This photograph was first published in 1939 in an article on the daily life of the Ngada [Ngaatjatjara] tribe of the Warburton Range; the events in the article were recorded in 1935. The plate was captioned 'Kangaroo cooking in native oven, Ngada tribe'. It next appeared in 1948 in Brown Men and Red Sand, the published account of Mountford's 1940 expedition into the Musgrave and Mann Ranges in SA. It then carried the following caption: 'The aboriginal method of cooking the euro could scarcely have been simpler'. The recipe is as follows ...

The 'natives dug a shallow trench in the ground, filled it with light branches, and set them on fire. While the fire was burning down, the men prepared the animal for the oven, first by throwing it on the flames, to scorch the fur from its body, then by cutting off the feet of the hind legs and the tail. The feet and the tail were later put on the bottom of the trench so that they would be better cooked. By the time the euro was ready for the oven, the fire had burned down. The embers were then raked out, the euro placed on its back in the trench and covered with hot sand and ashes. The carcase was left to cook for about an hour, certainly not long for a beast weighing fifty pounds. However, I have seen an eighty-pound kangaroo taken from the oven after twenty minutes. It was no exaggeration to say that the flesh was under-done.

Although the aboriginal method of cooking is primitive, it has points in its favour. The flesh of the animal, being enclosed in its own skin, is entirely protected from the contamination of flies, human beings, dust and ashes; also, the preliminary scorching, when the fur is removed, so hardens the skin that it becomes a complete cooking vessel - a stone-age men's [sic] casserole - which retains all the body juices' (BMRS, page 121).