This is one of the ten paintings by Westall of Matthew Flinders' Australian voyage (1801-03) that the Admiralty commissioned from 1809 (ZBA7914, 7935-7936, 7938-7944): they were completed over the next three years.

It shows a group of four seals, with three kangaroos and two emus, on the forested north shore of Kangaroo Island, which is the third largest in Australia after Tasmania and Melville Island. It lies 70 miles south-west of modern Adelaide and is part of the state of South Australia. Flinders named it from its population of grey kangaroos. The painting is signed and dated 1811, lower right, and the only one of the set which is.The image was engraved as one of the nine plates in Flinders ‘A Voyage to Terra Australis' (1814, and also separately published that year in Westall's 'Views of Australian Scenery'). It is the third plate in Flinders, vol. 1, placed with the dated journal text of 5 April 1802, towards the end of his account of the island. For other notes on the group see ZBA7914. [PvdM 1/18]