'Great Dangaroo Flood'

When you are in London’s West End, a triangle of buildings makes a small island at Charing Cross and Old Compton Street. Walk away from Charing Cross down Old Compton Street and look up to your left after a couple of buildings and you will see a marker that honors the Great Dangaroo Flood. It is a most bewildering sight, because everyone knows that Dangaroos only lived on the other side of what we call the Earth.

If you’ve never heard of a Dangaroo, it’s probably because they’re not part of our universe but rather part of Kcymaerxthaere, an art project created by Eames Demetrios. A series of plaques and other markers around the world honor events that have taken place in a parallel universe that, according to Demetrios, “co-exists to some degree with ours.” Most of these installations are bronze or stone plaques inscribed with stories but some are larger, even entire buildings. As of 2021, there are more than 140 sites spread across six continents and 30 countries.

The event is known as the Great Dangaroo Flood from the time when a band of Tehachapic refugees arrived at the height of the deluge, bobbing up and down on their rafts of asphalt. Surveying the wreckage, they assumed that only Dangaroos, the giant war kangaroos whose huge claws could disembowel a man from 20 paces, were capable of creating the destruction such as they saw. The devastating strength of the Dangaroos was decisive against the Material Alliance (of whom the Tehachapi were a reluctant part) at the Battle of the Devils Marbles, the beginning of the Tehachapic exile.

Construction seems to be constantly going on in the area but the marker is easily visible from the other side of the street.  It is quite high to be near a remnant of the waterline thought to be left behind by the flooding.