reliable (wind, bullet drop etc) so the "triple 2" is the preferred rifle.
It makes a loud "crack" noise a bit like a whip crack sound, and has a little bit of recoil, but (which is kind of scary) it sort of feels like nothing. It's not like movie guns. It takes 2 bullets at a time. The gun travels loaded, safety on, on the dashboard (not pointed at your passenger of course!). If you have an assistant, their job is to keep the spotlight on a downed roo while the shooter drives toward it (it's easy to lose where it went down). You shoot most of the night, take your carcasses back to your cool room & camp, and sleep during the day. In the ferocious heat of summer, many shooters sleep in their cool room with their carcasses (EWWWWW). At night it can be 40 degrees or hotter (yes, Celsius) in summer so lots of guys shoot naked. There are no showers at roo shootin' camp and a shooter might be out for ten days or more in the dust, flies and heat, shooting & gutting kangaroos in the nude, then sleeping with their carcasses.
Then he comes into town and asks you to have sex with him.
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