“Only my mum calls me Chris” ... Kangaroo Dundee star Chris ‘Brolga’ Barnes. Picture: Phil Williams Source: News Corp Australia

“I’m not average height,” says Barnes, 42, the star of Kangaroo Dundee. “So when I’m standing up with my big male kangaroo, when he’s back on his tail, I’m looking him in the eyes, he’s very big. And I want to run.”

Barnes is there to nurse sick and injured kangaroos, not fight them. And while he willingly plays with even the biggest of his brood, whose name is Roger, he’s aware of the danger.

“You never stand and trade blows, not that I would, but you don’t want to get within kicking range of Roger,” he says. “Just his hands can scratch you up badly. Recently he gave me six stitches in the groin. You’ve got to understand that big male kangaroos have the potential to disembowel you. I was very lucky recently getting away with just a few stitches.”

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It’s a solitary existence for Barnes, a former tour guide who has lived up north since 2005. With only the barest necessities in his home, he runs a kangaroo education centre and rescue service which has saved more than 200 joeys. Thanks to his unusual line of work, he was a finalist for the Australian Of The Year in 2014, he’s written a book, and the rangy animal activist has been painted for the Archibald Prize.

Star of Kangaroo Dundee ... Chris Barnes - AKA Brolga - with a young male kangaroo. Source: Supplied

But none of this impresses the tiny joeys, who he nurses in pillow cases, a substitute for their mother’s pouch.

“Amy, Ella, Abby, Molly … they are my children, I grow them up as my children with all the love,” Barnes says. “I feel that almost by giving them a human name it helps you associate with them more. You class the animal as being as important as another person. Their life has as much weight as a person’s. You never look at them as just an animal, I’m not like that at all.”

Despite his family of roos, it’s a solitary existence for Barnes. And while he enjoys human company, he doesn’t miss it.

“I have enough of it. That’s the thing. I like living out in the bush, and being with the animals. It’s not the fact that I am not sociable. Here I am, with an opportunity that I’ve built myself, to live out in the family of wild animals. Wild at heart. And what an adventure that is.

“I could be like anyone else with children and a mortgage and blah blah blah, but I decided to go against the grain, to go out and live in the bush in pretty basic circumstances with a family of kangaroos.

“After the show comes out, I mean, the world is jealous. People would love to trade their modern life for something like that. But it was something I made for myself, because I knew I wanted it.”

Kangaroo Dundee, Nat Geo Wild, Tuesday 8.30pm