“I feel like I’ve been run over,” said Mrs Neal, who looked tired and badly shaken up, also sporting cuts across her face and deep gouges on her hands.

Mrs Neal, who moved to Mudgee four years ago, commented on the increasing brazenness of kangaroos.

“They come up on the patio, but normally they hop away when you go near them.

“Every time we come here there are more,” added Jodie Norrish who drove up from Sydney when she heard of the attack on her mother.

The Neals’ property is a sloping wooded block on the southern side of Bellevue Road, not far from the Glen Ayr housing development.

Mrs Neal’s main concern is that others should be warned about the danger.

“I just can’t emphasise enough for children to be careful.

“They ride bikes through there all the time and you see tourists let their children go towards the kangaroos to take photos.

“If it had been a child they would have been killed,” Mrs Neal said.

“The neighbour had two grandchildren playing in their yard all week, it could have been them.

“If it’s happened once, it can happen again, they’re not Skippy, you know,” warned Mrs Norrish.

Mrs Neal’s son-in-law, Brian Norrish, works in the outdoor recreation industry and said this attack isn’t a one off.

“We see incidents like this all the time. It’s not just the isolated incidents but the number of car accidents attributed to kangaroos.

“It’s getting worse and worse.”