A kangaroo Dreaming is not a story about a kangaroo. It is a track: a path across actual country marking where an ancestral being travelled, what it did at each place, and which sites and songs and designs belong to that passage. The people whose country the track crosses hold the relevant portion, and holding it carries obligations to perform and to teach.
That is why the kangaroo means different things in different places, and why a general reading is not available. In one country the ancestral kangaroo made a waterhole; in another it fought and the marks are in the rock. The animal is the same; the account is local and is owned.
The x-ray style of western Arnhem Land shows the kangaroo from outside and inside at once, with the spine, the heart and the alimentary tract drawn within the outline. It is usually explained as knowledge of the animal as butcher and hunter know it, though the paintings are not butchery diagrams and the internal elements are stylised rather than anatomical.
Kangaroo images are among the oldest datable subjects in Australian rock art. A painting in the Kimberley was dated in 2021, using mud wasp nests above and below the pigment, to roughly 17,300 years old, making it the oldest known in situ rock painting on the continent. It is a kangaroo.