Well, one of the things that was puzzled ethymologists is "kangaroo court". Where does that term come from? It describes, really, an illegitimate court that has been set up that desides of the fate of somebody, and wouldn't stans up in court at all. It's quite old. It's over 150 years old, that we know of. And the immediate assumption would be that it would be Australian. But there is no link in the story, no link in the chain, that would take us back to Australia. But the first recorded use of kangaroo court is from Australian publication. It's about 1853. Nothing before then. That was about the time of the California gold rush. Of course, we know that a lot of Australians, who were often known as the 49ers, from the year 1849, which was that start of the main gold rush, we know that they did flock to California to seek their fortune. So it's possible that these gold-diggers could have brought the phrase with them. Of course, gold-digger gave us "digger", meaning "mate", in Australia. So it has affected the vocabulary in lots of different ways. But there is a more plausible explanation. If you took over someone else's mining claim without permission during the gold rush, you were set to be a "claim jumper". That's a phrase that looks back to a pretty old sense of the verb "to jump", which was to rob or cheat. You might still talk about "jumping" someone and robbing them in some way. So if you combine the idea of a claim jumper with the idea, of course, that kangaroos are word-class jumpers, and that's probably where kangaroo court comes from. There's one more link in the chain, which is that there is so much evidence in the Oxford English Dictionary of it been use in jail, where prisoners woulf set up a kangaroo court, to insist that new prisoners would give over their money and it would be divided amongst the inmates and then used for buying tobacco and others luxuries. But our best guess is that it goes back to those claim jumpers of the gold rush.
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