Ben Brooker

Dogs have long been a feature of Markus Zusak’s fiction. His pre-fame trilogy of Young Adult novels, centring on brothers Cameron and Ruben Wolfe and their family, deployed the animal as a metaphor for tenaciousness. In the trilogy’s final book, When Dogs Cry (2001), Cameron and Ruben all but adopt Miffy, a Pomeranian whose scrappiness matches that of the brothers and whose death provides the book’s emotional fulcrum. There is a caffeinated hound in The Messenger (2002) and a clothesline-obsessed border collie in Bridge of Clay (2018). Even when, as in Zusak’s best-known work, The Book Thief (2006), dogs are not present, something about the way the author sees them – lovably rambunctious, all rough edges, chaos and, yes, doggedness – permeates the spirit of his two-legged characters.

Given the global resurgence of interest in compounds such as psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca, it is a wonder more contemporary novelists have not turned to psychedelic experience for inspiration. It is, after all, hard to think of the golden age of psychedelics – roughly the mid-1960s to mid-1970s – without recalling the trippy, Zeitgeist-capturing literature it produced, including Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and Tom Wolfe’s (highly fictionalised) Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).

An anthology dedicated to the transnational history of psychedelic drugs and culture seems a timely enterprise. We are twenty or so years into what has become known as the ‘psychedelic renaissance’, the global revival of interest in compounds such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin centring on their use alongside psychotherapy as treatments for a growing number of mental health disorders.

In October 2014, an article by health reporter Aisha Dow appeared in Melbourne’s Age newspaper titled ‘Deadly flu pandemic could shut down Melbourne’. It began with a dystopian vision of Australia’s second most populous city plunged into a Spanish flu-like crisis:

In his 1927 essay ‘On Being One’s Own Rabbit’, the British-Indian scientist and writer J.B.S. Haldane surveyed the history of an enduring but contentious approach to scientific discovery: self-experimentation. At the age of eight, Haldane tested poison gases on himself in his scientist father’s home laboratory. As an adult, among other self-experiments occasioning losses of consciousness from ‘blows on the head, from fever, anaesthetics, want of oxygen and other causes’, he once induced sufficiently high levels of oxygen saturation to suffer a violent seizure and the crushing of several vertebrae. 

In the months leading up to the 2022 federal election, as the two major parties duked it out over the cost of living, integrity, and the climate crisis, one issue barely rated a mention amid the barrage of leaders’ debates, press conferences, and doorstops: the Covid-19 pandemic. Having raged in Australia for more than two years, resulting in once-in-a-generation disruption to daily life, including the world’s longest lockdown, the virus had become all but untouchable on both sides of the political divide. Labor and the Coalition obviously reasoned that the best position on Covid electorally was not to have a position at all. Neither party articulated a strategy to manage the virus, or its ever-expanding roll-call of variants, into the future. For the most part, journalists – more interested it seemed in the then Opposition leader’s ‘gaffes’ – could not bring themselves to mention the C-word either.

There is a slaughterhouse-like logic to the way humanity’s mistreatment of animals tends to be written about. Repetitive. Relentless. Atrocity piles upon atrocity, with no hope of remedy. Readers, probably appalled by the abattoir to begin with, likely vegetarians or vegans or animal fosterers, discomfort themselves yet again in the name of … what exactly? Duty? Academic interest? A renewed sense of the righteousness of animal liberation? We read on grimly, plumbing the depths of a despair that would feel commonplace if it didn’t remain, always, so excruciatingly raw.