Paging Dan MacArthur! Looks like his fellow Australians are finally entering the genome race, and starting with—what else?—the complete genomic sequence of a kangaroo.

So far, scientists at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics (KanGO) have made a (fairly crude) map of the tammar wallaby species’s genome. They’re now working on finishing the complete sequence.

From Nature News:

The Kangaroo Genome Project is giving Australia “visibility and respectability in the international genomic community”, says KanGO director Jenny Graves. But she says it is “disappointing that Australia really missed the genomics bus”.

Without substantial funds to push forward genome work in Australia, the first marsupial to be sequenced was the American opossum. And the sequencing of the platypus genome, a draft of which was published in Nature in May, was done with US money. Even the tammar wallaby sequencing was paid for by the US National Institutes of Health and the Victorian state government — not by the federal government.

“We failed to capitalise on the valuable information we can get from the genomes of our unique fauna,” says Graves “I hope now that the much cheaper next-generation sequencing is here, Australia can get back on the bus.”