It has all the ingredients of the perfect Aussie tale: a swimming kangaroo, a hero surfer, and two hungry hammerhead sharks.

An early morning jog with his son along a Queensland beach on Tuesday turned into a life-saving mission for Australian entrepreneur John McCallum, when a small kangaroo bounded in front of him and jumped straight into the sea.

“Suddenly at the waters edge he just dives into the ocean and starts swimming out to sea, it was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen, we were totally dumbfounded,” Mr McCallum told The Times.

“A man was walking past and he said to me: ‘Gee your dog’s swimming out a long way’, and I said: ‘that’s not a dog, mate, it’s a kangaroo’.”

Within minutes the kangaroo was caught in a dangerous ocean rip, about 200 yards offshore. As he watched, Mr McCallum remembered there had been two hammerhead sharks sighted off the beach, on the Gold Coast in southern Queensland, earlier in the week.

“I realised if we didn’t do something, that little roo would either drown or become lunch for some big hungry fish,” he said.

So he decided to act fast. He ran back to the family home, situated further up Kirra Beach, grabbed his surfboard and headed back to rescue the roo – but not before waking his wife and asking her to grab the video camera.

“I tried to get the kangaroo on my board a few times but he slipped off, so then I herded it over to a sand bar and he hopped through the water,” Mr McCallum, 48, said.

“When he finally got back to the beach he just collapsed, the poor thing had been swimming for 20 minutes and was absolutely exhausted. But after a while he got back up and bounded back off down the beach – but not before he looked back at me, staring at me straight in the eyes, as if to say: ‘thanks for that mate’. Or maybe he was saying: ‘you just wrecked my morning swim’.”

Kangaroo expert Pat O’Brien, from the Wildlife Protection Association of Australia, said the fact that the bush-dwelling marsupials can swim is a well-kept secret.

He said during the recent floods in Queensland a kangaroo was found by fishermen swimming seven miles offshore after being swept out to sea by floodwaters.

“They are actually very good swimmers and even though people might not see it, they seem to go swimming quite often,” Mr O’Brien said.

“Sometimes they appear to go into water so they can get rid of ticks, but we have also found that they go into the water fairly frequently and sometimes they seem to just like to go swimming to get from A to B.”

Despite their large, bottom-heavy size, the marsupials appear to be quite powerful swimmers – both in freshwater and in the ocean. They use their small arms to perform a dog paddle-style stroke while paddling underwater with their strong hind legs.

“I’m sure their big tail would be good for steering too,” Mr O’Brien joked.

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