What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Twelve weeks of ecology, engineering, and learning from other kangaroos’ mistakes. Explore the lectures below; fieldwork does not require becoming a case study.
Welcome to the Road. Please Remain a Student, Not a Statistic.
The unit's opening lecture — what risk, exposure, outcome measures, and uncertainty mean, worked through a single fictional collision, from a professor whose own qualifications now include "an unusually comprehensive incident report."
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Macropod behaviour and circadian activity
Why kangaroo–vehicle collisions cluster at particular times of day — and why the graph that seems to show this is not yet the explanation for it.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Spatial and temporal patterns of vehicle strikes
Why a map of recorded strikes looks like a finding before anyone has checked what the dots represent — and what survives once you check.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
The physics of a kangaroo strike
Why a modest change in speed produces a disproportionate change in stopping distance and available kinetic energy — and what a simplified model can and can't tell you about that.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Human perception and reaction time at dusk
Why "the driver should have seen it" assumes a detection distance nobody measured — and how far a stopping-distance model can travel once you give it one.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Roo bars, AEB, and their blind spots
What a safety technology actually does, under what conditions it's been shown to work, and what evidence would justify recommending one.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Fencing, signage and wildlife crossings
Why the interventions with the best headline results are also the ones hardest to fund, and what that means for recommending one.
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
Law, liability and insurance after a strike
Why "no one is at fault" doesn't mean "no one pays" — and why the payer depends on which document you read, not on fault in the everyday sense.
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
First aid, reporting, and wildlife rescue
What an untrained bystander should actually do in the minutes after a strike — and the hard line between that and treating the animal yourself.
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
Communicating risk to visitors and new drivers
Why a dense, legalistic warning fails the exact reader who needs it most — and what a plain-English brief has to do instead.
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
Does the evidence travel?
Two real overseas case studies, and the five questions to ask before importing anything they found into a different road, country, or species.
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
From evidence to a proposal
How to structure a scoped, evaluable intervention proposal — and what separates a proposal a marker can act on from one they can only admire.
Week 12 · 10 May 2027